This statement sets our commitment to the development of more ethical supply chains in delivering our contracts.
This includes the following employment issues:
- Modern Slavery
- Blacklisting
- False self-employment
- Unfair use of umbrella schemes and zero-hour contracts
- Paying the Living Wage
We recognise that we have a responsibility to take a robust approach to ethical employment and we are committed to preventing unethical employment in our corporate activities, and to ensuring that our supply chains are free from unethical employment.
We expect everyone working with us or on our behalf to support and uphold the following measures to safeguard against modern slavery:
- We have a zero-tolerance approach to unethical employment practices in our organisation and our supply chains.
- The prevention, detection and reporting of unethical employment practices in any part of our organisation or supply chain is the responsibility of all those working for us or on our behalf. Staff must not engage in, facilitate or fail to report any activity that might lead to, or suggest, a breach of this policy.
- We are committed to engaging with our stakeholders and suppliers to address the risk of unethical employment practices in our operations and supply chain.
- We take a risk-based approach to our contracting processes and keep them under review. We assess whether the circumstances warrant the inclusion of specific prohibitions against the use of unethical employment practices.
- Consistent with our risk-based approach we may require:
- Employment and recruitment agencies and other third parties supplying workers to our organisation to confirm their compliance with our Ethical Employment Status.
- Suppliers engaging workers through a third party to obtain that third parties’ agreement to adhere to the statement.
- As part of our ongoing risk assessment and due diligence processes we will consider whether circumstances warrant us carrying out audits of suppliers for their compliance.
- If we find that other individuals or organisations working on our behalf have breached this policy we will ensure that we take appropriate action. This may range from considering the possibility of breaches being remediated and whether that might represent the best outcome for those individuals impacted by the breach to terminating such relationships
We encourage the reporting of any wrongdoing through internal and external whistleblowing procedures. These procedures also contain arrangements to ensure the protection of whistle-blowers.