Speaker Spotlight: Dr. Martin Buttle, CCLA Investment Management

Introduce yourself: Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Martin Buttle, the Better Work Lead at CCLA Investment Management. We’re a £19 billion assets under management investor investing for church, charities and local authorities, and we’ve been engaging on the topic of modern slavery since 2012.

What will your session cover?

At CCLA, we’ve been benchmarking companies on their approach to modern slavery for three years now. We’ve been looking at the top 100 UK listed companies by market capitalisation, and this year we’ve also looked at the top 100 global companies by market capitalisation. We’re deep in the analysis of doing the 2025/2026 benchmarks, which will be coming out shortly.

So for my session I will be talking a little bit about some of the lessons we’ve learnt, some of the trends we’re seeing, and the improvements that we’re seeing in company disclosures.

What’s one key message that you hope people will get from your session at the conference?

I think the key message is that investors care about modern slavery, that we’re working with a group of other investors.

We’ve formed the Find It, Fix It, Prevent It investor coalition, which is engaging companies on their modern approach to modern slavery and asking them to be active in the fight against modern slavery.

And that the corporate disclosures on this are looked at carefully by investors and used in our engagements with companies.

What are you most looking forward to at the conference?

Well, like last year, I’m very interested to hear from companies, from other stakeholders and other businesses about, you know, the challenges and the opportunities and how they’re progressing their work in this area and and just meeting really interesting and engaged people.

Martin will be speaking at our 2025 conference on 12th November 2025. Find out more here.