Making the UK world-leading again: key recommendations from House of Lords Select Committee report on the Modern Slavery Act 2015

In October 2024, the House of Lords Select Committee on the Modern Slavery Act 2015 (MSA Committee) published its report, The Modern Slavery Act 2015: becoming world-leading again, which sets out a series of recommendations for how the UK can reform its existing legislation on modern slavery to bring it in line with international best practice. The report follows an inquiry commenced in January 2024 tasked with examining, among other things, the efficacy of the provisions of the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 (MSA 2015) relating to supply chains. 

The MSA 2015, once a trailblazing piece of legislation which introduced a corporate reporting requirement, has since been overtaken by regimes such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD / CS3D) (see our podcast series here).

Its shortcomings have led to multiple attempts to update the regime over the years, most recently a December 2023 Private Members’ Bill in the House of Lords that called for the introduction of wide-ranging human rights and due diligence obligations in the UK (see our previous blog post here). Lacking Government backing, it met the same fate as a similar bill from 2021 and failed to make any progress. Prior to that, the previous Government announced an update to the MSA 2015 in the Queen’s Speech 2022 but this did not develop further and was noticeably missing from the King’s Speech in 2023 (see our previous blog post here).

What is currently required under section 54 of the MSA 2015?

We have covered the requirements and expectations under section 54 of the MSA 2015 in more detail here. 

At a high-level, organisations fulfilling certain scoping requirements are required to publish an annual statement on the steps they have taken in the relevant financial year to ensure that slavery and human trafficking are not taking place in their own business or supply chain. 

The MSA 2015 and accompanying government guidance provide some recommended reporting areas, but these are not mandatory, and there are currently no penalties for non-compliance with the regime. 

Recommendations

In this blog post, we have summarised the main recommendations from the report relevant to businesses and the section 54 requirements.

Supply chain due diligence 

The report recommends the introduction of legislation requiring companies to conduct modern slavery due diligence in their supply chains and to take reasonable steps to address identified problems. 

Noting the development of other mandatory due diligence regimes internationally (which are broader than the regime proposed by the report, often covering human rights more broadly and also environmental impacts), the report states that any due diligence requirements introduced in the UK should be made compatible with standards internationally.

Although the MSA Committee considered the question of what the thresholds should be for the due diligence legislation, the report does not provide any suggestions on this front apart from the requirement that the thresholds should be consistent across sectors, including the public sector. 

However, the report included a recommendation for the Government to consult businesses on the potential issues with the introduction of this requirement, and to give due consideration to challenges that small and medium sized companies might face. 

Import bans

The report suggests that the Government consider introducing laws which ban goods being brought into the UK if they are produced by certain companies known to use forced labour. 

This would be similar to regimes such as the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in the US and the EU’s Forced Labour Ban (see our previous blog post here). 

However, the report emphasises that any such law should not be a blanket ban targeted at particular countries. 

Mandatory reporting requirements

The MSA Committee recommends that the Government make publication of modern slavery statements on its modern slavery registry mandatory and set out required topics that have to be covered in a statement. 

Apart from a recommendation that the topics include how an organisation assesses the effectiveness of its actions (a current suggested area of reporting), the MSA Committee did not specify the topics to be covered. 

Currently, publication on the Government’s modern slavery registry is done on a voluntary basis and the recommended areas of reporting (as noted above) are optional, which has come in for a large degree of criticism as key suggested reporting on the effectiveness of companies’ actions to manage human trafficking and modern slavery risks are often not included.

Enforcement 

The report calls on the Government to introduce proportionate sanctions for organisations that do not comply with supply chain reporting requirements. 

The report does not go into detail on what these sanctions should look like or how enforcement would work, but does strongly indicate that the current approach of no enforcement is not working.

A number of stakeholders contributing to the report suggested sanctioning directors for non-compliance with the MSA 2015, but there were mixed views as to the efficacy of introducing director liability.

Extension of section 54 requirements to public sector bodies

Section 54 of the MSA 2015 only applies to commercial organisations and not to public bodies, although some public bodies do publish modern slavery statements on a voluntary basis. 

While the report noted that the Procurement Act 2023 has sought to introduce additional provisions in relation to modern slavery (e.g., the ability to debar suppliers for modern slavery) , the report has called for the Government to meet the same standards of responsibility as private companies to reduce modern slavery in its supply chains by extending reporting requirements under section 54 to all bodies in the public sector with an annual budget equivalent to commercial organisations caught by the regime. 

What next?

The influence of this report on the new Government’s legislative agenda remains uncertain, particularly as human rights and supply chains did not feature at the Labour conference in September nor in Labour’s election manifesto.

Whether the report is the start of a long-overdue update to the Modern Slavery Act 2015, or is another proposal that falls by the wayside remains to be seen. 

Regardless, it signifies a growing appetite for reforming how modern slavery risks are managed in the UK and has the potential to drive further stakeholder scrutiny and influence the legislative agenda on modern slavery and human rights.

For more information on human rights and the EU CSDDD regime, see our Business & Human Rights materials.