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Human rights

How businesses consider human rights has gained greater prominence in recent years. It features regularly in current political discourse about public trust in business behaviour and in investors’ demand for increased transparency of Environmental Social and Governance performance. The two are related – lack of disclosure is a gap in the trust narrative.

Our Human Rights Policy (PDF 160 KB opens in new window) demonstrates our commitment to protecting the human rights of our employees and those working on our behalf in our supply chain and is communicated to all employees.

We convened a cross-company working group to draft the policy statement, and identify and assess human rights risks and potential impacts on our employees, customers, suppliers and communities. This group identified our salient human rights issues as access to clean water, data protection and privacy, health and safety, and modern slavery.

We understand that the risks associated with modern slavery are constantly changing. The changes in the labour market as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine are putting people at risk of exploitation. We will continue to engage closely with our supply chain, and anti-slavery groups, in relation to identification of increased modern slavery risk. We are committed to building on our actions and improving our processes, training and policies with a view to both eradicate the possibility of exploitation within our supply chain. Our progress over the last 12 months can be found in our Anti-Slavery and Human Trafficking Statement for 2023 (PDF 3.2 MB opens in new window).

To date, we have not identified any human rights abuses within our own operations nor our supply chain and so no remediation actions have been required. However, as we cannot guarantee that they aren’t present in some form, we’ve mapped our human rights risks against our corporate risk register and manage them within this framework. In addition, our supply chain modern slavery risk management plan is detailed in the Statement.

Previous Slavery and Human Trafficking Statements:

Salient issues and vulnerable groups mapping

  • Access to clean water
    Employees

    Our purpose is to provide great water for a stronger, greener and healthier North West. Providing great water means delivering our core water, wastewater and customer services, reliably and to the highest quality.
    Contract labour
    Local communities
    Children
    Migrant labour
    Indigenous people We are not aware of any of our employees, contract labour nor local communities identifying as Indigenous.

  • Data protection & privacy
    Employees Data Protection Policy
    Contract labour
    • Agency Worker Policy
    • Fixed-Term Worker Policy
    Local communities
    • Customer Data Protection Policy
    • Privacy Policy
    Children / Migrant labour

    Not applicable
    Indigenous people We are not aware of any of our employees, contract labour nor local communities identifying as Indigenous

  • Health & safety
    Employees Health, Safety & Wellbeing Policy
    Contract labour Contractors Health & Safety Charter
    Local communities Health, Safety & Wellbeing Policy
    Children / Migrant labour

    Not applicable
    Indigenous people We are not aware of any of our employees, contract labour nor local communities identifying as Indigenous

  • Modern slavery
    Employees Our stringent employment checks and various internal policies guaranteeing and protecting employee rights help ensure that human trafficking does not occur within our own operations
    Contract labour Irrespective of the applicable legal obligations we expect all suppliers to adhere to the overriding principles and ethos of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 and to mitigate modern slavery risk throughout their supply chain.
    Local communities Other statements in this column apply here
    Children / Migrant labour As a highly regulated UK utility operating in North West England only, our use of stringent employment checks means that it is highly unlikely that child nor migrant trafficking has occurred within our own operations, as well as a result of them
    Indigenous people We are not aware of any of our employees, contract labour nor local communities identifying as Indigenous

Human rights policy

Our latest human rights policy - September 2020

Slavery and human trafficking

Our latest slavery and human trafficking statement

Modern slavery policy

Click here to view our latest modern slavery policy