Citizens Advice modern slavery statement 2024-25
Summary
Citizens Advice is a registered charity operating in England, Wales and the Channel Islands, and produces a modern slavery statement on a voluntary basis. This statement covers the year to 31 March 2025 and focuses on our paid colleagues, volunteers and suppliers.
The statement outlines our organisational structure, policies and procedures relating to modern slavery, and safeguarding practices. It also sets out the risk of modern slavery with regard to our people and supply chain, and details our past, present and planned work in the area of modern slavery prevention.
We do not know of any instances of modern slavery having occurred anywhere in our organisation or supply chain in the year to 31 March 2025.
Introduction
This statement is made on behalf of the national charity, ‘Citizens Advice’. The registered name of the charity is ‘the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux’. This statement covers the financial year to 31 March 2025.
Citizens Advice aims to avoid any and all modern slavery and human trafficking - both within our own organisation and our supply chain. The Citizens Advice service helps people with problems that include employment, housing and discrimination. The national charity works to influence and improve policies in these and other areas. As such, Citizens Advice recognises the importance of safeguarding against modern slavery.
Organisational structure
The Citizens Advice service is an established network of independent charities in England, Wales and the Channel Islands that provides free, confidential and impartial advice. Find out more about the work we do.
In the year to 31 March 2025, our network was made up of 239 independent registered local charities (’local Citizens Advice’), with around 19,609 trained volunteers and 10,027 paid colleagues across our whole service. Local Citizens Advice provided advice over the phone, by email, webchat, and in person.
Our service delivers a wide range of advice and has statutory roles in energy and post. We receive both unrestricted funding for general advice provision and restricted funding for specific projects.
Our national charity has offices in England and Wales. In the year to 31 March 2025, 1,054 colleagues worked for national Citizens Advice. The national charity supports the Citizens Advice network, providing advice content, training, products and platforms, and operational, governance and leadership support.
We also carry out policy, advocacy, research and campaigns work, for which we collect and analyse anonymised data. Our data allows us to evidence our recommendations, best respond to changing client needs, and it supports our policy work and shapes our organisational and service-wide strategies. The national charity includes the Witness Service, whose volunteers and colleagues provide in-person support to prosecution and defence witnesses in every criminal court in England and Wales.
The charity has an active trading subsidiary, Citizens Advice Limited (formerly ’Advice Services Information Limited’), and a subsidiary pension trustee company, NACAB Pension Trustees Limited. As the 2024 turnover of Citizens Advice Limited was just £625, it is not required to complete a separate modern slavery statement. NACAB Pension Trustees Limited had no financial transactions or balances in the year to 31 March 2024.
Citizens Advice policies and procedures
A number of Citizens Advice policies and procedures relate to modern slavery - safeguarding, whistleblowing, commercial and contracting, using temp agency workers, risk management, dignity at work, and complaints. These provide routes for national Citizens Advice colleagues and trustees and, in the case of complaints, the service’s clients and volunteers, to report known or suspected cases of modern slavery to us.
Safeguarding at Citizens Advice
As well as our safeguarding policies and procedure, Citizens Advice has several safeguarding leads, including one for our national charity and one for our Witness Service. All of our colleagues complete mandatory annual safeguarding training, which includes how to identify the signs of modern slavery and report suspected cases.
Our volunteers
Other than our trustees, the only volunteers working within national Citizens Advice during the year to 31 March 2025 were in the Witness Service.
Our Witness Service has a number of policies and procedures for its volunteers. These include the following:
whistleblowing policy
criminal records and convictions: volunteer recruitment policy
Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) policy and procedure
complaints procedure
dignity at work policy, and
confidentiality policy and declaration
We have updated the Witness Service DBS procedures to provide clarity on how and when DBS checks are completed when volunteers become staff members.
As part of their induction, Witness Service volunteers complete e-learning about safeguarding. If Witness Service volunteers identify any safeguarding concerns in the course of carrying out their role, they report them to Witness Service staff.
Our suppliers
In the year to 31 March 2025, national Citizens Advice used the services of approximately 400 suppliers, in areas such as technology, research, consultancy and contracting. 372 of these suppliers were based in the UK and the remainder based in the United States, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. We contract with the UK-registered companies of some suppliers that are not ultimately based in the UK. As we have contracts with the UK-registered companies, we have recorded these as UK-based suppliers.
As part of our tender exercises, we include an assessment of our suppliers' modern slavery policies and practices. Since February 2023, we have more specifically included modern slavery in our templates.
Our supplier terms and conditions include modern slavery clauses and we last carried out a major review of them in April 2022. Although we have not made any changes to these clauses in the year to 31 March 2025, we update them as needed between major reviews. We also include modern slavery clauses in contracts with suppliers not subject to our standard terms and conditions. This can happen with lower-value contracts, where on occasion suppliers’ standard terms and conditions are used.
Our network
None of the local Citizens Advice in our service meet the requirement to complete a modern slavery statement. However, in the course of their work, performance assessors working for our national organisation sometimes read the modern slavery statements and policies of local Citizens Advice. This is also built into the model safeguarding policies which our performance assessors check.
Modern slavery is included in our leadership self-assessment guidance for local Citizens Advice. We suggest that local Citizens satisfy themselves that their current policies and procedures minimise their exposure to modern slavery. However, our organisation doesn't usually discuss these requirements with local Citizens Advice unless the evidence available to our performance assessors indicates a need to do so - to date, that has not been the case.
Risk of modern slavery at Citizens Advice and by our suppliers
At Citizens Advice
We remain confident, as a result of our policies and practices, that our colleagues working for national Citizens Advice are not subject to modern slavery in relation to their work with us. Since the publication of our last modern slavery statement, we have updated some of our employment policies and added some new ones, but we have not changed our categories of employment. As a result, we have not identified any new risks or mitigations.
We employ most of our colleagues directly and carry out checks at the point of recruitment to make sure that prospective colleagues have the right to work in the UK.
Neither national Citizens Advice colleagues nor Witness Service colleagues and volunteers are in any category generally regarded as being vulnerable to modern slavery in the UK.
3 of the 4 organisations we lease our offices from publish modern slavery statements themselves, and variously have policies, procedures and checks in place to prevent modern slavery from occurring within their business. The company we lease our fourth office from does not have a modern slavery statement.
By our suppliers
Our supply chain controls minimise the risk of our organisation working with companies that engage in modern slavery. We categorise our suppliers in terms of modern slavery risk by using our contract management system (CMS). We last carried out a high-level assessment of our key suppliers in April 2024 but did not identify any that were operating in high-risk industries.
We do not have a formal procedure, however if we discovered or suspected that one of our suppliers was a perpetrator of modern slavery, we would act on a case-by-case basis. In doing so, we would do everything we could to ensure the safety of the person or people being exploited.
Known incidents in the year to 31 March 2025
We are not aware of any incidents of modern slavery having occurred within our organisation or at any point in our supply chain during the year to 31 March 2025.
Continuous improvement and partnership working
We will continue to update our employment policies, as appropriate, and to identify and mitigate any new risks that may arise. As always, we will do this in line with any new or amended legislation, such as the Worker Protection Act (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) 2023, which came into effect on 26 October 2024. At the time of writing, the Employment Rights Bill 2024-25 is undergoing its second reading in the House of Lords - this may change the way we use temporary relief workers in the future.
We will update our Witness Service policies and procedures, as appropriate, and mitigate any new risks that may arise.
We will also continue to review supplier tender responses and to ensure that our contracts with suppliers contain clauses covering modern slavery. Citizens Advice is part of the Charity Sector Procurement Group, which explores and works together on all areas of procurement, including modern slavery.
Citizens Advice did not collaborate with any other organisations about modern slavery during the year to 31 March 2025. In the past, we worked with the Human Trafficking Foundation to train our network’s advisers to recognise the key warning signs of modern slavery and human trafficking.
Our website provides digital advice on what to do if you've been trafficked and how to report human trafficking, including how to make an anonymous report. These pages explain how people can identify whether they've been trafficked and what will happen afterwards if they contact the police. They also give alternatives to contacting the police, with information about charities that can provide support and advice about human trafficking.
Conclusion
This statement is made voluntarily, in support of the principles of the Modern Slavery Act 2015. It has been approved by the Citizens Advice trustee board and signed by the Chief Executive on its behalf.
Dame Clare Moriarty
Chief Executive
5 June 2025