Modern Slavery

At Oxford Instruments, we are committed to preventing acts of modern slavery and human trafficking from occurring within our business and supply chain. We have a zero-tolerance approach to all forms of modern slavery, including servitude, forced, bonded and compulsory labour, and human trafficking, and we expect our suppliers to adopt the same approach.

We are a provider of high technology products and services to the world’s leading industrial companies and scientific research communities who image, analyse, and manipulate materials down to the atomic and molecular level. Our key enabling technologies help underpin the shift to a greener economy, increased digital connectivity, advances in materials, discoveries in life science, and more productive manufacturing and healthcare. We have discrete business groups operating internationally and we recognise the importance of the protection of human rights across our Group.

As part of our commitment to combatting modern slavery and human trafficking, we have developed and maintain internal policies and procedures to reinforce our approach on modern slavery and human trafficking. These documents are designed to be easy to use and are intended to assist our employees in their due diligence of suppliers. In addition, we have developed a global code of business conduct, which will be made publically available in 2018, and will send a clear message to stakeholders and investors of our business principles and ethics.

We are committed to acting ethically and with integrity in all our business dealings and to putting in place effective systems and controls which aim to ensure there is no modern slavery taking place anywhere in our own business or in our supply chains. As part of this commitment we focus on the welfare and safety of individuals at potential risk, undertake periodic due diligence reviews of our suppliers and, where appropriate, provide support and guidance to help suppliers to address any concerns that they might have in their own business and supply chain.

In each Oxford Instruments business we conduct internal reviews of compliance with our processes. We take a risk based approach, and have developed our processes to create detailed profiles of key and high risk suppliers. Both new and existing key and high risk suppliers are encouraged to adopt the same or similar standards to those contained within our policies and they are expected to hold their own suppliers to the same or similar standards. We carry out an annual auditing cycle of our key and high risk suppliers through the use of questionnaires and, with supplier feedback, we seek to continually improve our systems of audit.

We believe in the importance of educating our employees on human rights issues and have launched training for relevant employees to help them to recognise the risks of modern slavery and human trafficking in our business and supply chains. Through this training, our employees are encouraged to use our procedures for reporting a business malpractice to raise any concerns they might have, which includes access to an independent whistleblowing service.

This statement is made in accordance with Section 54(1) of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 (the “Act”) and constitutes our anti-slavery and human trafficking statement for the financial year commencing 01 April 2018 and ending 31 March 2019, and will be reviewed in September 2019. The entities in our Group which fall within the criteria defined in the Act are Oxford Instruments plc, Oxford Instruments Nanotechnology Tools Limited and Andor Technology Limited.

Ian Barkshire
Chief Executive, Oxford Instruments plc