NEW- Local Authorities' reporting under the Modern Slavery Act

Olga Martin-Ortega and Anna Gorna, UK Modern Slavery Act Transparency in Supply Chains: Reporting by Local Authorities, BHRE Research Series. Report No. 5, October 2022.

We have produced a new report analysing Local Authorities Moder Slavery Statements. In this latest report in the BHRE Research Series, Anna Gorna and Olga Martin-Ortega analyse the progress in transparency reporting by local authorities under the UK Modern Slavery Act (2015) (MSA). As in our previous reports, we provide in depth qualitative analysis of modern slavery reporting by public bodies on their efforts to combat modern slavery and human trafficking in their supply chains since the MSA Transparency in Supply Chains Provision (TISC) (Section 54), entered into force on 29th October 2015. This research report covers the Modern Slavery Act (MSA) reporting periods for the financial years 2020/2021 and 2021/2022. During this period, local authorities had to simultaneously cope with the Covid-19 pandemic and its various impacts, some of which we explore in relation to modern slavery reporting later in this report.

Our first research report on local authorities covered the reporting periods corresponding 2015/2016 and 2016/2017 financial years. The second report covered the years 2017/2018, 2018/2019 and 2019/2020. Over the years since the implementation of the modern Slavery Act 2015, a total of 178 Councils have published a modern slavery statement which remain accessible online, out of 398 in the entirety of the UK, whether individual or jointly written.

Whilst not mandated by law, a significant number of local authorities in the UK has have chosen to report under the MSA, exposing themselves to scrutiny, embarking in challenging learning processes to develop due diligence in their decision making when purchasing and contracting goods, services and works, and providing national and international leadership in sustainable and socially responsible practices. As our report shows, local authorities are becoming increasingly aware of their responsibilities and opportunities to influence working conditions in their supply chains, even if there are still important changes that need to be done in both the way they pursue their procurement and they report on their actions. This is especially urgent as the next review of the MSA will extend S.54 of the MSA to public bodies, including local authorities, with a budget threshold of £36 million or more in England and Wales.

Radio Ghost at LIFT Festival 2022

The BHRE team was delighted to attend the laundh of Radio Ghost at LIFT festival at Ilford Exchange! Radio Ghost is a research and development project of a collaborative multi-player locative game experience for Shopping Centres. Based on the research contribution on working conditions and enviornmental impacts of global supply chains by BHRE, the game aims to promote ethical consumption by supporting the re-opening of sustainable commerce. After long hours of research during the pandemic and many playtests, it has launched at LIFT Festival in three different shopping centres this month and will be launched all across the globe! By following audio prompts on your mobile, it explores and engages players in mindful consumption behaviours through small data mining activities.

The BHRE, alongside Law, Emerging Tech and Science Lab (LETS Lab) is proud to have contributed to this fantastic knowledge exchange project. The focus is on encouraging ethical consumer behaviour through nudging the consumer part of corporate human rights due diligence and technology as a tool to modify behavioural patterns.

Radio Ghost is created and produced by ZU-UK and University of Greenwich, with support from the Innovate UK Sustainable Innovation Fund: Round 1 (Temporary Framework) 2020 (co-PIs by Dr. Jorge Ramos Lopes and Professor Olga Martin-Ortega).

Check the photos of some of the members of the research team playing the game in real time!

New Episode on The Professoriate: In Conversation with Maria Arche

In this episode Olga talks to Maria about the social role of linguistics and what it means to be an activist in this field, moving from chemistry to languages, speaking up as a woman in academia and creating safe spaces for all of us. This episode is dedicated to Professor Linda Burke, who has been instrumental in both Maria and Olga's academic, professional (and personal) development.

Professor María J Arche is Professor in Linguistics and Director of the Centre for Research & Enterprise in Language (CREL). She obtained a PhD in Theoretical Linguistics & Language Acquisition under the supervision of Tim Stowell (University California Los Angeles) and Violeta Demonte (Autonomous University of Madrid). Based on her doctoral dissertation she published the monograph Individuals in Time: Tense, aspect and the individual/stage distinction, in the collection Linguistics Today, John Benjamins Publishing (Amsterdam/Philadelphia) in 2006.

She was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southampton funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council and has been a visiting scholar at the Universities of California Los Angeles, Massachusetts Amherst, Groningen and Tromsø as well as part of several research projects. She is currently the Principal Investigator of an international team that has been awarded a theme-group fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).

Her research falls within the syntax-semantics interface focusing on Tense, Aspect, Argument Structure and copular verbs. She has studied these topics in the grammar of Spanish and has also investigated their crosslinguistic variation and acquisition.

Recent works include the edition of a Special Issue for the journal Natural Language and Linguistic Theory Arche, M.J. (ed.) 2014. Aspect across languages: semantic primitives, morpho-syntactic representation and the limits of cross-linguistic variation and Arche, M.J.,A. Fábregas and R. Marín (eds.) 2019. The Grammar of Copulas Across Languages, published by Oxford University Press in its collection of Theoretical Linguistics. These works comprise both extensive empirical data (from 17 and 12 languages respectively) and detailed theoretical analyses with consequences that go beyond the main topics of the works.

What is the Professoriate?

Professor Olga Martin-Ortega talks to women, and people who identify themselves as women, in academia about their lives and work; the choices and decisions they made to get where they are; the women who inspired them and how to empower women at earlier stages in their academic development. The Professoriate is the 'body of college and university teachers at an institution or in society'. In this podcast we focus on the voices of women, who have had less representation and whose experiences have been often neglected in senior academic bodies.