Modern Slavery Statement

Introduction

 

Matrix is committed to improving our practices to combat slavery and human trafficking in our business and in our supply chain. We work to the highest ethical standards in recruitment and seek to ensure that our suppliers and clients do the same.  We have in place policies around ensuring that workers satisfy identity and right to work checks and train our staff in these and in alerting the business to possible areas of risk and in minimisation procedures.

 

Organisation’s structure

 

We are a provider of recruitment, staffing and procurement solutions to organisations and businesses within the UK.  Matrix has its head office in the UK and our employees currently number approximately 120.

 

Our business

 

Our business includes the following companies, Matrix SCM Ltd, Client Directs Ltd, Matrix Managed Market places Ltd, Talent Pool and CDL Umbrella. Our Modern Slavery Policy is focused to apply to the specific needs of each area of the business and the ways in which they contract with their suppliers and clients.  This includes how workers are employed within the supply chain within a given sector and how Matrix can ensure it accommodates best practice.

 

Our supply chains

 

Our supply chains include employment and recruitment agencies and, independent contractor companies, umbrella companies and individual consultants.

 

Our policies on slavery and human trafficking

 

We have appropriate policies in place that underpin our commitment to ensure that there is no modern slavery or human trafficking in our supply chains or in any part of our business. We continuously review and update all of our policies.

Our Anti-slavery Policy reflects our commitment to acting ethically and with integrity in all of our business relationships and to implementing and enforcing effective systems and controls to ensure slavery and human trafficking is not taking place anywhere in our supply chains. We also have the following policies in place relevant to modern slavery, which we continuously review and update:

  • Code of conduct regarding ethical practice within the employment sector.
  • Responsible procurement and contracting within the employment sector.
  • Ethical business practices within the employment sector.

As a company that offers a neutral managed vendor solution to a large number of public sector clients we have a strong social value ethos.  This is supplemented by our commitment to ethical practices within our business dealings, including ensuring our suppliers are compliant with best practice in the sector.

 

Due diligence processes for slavery and human trafficking

 

We understand that the following areas give rise to the highest modern slavery risks:

Provision of staff via sub-contractors

Provision of staff from agencies without sufficiently robust identity and right to work checks

Provision of staff for short assignments

Provision of staff into certain industry sectors

As part of our initiative to identify and mitigate risk we have reviewed our contracts to ensure that we require full identity and right to work checks for all agency workers.  We have systems that allow us to audit our suppliers and we have training in place to ensure our staff are able to spot anomalies in the material provided to us.   We also have in place systems to:

  • Identify and assess potential risk areas in our supply chains.
  • Mitigate the risk of slavery and human trafficking occurring in our supply chains.
  • Monitor potential risk areas in our supply chains.
  • Protect whistle blowers.

 

Supplier adherence to our values

 

To support our policies to prevent slavery and human trafficking we also require adherence to our values by our supply chain. To ensure all those in our supply chain and ,where relevant,  independent contractors comply with our values we have in place a supply chain compliance programme. This consists of:

Supplier contracts that require explicit agreement to compliance with our policies and practices that include stringent identity and right to work checks;

Staff training on compliance from suppliers;

Supplier evaluation criteria that include assessing compliance with modern slavery policies and recruitment practices designed to ensure identity and compliance checks are carried out.

We have a dedicated compliance team, which consists of involvement from the following departments:

  • Legal
  • Finance
  • Human resources.
  • Business Management
  • IT

 

Training

 

To ensure a high level of understanding of the risks of modern slavery and human trafficking in our supply chains and our business, we provide training to our staff. This includes specially created e- learning modules on modern slavery and human trafficking. We also seek to ensure that clients who have workers placed with them and supplier employment agencies have appropriate training policies in place.

Our relationship with our clients requires us to adhere to their compliance requirements around modern slavery and human trafficking.  With many clients in the public sector this means Matrix is constantly exposed to current best practice.  Matrix ensures its policies are informed by client requirements in addition to its own compliance practices.

 

Our effectiveness in combating slavery and human trafficking

 

Our clients’ requirements that we have policies in place and are aware of and comply with their policies ensures that we are exposed to different and best practice along the whole supply chain.  We are putting in place evaluation and compliance processes for our current training.

 

Further Actions

 

We will review our compliance with client requirements   alongside evaluating our training and regularly  reviewing our  supplier agreements.  We will also review this policy at least annually.

 

This statement is made pursuant to section 54(1) of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 and constitutes our slavery and human trafficking statement for 2023. Signature:
Mark Inskip, CEO
Matrix SCM Ltd
Date: March 1st, 2023