Here at LNTV HQ many of us looked forward to the extra hour in bed on Saturday night, together with lighter mornings as we wait at train stations to start our commute, but the pay off is that evenings will now be getting darker earlier, and that is something we are not such great fans of. Someone from the team who shall remain unnamed for fear of deserved reprisals, has even declared that they have bought their first Christmas present. Don’t worry, appropriate action will be taken.
Meanwhile in the studio we were fortunate enough to have Richard Kenyon, Head of Employment and Pensions from Fieldfisher LLP, to talk to us about the new Modern Slavery Act 2015, and its implications for companies and organisations. Here is a brief extract from that upcoming programme:
Interviewer: What requirement does s.54 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 impose on organisations?
Richard Kenyon: Section 54 requires commercial organisations to produce an annual slavery and human trafficking statement for each financial year, and that needs to set out what the organisation has done, the steps its taken during that year to ensure that slavery is not taking place either anywhere in the organisation or anywhere in its supply chain. And once the statement’s been prepared it needs to be approved in the case of a company – by the directors, the board of directors of the company, signed off by one of those directors and then published on the company’s website with a link – a prominent link from the webpage.
Interviewer: And what information should be in a slavery and human trafficking statement?
Richard Kenyon: Well, the type of information that should be included is really left up to the organisation. The Act does give a high level framework of the type of information that might be included, and that includes a number of things. First of all, a description of the organisation itself and its supply chain, then the policies that the organisation has in relation to modern slavery, the type of due diligence exercises it carries out within its organisation and its supply chain, how it identifies risk and what sort of Key Performance Indicators it puts in place to ensure that its supply chain are not engaging in modern slavery and, finally, the type of training of the employees in the organisation that the organisation undertakes.
Interviewer: Given that an organisation can discharge its duty simply by stating that its taken no steps, why does the government think that any organisation is going to go to some considerable trouble to supply this information?
Richard Kenyon: That’s right that an organisation can comply with the legislation by putting out a statement that says we’ve taken absolutely no steps to ensure that modern slavery isn’t taking place. But the government is introducing this legislation in a kind of compliance and social shaming way, so that the statement itself will open up the organisation to public view, and the idea is that through pressure from NGOs and the public, and through peer group pressure, that organisations will want to show that they take this issue seriously. And therefore, peer group pressure will result in more and more information coming into the public domain as organisations take more and more steps is the idea.
Interviewer: So which organisations does this requirement apply to?
Richard Kenyon: Well, it applies to commercial organisations, which is bodies corporate or partnerships, which produce goods or services and which have a turnover of £36 million or more, some of which is done in the UK, so it’s businesses that are operating in the UK which have a turnover of £36 million or more.
Interviewer: And there was some debate, wasn’t there, about where to set the threshold of turnover? How did they arrive at £36 million and what are the reasons behind it?
Richard Kenyon: Well, the government consulted over a number of figures, the lowest was £36 million and the highest was a billion. In fact, only 7% of the respondents to the consultation suggested that it should be a billion pound turnover. The government ultimately settled for £36 million largely because, first of all, that was the number that the majority of respondents to the consultation requested; secondly, there is in the Companies Act a definition of medium sized businesses which is businesses which have a turnover of £36 million or less, so £36 million or more is large businesses. And the rationale is that large businesses will have the commercial clout to push this issue down through their supply chains by requiring their suppliers to provide information about what they’re doing in relation to modern slavery.
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