Richard Howitt

speaker

582 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 29 Jul

Richard Howitt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.

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Frankly Speaking - A Podcast on Responsible Business · #117 How Businesses Can Combat Modern Slavery: Professor John Dumay · 29 Jul 2026 podcast

But it's much more difficult for companies to actually talk about the adverse impacts that they have.

because they're worried about negative reputational risk, of course, and therefore defining victims, defining adverse impacts is much less plentiful in all of the human rights reporting and disclosure that's going on.

But clearly some companies do, and so in your example did.

Instead of

land-based companies for not doing it.

Let's actually just ask why the companies that are prepared to do it are prepared to be open about adverse impacts.

I think of Patagonia in Taiwan, for example, that were prepared to do it.

What is it that makes them feel prepared to do so and to actually deal with adverse impacts in a very practical way?

And Benny Freeman, who we had on the podcast recently, was one of the business people who led that fight against forced labour in Kazakhstan.

And indeed, it was successful.

So it's a great case study to look at.

And your point about companies having to confront government agencies...

I think, again, the intention of forced labour bans, and those exist in the US as well as in Europe, is to give an economic incentive to governments that their trade is going to suffer unless they deal with this.

I hope that the excuse that you talked about and I talked about for companies is being wiped away there and that this can be dealt with at a system level.

John, you talked earlier about court cases and companies not ending up in court.

We've seen how climate litigation is having quite a dramatic impact in terms of corporate behaviour, not least the recent...

example in the French courts about total energies but we've also seen a landmark case in the modern slavery issue brought by the World Uyghur Council in the UK Court of Appeal which they won and does perhaps show that there is a legal precedent that's going to follow in relation to modern slavery.

How important was that case and what did you read into it?

Great point.

I think also in the UK case it's quite a technical change but it's opening up companies to being prosecuted for breaching money laundering laws if they haven't themselves exercised due diligence against forced labour in their supply chains and I think a lot of people in companies would be really surprised to think that they're going to be accused of money laundering

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