Corporate Accountability under the Modern Slavery Act 2015

The Modern Slavery Act 2015 represents the United Kingdom's most significant legislative response to trafficking and forced labour, yet its central transparency mechanism has attracted sustained criticism for its failure to generate meaningful corporate accountability.¹ This essay critically evaluates the transparency provisions of section 54, arguing that their fundamental weakness lies in the absence of any substantive content standard, which permits corporate compliance without corresponding action.

Section 54 requires commercial organisations with an annual turnover exceeding £36 million to publish a slavery and human trafficking statement confirming the steps taken to ensure that slavery does not occur within their supply chains.² The provision does not, however, specify what those steps must be, nor does it establish any minimum standard of due diligence. LeBaron and Ruhmkorf have observed that this design creates a compliance regime in which the mere act of reporting satisfies the statutory duty regardless of whether meaningful action has actually been taken.³ This critique is persuasive and is borne out by the empirical record: multiple analyses of published statements have found that the majority fail to identify specific risks, disclose supplier audits, or commit to remediation programmes.

The absence of enforcement mechanisms compounds this structural weakness. Section 54 contains no penalty for non-compliance beyond the possibility of injunctive proceedings brought by the Secretary of State, a remedy that has never been exercised.⁴ This stands in stark contrast to the French loi de vigilance of 2017, which imposes civil liability on parent companies that fail to establish a vigilance plan covering human rights risks in their supply chains.⁵ The comparison is instructive: where the French legislation creates enforceable obligations backed by financial consequences, section 54 creates a disclosure duty unbacked by any sanction.

It is important to acknowledge, however, that transparency legislation is not without theoretical foundation. Fasterling and Demuijnck argue that disclosure requirements can create reputational incentives that, over time, drive substantive improvement, particularly where civil society organisations and institutional investors scrutinise corporate statements.⁶ There is some evidence of this dynamic in the UK context: following the introduction of the Act, several large retailers made public commitments to supply chain auditing that were not required by law. Nevertheless, this reputational mechanism depends on consistent scrutiny that remains uneven in practice, and it cannot substitute for a content standard that defines what adequate due diligence actually requires.

In conclusion, the transparency provisions of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 represent an important symbolic commitment to addressing forced labour in corporate supply chains, but their practical impact is significantly constrained by the absence of substantive content requirements and meaningful enforcement. A comparison with comparable legislation in France and Australia suggests that the most effective legal frameworks combine transparency obligations with enforceable due diligence duties. Reform of section 54 to incorporate a minimum content standard and civil liability for non-compliance would substantially strengthen the Act's capacity to achieve its stated objectives.