Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate she has made of the number of companies required under section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 to produce modern slavery statements for the year 2021 that have not done so.

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 are currently required to ensure their statement has been approved by the board, signed by a director, and is available via the homepage of their website (if they have one). Organisations are required to produce a modern slavery statement to report on their financial year (not the calendar year) and our statutory guidance states that they should publish a statement within 6 months of their financial year end. Therefore, statements covering activity throughout the year 2021 may not have been published yet as organisations have up to 6 months after the end of their 2021/2022 financial year to publish their statement.

Historically compliance with section 54 has been high, but we continue to push for higher compliance rates. In 2019, the Home Office contracted the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC) to undertake an audit of compliance with Section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015. The audit was concluded in January 2020 with data accurate up to this point. The high-level findings of this audit were published on 17 September 2020 in the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner’s annual report (available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-anti-slavery-commissioners-annual-report-2019-to-2020).

To further drive compliance with section 54, the Government response to the Transparency in Supply Chains consultation, published on 22 September 2020, committed to taking forwards an ambitious package of measures to strengthen the Act’s transparency legislation, including:

• Extending the reporting requirement to public bodies with a budget of £36 million or more;
• Mandating the specific reporting topics statements must cover;
• Setting a single reporting deadline by which all modern slavery statements must be published;
• Requiring organisations to publish their statement on the new Government registry.

The Government has also committed to introduce financial penalties for organisations who fail to meet their statutory obligations to publish annual modern slavery statements. As with the measures contained in the Government response to the transparency in supply chains consultation, this requires legislative change and will be introduced when parliamentary time allows.

In March 2021, the Government launched the modern slavery statement registry to radically enhance transparency by bringing together modern slavery statements on a single platform. The registry will provide a key tool for Government and others to monitor and drive compliance with section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015. We have been encouraged by use of the registry. Since launch, over 7,300 modern slavery statements covering over 23,950 organisations have been submitted on a voluntary basis.