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 2022 (PDF 2,561 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:
- 2021 Slavery and Human Trafficking Statement (PDF 2,158 KB opens in a new window)
- 2020 Slavery and Human Trafficking statement (PDF 1,107 KB opens in a new window)
- 2019 Slavery and Human Trafficking statement (PDF 361 KB opens in a new window)
- 2018 Slavery and Human Trafficking statement (PDF 301 KB opens in a new window)
- 2017 Slavery and Human Trafficking statement (PDF 233 KB opens in new window)
- 2016 Slavery and Human Trafficking statement (PDF 346 KB opens in new window)
Salient issues and vulnerable groups mapping
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