Citizens Advice modern slavery statement 2023-24
Introduction
This statement is made on behalf of the national charity, ‘Citizens Advice’. The registered name of the charity is ‘the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux’. This statement covers the financial year to 31 March 2024.
Citizens Advice aims to avoid the occurrence of modern slavery and human trafficking within our own organisation and our supply chain. As an organisation that exists to help people with their problems and positively impact society, Citizens Advice takes the prevention of modern slavery seriously. We will continue to update this statement when appropriate.
Organisational structure
The Citizens Advice service is an established network of independent charities in England, Wales and the Channel Islands. The service provides free, confidential and impartial advice.
The Citizens Advice network is made up of 242 independent registered local charities. In the year to 31 March 2024, its services were run by 13,958 trained volunteers and 8,698 paid staff who provided advice online, over the phone and in person. The network delivers a wide range of specifically and generally funded advice provision, through a variety of channels, and has statutory roles in energy and post.
The Citizens Advice service includes our consumer service and Witness Service. The consumer service gives advice about consumer rights, over the phone and online. Witness Service volunteers and staff provide in-person support to prosecution and defence witnesses in every criminal court in England and Wales.
The national charity has offices in England and Wales. We support the Citizens Advice network in a range of ways, including providing training, information, and operational, governance and leadership support. We also conduct policy work, research and campaigns, and collect and analyse data. Our data enables us to evidence and best respond to client needs, supports our policy work, and shapes our organisational and service strategies. In the year to 31 March 2024, 1,075 staff worked for national Citizens Advice.
The charity also has an active trading subsidiary, Citizens Advice Limited (formerly Advice Services Information Limited), and a subsidiary pension trustee company, NACAB Pension Trustees Limited. As the 2023 turnover of Citizens Advice Limited was £47,750, it is not required to complete a separate modern slavery statement.
Citizens Advice policies and procedures
A number of national Citizens Advice policies and procedures relate to modern slavery - procurement, safeguarding, whistleblowing, complaints and dignity at work. These provide routes for national Citizens Advice staff, as well as the service’s clients and volunteers, to report known or suspected cases to us.
Our volunteers
Outside of the Witness Service, national Citizens Advice did not have any volunteers during the year to 31 March 2024.
Our Witness Service has a number of policies in place that are specifically for its volunteers. These include a confidentiality policy and declaration, a whistleblowing policy, a volunteer complaints policy and procedure, and a dignity at work policy for volunteers.
The Citizens Advice trustee board is made up of volunteers. In the year to 31 March 2024, all new trustees were sourced by an external recruitment agency that has its own policies and procedures in place. We received information about the agency’s steps to safeguard against modern slavery when it submitted its bid to work with us. It has a zero-tolerance approach to ‘modern slavery, forced labour [and] human trafficking’. The agency conducts due diligence on its suppliers to ensure compliance with the Modern Slavery Act 2015 and has a clear route for its employees to report any instances of modern slavery in its supply chain.
Our suppliers
National Citizens Advice uses the services of approximately 475 suppliers, in areas such as technology, research, consultancy and contracting. 460 of these suppliers are based in the UK and the remainder are based in the United States, Germany, Australia and the Netherlands. We contract with the UK-registered companies of some suppliers that are not ultimately based in the UK. As we have contracts with the UK-registered companies, we have recorded these as UK-based suppliers.
As part of our tender exercises, we now include an assessment of our suppliers' modern slavery policies and practices. In February 2023, we updated our templates to more specifically include modern slavery.
Our supplier terms and conditions include modern slavery clauses. The last major review of these was in April 2022 and we update them as needed in between major reviews. In addition, we aim to include modern slavery clauses in contracts with those suppliers that are not subject to our standard terms and conditions - a situation that can happen with lower value contracts, where on occasion suppliers’ standard terms and conditions are used.
Risk of modern slavery at Citizens Advice and by our suppliers
At Citizens Advice
We are confident, as a result of our policies and practices, that the staff who work for national Citizens Advice are not subject to modern slavery in relation to their work with us. Our employment policies have been updated since the publication of our last modern slavery statement, but no changes have been made to our categories of employment. No new risks have therefore been identified, meaning no new mitigations are currently needed.
The vast majority of our own staff are directly employed and we carry out checks at the point of recruitment to ensure that prospective staff have the right to work in the UK.
Neither national Citizens Advice staff nor Witness Service staff and volunteers are in any category generally regarded as being susceptible to modern slavery in the UK.
We lease our largest office from an established charity that has stringent safeguards against modern slavery in place. These include its own modern slavery statement; transparency regarding its supply chain; policies, procedures and controls that cover procurement and people management; and a whistle-blowing policy that enables staff to anonymously report incidents. In addition, the organisation we lease from has a Modern Slavery Act Working Group that meets regularly. There are therefore multiple protections from modern slavery for the staff who maintain both the building and its offices.
By our suppliers
Through our supply chain controls we endeavour to minimise the risk of working with companies that engage in modern slavery. Our contract management system (CMS) helps us to categorise suppliers in terms of modern slavery risk. We carried out a high level assessment of our key suppliers in April 2022 but did not identify any that were operating in high risk industries.
If we discovered or suspected that one of our suppliers was engaging in modern slavery, we would act on a case-by-case basis, with particular care to safeguard those being exploited.
Known incidents in the year to 31 March 2024
We are not aware of any incidents of modern slavery having occurred within our organisation or at any point in our supply chain during the year to 31 March 2024.
Continuous improvement and partnership working
We will continue to update our employment policies, as appropriate, and to identify and mitigate any new risks that may arise.
We will also continue to review supplier tender responses concerning modern slavery and to ensure that our contracts with suppliers contain relevant clauses. Citizens Advice is part of the Charity Sector Procurement Group, which explores and collaborates on all sectors of procurement, including modern slavery.
We have previously collaborated with the Human Trafficking Foundation to ensure that the Citizens Advice network’s advisers recognise the key warning signs of modern slavery and human trafficking. Our service offers digital advice to help people understand whether they have been a victim of human trafficking. In addition, we signpost people to specialist support organisations and explain what might happen if they make a police report.
Conclusion
This statement is made voluntarily, in support of the principles of the Modern Slavery Act 2015. It has been approved by the Citizens Advice trustee board and signed by the Chief Executive on its behalf.
Dame Clare Moriarty
Chief Executive
22 May 2024