United Utiliites - Slavery and human trafficking statement

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.

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.

As part of our approach to protecting human rights and preventing modern slavery we carried out an internal risk mapping process across our entire supply chain. We initially identified four key areas of our supply chain where we believe the greatest potential risk of modern slavery non-compliance lies. During 2019/20 we have responded to evidence that the construction sector is one of the emerging risk areas where modern slavery is on the rise. This is relevant to us given the large amount of construction and maintenance based activity we undertake every day, particularly where there are sub-contractors involved. We have therefore included construction as one of our higher risk areas. Our progress over the last 12 months can be found in our Slavery and Human Trafficking Statement for 2020 (PDF 1,107 KB opens in a 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 Business Principle commitment to provide a safe, clean and reliable water supply now and in the future.
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 Our Business Principle commitment to make sure our customers and their details remain safe
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 Policy
Contract labour	Contractors Health & Safety Charter
Local communities	Our Business Principle commitment to make sure our customers and their details remain safe
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	99.5% of our supply chain spend is with EU based companies who are now required to comply with the EU non-Financial Reporting Directive, guaranteeing worker rights and protection*
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

* The 0.5% of our supply chain spend outside the UK/EU is in the US, Australia and Norway. These are countries that also have domestic human rights related laws and legislation in place.

Human rights

Salient issues and vulnerable groups mapping

Access to clean water

Access to clean water

Data protection & privacy

Data protection & privacy

Health & safety

Health & safety

Modern slavery

Modern slavery

Human rights policy

Slavery and human trafficking

Modern slavery policy