Supporting the human rights and anti-modern slavery agenda
Our human rights policy sets out the Group’s aim to respect human rights and identifies the key stakeholders and issues for our business.
In 2024 we published our latest Anti Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking Statement.
In 2024:
- We published our 8th Modern slavery and Human trafficking statement.
- We outlined our action plan resulting from our Aviva-wide human rights due diligence across our core markets in the UK, Ireland and Canada, and our international investments in China and our joint venture in India.
- Our comprehensive business ethics, human rights and modern slavery training is rolled out annually to specialist staff to regularly increase awareness about the modern slavery and human rights risks. The training has been completed by 1,127 Aviva colleagues by the end of 2023 since its launch in September 2020.
- Partnerships: we renewed our membership with Slave-Free Alliance to continue our aim to addressing the risk of modern slavery in our operations and supply chains. They reviewed our Modern Slavery Statement as ‘critical friends’.
- We began a partnership with Business for Responsibility (also known as BSR), a sustainable business network and consultancy focused on helping companies improve their sustainability practices. BSR will help us better understand our human rights impacts and identify the most salient issues across our operations and value chain.
- As we are very keen to collaborate with charities and social enterprises to support modern slavery victims and survivors and have started to select some partners. This year we have supported the work of Ride For Freedom CIC, a not-for-profit social enterprise.
- We are committed to integrating human rights standards and frameworks into our investment activities, including decisionmaking and engagement across all asset classes. As a financial institution, we also recognise that building our leverage may require engaging with other investors, policy makers, and wider stakeholders to address market failures which enable human rights abuses, including modern slavery, to persist in our society and in our investment portfolios.
- We continue to outline our aim to respect human rights approach in our policies and guidelines, including The Aviva Human Rights Policy, which is evaluated each year. In 2023 we improved key sections regarding human right risk screening and our responsibility to use our influence to proactively promote human rights. We plan on demonstrating our aim through our actions and improved policies and standards year on year.
Externally and in our supply chain:
- We continually enhance our work with key suppliers. We conducted modern slavery risk assessments on a range of key suppliers, selected based on their potential modern slavery risks. In 2023 we completed 20 assessments, including checks conducted remotely where we discussed suppliers’ management system to prevent modern slavery in their operations and in person where we conducted site visit. We also started to work more closely with our joint venture, Aviva India, by assessing two of their high-risk suppliers.
- No cases of modern slavery were discovered at Aviva, neither in our operations or supply chain, however corrective action plans were issued to all the suppliers to support and improve their capability to prevent instances of modern slavery. We continued to invite our suppliers to consider joining the Living Wage Foundation.
- Finally, we use our influence and connections to bring others together and enhance the industry’s wider understanding of, and impact on human rights. Moreover, we continue to work with the World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA) on the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB).
Reflecting on our history
We can trace Aviva’s history back over 300 years to 1696. Given our long heritage, it is likely that Aviva’s ancestor companies invested in, and insured, businesses involved in the slave trade. This is unacceptable now and should have been unacceptable then.
We should not deny or erase what happened in the past but we can and should apologise. We deplore any such connection, regret any association with an evil trade and are sorry for any involvement in the pain and suffering. We also can and must ensure it does not happen in the future.
Today, we have a commitment to prevent instances of modern slavery in our business and supply chain, and Aviva stands alongside those battling injustice and hate. Our ambition is to have a truly diverse and inclusive culture that enables everyone to be themselves and to thrive, no matter their background. As part of this, Aviva is supporting charities that support racial equality and diversity. Read our Modern Slavery Act statement (PDF 5.9MB) and human rights policy (PDF 2.8MB).