Webinar: Modern Slavery in the Workplace and your ESG programme

00:05

Hello, everybody and welcome to the Praxis42 webinar on modern slavery in the workplace and how it fits into your environmental, social and governance programme. I’m Tracy Praxis42 and today I’m joined by our expert panellists.

We’ve got Mike Stevens. Mike is the CEO of Praxis42 and a chartered safety practice practitioner. Mike is one of our founding directors and has worked in health and safety and compliance for over 35 years. His previous roles include being part of the Occupational Health and Safety and fire department at Mercury communications and Cable and Wireless and before that, a consultant at RoSPA.

And we’re also joined today by Hayley Gauntlett at QB l consulting. Hayley is one of the UK’s leading experts on managing modern slavery and the ethical risk in supply chains and has over 20 years’ experience managing ethical risk working within UK top retailers, builders, logistics companies, energy providers, and finance businesses. Hayley understands the business imperatives with global supply chains and is able to provide advice on what good looks like for those sourcing both within the UK and globally.

So, before we start our webinar, just some housekeeping for today’s events. Your mic will be muted, but there are buttons at the top of your screen, where you’ll be able to ask questions. So, if you click on the speech bubble to type your question, and these will be addressed in the Q&A session at the end of the webinar, we will also have some downloads related to the event. And we’ll be able to share those you’ll be able to share the event on social media. And we’ve already had some questions come in for the q&a. But if you do want to send a question in during the webinar, we’ll do our best to get to it. Any that we don’t have time to answer today will be answered and put up on our resources page after today’s session.

A recorded version of today’s webinar will also be available after the event and a link will be sent to everyone who signed up. So, today’s webinar is CPD certified and you will be sent your certificate after attending. I would now like to hand over to Mike.

02:21

Thanks, Tracy. Good morning, everybody. Great to see so many of you on the call existing clients, new clients, hopefully, people have taken an interest in the presentation which we put together today. My part in this is to just explain I suppose why modern slavery a lot of you probably recognise Praxis42 from our fire health and safety expertise and subject matter expertise. But we tend to find that we are moving more towards other compliance areas. And partly that’s due to the way that we provide our resources in terms of our software as a service shine platform, our elearning and compliance assessment tools. And equally as a supplier to large organisations and other organisations. They’re interested in our modern slavery and environmental, social and governance approach.

So, we put the webinar together on the basis that it was something which we thought would be of interest to our existing clients and potential clients. And to partner up with somebody with the credentials that Halley’s got was, was something which was good for us and is good for us in terms of working together in partnership.

So, the topic is about compliance. It’s about understanding the modern slavery Act, the MSA. And Haley will be able to give you some really good experiences from the point of view of her activities over the last 20 years. And I’m sure you will find it really interesting. I might chip in with some questions on the way. And equally if there’s anything that you want to ask, as Tracy said, please do ask the questions because that just enriches the experience. So, sit back, enjoy it. And please ask any questions as we go along. So I’ll hand it over to Hayley. Great, lovely.

04:23

Thank you very much, Mike. Good morning, everyone. I’m just going to share my screen with you now so that you can see what we’re gonna be working through. Hopefully you can see it.

04:37

So, we’re gonna be talking about the modern slavery act and some of the sort of like the requirements and impact from the modern slavery Act. As both Tracy and Mike said, I have over 20 years’ experience in working within a field of labour standards and ethical trade. I started my journey with retailers I put boots, the chemist and then went on to work for Tesco. Subsequently, in 2016, I decided to become an independent. And I’d be working out for my clients, mostly footsie 100 clients, subsequently, subsequently. So hopefully I should be able to answer any questions you might have about, about the modern slavery act and some of the repercussions for business.

So, the sorts of things we’re going to be talking through today. So first of all, we’re going to be talking about what is modern slavery, just so that we all have a complete handle on that? How big of a problem is it? We’re then going to specifically look at what the required the modern slavery Act requires? And then we’re going to have a look at how it is, how we find it in supply chains, what are the issues there? And what’s business doing about this? You know, what are companies doing?

We’re also then gonna be talking about the UN guiding principles on business and human rights framework. Because in in terms of people tackling it, it’s one of the best better frameworks to enable people to tackle what’s happening around global money supply chain and modern slavery and supply chains. So fundamentally, what is modern slavery? Well, modern slavery is a bit of an unpopular term to cover a variety of different things.

Now it is it does cover things like human trafficking. It does cover forced marriage, it does cover forced labour, but fundamentally this this terminology here covers what modern slavery stands for, which is basically the active recruiting harbouring, transporting, providing, or obtaining a person or persons for forced labour or sexual exploitation through the use of force or violence, deception, or coercion, which is the threat of force or violence.

So, we do see general exploitation on a day-to-day basis. But does it consist? Or does it meet the requirements of modern slavery per se. So, this is a very good way of defining it. If you look at general exploitation vote versus modern slavery, you can see that there are slightly different differences or like definitions of where that would fall. It’s commonplace for me, as a consultant in supply chains to see things such as low wages, excessive working hours, health and safety risks, things like you know, no freedom of association, so people are not allowed to collectively bargain, for example, to improve the situation within their own working environment. They’re not allowed to join unions.

Occasionally, we’ll find child labour, we know that there is child labour and supply chains, you only need to look at something like for example, cocoa, to look at where we see child and cotton where we see child labour, and particularly heavy sublet usage. There’s also discrimination and harsh, inhuman, inhumane treatment within General supply chains. But that doesn’t necessarily make it modern slavery, what makes it modern slavery is this action where you are forced against your will using violence, or coercion.

So, it’s, it’s important to make the definition between those, and quite often people who are in modern slavery have been deceived or tricked into that position. They could have been kidnapped into that position. And quite often, they’re in something that we call debt bonded slavery, which is whereby they incur debt, due to the fact that they are, you know, they’re basically they’re promised, they possibly promised a job in a bet in another country, they’re told that to get that job, they need to pay the you know, the equivalent of 500 pounds they need for the job, then, you know, there’s transport costs, there’s accommodation costs, and when they get to the position, and it actually is nothing like they accepted expected it to be that debt is then incurred.

So, and it’s in the traffickers interests, to keep that debt high, to say, you need to pay this debt off. But the reality is that people never get to pay the debt off because the worker basically gets told that there’s interest on top of this debt. And however strange this may seem, this is the reality for a lot of people, globally.

So, looking at this, we’ve looked at what’s quite modern slavery is what is the background to this? So let’s look at some of the global slavery metrics. And these are from the International Labour Organisation, the Minderoo on Walk Free Foundation. So, these are the statistics that were pulled up in 2018. And they are due to be done again this year. But the last ones were for 2018. So over 40 million people are victims of modern slavery. Now 25 million of those are in the forced labour market and 15 million people in forced marriage The one that we talk about mostly as businesses is the forced labour aspect, because obviously, that’s the one that we’re most likely to see in, in our supply chains. When we look at how that breaks down globally, we can see that it’s actually 71% of those are women or girls.

Now, that’s quite different than what we see in the UK. So, for example, in the UK, it’s almost a reversal. And what we see is 69% of men are victims of modern slavery in the UK. And that tends to be for forced labour. And this, the reason this is because there are strong women’s rights are stronger in the UK than they aren’t necessarily globally, women tend to be more vulnerable globally. So therefore, they tend to be more sort of like, they tend to be more often used for, you know, forced marriage, sex trafficking forced labour in other countries, because the legislation and protections aren’t necessarily there for them.

11:05

When we look at the prevalence per 1000, if we look at the global figure, it’s actually 5.4 people per 1000, as a global figure, but you also have areas in the world where those figures are much higher. So one person once said to me that 5.4 per 1000 Doesn’t seem like a very big number. And I my thought on that was, it’s not a very big number, unless you’re one of those 5.4 people. And we have reached a point in this in our world where now, you know, there have never been more people in slavery than there ever have been in the history of mankind than there are now.

So, when everyone thinks about slavery, they think about historic slavery, they think about the transatlantic slave trade, for example, we actually have more people in modern forms of slavery than we did then. And slavery looks very, very different today. So, we think you know, that, obviously, that it whilst most countries have abolished, modern, abolished slavery through legislative measures, what happens through those legislative measures is that it became an illegal and criminal action. And then basically, criminals took hold of it. And if we think about how criminals use modern slavery, that human trafficking is set is the second hot, most profitable criminal activity in the world. And it’s very, very quickly increasing is second only to drugs, drugs is most profitable, criminal industry in the world. But human trafficking is second. And it’s become so because a, you know, it’s hidden in a sort of a shady Underworld and people up until sort of like, you know, 10 years ago, people would not be thinking that even existed, you know, if I talk to people on the street, hardly anybody has ever heard of modern slavery.

So, we see this change, we see basically, people becoming more aware of it. And because they’re becoming more aware of it more legislation has been put in things like the modern slavery act for the UK. So when we look at the figures of the people who are in debt bondage, it’s actually 50% of people who are in forced labour are actually victims of debt bondage, which is what I explained earlier about incurring a debt through work.

Some of this debt is incurred through travel expenses, and things like that. Some of it is hereditary, there are some forms of debt, bonded labour, that go back generations. And you might find some areas where there are consistently, you know, consistent debt problems, especially in developing countries where people have been in debt, and they’ve not been able to pay it back. And it’s gone straight down through the generations, passed from generation to generation. So that pretty much after million, five generations or so people have forgotten what the initial debt was. But those people are still in debt, bonded slavery. And sadly, up to 25% of victims of modern slavery are children, again, because they tend to be vulnerable. And when we’re looking at people who tend to be targeted, due to, you know, due to vulnerability, you know, you basically, it’s easier to target vulnerable people than it is strong people.

You know, if you if you have good educational skills, if you have good language skills, if you if you come from sort of like a privileged backgrounds, it’s much you’re much, much stronger and more resilient against the, you know, the, the sort of like, the exploitation of on slavery, but if you come from a disadvantaged background from poverty, from places where there is war or conflict or ecological disaster, then you find that you’re much more vulnerable. And we can see this when we actually look at it by prevalence of modern slavery by country.

15:06

You can see here, the darker the colour, the area, the more prevalent modern slavery is. And this is the global slavery index by the watery Foundation. And like I say, these are 2018 figures. And there’s very critical data links behind this and a lot of methodology behind what sits behind here. But you can see, for example, you’ve got areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, that are, you know, quite prevalent areas. If you go to West Africa, you can see Mauritania there, particularly in Mauritania, there are issues around caste discrimination.

So, people, when we’re talking about caste, for people who aren’t absolutely sure What caste is, it’s really a class system, a very strict and defined class system. And quite often we find where there are very strict caste systems in place, there’s a higher likelihood of modern slavery. So, we do see that as one of the issues. You also see, in Sub Saharan Africa, here, you’ve got places like South Sudan, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, you, if you go to North Africa, you’ve got Libya, there, you’ve got a, you know, a variety of different areas all around sort of, like, you know, mid, sort of mid and Sub Saharan Africa, where you have these issues, and a lot of those are driven by poverty, and ecological disaster.

So, you know, that their access to water, for example, and conflict in all these areas, because, you know, they are, you know, they have major issues around drought. And quite often, you know, maybe corruption in terms of governments and government oversight of it. So, these can all mean that that makes it problematic, and makes it more likely to have issues about the slavery. And you can see, if you go across a little bit more to the east of East, you look towards you have places like Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, you know, you have all these places, if you go further past India, you can see you’ve got Myanmar, you’ve got Thailand, you’ve got Indonesia there.

So, you know, we’ve got lots of hotspots. I talked about prevalence being five-point port for per 1000. But if you look there, above, sort of like Japan, you can see next to China, you can see North Korea, and North Korea has the highest prevalence of modern slavery. And this is due to states sponsored or debt state supporting slavery, whereby the state itself makes slaves of the people that actually are in its country. So typical for North Korea, what they will do is they will send cells of workers to different countries to earn money and send it back into North Korea. This is something that helps fund their nuclear race and the wealth of the country. They have that their prevalence is 4.4 per 100, not four point 5.4 per 1000. So more than 4% of their entire population are victims of state sponsored, forced labour. And there are other countries we’ve seen it in the news. We’ve seen lots of stuff around Uighur, or the use of Uyghurs in in China around the cotton industry. You know, we see it in places like, like Thailand, for example, where there were issues around, you know, the use of migrant workers in Thailand and they rights, making them more vulnerable. We’ve seen it for similar people. For me in MMA, for example, with the coup that’s happened recently.

So, we see that there are issues around the state sponsored and forced labour as well. We tend to like set out forced labour into different aspects in terms of the areas it comes from. We see high levels of criminality. We see state sponsored forced labour, we occasionally see employer sponsored forced labour whereby the employer themselves is exploiting workers, and we also see it within recruitment agencies and intermediaries. We see that where you have the option or the ability to abuse a supply chain, then the likelihood is that will happen. So that’s kind of like talking about the background and prevalence of modern slavery and where it sort of like comes from.

19:54

So looking at the legislation, so looking at the modern slavery act 2015 Now, there’s key things about this, which are, which always amaze me is firstly, that one of this first came out is that people were very, very worried about this particular bit of legislation here, which is the this section 54 of the transparency and plot in supply chains Act, which basically stated that you needed to, was requesting that pig businesses operating in the UK with a turnover of more than 36 million, were required to produce a statement, setting out what actions that they’ve taken to address modern slavery within their supply chain, everyone got very upset about this.

At the very beginning, it was asked that this will be posted prominently on the company website signed off by the directors, and by signed off by the board of directors and signed off by a director on the website. Now, this isn’t for me, this isn’t the onerous part of the act at the moment, the onerous part is the next section we’re going to go on to, but a lot of people were concerned about writing this and putting it out. And we’ve been doing this now, you know, it’s 2022, the first, the first sort of light reports of first statements came out from 2016 onwards, pretty much our end of 2015 to 2016.

We’ve learned a lot in that time, what we’ve learned is that, you know, lots of people haven’t done it, which is, you know, still a major problem. And those people that have done it, haven’t necessarily got it right. So, they haven’t necessarily put it on their website in the right place. It’s not signed off by the right people.

So, we know that people aren’t really very good at doing this. We’ve also discovered that nobody has been prosecuted for not doing it yet. So, the legislation sets out to you can have a a fine of up to 100,000 pounds for actually not being able to do this. Now, what we’ve seen in these past years is that nobody has been prosecuted for this, which is disturbing, obviously, because it means that nothing really much has been done about it.

However, it has one of the one of the effects that the modern slavery statement requirement has had is it’s made people up for their game, especially the bigger companies, they’ve understood what they needed to do. And not just bigger companies, but smaller companies as well, understanding that their customers are really concerned about this, their customers need to know what they’re doing as well.

So there has been some change, even though it hasn’t been faultless, you know, there’s quite a few things we can say that aren’t necessarily right at the moment with the modern slavery act. But what I think is more terrifying for me as a business owner, and, and as a director of a business is that this part of the legislation, so this is called this, it says knows or ought to know, I’m gonna read this first bit.

So, slavery servitude, and forced or compulsory labour, a person commits an offence if the person holds another person in slavery or servitude. And the circumstances are that the person knows, or ought to know that the other person is held in slavery or servitude. It does go on to say, then the same thing about forced or compulsory labour. The thing with this is that it’s not that you didn’t know or that you didn’t know, it’s that you ought to have known. And that’s a huge thing. There’s no cut off in the supply chain. By the way, this doesn’t matter.

So, what the law is saying is, it doesn’t matter how many steps down your supply chain an action was, if you ought to have known it was happening, you could be prosecuted, you could be sent to prison, and you could be fined for knowing or ought to knowing. I know that sounds weird, but it’s kind of like, you ought to have known that was happening.

So, what it means is, there’s no get out clause for anybody to say, Actually, I didn’t know what was happening in my supply chain. And that’s really important, because that is what you know, is making people you know, businesses start to understand that you know, the complexity of this. It’s a very, very well written piece of legislation. There’s also because it hasn’t necessarily been effective in dealing with what it should have been dealing with. So for example, not everybody has signed up to this, not everybody has completed a statement that the like they should do.

24:37

The government looked at it and actually said, right, okay. Well, if that’s the anti-slavery, the independent anti-slavery Commissioner, the Commissioner Saara Thornton, and a government sort of like review has taken place and basically what they’ve done is that they said, Right, okay, this isn’t meeting the requirements we wanted it to do. From the first ad from the outset of this, what it’s doing is it is forcing some people to act, but it’s not forcing enough people to act.

So, what can we do? Also, can we trust what’s being put on the, the websites by people, you know, can we trust what’s going to happen? Because I read statements all the time. And I can tell that the statements mean nothing, quite often because of the language they use. Now, I’ve been in this area for a long, long time, and I know if somebody says, I’m, I’m certified to set x, well, actually, you can’t be certified to set x, it’s not a certification body. It’s a membership organisation. And that’s all you can do to be a member. But you can’t be certified to set x.

So, me reading this, I can read all these sorts of things into it and say, Well hold on saying, you know, you’re not doing anything. And it’s very clear to me companies that are saying they’re doing great things when actually they’re not. So that’s another part of what the what the government wanted to change and what they what they see as other changes. So these are the, these are some of the anticipated changes to the act.

Now, at the moment. Now these will come in, sort of, like 2021. But as we all know, they kind of like the time the parliamentary time was due to come in 2021, to put these through Parliament, but due to COVID, obviously, things, lots of things changed due to COVID, everything was pushed back. Now the government have committed to make parliamentary time for this when time allows, we don’t expect that to happen imminently. Because of the, like the impact of COVID. On, you know, economies and Parliament’s themselves. So, we expect this to be done a bit later. But these are still on the cards and are likely to be some of them are likely to be passed into legislation.

So, one thing is a new offence for false information and in modern slavery, human trafficking statements. So you could be fined quite significantly for and prosecuted for putting false information in your trafficking statement, you could be fined up to 4% of your turnover, or to a 20 million pound fine for continuing to source from people in your supply chain, that have been proven to have issues around modern slavery, after you’ve given up being given a formal warning by the independent anti-slavery Commissioner. There’s also more requirements on disclosure.

So, they want you to put three further things in in terms of transparency. So, they want you to be able to put information about your country of origin and publish verified information as well. So it’s not a case of I don’t know where we get that from, actually, you’ve got to say exactly where you’re getting that from, you’ve got to be able to select put in place credible and external inspections and audits, and think of, you know, report on the use of employment agents working for an overseas or acting on behalf of an overseas government.

Now, none of these are written in stone yet, but these are the changes that are likely to happen. And the reason this is happening is because as we said, there hasn’t been big enough teeth on this legislation until now, it hasn’t done what it was supposed to do. So, the government is looking to make those teeth bigger and apply further sanctions to get more people to comply with it. So that’s kind of like an overview of the act itself and sort of where we sit and what the current situation is

28:46

So Hayley, lots of points about similar to what happens in health and safety, I guess is that having a prosecution cases, case law is quite powerful in terms of convincing people. So, who is it that’s responsible for enforcing this? And why aren’t they doing it?

29:04

So, it’s accountable to sort of like director of boards or board level basically. So, if someone were to go to prison, it would be board members, that would be likely to be the people that would be held accountable and responsible for this. And the reason at the moment is reason that that hasn’t necessarily happened. And you’re quite right around about prosecution being something that would, you know, and, you know, being something that would mark action.

The real reason behind this is because the government and the GLA don’t want to punish legitimate business. They want to put bigger teeth on this, but they don’t necessarily want to send a director of a legitimate business to prison. What they’re far more focused on is catching criminals in supply chains, so people who are setting out to do criminal activity.

So, whilst a director could, potentially easily could go to prison for this. It’s not necessarily at the moment in the government’s interest to do this, what I think what will happen is if the legislation changes, that it’s more likely that there may be some prosecutions around the sort of like the truthfulness of what your statements saying. And actually, you know, one of the other one of the other suggestions, or, you know, one of the other things they want to do is a mandatory reporting on a Government portal, which is kind of like not mandatory at the moment, it’s voluntary, but they want to make that mandatory for the future so that they can easily then work out who hasn’t, who hasn’t.

However, that information is already currently available. For people who know what risk report is, which is one of the one of the portals for holding this information, working with, you know, helping support the government as well. They actually have some very, very intelligent software that is working out, it’s currently working out who’s telling the truth and who’s not. It’s going on to people’s websites, it’s we’re looking at public data held on websites. And it’s actually correlating to that to what people are putting in their statements.

So, there is this bit of work being done, that’s actually gearing up for stronger requirements around this legislation, the back work is being done. And the ability to have transparency about people’s statements is becoming easier and easier due to technology. So, it’s quite fascinating. I mean, I’m not a big tech person. But you know, I had a chat with Jaya from the from tectus report the other day about the capabilities behind what they’re doing. And they’re, you know, the data analysis that they’re doing, and it’s really quite surprising when I was quite surprised about how much has been done.

32:01

Yes, it’s a bit like the plagiarism thing that you can do. And you know, the technology you can use for that. And but is it likely to be more about naming and shaming rather than prosecuting the company for failing to post it because it’s easy to do the how pig’s head because this organisation? Have they got one? No, they haven’t. And it’s a bit like it’s easy in terms of saying your noncompliance. So, as you reckon, it’s going to be more naming and shaming and putting pressure on organisations? Or is it going to come through their ESG programme that they’ll be pressured?

32:35

I think I mean, the thing is, at the moment, the I think, what’s going to what’s happening at the moment, I think it will be a bit of naming and shaming. But I think that what’s probably more prevalent at the moment is this, this real investor focus on ESG. Because it is ramping up quite, you know, enormously exponentially compared to relax. I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and what sort of information that I see around ESG. Now, compared to sort of like, you know, 20 years that I’ve seen in the last couple of like, few years, you’ve got people like BlackRock, for example, one of the, you know, the largest investment organisation in the world.

Now, if you go to their web pages, and look at what they’re doing on sustainability, and their whole ESG agenda, it’s massive, absolutely massive. And companies, I think the squeezes coming from, I think it’s coming. It’s not just coming from one point, it’s coming from investors, it’s coming from consumers, but it’s also coming from the government, I think there is an aspect of name and shame. And as we see, Gen zeds, becoming far more interested in sustainability, and far more prepared to pay extra for sustainability, as opposed to, you know, past generations. I think you’re going to see that all coming together. And I think that this is kind of, I mean, 10 years ago, I was saying to people, you know, you know, your ethical trade, or, you know, social aspects are going to be as big as your technical aspects for the future.

You know, don’t think you can ignore this. And that’s exactly what’s happening. And it’s like, you know, so we, it’s coming to fruition, it’s just people, people are starting to get it because, you know, it’s become, it’s becoming a perfect storm. And, in fact, and this is something that Blackrock set out on a video that they’ve done on their website as well, is that they felt that during COVID What would happen is that people will be less interested in sustainability and less interested in social impact.

But what they found is that more of their investors during COVID have pushed towards sustainability, not away from it, which they say that they were quite surprised that because they thought, you know, in times where it’s tough economics, you know, things aren’t going exactly as they should be, you know, unprecedented stuff happening. They thought more of their invest This would pull back from sustainability. But they found actually increased. I can’t remember how many times it increased them, you know, the percentage, but certainly what they’ve actually got out on their lifestyle, their website.

35:12

And its people re-evaluating where they’ve come from and where they’re at. And it’s also about the wellbeing programme that employees have as well. So, there’s a, there’s a number of things which have come out of COVID, which, in some ways, maybe it’s rebalancing to where we should be.

Just sorry, I’m just, I’m taking some time. But that’s okay. No, because I’ve you know, it’s interesting stuff to talk about. Because if you look at the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, for example, it’s the first time in, in since they’ve been out that we’ve actually gone backwards during COVID

So that the impact was huge. But what people realise and like you say that that kind of like social piece about making it right for just for everybody, as well, that’s grown. And I think that that’s had a huge impact as well. And we will see that on the back of this. You see, hopefully, you’d still see my screen. So, I’ll just move on to the next slide. That’s okay. So that’s the act itself.

So, what are we looking at? And where in supply chains? Well, you know, the shocking thing really is that it can be anywhere, we’ve looked at if you if we looked at earlier, we saw the areas that were more prevalent, we know that there are countries and regions where that tends to be more prevalent. And we know that that’s more likely to be where people are vulnerable.

So, and those vulnerabilities, we’ve, we’ve talked about a few of them, you know, things like conflict, you’ve got things like natural disasters in terms of drought, or eruptions or whatever natural disaster it might be, you have things like whether you’re female, you’re much more likely you’re much more likely to be vulnerable. If you are a group of people who are generally discriminated against in countries, then again, that makes you more likely like Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, for example.

So, if you are vulnerable, if you don’t speak the language, if you don’t have education, if you have a disadvantaged background, all of those things will make you vulnerable. And at a risk of modern slavery, particularly in countries where we don’t adhere to, or human rights aren’t as closely adhered to. And we know that that happens in in countries, we, you know, we know about political unrest, we know about bribery and corruption in certain countries and certain regions.

So, we do know where these things are happening. Now, it’s quite often this isn’t necessarily happening in your first-tier supply chain, it could be, but I pretty much can guarantee that this is happening somewhere in your supply chain. It may not be in your first, second or third supply, third tier, but it could be happening at country of origin for the raw material.

For example, when we look at, you know, mobile communications, we have all sorts of issues, and green technology, the use of minerals, the INS of like, areas where we have conflict minerals, and high levels of, of modern slavery used in very, very poor areas to access minerals that are absolutely vital for a green economy.

So, we know that there are areas where that continues to be a problem. And where there are, you know, that that people don’t are in poverty, they don’t have the government’s to support them, they don’t have the government legislation or you know, the, the ability to actually get justice. So, we know that that’s where it happens in supply chains, you know, look to wherever your most vulnerable point is in your supply chain is always my advice to my clients is, you know, track your supply chain, look where that goes, and where is your most vulnerable point.

The government, even the government actually sets out that they expect people to prioritise when tackling modern slavery because if we looked at it as a whole, it would be too insurmountable. Because, you know, where do you start? So, you have to look at prioritising so, what’s high risk for you as a business you know, where does your risk sit in in your product range or your service range? What is it you provide, that is synonymous with you as a brand.

Is in a high-risk country or region and a high-risk sector. So certain sectors we know our higher risk sectors and others as we do with the same with countries. So, we know glass production in China very high-risk prick brick production in China very high risk. We know that garments in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan are very high risk. We know that and garments in the UK in less than the Leicester area and Bradford and some and possibly Leeds as well, we know that those are high risk areas.

So, it does really you kind of look at where your risk sits as you for you as a business, you know, where are you sourcing from that it’s high risk, what are the products that you’re sourcing from our risk. And that’s what businesses are doing at the moment. And they have, most businesses have looked at this and started risk assessing.

So, they, they kind of are setting out what they need to do from a, from a social perspective. And this is how modern slavery fits into the, to the social aspect. Social is very much about, you know, when we look at human rights, modern slavery is just a part of human rights. So human rights is part of that social area that we look out for under ESG. So, slavery, child labour, and all those sorts of things very much falls under this s part in, in, in, within sort of, like ESG. And it’s important to include that, because when we look at sustainability as a whole, when we talk about sustainability, as opposed to ESG.

We know that sustainability, a good sustainability model has the environmental aspect, the social aspect, and the profit aspect. So, people’s planet profit, so it has the economic aspect to it. So, we want to make sure that business is hitting those things, because the business knows now it’s had years and years to come to this conclusion, but it knows that having a sustainable business is the better way to go.

So, what are people doing in businesses? Well, the key thing they’re doing is that they’re putting in strong governance to board level. This isn’t just something that a junior manager can do nowadays, you know, this must be seen transparently at board level, and has to have commitment and representation at board level, somebody who’s passionate about it, and who is responsible for it. It needs to be embedded at the heart of businesses. Because unless you start embedding this and making it a day-to-day thing, this isn’t nice to have.

This is something that now every business should have. Not only is it morally right, but it works from a business perspective as well. If you look at the human corporate rates benchmark from 2020, which is the last one that was actually delivered, you can see that, you know, there’s some really key businesses that are at the top of those. And it’s having a look at what those businesses are doing.

You can see where this is all going. You have Unilever, Unilever, sorry, who have been embedded in this for a very long time, you’ve got PepsiCo, Heineken, Tesco, and M&S. And they’re at the top of the five agricultural product companies assessed by the benchmark. Now, all of these are doing what I’m saying here. Allocating significant resources, making sure that they are investing in this, not just saying, right, I want someone out, you know, we need to do this, but I’m not going to give it any resource.

So, there’s no that we’re not going to give any more people any more money any more time to allow for this, it is something extra that you need to be able to provide. So, if it’s something extra, why don’t we say that it needs resource, and that’s what boards need to be able to do. That’s why you need this got strong governance of board level, because you need people to actually say, we’re gonna put some money to this and apply resource.

You want detailed, honest and transparent report reporting in your, in your modern slavery statements. The companies that I’ve just mentioned there, all of them have very transparent information on their modern slavery statement, or in their modern slavery statement, to the point where they’re actually detailing out where they’ve encountered issues of modern slavery. Tesco had an issue a few years ago that they put in there.

And so, in the last few years, so where they had people so like, they were getting rubber gloves from Malaysia, and there were issues in that Malaysian supply chain. They were honest and open and transparent about it. And actually, instead of being criticised, they were praised for actually being able to do that. I mean, obviously, they put a remediation programme in place as well, they didn’t just leave it, they didn’t just say it was there. But actually, they told them, they said what the problems were and how they dealt with them.

44:33

They, you know, some good businesses are looking at supporting the employer pays principle. So fundamentally, this is the principle where, you know, nobody should ever pay for a job. So, they, you know, it’s something that you can sign up to and say, right, when we’re not going to expect anyone to pay for a job or when we do find that they pay for a job. We’re going to make sure they’re reimbursed. Using a doodler. Since toolkit and not just one piece of thing, one piece of software due diligence.

So, for example, you could have a variety of different things. You could do financial doodle, due diligence, you could do questionnaires, you could do site visits, you could do site surveys, you could do audits, you could do human rights impact assessments, there’s lots of things you can do, rather than just say, right, and just getting audited and not doing anything else, or just going to ask a questionnaire, questionnaires get you a tiny bit of the way because I don’t, you know, call me cynical, but it’s been a long time I’ve been doing this. And I quite often don’t just believe self-assessment questionnaires when I get them. Because they’re not always, they’re not always accurate. And so, I’m very much more of a third-party validation form. But, but also, you know, site visits your if you’re going to a supplier cite that that’s a really good way to actually have a look at what’s happening. They’re not just third party.

They also train everybody on all aspects of spotting reporting or remediating modern slavery. So, it’s got to be, you know, right for the fit in your business. But training is important for people to understand what it is and spot it. And then also, the area that lots of people who are not as embedded in this as some of the bigger companies, the lot, the areas that they fall down on is providing remedy, they can find it and they can report it, but then they don’t really know what to do with it. And remedy is really important in this and actively looks for it’s in their supply chains but collaborates with peers when it finds it. And basically, works in alignment with the UN guiding principles on business and human rights, which is a due diligence framework.

There are a few I’ve got a few slides left, I’m obviously noting the time. So, I’m just going to quickly go through these, just to give you a bit of an idea. So, this is the framework that lots of businesses use, and it’s the UN guiding principles on business and human rights framework. But basically, what it requires is commitment from a business, it then looks for that business to assess what’s happening in its supply, chain assess, assess the risk.

Once the assess the risk is assessed, it can then look at putting in place an action plan to an or taking action to start dealing with mitigating and preventing risk. Then, when it mitigates or when it needs to, it then has to look at remedying rare instances.

So, for example, if you found that you have modern slavery in your supply chain, what do you do about it? Well, you need to provide remedy, you then monitor what you do, and then to make sure it’s effective, and then you communicate this out. So that’s kind of it. I’ve got three little case studies here.

So, I’m not going to spend a massive time unless people want me to talk a bit more in detail. But it just gives you an example of what people are doing. This is a UK FMCG company that currently commissioning work interviews throughout its warehouse and logistics supply chain in the UK. What we found are instances of recruitment fees, bullying, harassment. And we are in the process of identifying those and we were in process of putting those right and remediating them. They were you know, this is something that the business is committed to, and they have invested in, so they’re able to do it. And this is the sort of commitment and investment that is actually needed if you want to do if you want to manage it within your own supply chains, excuse me.

48:46

The second one is this was in 2020. This was basically a UK housebuilder in the UK, we undertook some surveillance sites on their building sites. What we identified through doing that was to vulnerable workers with potential gangmaster involvement. And that was reported through to the GLA as an instance of potential incidents in modern slavery.

This was basically a business taking on itself to say look, are we going to look at our own operations, or we’re going to apply some resource here with allocate resource we’re going to get this reviewed, and we’re actually going to undertake these sites surveillance visits. And from that we were able to identify there was something there.

Now they have this I’m not I’m not gonna tell you who these are, because obviously they’re my confidential clients. But this client has actually made this publicly available on their website. So, you know, the detail is there in the modern slavery statement. And the final one is working obviously with big supermarkets. Back in 2014. There was a guardian exposure. This was a very big thing on Rohingya Muslims being trafficked on to Thai fishing vessels. What worked here now a quite a few supermarkets were named not just UK ones but European and US supermarkets as well.

Now, because the problem was an endemic and entrenched problem in country, what they needed to do was actually say, well, how do we how do we do this? And what happened was that they came together under two different sorts of like, forms. One is the sea food Task Force and the other under the Asara Institute, to actually look at doing this as a collaborative piece ongoing for years to be able to put right the issues in the supply chain.

Now those things are still going seafood taskforce and Asara Institute are still going and they are remediating massively. They’ve saved more than 10,000 victims of modern slavery, they’ve been able to prevent modern slavery from occurring because they managed to, to, to educate and get information out to potential victims to stop them becoming victims. So those are my three case studies. I’m gonna stop there and hand back over to Mike for a second. That’s the end of my presentation. Like sorry,

51:20

Yes, no, fascinating. It’s similarities in this compliance framework that we all are part of is there’s some great similarities here in terms of commitment at the top, making sure there’s resources. So, it’s about your policy that you write the policy which you then implement, and making it work, and then checking that it’s in place and providing yourself with assurance.

I think it’s really fascinating. And this agenda, which is the ESG agenda is very similar to the environmental agenda probably 20 years ago, where, you know, where was that in the way that organisations were operating? So, really great. And there’s, there are some questions in, so I’ll hand on to hand over to Tracy, but it’s really, good to listen in on that, Hayley. Thank you. Do you welcome.

52:08

Thank you. Thanks, both. Yeah, really interesting. And we’ve got some great questions that have come in. So, onto the first one, Hayley, as the ICAO regulates the GDPR and HSE health and safety who will regulate modern slavery.

52:24

Modern slavery sits officially under the home office. So, it is a home office thing. But it is that the legislation is regulated through the minister of the NP for vulnerability and safeguarding. Chani was just gone completely off the top of my head, it’s a well, it’s an MP, I’m probably about to get you that information. But it’s at the moment, I’d say it’s only it’s not mandatory reporting at the moment through the government website. Any prosecution sits under the gangmaster Labour abuse authority or the police.

Okay. Sometimes the Border Force, border agents are involved in it as well. But they’re, what the plans are for the future is to bring them all together under one body. So that’s what’s underway at the moment, so that everything comes together, and it’s held under one body, because at the moment is a little bit disparate. But that that is in the pipeline.

53:24

Excellent. Thank you for that. So next question, apart from supply chain, what are the business associations or relationships are covered by this legislation? For example, shareholders who may within their business interests, or supply chains be advocating, supporting, or evidencing modern slavery? And should we be checking slash tracking these associations as we would do from an anti-money laundering perspective? For example

53:54

Can I see that question? Sorry, is there any chance I can see that purely? is quite a long question. It is a really intellectual, I’m tackling the right bit of it.

54:02

It is a really long question. So let me send that over to you. Whilst I’m sending that over to you. I’ll go on to a much shorter one. Would you say the definition of supply chain includes minor product providers, for example, stationery, or IT?

54:19

Oh, absolutely. does? It? Yeah, unfortunately, the thing is, is that a supply chain could be anything, it could be down to the sort of like tip X you have on the desk kind of thing. The reason is, is that the government haven’t specified because their supply chain is just anything as far as they’re concerned. And this is what I was telling my clients and people I work with is that, you know, at the end of the day, the government could ask you who supplied that desk you’re writing on, you know, and you should be able to say it now the reality is that the government knows that this isn’t possible. And you know that basically that’s why that’s why their guidance says, look at your priority supply chains, it’s very unlikely you will be prosecuted with something that’s absolutely minimal fee for you in a business. But it’s but there’s not a guarantee.

Unfortunately, I can’t give any guarantees because that’s what the legislation says. But it would probably be very unwise for the government to do that to sort of like even to look down to stationery supplies. Yes, the legislation goes down to the stationery suppliers, but the likelihood of it being looked at is, you know, it’s probably not high risk to you. That’s why if you’re a promotional goods supplier, on the other hand, stationery is important to you, because it’s your puppy is your business, you know, so that’s where I would say the difference lies.

55:46

Thank you. Okay, on to the next question. Sorry. I’m just working out. I’m just sending you that. Another question, Hayley. So now I’ve lost my questions. Apologies. So next question, does the MSA apply to government departments, local authorities and charities?

56:06

It applies to governments. And the government actually have one slavery statement, they have published this. So yes, it does. Not necessarily charities. But yes, governments and government, local authorities, if they’re, you know, they’re usually covered by the government. But yeah, they are involved in that.

56:31

Excellent. Next question, if you know that it’s in your supply chain, but it is maybe seven steps away from you. And your direct supplier is not forthcoming on addressing it, how can you protect your business?

56:44

You can I mean, that’s difficult, you know, that is a difficult question. It’s about trying to get that I mean, there’s all sorts of things you can do. But what’s the most logical thing to do? So, you could, you know, if it’s seven steps down your supply chain, there is something you could do about it, if you know where that is, you could go and investigate that yourself.

You know, by sending somebody who’s a local NGO, in, for example, a non-governmental organisation, or a charity in or going through an industry body, that’s another way, for example, to get that information.

But it’s very difficult. I mean, I know that my clients or my clients have this problem is that they did that I don’t think it’s that they know it’s necessarily happening, but they suspect it might be happening. And it’s really leveraging that supply chain and getting the influence in there. So that’s the difficulty if you can show some level of due diligence. So, for example, if the if the government decided to prosecute you, which would be unlikely.

But if you could show some level of due diligence, that you were active with that supplier, and you were trying to find out what was happening in that supply chain, that you had raised your risk these issues to them. And, you know, that would see you some way towards your due diligence, because due diligence is about either what can you do, and sometimes you can’t do anything, if somebody won’t tell you where they’re getting your product, you can’t force them to.

So when we do have, if we do have people like that in supply chain agents, for example, agents are particularly, you know, because, you know, their job is to be the middleman, what they don’t want to do is divulge their sources, because they worried about the person at the top, going direct to that source and cutting the agent out, because that cuts out their business. So, there are areas like that collaboration is another way to do it. And that’s what I said about going through an industry, a forum perhaps for that. So, there are ways you can do it. It’s just, they’re not straightforward. They’re not simple. But you can do it.

58:48

It takes work.

58:50

Yeah. Sorry, I was just gonna say a perfect example of a would be about spices. So very few people buy a lot of spice. Lots of people buy a small bit of spice, so nobody is particularly a big player in the spices market. Yet. If you get a whole load of people, like there’s an organisation called F net, which is the Food Network for ethical trade, they work collaboratively with the spice industry. So yes, you can do that.

59:22

Yeah, good example. Thank you. I think I mean; we are sort of over time. I don’t know if we want to answer any more of these questions. What we could do is answer them afterwards. And then we’ll put them out to everybody who’s signed up to the webinar, so that we can make sure that we get to all of those questions. Everyone happy with that. Lovely.

Well, thank you so much. And thanks for joining us today. So, we are now out of time. And any questions, as I say that we didn’t get to will be answered and we’ll post all of the questions and answers on our resources page, and a link to these and the recordings of the webinar will go out to everyone that signed up and If you have any more questions that you want to submit them please email them to info at Praxis 40 two.com Thanks again Hayley and Mike.

1:00:09

Thank you very much it was really good thank you.