Modern Slavery Act

Modern Slavery Statement for the Financial Year from April 2021

This statement is made on behalf of Systech Group Limited pursuant to the section 54(1) of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 and comprises Systech’s Modern Slavery Statement.

It outlines the steps Systech have taken as a business to identify and prevent slavery in our own operations and supply chains.

Systech understands its responsibilities and are committed to improving practices to combat slavery.

OUR BUSINESS

Systech provides responsive, high quality, multi-disciplinary managed services to support the delivery of complex and challenging projects, globally.

We ensure that robust measures to control risk, cost, and time, manage claims and prevent disputes are in place to support the successful delivery of global projects. Our co-ordinated, multidisciplinary teams give our clients the commercial edge throughout the project and the expertise to resolve claims and disputes. Our services include: Claims Management, Contract Management, Site Diary App, Planning and Scheduling, Systech Delay Analysis Software, Legal Services, Dispute Resolution, Visualisations, Expert Witness and Training.

Systech Group Limited has its head office in the UK. We manage the Group through four regional hubs: 1. UK/EUR, 2. APAC, 3. MEA and 4. Americas.

With a presence in 5 continents, our 600 specialist construction consultants offer a mixture of both local and international experience, bringing fresh and independent ideas and lessons learned from global projects. They are led by a senior management team, many of which have been with us from the early days of the business.

Systech’s consultants work together under a single point of responsibility to provide a fully coordinated and seamless service; we adopt a team approach and encourage our consultants to call on the support of their colleagues with specialist skills and experience for advice. We also work closely with our clients to advise and support them with their staff upskilling programmes, to ensure that our expertise is shared for the benefit of future projects.

OUR POLICIES ON MODERN SLAVERY

We are committed to ensuring that there is no modern slavery in our supply chains or in any part of our business.

Our Anti-Slavery Policy reflects our commitment to acting ethically and with integrity in all our business relationships and to implementing and enforcing effective systems and controls to ensure modern slavery is not taking place anywhere in our business and in our supply chains.

Accompanying this is our Whistleblowing Policy which provides a system for our employees to escalate modern slavery issues and breaches of our Group policies. Both policies are reviewed annually.

There have been no breaches or suspected breaches of our Anti-Slavery Policy reported.

DUE DILIGENCE PROCESSES FOR MODERN SLAVERY

As part of our initiative to identify, monitor and mitigate against industry risk, business transaction risk and risk in the countries in which we operate, we nominate senior representatives of the business, who in turn report to the Group CEO.

We have policies and systems in place across our business, our trading partners and our supply chains to:-

  1. Identify inappropriate employment practices.
  2. Identify, assess, and monitor other potential risk areas.
  3. Mitigate the risk of modern slavery occurring.
  4. Protect whistle-blowers.
  5. Investigate reports of Modern Slavery.

SUPPLIER ADHERENCE TO OUR VALUES

Our procurement activities take place around the world but are overseen from the Group’s headquarters in the UK. The profile of procurement means that the risk profile in relation to modern slavery of our supply chain is assessed as being very low.

We expect our Delivery Partners, organisations within our frameworks and other companies we engage with to ensure their goods, materials, and labour-related supply chains:

  1. Fully comply with the Modern Slavery Act 2015.
  2. Transparent, accountable, and auditable.
  3. Free from ethical ambiguities.

We have zero tolerance to modern slavery.

To ensure all those in our supply chain and contractors comply with our values we operate in line with principles of responsible sourcing, including paying employees at the prevailing minimum wage applicable within their relevant country of operations.

TRAINING

To ensure a high level of understanding of the risks of modern slavery in our business, in our supply chains and in our business partners, we provide relevant in-house, on-line training to our colleagues.

COVID-19

We understand that some workers may be more vulnerable to modern slavery during the coronavirus pandemic. The Group adopted government guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic to transition to remote or home-working and paying statutory sick pay to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Our employees have been and continue to have access to our grievance procedures.

STEPS TAKEN AND NEXT STEPS

Management responsibility and Building Awareness

We have:

  • Agreed management responsibility for this policy and statement and received unanimous endorsement from our Executive Management Team and our Board.
  • Undertaken an assessment to determine our risk exposure.
  • Established that our primary risk is association with a Supplier or Client with an ambiguous or non-compliant supply chain.
  • Included the Modern Slavery Act 2015 within our Risk Register to ensure the risk continues to be flagged, assessed, and appropriately addressed.

We are:

  • Raising general organisational awareness by circulating an article to all staff explaining the requirements of the Act.
  • Amending client and supplier standard terms and conditions to include a clause for breach if a client has been convicted of an offence under section 1, 2 or 4 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015.
  • Requiring all existing staff and sub-contractors to undertake and successfully complete awareness training.

We will:

  • Report progress to our Executive Management Team and our Board.
  • Raise awareness of this published statement.
  • Prepare the next annual statement.
  • Commence a review exercise of this policy against our activities to establish whether the approach we have taken follows emerging best practice by:
    • Assessing and interpreting any recent or emerging case law and best practice.
    • Benchmarking our activities against statements and action plans undertaken by similar private organisations.
    • Re-evaluating the risk of non-compliance as part of our cyclical Compliance Risk Register assessment.
  • Act promptly where a compliance breach has been identified or flagged.
  • Continue to feed back lessons learnt into the compliance risk management process.
  • Introduce contractual obligations for all staff and sub-contractors to undertake awareness training and comply with Company policy and procedures in relation to modern slavery issues.

This statement is made pursuant to section 54(1) of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 and constitutes Systech’s slavery and human trafficking statement for the financial year starting April 2021.

Signed: Mark Woodward-Smith, Director