• Councils for Fair Tax Declaration
  • Living Wage Accredited Council
  • Charter Against Modern Slavery
  • Care Leaver Protected Characteristics

Councils for Fair Tax Declaration

Councillors across the UK work hard to serve their local communities and help direct the delivery of essential public services. By signing up to the Councils for Fair Tax Declaration below, councils can demonstrate alignment with their values and encourage responsible tax practice through:

>leading by example on their tax conduct

>demanding to know who owns and profits from businesses the council buys from – UK and overseas – and their full financial reports

>joining calls for UK public procurement rules to change so that councils can do more to tackle tax avoidance and award points to suppliers that demonstrate responsible tax conduct.

Research commissioned by the Fair Tax Foundation from DatLab has revealed that between 2014 and 19, a huge 17.5% of UK public procurement contracts—with a combined value of £37.5bn—were won by businesses with connections to a tax haven.

Similarly, the EU Tax Observatory has found that 35% of multinational profits (US$1tn) are artificially shifted to tax havens each year, leading to a 10% worldwide reduction in corporate income tax revenue (which equates to a US$170bn annual deficit). The UK was found to suffer a staggering £64bn of profit shifting, leading to an estimated £12.5bn reduction in corporation tax revenues.

Significantly, recent polling has found that almost two-thirds of people (64%) agree that the government and local councils should consider a company’s ethics and how it pays its taxes, as well as value for money and quality of service provided when awarding contracts to companies.

Living Wage Accredited Council

Living Wage accreditation is the best place to start for organisations wanting to demonstrate their commitment as a responsible employer. By paying the real Living Wage, employers voluntarily take a stand to ensure their employees can earn a wage that is enough to live on. That fundamental fairness is at the heart of what the Living Wage campaign is trying to achieve and why great businesses and organisations choose to go further than the government minimum. As well as it being the right thing to do, a growing body of evidence demonstrates the business benefits of becoming a Living Wage Employer.

Charter Against Modern Slavery

Councils across England and Scotland are leading the way with a new Charter to ensure exploitation has no place in council supply chains. The Co-operative Party’s Charter Against Modern Slavery goes further than existing law and guidance, committing councils to proactively vet their own supply chain to ensure no instances of modern slavery are taking place.

The term ‘Modern Slavery’ captures a whole range of types of exploitation, many of which occur together. These include but are not limited to:

>Sexual exploitation

>Domestic servitude

>Forced labour

>Criminal exploitation

Other forms of exploitation include organ removal, forced begging, forced benefit fraud, forced marriage and illegal adoption

In short, Modern Slavery is where traffickers and slave masters use whatever means they have at their disposal to coerce, deceive and force individuals into a life of abuse, servitude and inhumane treatment.

Modern Slavery can affect adults and children, and last year 51% of victims were female and 49% male. 15% of victims were referred for domestic servitude, and there are now more victims exploited for labour than those who had been trafficked for sex.

It affects foreign nationals, but many of those exploited are from the UK and exploited within this country. In 2016 the third largest victim group came from the UK.

Care Leaver Protected Characteristics