Slavery
(asked on 6th January 2021) - View Source
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many eligible businesses have advised her Department that they have taken no steps to confirm the existence of slavery or trafficking in their supply chains as required under the Modern Slavery Act 2015.
Section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 established the UK as the first country in the world to require businesses to report annually on steps taken to prevent modern slavery in their operations and supply chains. Organisations which have taken no steps must state this clearly in their statement, which must be published in a prominent place on their website. Currently, organisations are not required to submit their modern slavery statement directly to the Home Office.
To assess compliance rates, the Home Office contracted the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC) from September 2019 to January 2020 to undertake an audit of compliance on the Home Office’s behalf. The audit findings on levels of compliance were published on 17 September 2020 in the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner’s annual report (available here:
To improve the quality and detail of reporting and accelerate action to prevent modern slavery, the Government recently announced an ambitious package of changes to strengthen and future-proof section 54, including requiring organisations to report against specific topics and creating a Government modern slavery statement registry to make all statements available in one place. The new registry, which is due to launch this year, will improve the transparency, accessibility and comparability of statements published under the Act, empowering investors, consumers and civil society to scrutinise progress and enabling Government to continually monitor compliance.
These measures, including requiring organisations to publish their statement on the Government modern slavery registry, require primary legislation and will be introduced when parliamentary time allows.