This week the BRC gave oral evidence to the Business and Trade Committee's inquiry Making Work Pay: Employment Rights Bill.

We believe the UK government can and should play a crucial role in upholding human rights in business supply chains and ensure all businesses play their part, through stricter enforcement and tougher regulations that standardise due diligence approaches.

The BRC have been supporting its members to raise industry concerns over the lack of progress in protecting the human rights of workers, both in the UK and globally, across a number of areas.

The Seasonal Worker Scheme

  • Since 2022, retailers have been working with the rest of the industry and government to improve the seasonal worker experience, from recruitment to working in the UK, through their participation in and funding of the Seasonal Worker Scheme Taskforce.
  • This includes the funding of a series of seven regional grower roadshows, hosted in February and March this year, which built on the content of 2023 roadshows. The series focused on supporting farms to address key challenges identified through Defra surveys and other sources including accommodation standards, access to effective complaints mechanisms, and supervisor conduct – including a train-the-trainer supervisor training programme. See the 2024 update here.
  • However there a significant actions need to be taken by Government to improve the scheme design and thus the worker experience. See our asks, as part of the Seasonal Worker Scheme, here.

establishing a Fair Work Agency

  • On 10 October 2024, Ministers introduced the Employment Rights Bill. The legislation broadly aims to upgrade workers’ rights, helping deliver economic security and growth to businesses across the UK, including through the establishment of a single enforcement body – aka the Fair Work Agency (FWA).
    • Find out more about the Bill, its implications for modern slavery enforcement via the FWA, and how BRC are engaging with government to ensure best implementation of the proposed regulation here. 
  • The BRC wrote to Minister Madders to show support for FWA and set out our vision for the agency, as well as submitting evidence to Department of Labour Market Enforcement Strategy 2024-25 call for evidence.
  • We believe it is crucial for the FWA to have the appropriate scope, powers, resourcing and form to achieve its outcome of protecting vulnerable workers.

Modern Slavery Act 2015

  • Section 54 Guidance (Transparency in Supply Chains) of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 requires commercial organisations in scope to:
    • produce a modern slavery statement each financial year setting out the steps they have taken in the most recent financial year to manage modern slavery risks in their operations and supply chains,
    • annually publish their organisation’s statement on their website and include a link to this on their homepage,
    • get approval from the board of directors (or equivalent management body), and
    • ensure it is signed by a director or designated member (for LLPs).
  • BRC were supportive of the Modern Slavery Act when it came into force in 2015 and have since called for Government to enhance the powers of the MSA and move to embed modern slavery due diligence within stronger human rights due diligence requirements.
  • The BRC submitted evidence to the House of Lord’s review of the MSA and is currently participating in the government review of the Section 54 Guidance (Transparency in Supply Chains). Our members have noted that the current guidance is long and unengaging as a document, and the language used in the document is not strong enough.
  • We call on Government to:
    • Align UK requirements with similar global legislation on Modern Slavery or Human Rights Due Diligence, to avoid duplicated efforts (e.g. reporting in multiple formats or via multiple separate documents).
    • Establish the Modern Slavery Registry for publication as an alternative should the organisation not wish to, or be unable to, publish on a corporate website (understanding that the Registry publication remains non-mandatory currently).
    • Include the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioners Maturity Framework. This asks for businesses to demonstrate improvement year on year. It would therefore be useful to include guidance on what this means in practice and how this can be self-measured.

BEST PRACTICE

The BRC continues to work with other key stakeholders to address industry-wide issues, such as:

For more information or to join our Ethical Labour mailing list, please contact Sophie De Salis.