Modern slavery statement: publishing one that survives being read

A modern slavery statement is an annual, public account of what a company has done to check that forced labour and human trafficking are not present in its business or its supply chain. It is unusual among compliance documents in being written for strangers: customers, campaigners, journalists and prospective employees read it, and increasingly so do the procurement teams of your larger clients. That audience is why the statement written to satisfy a legal minimum tends to do more harm than good — it is visibly a statement about nothing, published under the company name.

What a modern slavery statement should contain

• The organisation, its structure and its supply chains, described concretely enough that a reader can picture where the risk would be.
• The policies that bear on it, including the supplier code of conduct and how it is actually communicated to suppliers.
• The due diligence performed: what was assessed, by whom, and at what tier of the supply chain. Tier one only is a legitimate answer if you say so.
• The risk areas identified — by geography, by commodity, by labour model — rather than an assertion that risk is low.
• What was done about them, including anything found and what happened next.
• Training, to whom it was given, and the effectiveness measures you use, however imperfect.
• Board approval and a director’s signature, with the date.

Where it goes and when

1. Publish it on your own website, and put a link on the homepage rather than three levels down under corporate.
2. Publish annually within the period your jurisdiction requires after the financial year end, and keep prior years accessible — the comparison across years is what makes it credible.
3. Register it where a central government registry exists, which several jurisdictions now operate.
4. Give it a stable URL, because customers link to it in their own supplier files and a broken link reads as withdrawal.
5. Date it and name the financial year it covers, since an undated statement is indistinguishable from an abandoned one.

The sentences to delete are the ones that assert an outcome you have not verified. "We have zero tolerance and there is no modern slavery in our supply chain" is a claim about several thousand people you have never met, and it is the line campaigners quote back. "We have assessed tiers one and two, we have not assessed beyond that, and here is what we intend to do next year" is weaker prose and a far stronger document.

What separates a real statement from a template

• Named risks rather than a general statement that risk exists.
• Numbers: how many suppliers, how many assessed, how many audited, how many issues raised.
• An account of something that was actually found, which almost no statement includes and which immediately signals that someone looked.
• Year-on-year continuity — what you said you would do last year, and whether you did it.
• A remediation approach that puts the worker first, rather than one that terminates the supplier and moves the problem somewhere less visible.

Where the statement lives

Ettex Sites is where the statement should be published: a stable page on your own domain, linked from the homepage, with previous years kept rather than overwritten. That last point is the one most companies get wrong — replacing the file each year destroys exactly the year-on-year comparison that makes the document persuasive. The evidence behind it, the supplier assessments and the audit findings, belongs in your supplier records rather than in the published text. Ettex does not assess supply chains and this is not legal advice; the thresholds, deadlines and registration requirements differ by country and change.