Swansway Motor Group: Modern Slavery Act Statement

Swansway Garages Limited, known as Swansway Motor Group, is a private, family-owned business, operating motor retail dealerships across the North West, West Midlands and Cumbria. The group employees just over 1100 people across 28 sites. Our principal activity is the sale, hire, service, financing and leasing of new and used motor vehicles. We operate in the UK.

We operate in partnership with some of the largest automotive brands in the world; these include Audi, Jaguar Land Rover, Volkswagen, Honda, SEAT, and Peugeot and have developed our own used cars sale establishments, under the brand Motor Match. We have five of these locations throughout our network.

We are a family owned and managed business, committed to ensuring that there is no modern slavery or human trafficking in our supply chains or in any part of our business. We are also committed to acting ethically and with integrity in all our business relationships and to implementing and enforcing effective systems and controls to ensure slavery and human trafficking is not taking place anywhere in our supply chains.

Our own employees work for us on transparent and compliant terms and we respect their equal opportunities rights.

Swansway Garages has centralised functions based in the Head office, which includes; Human Resources, Finance, Purchasing, Marketing and Payroll and this allows us to exercise control over areas of concern as detailed in the Modern Slavery Act 2015.

As a result of the franchise nature of our business, a large proportion of our supply chain relationships are with a number of large multinational vehicle manufacturers. The contracts that we have in place with these manufacturers contain specific policy clauses on the modern slavery act to ensure all businesses conduct their operations in line with the legislation.

We also have policies and practices in place to ensure human rights and modern slavery instances do not take place within our business which include our Business Code of Conduct, Whistleblowing Policy, Grievance Procedure, Harassment and Bullying Policy. This information is provided to all new employees on joining the business and is available on the Swansway Intranet.

Swansway Garages will investigate thoroughly any claim or indication that areas of our business or supply chains are engaging in human trafficking or slave labour. Any such claims that come to the attention of Swansway Garages will be reported to the board of directors and they will be informed of any issues including details of the investigations, the findings and the outcome so that remedial action if required can be resourced without delay.

Over the past twelve months, we have continued to:

  • Use an applicant tracking system which has minimised the risk of employing individuals who are subject to forced labour;
  • Carry out background checks with stringent controls in place to ensure robust right to work checks are carried out on every hiring occasion;
  • Review our onboarding and induction processes to now include modern slavery and what it means in a business sense and;
  • Centralise Procurement, to ensure through education and transparency, that there is no modern slavery within our extended supply chains.

This statement is made in accordance with the Modern Slavery Act 2015 which requires businesses to disclose publicly the steps taken to pursuant to section 54(1) of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 and constitutes our Group’s slavery and human trafficking statement for the financial year ended 31 December 2022.