Human Rights: Supply Chains
House of Commons · Westminster Hall · 18 Jun 2026 · 23 speeches · Official Report
[Relevant documents: Sixth Report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights of Session 2024-25, Forced Labour in UK Supply Chains, HC 633, and the Government response, HC 1404.]
I beg to move, That this House has considered the matter of safeguarding human rights in supply chains. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd, particularly as you had such short notice. Globalisation and technological advances over the last few years have given us the ability to better connect across the world and improved our ability to trade globally. With increased connectivity comes increased awareness of issues and events around the world, and one issue that that increased awareness has brought into sharp focus is human rights in our country’s supply chains. From the Boohoo scandal, involving the exploitation of workers paid £3.50 an hour in a factory in Leicester, to the Bangladesh sweatshops making our clothes, to state-imposed forced labour for the Uyghur community in China, we have never been more aware of the need to ensure that our supply chains do not involve human rights violations and the exploitation of workers at home and abroad. Supply chains run our daily lives, but the uncertainty over where many of our daily products originate and whether they have been produced through forced labour and in inhumane conditions has wide-ranging ethical and national security implications. Here is an example to illustrate the point. This morning, a nurse in the UK woke up to prepare for her NHS shift. She wears a cotton uniform, the fibres of which were produced with Uyghur forced labour. For breakfast, she eats a banana grown by workers facing...
First, Mr Dowd, I commend you for taking the Chair and saving the debate. It is said that you never go home, so perhaps that is why you were able to get here. I thank the hon. Member for Southgate and Wood Green (Bambos Charalambous) for securing this incredibly important debate. He has outlined a number of countries where the problems are acute, but does he agree that China is the worst of all? Its abuses-of human rights in particular-are on an industrial scale. Some 70 million Christians are abused in terms of their human rights, including their right to believe, as are millions of Uyghur Muslims and between 7 million and 20 million Falun Gong. China must be taken to task. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, in summing up the debate, the Minister needs to outline a number of methods to take China on? It has done some 13.75 million forced-labour transactions, and it is time for those to stop.
The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. I am sure many colleagues in the Chamber will focus on the Uyghurs in their contributions, but he is right to highlight the abuse in China and the need to address it. That is the reality in UK supply chains: these products, which we use every day, are integrated into our lives. We need legislation to fix that, to prevent the abuse of human rights and the degradation of the environment.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for securing the debate. As a long-time trade unionist, I am proud of the work this Government have done to secure employment rights in our country, but last year the International Trade Union Confederation global rights index found that more than 80% of countries restricted the right to collective bargaining, and 75% denied the right to establish or join a trade union. Does my hon. Friend agree that our duty is to promote human and labour rights wherever we can and to regulate our global supply chains so that workers across the world can enjoy the protections we have?
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. The lack of trade union rights globally is seriously worrying. I am a proud trade unionist, and we need to ensure that trade union rights are respected in our UK supply chains. I will come on to that shortly in my speech. Our country is the birthplace of the trade union movement. We pride ourselves on championing workers’ rights, human rights and our democratic values. Our Labour Government recently passed the Employment Rights Act 2025, the biggest reform of workers’ rights in a generation, bringing more security to millions of workers and making work pay. Our freedoms of association and collective bargaining-some of the most important rights we have-allow workers to have representation in the face of unfair treatment and to advocate for fair pay and protections against dismissal, discrimination and other unfair and inhumane conditions. The same cannot be said for workers around the world. Workers in 75% of countries are denied the right to freedom of association. In many countries, it is illegal to be a trade unionist. Coupled with attacks on freedom of speech, we have countless reports of human rights activists and environmental defenders being threatened, or even killed, when challenging or opposing abuses by large corporations. With 50 million people trapped in modern slavery globally-a number that is growing every year-and labour rights under threat almost everywhere, it has never been more critical to tackle this issue head on....
My hon. Friend will know that I am a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which recently published a report called “Forced Labour in the UK’s Supply Chains”. One of our recommendations was that the Government need to strengthen section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015, and specifically the reporting duty, in a way that reflects the size and capacity of the business in question. Does my hon. Friend agree with that recommendation? Would he like to see more done to strengthen the Modern Slavery Act?
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, which I will come to in just a moment. I strongly support the strengthening of section 54 and its application. With the UK importing £20 billion-worth of high-risk goods every year, our current framework is not effective enough in preventing goods made with forced labour from entering the UK market, despite the Government’s stated position that no company operating in the UK should have forced labour in its supply chains. The Modern Slavery Act was considered world-leading legislation, as the UK was the first country in the world to introduce such legislation. However, the current transparency and supply chain reporting, as set out in section 54 of the Act, is wholly inadequate, applying only to organisations with a turnover of more than £36 million, and excluding public bodies, meaning many businesses and organisations fall through the cracks. The exclusion of public bodies from the duty to report on transparency in their supply chains can leave our country’s most important agencies vulnerable to being complicit in horrific human rights abuses, which affect not only the welfare of workers globally, but the stability and growth of our economy. In addition, the transparency reporting duty can be met by an organisation simply declaring that it has taken no steps to address forced labour in its supply chains; that is simply not good enough. Corporate giants with big money are given a free pass to escape their moral responsibilities by...
I remind Members that we have about five or six minutes, give or take, per person. Just bear that in mind. I also remind Members that they should bob if they wish to be called.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. I am sure I speak for us all in extending warm thanks to you for stepping into the breach at the last minute to enable us to have this timely and important debate, and I thank the hon. Member for Southgate and Wood Green (Bambos Charalambous) for securing it. It is clear that UK business has global environmental and human rights impacts. UK business has impacts on climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, waste management, deforestation, and of course on human rights and labour rights, as we have already discussed. The Government have acknowledged those concerns. This debate comes at a particularly timely moment because, as the hon. Member for Southgate and Wood Green pointed out, we await with bated breath the Government release of announcements. I note that the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Martin Rhodes) tabled a question to the Secretary of State in January asking when the responsible business conduct review would be published. The Minister for Trade responded with one word: “Soon.” It is now five months later, so perhaps today’s Minister could assure us in her wind-up that soon really will mean soon. We would very much appreciate seeing that review. Although we have some parts of an existing legal framework-for example, the Modern Slavery Act and the Environment Act 2021-they are too narrow to meet internationally accepted standards. Single-issue measures such as robust legislation to prevent and address...
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Southgate and Wood Green (Bambos Charalambous) for securing the debate, which is much needed. Also, it is not often that I thank an Everton supporter for anything, but thank you very much, Mr Dowd, for stepping into the breach. A number of organisations have been working incredibly hard with me and other Members on a number of fronts relating to this issue for some time. I thank the Corporate Justice Coalition, which is a large coalition of organisations. I thank the TUC and my own union, Unison, for circulating briefings. I also thank Anti-Slavery International; ActionAid; Sarah Benn Gordon, who put together a range of information for me; and the wonderful House of Commons Library. The report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights is an excellent piece of work, not surprisingly. My hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Peter Swallow) has gone, but he is a specialist in Aristotle, and we can see the logic in the report. I have read the Government’s response and want to make sure that I have it clear; the Minister can clarify later in the debate. First, the response says that the Government share the Committee’s concerns and accept that there are real worries about global supply chains and that we have to ensure that, as a country, we are not complicit. Secondly, it states that “the Government is actively exploring options to strengthen protections.” Thirdly, it states-as hon. Members have noted-that their response will be based on the...
I am pleased that the right hon. Member referred to my generosity, which extends even to Liverpool supporters.
It is always a blessing to have you chairing a meeting, Mr Dowd. It is particularly a blessing today, as we would not have this debate were you not here, so thank you. I have been active on this subject for some time. I have been sanctioned by China because of the issues that we raised over modern-day slavery. I remind Members that it was the Centre for Social Justice, which I set up, that first published the paper “It Happens Here”. We were then able to get the Government to initiate the Modern Slavery Act-the first legislation of its kind in the world. We were all very proud of that Act, but sadly it really has no enforcement. Government and suppliers have no obligation to check. They are supposed to make a declaration, but we know that many of those declarations are in fact deliberately false-they know they will not be checked, and therefore they do not have to worry about it-so while the Act is great, it is rather toothless. I congratulate the hon. Member for Southgate and Wood Green (Bambos Charalambous) on securing this debate and making such a good opening speech. I will not repeat all he said, although I agree with so much of it. In the limited time I have, I want to focus on certain issues. First, the reality is that slave labour is not only a massive punishment and a human rights abuse on a scale, like genocide, wider than anything else; it is also commercial. Countries such as China use slave labour as a way to undercut markets, compete unfairly and drive...
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Southgate and Wood Green (Bambos Charalambous) on securing this important debate, which has implications for human rights everywhere-whether here at home or in Malaysia, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo or elsewhere. I will focus my remarks first on Bangladesh. In May, the all-party parliamentary group on Bangladesh, which I chair, held a meeting on workers’ rights and labour conditions in Bangladesh following the 13th anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse; we were joined by the Rana Plaza Solidarity Collective, the International Centre for Trade Union Rights and human rights lawyers. On 24 April 2013, 1,134 garment workers lost their lives in what trade unions at the time described as a “mass industrial homicide”. The incident exposed the brutality of the global production system, in which labour rights are constantly under attack. I want to be clear: those Bangladeshi lives would not have been taken if workers’ rights, which are human rights, were respected in global supply chains. Before the Rana Plaza collapse, workers’ safety concerns were unheard by managers and their attempts to organise unions to address their unsafe working conditions were suppressed. A global outrage followed the collapse of Rana Plaza, and it is true that there have been welcome advances in workers’ rights in Bangladesh since then, but the truth is that the gains have been slow and...
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd; thank you for stepping in to chair the debate. I congratulate my constituency neighbour and hon. Friend the Member for Southgate and Wood Green (Bambos Charalambous) on securing this debate. He has a long-standing commitment to human rights. He is right to emphasise the international nature of trade and the risks of human rights abuses, for example, from China, as the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) has said. As my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Apsana Begum) has said, south-east Asia, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan are areas where we do a lot of trade but we often do not know enough about what is going on. I want to add some brief remarks about the UK fashion and textiles industry and human rights here in the UK. I know that the Minister has a background in understanding the potential for human rights abuses. She also understands manufacturing and the scope within the UK to augment that particular sector and produce more jobs for local people. There is the potential for international trade, best practice and home-grown industries to sit side by side. I note that when my right hon. Friend the Member for Rawmarsh and Conisbrough (John Healey) was reflecting on defence spending a couple of weeks ago, he said there should be more defence money spent locally, certainly when it comes to uniforms. When I led a previous debate in Westminster Hall, I detailed the...
It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd, and thank you again for joining us to allow this important debate to take place. I start by congratulating the hon. Member for Southgate and Wood Green (Bambos Charalambous) on introducing this debate so emphatically and wonderfully-I could not have done it better myself. I am a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and as we have already heard, last year the Committee published its report, “Forced Labour in the UK’s Supply Chains”. Our inquiry found that, despite Ministers’ repeated assurances that no company operating in the UK should have any forced labour whatsoever in its supply chain, that simply is not happening in practice. Goods made, or at least partly made, with forced labour are still reaching our shelves here in the UK. In fact, we report billions of pounds of goods a year from sectors where forced labour is rife, yet companies are still not required to map their supply chains or prove that their goods are clean. Nowhere was the gap between rhetoric and reality more clearly seen than in the Government’s China audit. That was a genuine opportunity to set out, transparently in public, exactly how Britain intends to tackle state-imposed forced labour against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang and other minority groups across China. Instead, the Foreign Secretary offered us “shining a spotlight” and described the audit as an “ongoing exercise”. When our Committee pressed for concrete measures behind that...
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd, and I join other Members in thanking you for chairing this debate. Also, if your Wikipedia page is correct, may I be the first to wish you a very happy birthday for Saturday? I am grateful to the hon. Member for Southgate and Wood Green (Bambos Charalambous) for securing this debate and to Members from across the House for the thoughtful and serious way they have approached it. The hon. Gentleman really brought to life the way that globally sourced products are infiltrating every part of our daily lives, and I thank him for that. I also thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) for sharing the benefit of his many years working on this issue. I thank the hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Dr Chowns), the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), and the hon. Members for Poplar and Limehouse (Apsana Begum) and for Hornsey and Friern Barnet (Catherine West); they all brought different perspectives, for which I am grateful. There have been differences in opinion this afternoon about the causes of the problem, the strength of the enforcement required and the precise tools the Government should use, but there should be no disagreement on one central point: goods produced through forced labour, modern slavery or serious human rights abuses have no place in UK supply chains. The question is whether the Government are prepared to deliver serious...
Thank you reminding me that I am almost a year older.
It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I join hon. Members in thanking you for chairing today’s debate at short notice. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Southgate and Wood Green (Bambos Charalambous) for securing a debate on this deeply important subject. He made some excellent points, particularly about how fundamental supply chain resilience is to our economic security, and the importance of the public sector procurement regime to ensuring that public bodies do not inadvertently support international labour and humanitarian abuses. He and the other Members here today continue to be excellent and thoughtful advocates on these matters, and I thank all colleagues for their important contributions. Human rights are just that: they are fundamental, and they exist to protect us all. Infractions cannot be ignored or dismissed simply because they occurred far enough back in a supply chain for us to feel insulated and not responsible for supporting exploitative practices. Never has this issue been more important now that more than 70% of global trade runs through complex global supply chains. Although globalisation has driven productivity, innovation and technological advances that have lifted billions out of poverty and created the life that we depend on, it has also made supply chains more complex and opaque and has reduced the transparency and accountability that consumers, retailers and the Government need to protect workers and the natural world...
Could we get a commitment today that the Government will look carefully at what countries that are well in advance of us, such as the United States and some European countries, are doing, to make sure that we urgently get on to resolving this issue, rather than delaying with another review and more debates? We know what needs to be done, and surely we can get on with it pretty quickly.
I thank the right hon. Member for that and his contributions today. I reassure him that we are working closely with the US on the review, updating the Americans on all the work we are doing and understanding their practices too. I will turn soon to the other important points he raised throughout the debate. My right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) highlighted our work with the Treasury as part of this review, and I thank him for that. We are doing the review economy-wide, and as well as working with the Treasury, we have engaged with investors. We will of course keep him updated, as I know he is interested in-indeed, passionate about-this subject. We took another key step in the trade strategy by launching the Office for Responsible Business Conduct to provide UK businesses, trade unions and charities with a simpler route to compliance, supporting the integration of responsible business practices and helping victims of corporate malpractice by providing a non-judicial grievance mechanism. Alongside the broader RBC review, we are considering how to strengthen the section 54 transparency regime, which lots of Members mentioned today-I thank them for it-including mandatory reporting requirements that extend to the public sector and penalties for non-compliance. We published updated statutory guidance on transparency in supply chains in March 2025, calling on businesses to go further and faster. I thank the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon....
We have had a great debate. There has been lots of agreement in the room, and I am sure the Minister heard the strength of feeling about what needs to be done. We would very much welcome the responsible business conduct review happening as quickly as possible. I know that it is not in the Minister’s direct brief and I know that she is a champion of international labour rights, but we need it to happen as quickly as possible. We also need to ensure that section 54 is strengthened. That has cross-party support and I am sure that we will get there eventually, but it needs to happen quickly. I look forward to having a more detailed response from the Department in due course. Mr Dowd, thank you again for stepping into the breach at the last minute and allowing this debate to proceed. We could not have done it without you. I hope you have a very happy birthday as well. Question put and agreed to . Resolved , That this House has considered the matter of safeguarding human rights in supply chains.
Sitting suspended.