Written submission from British Retail Consortium (ERB0102)

14 January 2025

Dear Chair,

Thank you for the opportunity to discuss the ways in which retailers undertake due diligence and monitor supply chains for labour abuses and modern slavery as part of your inquiry on the Plan to Make Work Pay. I wanted to follow up to a provide a summary of what we covered and some additional information, which I hope you find useful.

Tackling modern slavery is an urgent priority for our members. They work closely with Government, NGOs and other stakeholders both independently and through the BRC to tackle labour exploitation and share best practice. This includes our grocery members’ work as part of the Seasonal Worker Scheme, which we believe could be strengthened.

Our members also want to see improvements to the Modern Slavery Act to ensure it provides the strongest protections. This would also help to restore the UK’s reputation as a progressive global leader on human rights. They support the establishment of a Fair Work Agency to enforce workers’ rights under the Employment Rights Bill. We believe that this could be an important tool in tackling modern slavery and labour abuses, if it has sufficient dedicated resource, scope, powers and structure to investigate and take action.

Seasonal Worker Scheme

Since 2022, BRC and our members have been working with government and other stakeholders, including NGOs, to ensure that the Seasonal Worker Scheme (SWS) provides robust protections against labour and human rights abuses for seasonal workers. There has been a series of roadshows to support farms to address key challenges over the last two years. However, we believe that Government should take forward several recommendations to improve the SWS further, which I have included in the Annex to this letter.

Modern Slavery Act 2015

BRC has been supportive of the Modern Slavery Act (MSA) since it came into force in 2015. Since then, we have called on Government to enhance the powers of the MSA and embed modern slavery due diligence within stronger human rights due diligence requirements. However, we believe that the MSA could be further strengthened.

The Government’s MSA guidance (Section 54 (Transparency in Supply chains) requires commercial organisations in scope (exclusively large businesses, due to the £36m annual turnover threshold) to:

• Produce a modern slavery statement each financial year which sets out the steps they have taken to manage modern slavery risks in their own operations and supply chains.

• Annually publish their statement on their website with a link to this on their homepage.
• Get approval from the board of directors (or equivalent management body), and;
• Ensure the statement is signed by a director or designated member.

We submitted written evidence to the House of Lords review of the MSA last March. In this, we shared our members’ view that the current guidance, as a document, is too long and engaging, and that the language used is not strong enough. We have called 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.

Establishing a Fair Work Agency

We support the establishment of a Fair Work Agency (FWA) to enforce workers’ rights under the Employment Rights Bill and wrote to the Employment Rights Minister to share our support and our vision for the FWA. I have included a summary of our recommendation in the Annex. I also wanted to share our submission to the call for evidence on the Labour Market Enforcement Strategy 2025-26

Sourcing from China

I didn’t get the chance to talk about sourcing from China, but wanted to share our disappointment that the Foreign Affairs Committee recommendation to the government, to “issue guidance to business to implement modern means of traceability and product origin verification as part of their due diligence measures” has not been taken forward (Never Again: The UK’s Responsibility to Act on atrocities in Xinjiang and Beyond, Recommendation 24). We gave evidence to the committee and this guidance – which we have unsuccessfully chased for publication – would be a significant help to our members as they work to ensure that goods and materials from parts of the world where human rights abuses occur never enter the supply chain.

Once again thank you for the opportunity to share the retailer perspective and I hope our panel and this letter are useful to the Committee.

Best wishes,

Andrew Opie

Director of Food and Sustainability

ANNEX

Seasonal Worker Scheme – Recommendations for Government

Fair Work Agency – Recommendations for Government

Scope

The risks of exploitation remain high in the GLAA licenced sectors, many of which form part of our businesses’ supply chains. It is critical that these sectors remain in scope for the FWA, and we support calls for a regular review to ensure that the sectors with the highest risks of worker exploitation are covered by the FWA.

For investigations of labour exploitation in non-regulated sectors, the FWA must have sufficient powers and resourcing to be able to effectively deal with exploitation wherever it is found. This should include tackling the particular challenges around protections of migrant workers and a lack of enforcement in the UK fishing sector.

Powers

It is critical that the FWA has the ability to investigate cases across the full range of exploitation, from minor labour law violations to more egregious incidents of modern slavery. We support the FWA retaining the existing powers of the GLAA and expanding these powers to enable it to investigate and prosecute both modern slavery cases and labour market offences which fall short of the high threshold to be deemed modern slavery.

The FWA must retain the specialist powers granted to the GLAA[1] to investigate labour market offences. These powers should not be restricted to police forces, whose resources are under significant pressure and do not have the specialist expertise to investigate these most serious offences. 

Furthermore, following from the serious allegations of labour exploitation and abuse of workers working in the UK under the seasonal workers’ scheme (SWS), we support the calls for additional powers for the FWA:

• Poor regulation and enforcement of overseas-based labour agencies recruiting people to work in the UK have led to recent cases of exploitation in the agricultural sector and resulted in vulnerable workers owing thousands of pounds in debt. We support the FWA to be granted the powers to investigate these labour agencies which are committing offences under UK law, alongside collaboration between the FWA and overseas enforcement bodies in order to tackle the root cause of these cases. Tighter due diligence on in-country agents is critical to ensure workers don’t arrive in the UK having already experienced exploitation.
• The recent Migration Advisory Committee report on the seasonal workers’ visa recommended that the GLAA should have the statutory power to visit farms as part of their compliance work with operators rather than only when modern slavery issues arise. We support these recommendations.

Additionally, under the UK Modern Slavery Act, large companies must publish an annual statement, signed off by the Board of Directors, with the steps they are taking to eliminate slavery in their business and supply chains. To date, there have been no repercussions for companies who do not comply with this requirement. We support the FWA to investigate and publicly publish non-compliant companies to inform the Home Secretary’s actions to enforce compliance with the Modern Slavery Act.

We support equipping the FWA with the power to issue significant financial penalties to perpetrators of labour abuses, and disqualification of directors for serious incidents. The FWA should have appropriate powers to ensure that workers affected by exploitation are provided with effective remedy.

More generally, the FWA should be seen as a key stakeholder in policy development and regulation enforcement, informing and advising where existing policy is not supporting the effective elimination of exploitation.

Resourcing

For the FWA to protect vulnerable workers, it must be adequately funded and resourced. We support the calls for the FWA to be staffed in a way that aligns with the ILO minimum standard benchmark of one inspector per 10,000 workers[2]. Current resourcing of the GLAA is reported to be less than one third of the minimum standard benchmark and has led to critically low levels of inspections and enforcement, with near-to-no deterrents for perpetrators of abuse to the most vulnerable workers. More than trebling the number of inspectors would require at least a trebling of the existing GLAA budget from £7.1m to at least £21.3m. Any

additional scope for the FWA should be reflected in further budget increases, such as any expansion of the regulated sectors to include high-risk areas such as healthcare.

In the regulated sectors, the FWA should have the resources to properly assess whether or not to grant a GLAA licence, and to investigate for evidence of unlicensed businesses.

We recognise the House of Lords Committee on Horticulture’s concerns about the low level of GLAA activity to protect those on seasonal workers visas. We support their recommendation of a system of audits, spot-checks and systematic inspections on entities that are part of the seasonal worker scheme, with a clear, tiered, enforceable system of penalties.

It is critically important that the labour exploitation and modern slavery expertise held within the current GLAA is maintained and for any FWA officers responsible for investigating potential breaches of workers’ rights are meaningfully and substantially trained in identifying labour exploitation, supporting workers and taking a survivor-centred approach. The specialist powers and skills currently held by the GLAA are critical for the effective investigation and enforcement of labour abuses and it would be inappropriate for untrained, unexperienced officers to wield these. We support the call from the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner for a dedicated modern slavery team within the new agency which would maintain strong working relationships with the Home Office and the anti-slavery sector.

Form

We recognise the importance of the FWA operating with a degree of independence from government and operating independently from Home Office powers and governance.

We support the views expressed by the House of Lords Horticultural Select Committee on the need to protect exploited workers from being seen primarily through an immigration lens. Labour inspectorates must be separate from immigration enforcement and the FWA should provide an official source of redress to exploited workers that is not linked to immigration.

The Labour manifesto proposed that the FWA should have a board including union representation. In addition to union representation, we support the board being comprised of experts, civil society, academics as well as trade unions.