Supply chain risk assessments
As a business we assess our supply chain to understand if there are any potential areas of risk when it comes to modern slavery;
- Risk as identified in The Global Slavery Index highlights 15 product categories that are at high risk from Modern Slavery. Of these the only three that impact on Bluetree’s supply chain are Timber, Consumer Electronics (such as laptops and mobile phones) and garments.
- Timber sourced from Brazil, North Korea and Peru are raised as possible concern, however our paper and board is all FSC certified, comes from European sources and therefore is unlikely to have Modern Slavery risks.
- As a technology driven company we use large volumes of computers, laptops and other electronic goods. These are sourced from a mixture of electronic equipment manufacturers and suppliers, as well as using refurbished equipment sourced locally. Our partnering with two electronic equipment suppliers has allowed us to mitigate this risk.
What have we done? – Understanding and Influencing our Supply Chain
As part of the launch of our Sustainability Strategy we identified that we wanted to expand our direct understanding of our Supply Chain to support the ‘Sustainability at the Source’ branch of the strategy, doing so will allow us to work towards our key objective of operating within a fully transparent and socially responsible value chain.
To achieve this we have launched, in partnership with Diligent a leading risk management company, our Supplier Risk Management platform. This system works with Diligent’s Risk Models and our own in house developed Sustainability Questionnaire to build an accurate risk profile of our supply chain. The risk model is designed to assess our suppliers against 6 key areas: Labour Standards and Modern Slavery, Ethical Procurement, Carbon, Sustainable Procurement, Quality and Supply Chain Resilience.
After several months of development, we have launched the system with our first round of suppliers in July of 2023. So far, we have reached out to 23 of our main suppliers as to test the system and get
our first round of Supply Chain risk data. We are currently working on interpreting this data and building our first Supplier Risk profiles. This will allow us to directly understand the risks associated with Modern Slavery for our wider supply chain and begin to set specific objectives and targets for ourselves and our suppliers to reduce any identified risks.
How we tackle modern slavery risks within our organisation
Our Team Experience Department and wider Management Team are responsible for ensuring that we have the right Internal policies and processes in place to proactively tackle modern slavery, human trafficking and labour standards concerns, including:
- We are an accredited Real Living Wage Employer which means that all our employees are paid the Real Living Wage which is higher than the Governments recommended hourly rate.
- When onboarding our colleagues, we have some strict internal processes which we follow to ensure that our colleagues are employed legally, fairly, and ethically.
- Prior to contracts being issued in person Right to Work checks are performed by the team.
- All employees are issued contracts of employment electronically before their first day of work and are given their own personal copy of this to keep and refer to.
- All employees must provide official proof of their identification so that we can check they are who they say they are, are of the legal working age and have the right to work in the UK
- All colleagues are paid weekly into a named bank account, and changes can only be made by the employee and verified by a member of the HR team.
- All employees clock in and out of the business so that we can ensure they are paid fairly for the time they have worked.
- As a business we are committed to phasing out agency workers where risk of exploitation and underpaying is in the hands of an external supplier.
- The business has a long-established Grievance policy (updated March 2022) which is published in our company handbook and on our intranet. This grievance policy encourages individuals to raise problems or issues that they may have with other colleagues, managers, or teams so that they can be resolved in a fair and constructive way. This would include the ability to raise concerns about exploitative working or practices internally or by our suppliers or customers.
- To prevent third parties from influencing our employees financial situation all requests for information about and/or changes to employee bank details must come in the form of a written request from the employee only.
What are we doing in the next 12 months
We will continue the roll out of our supplier risk system, onboarding the remainder of our significant direct suppliers, and working to identify and onboard the significant companies that work within our wider Value Chain.
We will use the supplier risk profiles to identify areas of concern and begin working with our supply chain partners to address them, setting specific targets for our partners to reduce their risk. We will publish our first round of KPI data for our ‘Sustainability at the Source’ objective, setting our first improvement targets, including detailed information about Modern Slavery risks.
