Our Modern Slavery Act Statement
The Direct Produce Supplies Ltd (dps) board of directors have approved and signed the below statement
Amid increasing geopolitical instability and climate related risks that inevitably enhance vulnerabilities, and exploitation risks for some of the people within our end-to-end supply chain, the Terradace Group, encompassing Direct Produce Suppliers (dps), dps(M&S) and Integrated Service Solutions (ISS) remain focused on our strategy and values of Operating Responsibly to maximise our positive, social and ethical impacts and minimise our environmental footprint. Our commitments include applying the principles and practice of ethical trade to ensure trust, transparency and drive improvements to protect and respect human rights.
The UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 requires us to demonstrate actions to reduce modern slavery, human trafficking and forced labour risks across the supply chain each year.
To this effect, The Terradace Group have published our full Modern Slavery statement in the following locations: UK Government Modern Slavery Registry and Terradace Group Modern Slavery Statement 2023 -2024
Our 2023 – 2024 statement refers to the financial year ending 30th September 2024 and includes the action implemented to identify, mitigate, and prevent modern slavery risks in our own operations and upstream supply chains.
We are cognisant that there is still much work to build on our approach to tackling modern slavery and preventing exploitation, but are confident that the steps we have taken over the last 12 months are having an impact and are critical in moving us in the right direction:
- Continued to include strategic pillars for modern slavery, worker voice and grievance mechanisms in our ethical trade and human rights due diligence framework
- Implemented our new Human rights risk assessment tool including new inherent modern slavery, climate change and gender related indicators
- Identified our top 10 sourcing countries with highest inherent modern slavery risks
- Maintained StrongerTogether Advanced Business Partner status
- Established new KPIs to measure our effectiveness, progress and impacts
- Hosted supplier webinars on modern slavery awareness and effective grievance mechanisms
- Created a serious incident & allegation management policy and procedure including modern slavery and remediation
- Reduced the number of temporary labour and reliance on agency labour at ISS by increasing the proportion of directly employed colleagues
- ISS Increased participation in the internal Engagement and Well Being Surveys, making a positive step change in engagement levels from 68% in 22/23 to 74% in 23/24. dps also increased engagement levels from 88% to 94.32%, while dps(M&S) moved marginally backwards from 88.89% to 85.71%. Participation in retailer engagement surveys continued with good results too
- Stronger Together welfare questionnaires were introduced into the ISS induction for employees. Questionnaires are taken in workers own language so workers can answer as honestly as possible and raise any concerns they might have about their welfare and modern slavery. Agency partners have been requested to follow this process which will be audited
Over the next year we remain optimistic that plans will enable us to continually evolve our approach, including becoming members and being on the governance committee of the Modern Slavery International Network, and implementing derisking actions to address the most salient modern slavery risks by country, crop, and vulnerability and driving engagement internally and within our supply chains.
This statement is approved by the dps Board of Directors
Paul Beynon
Group CEO
March 2025