Modern slavery:

how is York responding?

Introduction
This is the report of a study undertaken by members of the University of York Students
Union Anti-Trafficking Society in early 2018. The intention is to summarise how well York
is doing, three years on, in responding to the terms of the 2015 Modern Slavery Act,
andparticularly in relation to the role of businesses operating in the city.

Background

If, twenty years ago, you stopped someone in York and asked them what came to mind when
‘slavery’ was mentioned, probably one of four responses would be given: these would be
something ‘to do with William Wilberforce’; with the transatlantic slave trade from Africa to
the Americas; to the effect that it involved people working in appalling conditions elsewhere
in the world (generally associated with the growth of the Fairtrade movement); or possibly,
with child sexual exploitation in South East Asia (as the issue of sex tourism was becoming a
publicly-discussed phenomenon). What is almost certain, is that virtually nobody would have
observed that it was a phenomenon commonly to be found on the streets of the UK.

In the last twenty years, however, there has been growing awareness both amongst the
general public and at a political level, that forms of slavery are now to be found across the
UK; these include human trafficking for sexual or labour exploitation; forced labour,
cannabis farming; forced begging, pickpocketing or shoplifting, especially by exploited
children; domestic servitude; and organ sales. In addition, many goods and services provided
in the UK to consumers are implicated in slavery because they are produced in other
countries in slavery conditions. Modern slavery is therefore an issue affecting us all, in terms
of the things we buy and consume in our everyday lives. The government finally responded
to growing pressure and concern by introducing a Modern Slavery Act in March 2015. The
Act largely consolidated existing legislation although it introduced some new measures (see
below). It has since been strongly criticised as being weak, inconsistent and inadequate by
bodies such as the National Audit Office and the Inspectorate of Constabulary as well as by
many independent commentators and there are growing calls to strengthen it.

Twenty years ago, the government suggested there were fewer than 1000 people working in
slavery conditions in the UK; this number rose to 3000 a few years later and three years ago
the government produced an estimate of between 10,000 and 13,000 people in forms of
modern slavery in the UK at any one time. Over 5000 people were identified as potential
victims of slavery last year and this is generally recognised to be the tip of an iceberg. The
most recent estimate of the numbers in slavery in the UK, by the National Crime Agency,
which coordinates the government response, is ‘tens of thousands’. If we take just the lower
end of this estimate, say 30,000, this implies that there are around 400 people held in forms of
modern slavery in the North Yorkshire police force area,100 of them in York and 300 in
North Yorkshire. This is likely again to be an underestimate. The nature of modern slavery is
likely to differ between urban and rural areas. In urban areas, there are more likely to be
women and children held in forms of human trafficking for sexual purposes, in rural areas
men are more likely to be found in situations of severe labour exploitation, for example in
agriculture, although this is not a hard and fast rule.

Very few cases of modern slavery have been identified yet in the North Yorkshire police
force area. Recent cases which have been reported in the media have involved a cannabis
farm found at Elvington, with several young men held in captivity and one found dead in the
River Ouse; two young women who had been trafficked and fled from North Yorkshire, later
being identified and rescued in Derbyshire; and women found working in slavery conditions
in nail bars in York. One current investigation concerns car washes where men are working in
exploitative conditions. North Yorkshire police has recently been criticised by the Police
Inspectorate as one of only 7 police forces (out of 43) in the UK as a whole, where no cases
of slavery perpetrators have yet been prosecuted, although much of the work in tracking the
two young women was done from North Yorkshire, the final stages of the case being
undertaken from Derbyshire. It is certainly difficult to achieve prosecutions and they may
take time to be brought to court, often because victims are too afraid to give evidence against
those exploiting them. This highlights the need for adequate support for victims. Unlike many
neighbouring authorities such as Bradford, Leeds and Sheffield, there are no places of safety
in York or North Yorkshire at present for victims of slavery. Local public bodies and NGOs
need to address this deficit. Clearly, too, unless North Yorkshire and York are slavery-free,
there is much to do: over 5000 referrals were made to the NRM (the official mechanism for
identifying victims of slavery) in 2017, yet no referrals at all were made to the NRM from
North Yorkshire organisations in the last quarter of 2017.

North Yorkshire police has now taken the lead in establishing a multi-agency anti-slavery
partnership involving local authorities, the voluntary sector, criminal justice agencies and
other interested parties. Experience elsewhere in the UK shows that the creation of such
partnerships is critical to success in raising awareness of modern slavery in local areas and in
developing coherent, coordinated responses, but there is clearly some way to go. The North
Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner, whose financial and moral support for such
initiatives could be significant in promoting the issue of modern slavery, has yet to be
convinced that it is a priority for her work.1

The role of businesses in fighting slavery

One of the more innovative measures introduced in the Modern Slavery Act is found in
Clause 54, which covers the issue of transparency in supply chains. This requires companies
which are active within the UK or based within it and active elsewhere, and which have an
annual turnover of £36M or more, to publish a modern slavery statement (MSS) on their
website. The Clause requires the company to publish the MSS in a prominent place on their
website (i.e. on the front page), to be signed off by a senior executive with the authority of
the Board, and to state what the company is doing to ensure modern slavery is not found
anywhere in its supply chains (i.e. companies supplying goods or services to it), whether
within the UK or abroad. The MSS has to be updated every year and this means that most
companies should now have published at least one, and probably two versions of their MSS.
This Clause has also been widely criticised as being weak as it has very few sanctions to
force companies to act. The government has argued that ‘naming and shaming’ companies
which do not act on the Clause will cause reputational damage and that consumers will buy
elsewhere. There is little evidence of this happening to date. It is this aspect of the Act that
our study has focussed on, contributing in a sense, to the ‘naming and shaming’ process
which the government has encouraged researchers and critics to make use of to ensure it is
adhered to. There is little doubt that this is a significant issue. In 2015, a survey of UK
companies actively managing labour standards in their supply chain revealed that 71 per cent

1
Organisations interested in joining the North Yorkshire and York Modern Slavery Partnership, or contributing
to its work, are encouraged to contact either the Chair at [email protected] or the
Vice-Chair at [email protected]
believed that there is a likelihood of modern slavery occurring at some stage in their supply
chains, a figure which then went up to 77% in a more recent study.

Why should companies comply properly with the Clause? There are at least four good
reasons. One of course is that by not doing so they are breaking the law and are open to
criminal prosecution. A second is that there is a risk to a company’s social reputation if it is
seen to be profiting from slave labour. Thirdly, there are economic risks as other companies
may not trade with a company seen to have disreputable practices. And fourthly, from an
ethical point of view, companies should regard themselves as having moral responsibilities to
those working for them or dependent on them

This study

The methodology for this study is fairly straightforward although it is time-consuming. Ten
students were involved in the work. The city was divided up into sectors, and students each
took an area to physically visit, making notes on the likely companies present in their area.
We were helped by an academic staff member with a car who visited outlying retail and
industrial sites such as the Designer Outlet off the A19, industrial estates in places such as
Poppleton and Dunnington, and outlying villages including Haxby and Wigginton,
Copmanthorpe, Strensall, Naburn and Wheldrake. Once a list had been compiled from
walking the streets, each company was entered into a database and its website was checked to
see if it had a turnover of £36M or more, what its ultimate holding company was, and
whether it had published a modern slavery statement in a prominent place as required by the
Act. We also consulted the database of the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre
which is compiling a registry of companies publishing modern slavery statements. They have,
to date, compiled a list of more than 4500 statements. It is not known exactly how many
companies may be ‘caught’ by Clause 54; recent estimates suggest it is about 20,000: that is,
that barely 20% of companies have complied to date. Most companies are breaking the law.

Which companies are we talking about?

We identified about 450 companies in our fieldwork which might have been covered by
Clause 54. After searching websites, we were able to eliminate more than 120 of these as not
being covered by the Act as their turnover was too low. It is worth noting that there was a
lively debate at the time of the passage of the Act as to what the threshold should be and the
figure of £36M is completely arbitrary. There is no reason why a company with a turnover
below that figure which is concerned about its ethical policy should not complete an MSS.
There are several locally present companies which have turnovers just below this threshold: it
is open to them to publish an MSS. It is also open to public sector companies to do so
although at present they are not required to do so; we address this later.

The types of company we identified with a presence in York and captured by the terms of the
Act are as follows. Note that all are private companies.
o Multinational companies based outside the UK but trading or having a presence in
York. We found many examples of this including for example, subsidiaries of holding
companies based in the USA, Sweden, Switzerland, France, Germany, Luxembourg,
Japan, Denmark and the Netherlands. Many formerly public utilities are also under
foreign ownership and have no MSS.
o UK-based multinational companies.
o UK-based national companies.
 o Regional or local companies.
In summary, we found 277 companies ’caught’ by Clause 54 of which 179 (64%) had some
form of MSS. Although this seems, compared with national figures, to be a relatively positive
response, there are many caveats to this basic figure which would substantially affect any
sense of complacency York residents, politicians or businesses might feel. For example, in
many cases of those companies publishing an MSS, this is either not in a prominent place
(either on the home page of a website or with a clear link from it) or not otherwise easy to
find. Many MSS are very vague and are statements of aspiration rather than having detailed
pans of action. And in many cases, an MSS has been published which has not been updated
in following years since the Act was passed. These caveats would by themselves reduce the
level of positive response to well below 50%. Interestingly, a recent national study found that
only half of the largest 100 companies providing goods and services to government had an
MSS which was fully compliant.

Secondly, we were only able with the limitations on time and energy available to us, to map
the most obvious sites where companies were based and thus may have missed a substantial
number of companies located in less prominent places. There may be a greater number of
non-compliant companies in these locations.

Thirdly, we only mapped sales outlets rather than products. Thus, although, for example, we
identified a number of Tesco outlets, we did not map the thousands of products which
Tesco’s stock. Whilst Tesco themselves publish an MSS, we know that there are products
they have stocked which have themselves been the subject of modern slavery cases, for
example the suppliers Happy Eggs in Kent which engage in forced labour of its workers and
supplied to most major supermarkets; and tunameal in their catfood which was sourced from
suppliers in Thailand where sailors complaining about the slavery conditions in which they
worked were thrown overboard to the sharks. Similarly, John Lewis and Next, both of which
have published MSS, were found to be buying bedding materials from Kozee Sleep in
Dewsbury which kept workers in slavery conditions. And in the most high profile instance,
three years ago, more than thirteen hundred mainly female garment workers working in
highly exploitative conditions were killed when a factory collapsed at Rana Plaza, in
Bangladesh. This factory supplied clothing to companies such as Primark, Debenham and H
and M; some of these companies have now agreed to pay compensation to workers’ families.
In a nutshell, having an MSS does not mean that a company is free from slavery in its supply
chains although it can be hoped that with such tragic incidents, companies are now taking
steps literally to clean up their act. And if we were able to map products rather than outlets,
available in York, we would be talking about many thousands of companies.

Fourthly, having an MSS does not mean the company itself is free from behaving badly. Two
local examples can be cited here: one is that of Carillion which, despite publishing an MSS,
has recently collapsed amidst accusations of corruption, fraud and appalling management.
Sports Direct has also published an MSS but has been accused of using migrant workers in its
factory in Shirebrook in highly exploitative conditions, tantamount to slave labour. In some
cases, it is clear that companies publish an MSS at the lowest possible level simply to appear
to adhere to the minimum of legal requirements but with little intention of taking firm action.

Fifthly, size does not matter. We found instances of very large companies (such as Cadbury)
which do not meet the terms of the Modern Slavery Act, and much smaller ones which do.
Sixthly, many large companies trade under a variety of brand names. One example with a
large presence in York is Whitbread which has outlets such as Beefeater, Premier Inns,
Whitbread Pubs and Costa Coffee. Most of these brands do not publish separate MSS but
hide under the umbrella of the parent company. (Similarly EE is a subsidiary of Carphone
Warehouse which itself has a very obscure MSS.) We think they should do since their form
of trade is often highly specific in terms of the country of origin of their products. Many
mobile phones of course rely on coltan (see below).

Seventhly, we did not find any particular industrial sector which had a clearly positive record
in terms of modern slavery statements. There are however sectors where the risk of slavery is
relatively very high. Two examples would be cotton, where much of the world’s cotton is
harvested in countries such as Uzbekistan by child slaves, and cocoa, which still depends on
child slavery in West African countries. Conflict diamonds (used in jewellery and watches)
and minerals such as coltan (used in mobile phones and sourced from countries where there is
both large-scale internal conflict and slavery, such as the so-called Democratic Republic of
Congo), might mean that MSS in affected companies would be particularly prominent in their
stance and level of activity. That is not the case. Two local examples again are Whittard,
which retails coffee; and Tag Heuer which retails upmarket watches: neither has an MSS.

Eighthly and finally, it is important to note that many products available on the streets of
York may be complicit in slavery in a very indirect way. For example one might think of
newspaper and wonder where the paper is sourced from, or the printing ink? Similarly, there
are companies offering services – insurance, estate agency, financial services – which may
appear to have nothing to do with potential risks of slavery but many of these companies,
whilst appearing homegrown or local, are actually part of much larger multinational multi-
product firms which may be involved in slavery in their supply chains and/or which have not
published an MSS. Thus, Reeds Rains, an apparently local estate agency, is part of the much
larger LSL Property Group which should have published an MSS but hasn’t.

Do York’s own companies do any better?

Although we cannot say with any certainty that companies with a presence in York have a
better or worse record than is the case nationally, and indeed in many ways York appears a
typical reflection of the poor national picture, we are able to say something with more
precision about companies headquartered in York. As we were undertaking this work, the
York Evening Press in conjunction with York St John University Business School, published
a list of the one hundred top companies said to be headquartered in York. Our analysis
suggested that, of these, 18 had an annual turnover of £36M or more, and of these eighteen,
thirteen (72%) had not published an MSS. These thirteen are also breaking the law, and it
suggests that York is doing rather worse than the national picture in relation to this sample:

Park Leisure Gear (4) Music Pavers Holdings

ADVA Optical Shepherd Building Group Total Systems Services
East Coast Main Line Reeds Rains B-Sporting
HoComm Simpson (York) Holdings Providence Holdings
Rhomberg Sersa2

2
Actually, neither Total Systems Services nor Rhomberg Sersa are in fact head-quartered in York, we found:
the former is a subsidiary of a USA company, the latter a Swiss company. One other company, CPP, which has
published an MSS, is also a subsidiary of an American company.
Some of these operate in sectors which the official watchdog, the Gangmasters’ Licensing
and Abuse Authority, has identified as key risk areas for modern slavery: for example,
construction (Shepherd [Fulford], Simpson [Dunnington] - building), hospitality and leisure
(Park Leisure [Poppleton] – caravan sites, B-Sporting - sports shoes [Clifton]) and
agriculture (Providence [Dunnington] – potato distribution). As a start, it might be
appropriate for pressure to be brought to bear from various quarters for these companies to
publish an MSS and act on it so that York could begin to argue that it was taking steps to be
‘slavery-free. Of course, this does not imply that the other 87 larger companies headquartered
in York could not or should not also take action.

One model of good practice has been shown by the former MonkBar Hotel, owned by the
Shiva Group. This engaged in a very thorough programme of modern slavery training for its
staff. As noted above, leisure is one area where the risk of trafficking and forced labour is
relatively high and staff have been trained by Shiva to spot and respond to the signs of
modern slavery.

What about the public sector?

It has been argued that the terms of Clause 54 of the Modern Slavery Act should be extended
to the public sector as many public sector organisations such as local authorities, health
bodies and the police, have huge procurement budgets, considerably in excess of the £36M
threshold. For example, York City Council’s procurement budget is currently £140M. There
have been moves in Parliament, including a Private Member’s Bill sponsored by Baroness
Lola Young, to do precisely this although her Bill fell at the last general election and will
need to be resubmitted. There are currently in fact 12 local authorities which are either
considering or have constructed a Modern Slavery Statement ahead of legislation, and York
City Council is one of these. Now it is completed and signed off by the City Council, it can
provide a real sense of leadership in the region for both public and private sectors to take the
issue of modern slavery more seriously. There is also a growing number of health
organisations doing so, including in York, York District Hospital Teaching NHS Foundation
Trust and Yorkshire Ambulance Service, and other public sector or quasi-public sector bodies
such as York St John University and the University of York.

In York’s case, it may not make much difference immediately since of the 28 top suppliers to
York City Council by annual value of contracts, only 5 are private companies with an annual
turnover of £36M or more for themselves or their ultimate holding company and all have
published an MSS. These are:

First Bus ISS Mediclean Helplink

BSS (Travis Perkins) Northgate Public Services

providing transport, cleaning, heating, building, and software services respectively. Two
other suppliers, Zurich Municipal (Insurance) and Insight direct (software) are below the
threshold but have published an MSS. This provides a solid base for York Council to build
on, and should hopefully provide a lead to other public sector organisations in the region,
many of which have much larger procurement budgets.

Conclusion
The government’s hope that companies will respond to the Modern Slavery Act, at worst, for
fear of being ‘named and shamed’ has clearly not been realised and there is a clear need for
the existing legislation to be strengthened and extended to the public sector. The
government’s expectation that ‘illegal’companies such as Burger King, Jewsons, Calvin
Klein or HSS Toolhire would respond to the threat of public boycotts is clearly unrealistic.

The picture in York is mixed with, on the positive side, York City Council and some health
and public sector bodies acting ahead of a requirement to do so, and on the negative side, the
picture in the private sector no better than nationally and in relation to locally-headquartered
companies, clearly worse. Overall the picture is of companies doing the absolute minimum to
adhere to the legislation and not following an MSS, where published, with definitive and
energetic action programmes. Our next step will be to explore the behaviours of those
companies whose MSS are vague or hidden or have not been updated (in all cases breaking
the law) as well as monitoring those companies locally which have not even taken the first
basic steps to prevent slavery in their supply chains.

What can we do to make York a slavery-free city?

Everyone has a contribution to make towards this aim. First, all of us as consumers and
users of services, or as those providing services, can make ourselves aware of what modern
slavery looks like, spot the signs and know what to do. There is plenty of advice on the web
and from specific organisations. Modern slavery is everyone’s business: recent cases have
been identified by fire service personnel, by a radio repair man, by people engaged in
transportation and by those simply living near a site of modern slavery. If we are worried
whether companies we buy things from may have been made in slavery conditions, ask to
speak to the manager and if you don’t get a satisfactory answer, write to the managing
director of the company. Write to your MP and ask them if they are doing anything about
modern slavery.

Companies which have published a modern slavery statement need to do more. The
statement has to be updated every year and needs to be more than a statement of aspirations.
It needs to say what the company is actually doing to investigate conditions in their suppliers
and take action where slavery is found to occur. Very few companies meet this standard at
present. Companies with a turnover of more than £36M which have not published an MSS
are breaking the law. They need to be shamed into publishing an MSS or have legal action
taken against them.

Public bodies are not required to publish an MSS but, as the case of City of York Council
shows, it is open to them to do so and there is no reason why they should not. They should
show a lead and publicise what they are doing. They should also be very clear that suppliers
must meet the terms of the Modern Slavery Act. Local authorities which give planning
permission for retail and industrial developments and developers responsible for managing
these developments can require prospective tenants to demonstrate their compliance with the
Act. Interestingly, our researcher taking notes of companies at the Designer Outlet at Naburn
was harrassed by a security guard who demanded to know what the researcher was doing,
stating that it was illegal to do so! In the event, we identified 8 companies with outlets there
which were not compliant with the Act.

This report has been produced from research undertaken by members of the Students Union
Anti-Trafficking Society at the University of York as part of its commitment to making York
slavery-free. We are grateful to all those providing help with it. For further information
contact:
[email protected].