Stamping out modern slavery in supply chains is one of the UK government’s top priorities.

Published 25 October 2019

Last updated 25 October 2019

UK government statement of commitment

The government’s task force on modern slavery has endorsed a government-wide strategy to tackle this issue. The strategy has identified actions to ensure modern slavery is tackled in government supply chains through public procurement and has committed to publishing its own modern slavery statement in December 2019.

What has CCS been doing?

We have been working closely with the Home Office, Cabinet Office and NCQ to deliver an approach to managing modern slavery risk in public sector supply chains, which will inform the government’s statement.

As part of this activity, we have:

  • developed a Modern Slavery Assessment Tool (MSAT) to help suppliers identify and manage potential modern slavery risks in their supply chains
  • identified which contracts are in the sectors and categories where there is greater risk of modern slavery occurring
  • compiled a list of high and medium risk framework contracts
  • run a series of training sessions with NQC to familiarise our commercial agreement managers with the MSAT tool

What’s happening next?

We are inviting suppliers that are working under framework contracts in those sectors and categories where there is a greater risk of modern slavery to complete the MSAT assessment.

To reduce the burden on suppliers, government is adopting a ‘tell us once’ approach using the HMG Supplier Registration Service (SID4GOV). Suppliers will not have to provide the information again for other government departments, but will be asked to approve sharing the information with them.

Our commercial agreement managers will be reviewing suppliers’ assessment results and holding follow-up discussions with all of those suppliers returning a high or medium risk score.

They will then work in partnership with them to ensure that they are putting effective risk mitigation plans in place and addressing modern slavery in their supply chains.

We recognise that this is not a one-off exercise. As a result, our commercial agreement managers are also risk assessing their future framework contracts to ensure that modern slavery risk is effectively identified and addressed in CCS’ future procurement pipeline.

The modern slavery assessment is part of a learning process to help government understand how its suppliers are approaching this important issue. The results will not be used as part of any procurement competition.

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