Modern slavery statement

About us

Our vision is safe, effective and kind nursing and midwifery that improves everyone’s health and wellbeing. As the professional regulator of almost 745,000 nursing and midwifery professionals, we have an important role to play in making this a reality.

Our core role is to regulate. Firstly, we promote high educational and professional standards for nurses and midwives across the UK, and nursing associates in England. Secondly, we maintain the register of professionals eligible to practise. Thirdly, we investigate concerns about nurses, midwives and nursing associates – something that affects less than one percent of professionals registered with us each year. We believe in giving professionals the chance to address concerns where it is appropriate to do so, but we’ll always take action when needed.

To regulate well, we support our professions and the public. We create resources and guidance that are useful throughout people’s careers, helping them to deliver our standards in practice and overcome new challenges. We also support people involved in our investigations, and we’re increasing our visibility so people feel engaged and empowered to shape our work.

Regulating and supporting our professions allows us to influence health and social care. We share intelligence from our regulatory activities and work with our partners to support workforce planning and sector-wide decision making. We use our voice to speak up for a healthy and inclusive working environment for our professions.

Our values

Our core values underpin everything we do. We are kind, fair, ambitious and collaborative. Our modern slavery statement and internal control processes align with these values:

We work collaboratively with suppliers to understand their working practises to assure ourselves that we have taken due diligence when we procure goods and services
We are ambitious in our commitment to increase our assurance measures and will continue to ensure NMC colleagues are trained to be alert to the risk of modern slavery.
We are fair and kind in the way we work with colleagues and suppliers creating a culture where concerns can be raised in an open and transparent way. We commit to listening to others and acting on potential issues quickly.

Our supply chains

In order to run our organisation and deliver our objectives, we engage a number of external suppliers. The goods, works and services they provide include hosting services for our IT systems and data, software licensing and support, office cleaning, and legal support with case preparation, among many others.

Our position on modern slavery

We believe modern slavery has no place in society and we are committed to ensuring that there are no modern slavery offences occurring in our supply chain.

We require our suppliers to comply with all law and regulation, and expect them to maintain the highest ethical standards in all areas of their business operations.

If we discover one of our suppliers is allowing modern slavery offences in either their own business or their wider supply chain, we will terminate their contract and notify the relevant authorities.

Our due diligence processes, including training

We aim to buy most of our services through well-established public sector framework agreements. The suppliers on framework agreements have been subject to rigorous due diligence by organisations such as Crown Commercial Services.

We undertake due diligence of new suppliers as part of our supplier on-boarding process. This includes assessment of the risk of modern slavery offences.

We have raised awareness of modern slavery with NMC colleagues by promoting our modern slavery statement and supporting policies. Colleagues are provided with training and we have created a modern slavery e-learning package which everyone is encouraged to complete.

We have put in place guidance for our contract managers that includes a review of modern slavery as part of their regular contract auditing activities.

Our colleagues know that if they have any concerns, they can raise them, and we have a whistleblowing policy and systems in place to support this. Our managers are trained on how to handle concerns that are raised with them.

Risk areas

Due to the nature of our business and the services we require, we believe the risk of modern slavery or human trafficking occurring within our supply chains is generally low. The services we use that we considered may be at relatively greater risk of modern slavery offences are hotels and cleaning services.

We have already taken steps to put in place robust contracts for these services. In 2021-22 we surveyed the hotels we most frequently use for business travel. From the responses received we found that: all have an understanding of modern slavery risks; all have policies and programmes in place to manage the issue; all have adopted various codes of practice; and all provide training to their staff. No modern slavery offences had been detected. This learning has given us assurance that we are working with reputable hotels who take the issues of modern slavery seriously.

In the year ahead we will expand our supplier assurance programme to suppliers already working for us. We will review our modern slavery e-learning and our policies, updating where necessary.