Helping businesses combat slavery

We’re helping businesses, including one of Britain’s largest supermarkets, to identify and eradicate potential slavery in their supply chains.

Our Modern Slavery Risk Assessment Service is a unique combination of business experience and academic precision. It digs deep into supply chains and uncovers the possible involvement of organised crime, human trafficking and forced labour.

Our experts also deliver a modern slavery training package for front-line professionals in agencies such as councils, the police, the NHS and Jobcentres.

And through the Anti-Slavery Usable Past project, we're creating a slavery toolkit for policy-makers worldwide, drawing on the lessons learned from the successes and failures of earlier abolition movements.

Our researchers played a major role in shaping the UK’s Modern Slavery Act (2015), which obliges companies to report on their work against slavery.

Businesses with a turnover above £36 million are now legally required to publish a slavery and human trafficking report each year. They have to set out what steps they have taken to ensure that slavery is not occurring within their business or its supply chains.

Failure to comply results in a court injunction. There are fines for continued non-compliance, as well as significant damage to a company’s reputation.

Forward-thinking companies are finding that showing annual progress is a powerful display of their ethical credentials and protects their brand. It can also strengthen their relationships with suppliers, producers and customers.

And, with consumers 'shopping with their conscience' more and more, publishing anti-slavery statements enables everyone to see which companies are actually addressing the issue.