The Modern Slavery Act 2015 (MSA 2015) received Royal Assent on 26 March 2015.

Section 54 requires certain firms to produce and publish a modern slavery and human trafficking statement for each Financial year of the organisation.

The government has published guidance, which has been updated on 27 March 2025 (the Guidance). The 2025 updates to the Guidance represents the first complete replacement of the Guidance since its original publication in October 2015, superseding previous partial updates.

The Guidance makes it clear that organisations should seek to publish their statement as soon as reasonably practicable after the end of their financial year, ideally no later than six months after the organisation’s financial year end. Therefore a firm with a financial year end of 31 March of a certain year is effectively required to have published a statement by 30 September of that same year.

Organisations may wish to publish these statements at the same time as they publish other Annual accounts. Aside from the regulatory Requirements, organisations should anticipate commercial pressure from a wide variety of stakeholders and