Bristol’s role in combating modern slavery

Bristol continues to take a leading role in combating modern slavery in the UK. 

The 2015 Modern Slavery Act was born out of a report from Bristol-based anti-slavery charity Unseen’s Chief Executive, Andrew Wallis OBE, commissioned by the Centre for Social Justice. And it is Bristol again that has put the issue back at the forefront of the public agenda. 

At the end of January 2017, Business West’s Corporate Social Responsibility division, Initiative, hosted an event on ‘The Modern Slavery Act and your business’, which aimed at empowering firms to do more to tackle the problem of modern slavery in their supply chains.

Chiefly, this takes the form of signing up to the Transparency in Supply Chains (TISC) report: an open data platform that enables firms to declare they are slavery-free and to better monitor their supply chains.

Amie Vaughan, head of Business West’s Initiative, elaborates: “If you work in an industry, you can log on and see which other businesses are signed up and the measures they have in place. It’s essentially a way of sharing best practise on the issue”. 

As an open data registry, anyone can search for a business to see if a Modern Slavery Statement has been filed. So far, over 17,000 firms doing business in the UK have signed up. 

One key speaker at the Business West event was Jaya Chakrabarti, head of Semantrica, a social enterprise firm who run TISCreport.org. 50% of the profits made through the site are donated to Unseen, to help close the loop. “This initiative started in Bristol,” she says. “A Bristol charity got together with a Bristol social enterprise and the world is now watching.

“The whole point is to make Bristol the most transparent city in the world to do business in. My call to action would be: whether or not you’re a million pound company, you can still register with TISCreport.org. Be ahead of the game.” 

It’s a call that is being increasingly heard. In the first two weeks of February, the number of companies with statements leapt from 10,000 to 17,000. A cursory perusal of the list shows many Bristol firms already signed up. Whether you’re sipping some water from your Wessex Spring Water tap, dining at Browns or enjoying BBC Bristol radio, you can be sure of an ethical supply chain. 

But it doesn’t end here, as Semantrica are partnering with Bristol City Council to create a national online platform for local authorities, and Bristol will be the first to sign up to it. In the meantime, TISCreport.org continues to grow. “The vision for our enterprise is to give modern slavery no place to hide within our supply chains,” Jaya Chakrabarti says. 

Despite, or perhaps because of, Bristol’s intimate connection with the slave trade, the city is blazing a trail when it comes to dealing with slavery in the contemporary world. It might not change the past, but we may yet see a brighter future. 

Read more: ‘Facing our past by tackling modern slavery’