Modern slavery statement 2018-19

The Crick is opposed to slavery and human trafficking.

The Crick is committed to better understanding its supply chains and working towards greater transparency and responsibility towards people working within them.

We will continue to monitor and work with our service partners to encourage more of them to commit to managing the risks to humans in their supply chains.

This statement was approved and published by the Crick Board of Trustees and will continue to be reviewed at least annually.

Lord Browne of Madingley Chairman The Francis Crick Institute	Sir Paul Nurse Director The Francis Crick Institute

Financial year 2018/19

 

The Francis Crick Institute (the "Crick") is a biomedical discovery institute dedicated to understanding the fundamental biology underlying health and disease. Its work is helping to understand why disease develops and to translate discoveries into new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, stroke, infections, and neurodegenerative diseases.

The Modern Slavery Act (the "Act") is intended to tackle conduct that constitutes the offences of slavery, servitude, forced or compulsory labour and human trafficking, or that would constitute an offence if the conduct took place in the UK.

This statement sets out the steps taken by the Crick, and the steps it proposes to take, to identify, prevent and mitigate the risks associated with modern slavery across the institute. It is made pursuant to the requirements of Part 6 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 (the "Act") and it constitutes the Crick's slavery and human trafficking statement for the financial year ended 31 March 2019.

The Crick

The Crick is a registered charity. An independent organisation, its founding partners are UK Research and Innovation (Medical Research Council), Cancer Research UK, Wellcome, University College London, Imperial College London and King's College London.

Overall responsibility for setting the strategic direction of the institute lies with its Board. An executive management team led by Sir Paul Nurse is responsible for leading the organisation and implementing its scientific vision and research strategy.

The Crick is committed to acting ethically, with integrity and transparency across its supply chain. We have, and continue to put in place appropriate processes intended to safeguard against any form of modern slavery taking place within our procurement, supply chain or contract management operations.

High-risk areas and spend categories

The Crick's workforce comprises highly educated professional occupations and the Crick does not directly employ staff in categories typically deemed to be vulnerable to modern slavery in the UK, such as unskilled domestic, agricultural and factory workers. The focus of the Crick is, therefore, on its supply chain and on ensuring there are appropriate safeguards in place in our relationships with contractors and suppliers.

Whilst we continue to work on categorisation and identification of risk, at present our supply chain can be broken down into five main areas:

• Equipment
• Laboratory consumables
• IT equipment and services
• Professional services
• Building services

The principal categories which carry material risks are sourcing office supplies, laboratory consumables, ICT equipment and some estates services, such as cleaning and security services.

Mitigation of risk

In order to mitigate the risk posed to cleaning, catering and security staff we ensure that all supply chain partners commit to paying the London Living Wage to all staff working at the Crick, with the exception of apprentices. By ensuring our supply chain partners pay staff employed at the Crick the London Living Wage the Crick is taking a stand to ensure its workforce can earn a wage which is enough to live on.

The Crick is a member of the London Universities Purchasing Consortium (LUPC), which works with vendors in supply chains with higher risks for human rights violations such as IT and office supplies, to encourage more suppliers to commit to the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) Base Code.

Our approach

TThe Crick is committed to acquiring goods and services without causing any harm to others. As such, we remain committed to the UK Government's National Action Plan, updated in May 2016, to implement the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

We take a multifaceted approach, which includes:

1. Modern slavery - this Statement publicly sets out the Crick's stance on modern slavery and our continuous work to develop in this area.
2. Recruitment policy - we operate a robust recruitment policy, including conducting eligibility to work in the UK checks for all employees to safeguard against human trafficking or individuals being forced to work against their will.
3. Whistleblowing policy - we operate a whistleblowing policy so that all employees know that they can raise concerns about how colleagues are being treated, or practices within our business or supply chain, without fear of reprisals.
4. Procurement policy - this policy covers the acquisition of all goods and services from external sources, by the Crick and any of its subsidiaries, whether or not for financial consideration.

Procurement

Procurement at the Crick plays an important role in our approach to combat modern slavery in our supply chain. Procurement projects follow one of two paths, an in-house tendering and contracting process or a collaborative route through purchasing consortia. 

For those areas of our supply chain where we believe there is a significant risk of modern slavery our in-house tendering and contracting process is adapted to identify those risks, e.g. we may use assessment questions around compliance with the Modern Slavery Act 2015 which may provide grounds for exclusion from tendering and contracting process in the event of non-compliance by a potential supplier.

We are working to embed our Modern Slavery Statement in our tendering process and we are updating our standard terms and conditions to include clauses relating to modern slavery and human trafficking. 

Continuous review

As part of this reporting exercise in this and the coming years, the Crick is committed to better understanding its supply chains and working towards greater transparency and responsibility towards people working within them.

We have identified modern slavery awareness as a training need and aim to develop wider awareness across the institute.