Our employees – within our business we have a low level of migrant labour. All employees (excluding apprentices and interns) are paid at, or above, the living wage. The standard terms and conditions of employment for our staff provide for the freedom of the employee to terminate his or her employment at any time, and state that any overtime is by agreement between Mills & Reeve and the employee.
We are very proud to have been listed for the last fifteen years in The Sunday Times 100 Best Companies To Work For. Indeed, we are the only law firm to have achieved this.
We carry out regular employee satisfaction surveys. Our last employee satisfaction survey (April 2017) found that our employees continue to have exceptionally high levels of employee engagement, with 97% of our employees responding that they would recommend Mills & Reeve as a good place to work. 83% of our employees said that they felt valued for the work that they do. Our next employee survey will take place in early 2019.
Mills & Reeve also has the following policies published on our Intranet (which is accessible to all employees):
- Whistleblowing policy: protecting whistle-blowers through our confidential reporting process
- Harassment policy: prohibiting harassment and intimidation
- Disciplinary policy: prohibiting any threat of violence
Training on slavery and human trafficking risks and the requirements of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 is available to partners and staff.
Our supply chain – Mills & Reeve’s purchasing policy provides that anyone responsible for purchasing services from suppliers is expected to observe the highest standards of honesty and fairness and work in a manner which ensures full accountability, consistent with the firm’s core values.
We are committed to acting ethically, with integrity and transparency, and to putting effective systems and controls in place to safeguard against any form of modern slavery taking place within our supply chain. We have in place a supply chain compliance programme. This programme is designed to:
- identify and assess the potential risk areas in our supply chains; and
- require that all of Mills & Reeve’s suppliers comply with the Modern Slavery Act 2015 and are transparent, accountable, auditable and free from ethical ambiguities.
We operate and maintain a preferred supplier list. We also conduct due diligence on suppliers we perceive to be high risk or vulnerable, in alignment with the Chartered Institute of Purchasing & Supply guidance, before allowing them to become a preferred supplier (including due diligence relating to compliance with the Modern Slavery Act).
We expect all our delivery partners, organisations within our frameworks and other companies we engage with to ensure their goods, materials and labour-related supply chains are free from any form of modern slavery. Our terms and conditions of purchase and framework supply agreements include appropriate contractual provisions to ensure that our suppliers are contractually committed to seeking to avoid the use of slave labour and trafficked labour.
As part of our on-going risk mitigation, we will:
- act promptly where a compliance breach has been identified or flagged; and
- continue to feed-back lessons learnt into the compliance risk management process.