Modern Slavery Statement

Introduction

This statement sets out Empower Family Group’s absolute commitment to minimising
potential modern slavery or human trafficking risks in its business, whilst ensuring that
we meet the requirements of section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015. This statement
relates to our 2025-26 financial year, ending on 31st August 2026.

We produce one statement for Empower Family Group Limited which covers the below
subsidiaries. All Empower Family Group Limited’s subsidiaries will be referred to as
Empower throughout this statement.

• Empower Fostering Ltd
• Empower Residentials Ltd
• Quantock Outdoor Education Ltd
• Empower Supported Living Ltd
• Empower Outreach Ltd

This statement covers:

• Business overview
• Modern Slavery Roadmap
• Our Policies
• Our Sites and Services
• Our Recruitment

Our Business:

Empower Family Group is a social care business within the UK, providing children’s
residential home, fostering, alternative provision education, supported living and
outreach services.
We operate out of 11 homes and 1 office location based across the Southwest of
England, employing over 130 employees.
As a social care business, our purpose and vision are to open our homes and hearts to
every young person.

Our values and behaviours:

Modern Slavery working groups and programmes:

We will be developing a working group led by our HR team with stakeholders covering
the umbrella of Empower Family Group Ltd. including permanent and bank staff. The
aim of this group will be to develop a robust risk-based approach to tackling modern
slavery risks, ensuring best practice within our existing policies and practices as well as
identifying training needs across our workforce to mitigate Modern Slavery risks.

Our Policies:

To support our Purpose and Vision of ‘opening our homes and hearts to every young
person’, we have a number of policies outlined below.

Our commitment to minimising modern slavery or human trafficking risks within all
parts of our business is reflected in our policies. We have several relevant policies and
procedures, including but not exhaustive: Equality and Diversity, Whistleblowing,
employee handbook and recruitment. These policies support our continual compliance
not just from a legal standpoint but also to ensure our business requirements are met
and our employees are engaged to support our ambition of becoming an employer of
choice.

Our sites and services:

Our focus on the meaningful influence of our employees ensures that everyone feels
that they belong and have a future at Empower. Each service has developed an
engagement action plan following our annual engagement survey which sets out
focused aims. Our Senior Leadership Team meet monthly to discuss and action
relevant topics and business led initiatives.

We have a number of processes, due diligence checks and channels of communication
to monitor potential modern slavery indicators throughout the employee lifecycle and
give our employees the opportunity and space to feel heard.

• Since 2025, we have started to run an annual confidential engagement survey
covering all areas of human rights, in 2025 we saw a participation rate of 40% and
achieved a sustainable engagement score of 64%. We aim to increase participation and
all areas of engagement to 80% by 2027 as part of our HR strategy and KPI’s.
• We have a whistleblowing policy
• Our payment software completes due diligence checks to review if any employees
share bank accounts, with any flags then reviewed internally.

Our Recruitment:

We have a dedicated in-house HR team trained in safer recruitment practices that
manage both our internal recruitment across our sites and our external agency
partners. We predominantly hire through our in-house recruitment and have rigorous
controls throughout the on-boarding process to support and assess our future
employees. A small proportion of our workforce are sourced through the use of agency
recruitment, though this has significantly reduced since 2025 and we make sure to
monitor the agencies processes and due diligence to ensure they meet our own
standards.

We are aware that there is a risk by using agency staff and this has been identified as a
key area of focus within our upcoming Modern Slavery Working Group. We work to
mitigate this risk by;

• We have regular meetings with our agency provider to discuss performance against
agreed KPIs and any issues.
• The labour agencies are responsible for completing necessary right to work checks (if
temporary), however secondary identification checks are completed by Empower prior
to an individual commencing employment. The secondary checks are cross-referenced
against an employee photograph taken at interview to ensure a true likeness.