Powerful and eloquent speeches from all sides demanding more urgent action to root out goods that are made by slave labour in places like Xinjiang and Congo – and which increase dangerous dependency on dictatorial regimes, compromise resilience and destroy British jobs.
Motion to Take Note
Moved by
Lord Alton of Liverpool
That this House takes note of the Report from the Human Rights Committee Forced Labour in UK Supply Chains (6th Report, HL Paper 159, Session 2024-26).
Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, it is an honour to introduce this report from the Joint Committee on Human Rights, Forced Labour in UK Supply Chains. I pay tribute to my hard-working Joint Committee on Human Rights colleagues, two of whom will be speaking in the debate, and to our committee team—its clerks, Rhiannon Hollis and Moriyo Aiyeola, and the specialist Laura Fatah.
I am also grateful to the Library and to the noble Lord, Lord Sarwar, who was introduced and made his maiden speech only yesterday, and will give the ministerial response this afternoon. He is a very welcome addition to your Lordships’ House. I also thank his officials and the committee’s witnesses, including the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, Border Force, BSI, NCA, Solar Taskforce, the courageous Rahima Mahmut of the World Uyghur Congress and the noble Baroness, Lady May, the principal driver of the Modern Slavery Act 2015.
Having visited Tibet and western China, where 12 million overwhelmingly Muslim Uyghur people face state-imposed forced labour and genocide, I make no apology for remaining focused on Xinjiang. President Xi Jinping explicitly framed his labour policies around ethnic minorities, telling his cadres to “guide them to integrate into modern urban life”—a campaign which, researchers note, masks coercive labour transfers.
For exposing this, the Minister’s noble friend and Scottish compatriot, the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, and I, in an attempt, I suppose, to try to silence us, were sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party regime. In part, this report is a riposte. But Uyghurs are not the only victims. Globally, around 50 million people endure modern slavery, generating some £174 billion annually in illegal profits. The charity Walk Free has identified state-imposed forced labour across 17 countries.
Last year alone, the United Kingdom imported around £20 billion-worth of goods at high risk of exposure to forced labour—shamefully built on the broken backs and broken lives of men, women and children. The committee identified high-risk sectors right across our economy. These include renewable energy components, such as solar panels, which I raised as an all-party amendment to the Great British Energy Act 2025, alongside seafood, coffee, tea, chocolate, PPE, garments and critical minerals, where our committee cited the widespread and shocking use of child labour in Congolese cobalt mines.
Although the Modern Slavery Act 2015 was ground-breaking, our legislative architecture has completely and utterly failed to keep up with the escalating challenges. We found that our reliance on a patchwork of regulations randomly and erratically applied opens the door to tainted goods bearing the fingerprints of slavery. Compliance with transparency rules is dangerously low, as companies can legally report taking zero steps without facing penalties. The noble Baroness, Lady May, wrote to the committee saying that
“there is growing acceptance that mandatory human rights due diligence, aligned with the UN Guiding Principles, is the best approach”.
That requires changes to Section 54 of the Act.
The UK must implement mandatory due diligence and stay in lockstep with our international allies. Failing to do so leaves a yawning regulatory gap that puts the UK at risk of becoming a dumping ground—the top safe haven for forced labour goods that cannot be legally sold elsewhere. Adding to that danger, note that as of 3 August, United States tariff policy has led to 13 countries responding to US pressure to address slave labour products. With so many countries robustly scrutinising products that enter their countries, UK exports will be at higher risk of exclusion because there is no mechanism in place to exclude forced labour imports from entering UK manufacturing supply chains.
For anyone who believes in national resilience and less dependency on slave-based economies, we must tackle both those things. Let me add to the list: this is also about protecting United Kingdom workers. Forced labour artificially deflates the price of goods, creating unfair competition for UK companies. It is not too late to reverse the irresponsible emasculation of our manufacturing base and the wanton destruction of British jobs. Automotive, aerospace and pharmaceutical jobs continue to be at extremely high risk from state-imposed forced labour. I commend a recently published Henry Jackson Society report into the doubling of dependency on China for active pharmaceutical ingredients, many manufactured in Xinjiang. This is a strategic risk.
Reducing dependency can also bring gains. In the US, when solar modules made with polysilicon made by forced labour were banned from import, the US solar market exploded. After a decade of decline and the loss of thousands of jobs, the US solar industry has made a striking comeback, producing solar modules for consumers who prefer products that are not made from forced labour. Segments of the solar industry require a short lead time and could become a growth industry in the United Kingdom too. In this instance, the ethical and moral choice can coincide with self-interest and the national interest.
Under Section 3(2) of the Great British Energy Act 2025, GBE is required to encourage and participate in measures to ensure that
“slavery and human trafficking is not taking place in its business or supply chains”.
The JCHR recommended that GBE reported to our committee on what it had done to cleanse its supply chains, and last month it constructively wrote to us with an update. It says it will use various
“levers to drive meaningful change within a constrained context”.
This is what happens when the chairman of a company, in this case Jürgen Maier, makes a welcome and deeply personal commitment. It is even better when they have the sense to appoint people of the calibre of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, my noble friend Lady Young of Hornsey and Sarah Champion Member of Parliament to the GBE ethical supply chains advisory group, something I greatly welcome.
More generally, the JCHR found that the Government’s Solar Roadmap and the Solar Taskforce fail to address forced labour in solar supply chains. In recommendations 26 to 28, we urge the Government to evaluate the work of these failed initiatives and develop a viable strategy to address the risks of forced labour in the UK’s solar supply chain. I hope that the Minister, fresh as he is to his post, will nevertheless give us an update on that.
In a letter to the committee of 26 August—one of the first he must have written in post—the noble Lord, Lord Sarwar, gave a welcome pledge:
“The Government believes that progress towards our clean energy and net zero ambitions must not come at the expense of human rights. The Government is clear that the UK’s ambitions for energy security, bill affordability, and clean power must go hand-in-hand with HMG’s longstanding position towards protecting human rights domestically and in its supply chains”.
However, note that Professor Laura Murphy categorically states:
“It is possible to trace these goods to identify which are at higher risk of forced labour, but currently, the UK has no apparatus to do so”.
To tackle that, I will summarise our main recommendations. The committee calls on the Government to examine targeted import bans to prevent goods linked to forced labour entering the UK market. It calls for mandatory human rights due diligence, a legal requirement forcing companies to actively map out, clean up and audit their supply chains, backed by financial penalties for non-compliance. It calls for civil liability—that is, a legal duty to prevent—and, where a company fails to take adequate steps to prevent exploitation, for clearer access to justice and civil remedies for victims in the UK courts.
We commend to the Minister best practice elsewhere. See the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act 2021 in the United States, which introduced a rebuttable presumption banning goods produced wholly or in part by forced labour in Xinjiang, unless the importer can prove otherwise. Following suit, the EU forced labour regulation will come into force in 2027. That bans the sale, import and export of goods made with forced labour. Once again, if we are not in lockstep and do not do the same, it will further exacerbate the risk of the UK being a dumping ground. This is urgent.
To achieve our recommendations, we call for comprehensive new legislation. Many of us were justifiably disappointed not to see that hope realised in this year’s King’s Speech, but we welcome measures in the Immigration and Asylum Bill implementing JCHR recommendations 3 to 5 to strengthen and expand the transparency and supply chains reporting duty under Section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act. It will be a good start, but there is still much more to do, which is why we still argue that a new Bill is urgently needed.
While we await comprehensive legislation, there are, of course, other things that we can do. The committee examined the historic 2024 UK Court of Appeal ruling, in a court case brought by Rahima Mahmut, that the UK’s National Crime Agency had applied the wrong test in deciding whether to investigate the importation of cotton products produced by forced Uyghur labour in Xinjiang. Those powers in the Proceeds of Crime Act have too rarely been used to confiscate goods linked to forced labour. The National Crime Agency and Border Force appeared before our committee, and the NCA wrote to us stating that it does not have a clear mandate to confiscate goods linked to forced labour. After an exchange of correspondence, we have only today had a letter from the NCA, which I will ask the Joint Committee to publish and will of course share with the Minister.
I can say that it adds weight to the committee’s view that the Government need to get a grip on this issue. We are clear, in recommendation 31, that the Government should explore further ways of using the existing proceeds of crime powers to prevent goods linked to forced labour being sold in the UK and should go on to seize assets linked to forced labour. The Government should not use the lame excuse that they cannot direct independent law enforcement bodies. They can give them a legislative mandate—they have done so before. This House amended the Health and Care Act to prohibit the NHS from sourcing products, such as PPE, made with slave labour. However, given the 2024 finding that 21% of NHS suppliers had a “high risk” of exposure to forced labour, I hope the Minister will commit to a review of whether and how the NHS has implemented those legal obligations.
It also became worryingly clear during our inquiry—backed up by some brilliant journalism in the Financial Times—that the UK does not bother to collect or publish data that would enable risks of forced labour in supply chains to be identified. I am referring specifically to shipping manifest data. It provides only less detailed, aggregate data, in contrast to many other states, including, for instance, Kazakhstan and the United States. On 15 July, the noble Lord, Lord Hanson of Flint, the Minister of State at the Home Office, confirmed:
“Home Office does not routinely assess whether goods entering the UK may have been produced using forced labour”.
If other jurisdictions can assess this, I hope the Minister will commit to thinking again about creating comparable transparency.
The JCHR also recommended the creation of greater corporate responsibilities, including enhanced transparency reporting obligations and mandatory human rights due diligence duties, to be implemented with new regulatory arrangements, including penalties for non-compliance overseen by either the Supply Chain Centre or the Office for Responsible Business Conduct. In his letter to us of 26 August, the Minister said that the Government are considering their response to the responsible business review. Can he say whether he has a preliminary view on whether the ORBC should have a regulatory role and when he imagines that the response will be published?
I conclude by returning to the people who have been subject to forced labour and who provided evidence to the inquiry. They described a lawless existence, where they have been denied food and water. Wounds were left untreated. They sustained permanent injuries, and they were abandoned destitute, without papers. Some survivors reported their exploitation to local authorities, but nothing was done. Even after reaching safety, survivors expressed experience of psychological difficulties, such as PTSD and addiction.
In recommendation 54, the JCHR calls for improved access to justice for survivors. Corporations should be subject to a civil cause of action generated by a failure to prevent forced labour. I say to those who talk about slavery as a problem of the past that, despite the hopes of William Wilberforce and many others, it remains a contemporary challenge. Modern-day slavery is not a problem simply in far-away countries; it affects all parts of the world, despite us too rarely hearing about it.
Sadly, most of the items and products that we use and buy every single day are, to a smaller or larger degree, tainted with modern slavery: the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the computers and phones we use, and the food we eat. But, as a country, we are still a long way from eradicating it. We must try harder. We must do more to focus on victims, Governments, companies and consumers. I am particularly grateful to the Wilberforce Society at Cambridge University, which is working on proposals for me on the empowerment of consumers in challenging modern-day slavery. We can do far more.
In welcoming the Minister to his new role, I hope that he will keep this report on his desk and its recommendations in his in-tray. I welcome him to his post and thank all noble Lords who will speak today. I beg to move.
1.53pm
