Human rights governance

Without strong governance, our human rights policy would be just words.

A BT Board sub-committee (called the Digital Impact & Sustainability Committee) oversees progress on our human rights programme.

Day-to-day our human rights team works on integrating the UN Guiding Principles and other human rights commitments into our business. This includes training and supporting the people who bring our policy to life across the company. The team reports to the Board every quarter. Our Group Corporate Affairs Director (a member of our Executive Committee) makes decisions on any human rights matters that can’t be fixed at an operational level.

You can download our human rights framework for more on how we manage human rights issues. And every year we give a human rights update in our Annual Report and Digital Impact and Sustainability Report  (as well as our Modern Slavery Statement).

Our people complete mandatory annual training on human rights as part of their training on the BT Way, our ethics code. And we’ve rolled out more detailed human rights training for teams most likely to come across these issues.

In addition to managing our suppliers and protecting our customers’ privacy, we consider our potential impacts through our customers. We have due diligence checks on our higher risk sales depending on what we sell, where and who to. If we have any concerns, we'll look into things in more detail.