Companies ‘fail to follow law’ on modern slavery
MANY LARGE businesses in a Yorkshire city are failing to abide by laws designed to combat modern slavery, a study has found.
Since 2015, businesses with annual turnovers of more than £36m have been required to set out the steps they take to keep their supply chains free of slave labour in annual statements published on their websites.
At the time, then-Home Secretary Amber Rudd told the business community it had to “take serious and effective steps to identify and root out contemporary slavery which can exist in any supply chain, in any industry”, adding: “Businesses must not be knowingly or unknowingly complicit in this horrendous and sickening crime.”
However, more than a third of businesses in York which are required to comply have failed to publish any such statements, while many of those which have done so are lacking in crucial detail, research by students at the University of York has found.
The analysis, by members of the university’s Students Union Anti-Trafficking Society, found that of 277 companies in York which should have published details of its anti-slavery actions, only 179 had done so.
And in many cases, businesses which had published statements had not updated them each year, as required by the legislation.
The report says: “Overall, the picture is of companies doing the absolute minimum to adhere to the legislation and not following a Modern Slavery Statement (MSS), where published, with definitive and energetic action programmes.
“Our next step will be to explore the behaviours of those companies whose MSS are vague or hidden or have not been updated, in all cases breaking the law, as well as monitoring those companies locally which have not even taken the first basic steps to prevent slavery in their supply chains.”
The authors suggest that similar rates of non-compliance are likely to be seen across the country and “in many ways York appears a typical reflection of the poor national picture”.
“Most companies are breaking the law,” the report says.
However, the study praises some public-sector organisations for setting out what they are doing to combat modern slavery, even though they are under no legal obligation to do so.
These include York Council, Yorkshire Ambulance Service, York Teaching Hospital NHS Trust and both the University of York and York St John University.
The extent of labour exploitation and slavery in modern-day Britain was laid bare in a report by the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA) earlier this month. The GLAA was given police-style powers in May last year and during its first year, it arrested 107 people and identified 1,335 abused workers nationwide.
In Yorkshire and the Humber, labour exploitation was most frequently reported in food production businesses, car washes and agriculture, with Romanian and Bulgarian nationals most likely to be exploited.