Forced Labour in UK Supply Chains (JCHR Report)

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.

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and his committee on this important report and on securing this debate. I add my warm welcome to my noble friend the Minister. I chaired the House of Lords committee that examined the Modern Slavery Act 2015. It recommended the introduction of much more robust due diligence standards, aligned to those emerging from the EU. I was so pleased to see that echoed in this report. Will my noble friend the Minister signal support today for the approach advocated by the Corporate Justice Coalition, which is backed by both business and unions, as set out in the excellent Private Member’s Bill from the noble Baroness, Lady Young? I also have an interest in the debate, as we have heard, as Great British Energy’s board member with lead responsibility for a just transition for workers and to combat modern slavery. Basic human rights are severely threatened by climate change too. So the answer cannot be putting the brakes on decarbonisation. GBE is committed to becoming an anti-slavery leader, helping to cut industry reliance on minerals and products from companies or regions that use forced labour. In the short term, we are finalising a code of conduct on which investments and grants will be conditional. But ultimately I agree that the best way forward is to invest in the development of alternative technologies and to build supply chains and decent jobs here in the UK. As a country, we must also learn from history. Globally, the last great advance against forced labour came after the Second World War, when many former colonies won independence and set about dismantling colonial systems of indentured labour. In the British Empire alone, an estimated 1 million Indian workers and hundreds of thousands of Chinese labourers had been brutally controlled through drugs, debt bondage and the criminalisation of desertion. My point is that today the root causes of forced labour are the same: unaccountable state or corporate power; poverty, racism and discrimination; and weak labour rights. Workers organised into free and independent trade unions play a vital role in holding companies and their supply-chain policies to account. I hope that the Minister can reassure us that new UK rules on due diligence will recognise and strengthen that trade union role.

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for bringing this debate to the House and I commend the Joint Committee on Human Rights for a report that is both sobering and constructive. Its central conclusion, that goods produced through forced labour are entering UK supply chains, should concern us all. As the report argues, in comparison with our main international trading partners, the UK is falling behind. A country that rightly takes pride in its leadership on modern slavery must ensure that its own market does not become a route for exploitation. I approach this debate with two principles held together: our responsibility to tackle forced labour and uphold human rights, and the need for a regulatory environment that supports responsible business rather than placing unnecessary burdens on it. The committee is right to highlight that many British companies are already investing significant time and resource into tracing suppliers, improving transparency and mitigating risks. They do so because it is morally right but also because their consumers increasingly expect it. Yet these responsible firms can find themselves undercut by competitors which take a less rigorous approach. That is not fair competition and is one reason why this debate matters. At the same time, we must recognise the pressures that businesses face. Many sectors are navigating inflation, supply-chain disruption and tight margins. Additional mandatory requirements, particularly if introduced without careful design, could impose substantial new costs. The committee’s proposals on mandatory human rights due diligence and import controls are serious and deserve consideration, but they would mark a shift in the UK’s regulatory landscape. So, before moving in that direction, we need clarity, evidence and a full understanding of the economic implications, as well as ensuring their efficacy in tackling forced labour. I welcome the Minister to his position and would be grateful if he could address three points. I am happy to take his responses in writing. First, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, asked, when will the Government publish their responsible business conduct review and the national baseline assessment on the UN guiding principles? Those documents will be essential for informed policy-making. Secondly, how will the cumulative impact of potential new due diligence requirements on small and medium-sized enterprises be assessed? Thirdly, can the Minister confirm that any future proposals, whether on due diligence or import controls, will be developed in close consultation with business, with a clear understanding of sector-specific risks and the need to maintain competitiveness? The UK should never be a market for goods produced through coercion or abuse, but our response must be effective, targeted, proportionate and workable. The task before us is to protect those being exploited, while supporting responsible business. I hope that today’s debate helps us move closer to achieving both.

My Lords, I join others in welcoming the Minister to his seat. I hope that he will not mind my sharing that, before his introduction yesterday, we were chuckling that wandering about this place for the first time felt a bit like wandering around Hogwarts. My hope, if I may say so, is that he will fight as passionately for justice as the heroes of those stories. I am also not alone in welcoming this report wholeheartedly. I express my gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and his colleagues for the extraordinarily good and profound work that has been done here. I am proud to be part of a nation that, 10 years ago, introduced—for the first time anywhere in the world, I believe—ground-breaking legislation. However, we have not gone far enough. This matters, morally, legally, economically and in terms of human rights. I suspect—to think of my day job—that I am preaching to choir in terms of the moral case for this. We have only to glimpse the basics of forced labour to see that this is not good enough. Although that is part of the problem: we do not glimpse it, and we do not have the public outrage that we need. Others will make the economic case far better than I could. I refer the House to the work of charities such as Unseen, which reckons that around £60 billion a year is added to the British economy by dealing with these issues. Imagine the effect of money being taken out of the criminal economy and put into the mainstream economy. If I may speak up for the Church Commissioners, I am glad that our responsible investment team has been working for a number of years on this. I would say that I am a bear of little brain, so my reflections are focused on two very clear questions. The first is how, in tackling this injustice, do we make sure that we do not transfer inequity from one group to another? I suspect that to most in this Chamber, it would make very little difference if 10% were added to the cost of a new sweater or other items of clothing, but it would matter hugely to many of the people I am privileged to serve. In researching this, I have been surprised and delighted to find that many of the most cost-effective clothing providers in our society today have some of the strongest policies in this regard. Can the Minister say what the Government are doing in response to these recommendations, but particularly in ensuring that cost is not added to the most impoverished parts of our economy? My second question, which has really absorbed me, is how do we raise public awareness of this issue, so that people know when there is forced labour in the supply chain when they go to buy a new pair of socks or whatever it happens to be? Where are the Greta Thunbergs or—if you are of a particular generation—the Bob Geldofs who will raise these things and raise public irritation to a point where we must do something about it, not only legislatively but by changing our society? This question matters morally, legally and economically. It matters to the very soul of our nation. I thank the committee for this report and urge the Government to respond.

My Lords, I declare that I am co-chair of the parliamentary group on modern slavery and vice-chair of the Human Trafficking Foundation. The Modern Slavery Act 2015 was transformational in its ambitions, but it was a long time ago and much of what came from it has not really been implemented, or has been positively discouraged. The two recent reports, particularly the excellent one we are debating today, set out sensible recommendations, but they are not yet implemented by the Government. That really is what I will talk about today. There is no provision in the Act for enforcement and we are now, as has already been said, out of step with many other countries, including Australia, the United States, Norway and France, and with the EU. I remember discussing with United States border control officers, over a web link, how they stopped “hot goods”, as they call them, very effectively. Why are we not looking at how the Americans deal with hot goods? The EU has a due diligence directive. That is going to affect our big companies, because we deal hugely with the with EU, as we do with the United States. As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, said, are we going to find that our goods are rejected because we cannot be clear that they are safe? We have the Procurement Act 2023; excellent in idea, but not yet effective. We have an Immigration and Asylum Bill that will increase transparency and reporting, but it has no due diligence directives, mandatory provisions, or duty to identify, prevent and address forced labour. Quite simply, we do not have anything effective to deal with the companies, many of which are working extremely hard to do the right thing, which means they are at a financial disadvantage compared with all too many companies that are not doing anything to prevent forced labour. My view is that the mandatory provisions should apply and that they should have financial implications. We should use SMEs, as well as the very big companies, with a right degree of proportionality. Trade negotiations should include consideration of modern slavery and cleaning the supply chains. There are issues across government departments, so there should be clarity and responsibility. This is urgent. The Government need to get on with it.

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for bringing this report and securing this debate. I also thank those who worked on the committee, my noble friend Lady O’Grady for the work her committee has done, and others in this House who are working on this issue. I have a long-standing interest in today’s discussion. As an adviser to the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, I welcome the opportunity to discuss the Human Rights Committee’s report, Forced Labour in UK Supply Chains. The figures provided by the International Labour Organization are beyond disturbing: every single day, an estimated 27.6 million people are trapped into forced labour conditions—nearly double the populations of London, Manchester and Birmingham combined. Of course, this travesty is not gender neutral. Of the 6.3 million people in forced commercial sexual exploitation, nearly four out of five are women and girls. Children—who are the most vulnerable and deserve care from their communities—make up 3.3 million of those stuck inside forced labour situations, of which over half a million are commercially sexually exploited. No one who has been sexually exploited lives a long life; we ought to realise that. Every single one of these people deserves our efforts to secure them the freedoms they deserve. The nature of supply chains means that many of these cases are deliberately obscured and hidden beneath layers of supply chain contracts, and ultimately also hidden within British homes and workplaces. Our current framework asks only companies with a turnover of £36 million to report on supply chains. The committee noted that due diligence currently takes a voluntary approach that disregards businesses that take this responsible approach but do not always publish. I support the committee’s call for mandatory human rights due diligence throughout the supply chain and would want to ensure that safe reporting mechanisms for victims are prioritised at every level, including the right to autonomy and protections of the dignity of the people who have experienced this trauma. I also support the call for businesses to have a duty to prevent, meaning that victims have a route to a civil claim if they are wronged. I hope the Government will look again at establishing a survivor advisory council. Those who have lived through this terrible form of exploitation understand the truth of its mechanisms more than any legislator ever could. Finally, I briefly bring attention to the fact that our principal trading partners are moving forward in this area. The EU will be banning the sale, import and export of goods made with forced labour from December 2027. While that is a while away yet, it is a strong and decisive move, and one that we must bear in mind to avoid goods that are rejected over the channel being simply redirected to be sold at our stores. A year has passed since the committee’s recommended timetable for legislation, and we now have a new Government. Both give us a real opportunity for fresh leadership on this matter. Can my noble friend the Minister say when the Government expect to set out their legislative plans? I congratulate the Minister on being with us today.

My noble friend Lord Alton’s commendable inquiry has shone a light in dark places. Abuses occur beyond first-tier suppliers, affecting women and the environment in particular. It made us think, and his opening speech today will have made us think further. As the NHS is one of the largest commercial organisations in the country, and the fifth-biggest employer in the world, I want to focus on its supply chain. Antibiotics alone constitute about half of NHS primary care prescriptions, mostly penicillin based. Their manufacture depends on the precursor 6-APA, for which 85% to 90% of global manufacture is in China. In the NATO area, Sandoz in Kundl, Austria, is the only producer of 6-APA for penicillins, which it manufactures. The surgical equipment supply is similarly worrying. Over one-fifth of equipment, especially disposables, is produced in northern Pakistan, with supplier companies in Europe or the US. Labourers manufacturing surgical instruments are often paid less than $1 per day and have poor job security and woefully inadequate health and safety protection, and many employees are children, some as young as seven. Some 150 billion pairs of disposable gloves are produced every year, mostly in Malaysia, Thailand and a few other Asian countries, from factories often known already for their serial labour rights concerns. In Malaysia, migrant workers producing surgical gloves have reported unsafe factory conditions, confiscation of passports, illegal withholding of pay, and debt bondage from high recruitment fees paid to agents to secure the job. In 2016, procurement agencies for the NHS started introducing contractual requirements. But our “strategic vulnerability” was evident in Covid, buying £150 million-worth of equipment from Chinese companies whose factories were using Uyghur and North Korean forced labour with extensive links to human rights abuses in Xinjiang. The report’s recommendations warrant action. Our short-term approach, with procurement based on price, leaves us complicit with human rights abuses and perilously vulnerable to disruptions in critical health supplies. In Sweden, procurement directors included effective labour clauses into a regional contract with an Indian healthcare uniforms manufacturer. It can be done, it must be done, and I hope the new Minister, who I congratulate, will urgently press for the supply of medical instruments and medicines to be tackled across ministries.

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to see the Minister in his place. He has always represented the best of the Scottish Labour tradition, that of building people up rather than trying to tear things down. I am strongly in favour of what the noble Lord, Lord Alton, said about Xinjiang. It is worth looking not only at the horror of what happens there, but the exportability of it. An algorithm monitors you for antisocial behaviour. What is antisocial behaviour? Growing a beard, covering your hair, observing the fast, talking to foreigners, accessing the wrong websites. The algorithm can then sentence you to re-education. I hope it is common to all of us in this House that that is abominable behaviour. Equally, I hope it is common to everyone on every side that forced labour is an atrocity. It offends all our deepest moral sensibilities. I wish we would spend more time eliminating the remaining pockets of slavery in Afghanistan, Eritrea, Mauritania, and so on, rather than fretting over who owned a share in the Royal African Company in the 18th century. The problem that arises from this report is that we should not judge policies only by their intentions. We need to look at their consequences, and there are reasons why we have generally, in trade policy, restricted ourselves to the finished product, rather than trying to police the production of any given good or service, whether it is to do with net zero, animal welfare, or whatever it is. It is an incredibly difficult and intrusive thing to try and police, and it is usually very ineffective. To the extent that there is an impact, it is very often negative. With a trade sanction of any kind—refusing to buy certain products and then having to go through a bureaucracy to see which products they are is, if you like, the loosest form of trade sanction—who does that hurt? It hurts ordinary people in the other country and, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester reminded us, in our own country, and it generally drives support to the regime of which you disapprove. It strengthens its control of the economy and makes it easier for it to put its cronies in positions of power. So there is a real danger that we elide from saying, “I disapprove of this practice”, or “I disapprove of this regime”, whether it is Iran, China or wherever else, into saying, “Therefore, let’s have some kind of trade sanction”. Actually, I think we need stronger sanctions: not commercial sanctions but political and legal sanctions aimed at the individuals responsible. We should not use trade as a kind of dustbin into which we put all our desiderata. It is rather like the last debate, when people were talking this way about the school curriculum: “I want my particular thing in the school curriculum—I want there to be more financial literacy, more climate change”. If you put in everything that everyone wants in the school curriculum, there would be no English, maths or science. Similarly, if trade deals become about women’s rights and workers’ rights, net zero and indigenous rights and all the rest of it, there will not be room in them for what they really for, which is the removal of obstacles to increase mutual prosperity. I have to say that, historically, the thing that really did for slavery was rising prosperity, which made it obsolete, and if you look at the list of countries where it still persists, they are poor countries. The best thing we can do is to allow them to trade their way to wealth.

My Lords, like all the rest of us in the Chamber, I thank my noble friend of over 40 years for his incredibly diligent work and for the work of his committee, which, as we have said, has shone a light on this very painful area: an entangled web of cheap and forced labour, modern slavery and migrant and asylum issues, all of which are in a mess. I do not wish to trivialise the issue in any way, but if your Lordships fancy a cinema trip, the current film “Mutiny”, available in cinemas now and featuring Jason Statham, is all about a conspiracy of international slavery proportions—and in fact, a great British actor exposes the best way to deal with the issue. It is quite violent, I have to say, but never mind; it is there to be seen. We are having this debate in the week in which we discover that 660 British companies have underpaid their workers—not even minimum wage, barely living wage and having to return £4 million to 27,000 people for trying to get them to do things on the cheap in the UK. This is the kind of disgrace we are focused on. I noted in particular that the report from the noble Lord’s brilliant committee states that state-imposed forced labour is an issue, and it is. When a state seeks to either criminalise, reduce or push people to the margins, it forces not just forced labour activity but wrong labour activity. This very week a young man, of British origin but of African parentage, was arrested on the streets of London and bunged behind bars again for a minor offence—nothing to do with violence or other people—simply because, as an asylum seeker trying to get the Home Office to do its job and because of its failure to do so, he found the only way to get some income to feed himself was to sell minor category B drugs. Now the taxpayer will shell out £120,000 over the next two years by simply saying that keeping him in prison is better than letting him work. That is a nonsense. That is state-imposed forced labour absence, and I hope the committee will consider in its brilliant future thinking how these minor aspects of our policy and failed government departments trap people rather than liberate and build them up.

My Lords, as a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, so ably led by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, my first remark is that I find it slightly unfortunate that the House is only now considering a report that the committee published in July 2025. But delay has been something of a feature in the long history of dealing with modern slavery and, indeed, slavery in the history of our country. As has been observed, the 2015 Modern Slavery Act, so bravely introduced by my noble friend Lady May, was a ground-breaking international instrument, which reflected in our domestic law our obligations and led the way for many countries to emulate the points that were made. That was a reflection of our nation’s long and very positive history in this area. As long ago as 1897, Parliament passed a statute called the Foreign Prison-Made Goods Act, which sought to achieve for its own time a measure of the type that is recommended in our report. One can trace a line all the way back to the great glory of the British Empire, which was the abolition of the slave trade, led so wonderfully by William Wilberforce. The recommendations of our report are, in my submission, a logical extension of that long and noble history in our country of seeking to eliminate slavery in all its forms. I appreciate that the Minister will look at our recommendations and wish to balance them against the desire not to burden business with undue regulation, which is a real and genuine concern, given the state of burdens on businesses, but I urge him to accelerate that consideration. In doing so, I circle back to a point ably made by my noble friend Lady Sugg and the noble Lord, Lord Alton: we are awaiting a response from the Government. In June 2025, the Government announced in the UK’s Trade Strategy that they would: “Launch a review of our approach to responsible business conduct, focusing on the global supply chains of businesses operating in the UK”. The JCHR received a letter from the then Secretary of State for Business and Trade, saying that he considered that the launch of the responsible business conduct review was 30 June 2025. One of the noble Lord’s earliest acts as a Minister was writing to us on 26 August. In that letter, he said that the responsible business conduct review “has now been completed, and the Government is considering its findings”. I ask the Minister: could he publish the review now, prior to the Government publishing their consideration of its findings? In so doing, I welcome the Minister to his place.

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Alton of Liverpool, chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, together with his 11 fellow members of the committee, is to be congratulated on this insightful and timely report. The action on it has been delayed. Nevertheless, it is a very timely report. I, too, congratulate the noble Lord on securing the debate and, most importantly, on the masterful way in which he introduced it. The issues that the report raises are live issues. They are not something in the past; they are going on and on. Somehow, we have to find a way of stopping them. His Majesty’s Government’s response to the report is centred on the recommendations of the report. In my short contribution to the debate, I will ask questions on the Government’s response to the first and sixth recommendations. The first recommendation deals with UK domestic law. It recommends a new law that would ensure that the UK’s market is protected from goods tainted by forced labour. It would do this by clearly stating “that it is unlawful to import or sell goods linked to forced labour”. I Timothy 5:18 says: “For the scripture saith, Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn. And, The labourer is worthy of his reward”— his wages and his hire Forced labour pays peanuts to its workers, almost treating them as if they were squirrels and less than human. That is what forced labour does to people. The challenge that His Majesty’s Government now face is that the Joint Committee on Human Rights asked for the new legislation to be introduced within one year of the publication of the report. The Government’s response was that there was a review. Can the Minister, whom I welcome most warmly to the Front Bench, tell your Lordships’ House where we are on this? My concern is that delay will result in the innocent becoming complicit in unlawful importing or selling of goods that are linked to forced labour. We all know that ignorance is not a defence. Furthermore, those who are carrying out forced labour have the time to find devious ways of getting away with it. If we do not do something, we are allowing them to get away with it. In all these areas where the reviews are announced in the report, who is persistently urging and chivvying the reviewers to complete the work? The time to act is now.

My Lords, talk about being thrown in at the deep end. My noble friend the Minister was introduced just yesterday and I welcome him to your Lordships’ House and to his post. My noble friend is not a new friend. We first met so long ago that he was probably a teenager at the time. Much water has flown under many bridges since then. Maintaining the aquatic theme, I am sure that he will take to your Lordships’ House as a duck to water and excel here. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and the members of his committee on their report, which builds on the report to which my noble friend Lady O’Grady referred. I was a member of that committee two years ago, conducting a post-legislative review of the 2015 Act. One of our recommendations was that the Government should introduce sanctions for companies that fail to comply with supply chain requirements. Unfortunately, the Government’s response in December 2024 was that the status quo should be retained with a voluntary aspect to it. Evidence shows that this is simply not enough. Without it being made compulsory, there will not be any meaningful change. Section 54 of the 2015 Act requires companies to publicly disclose their efforts to tackle forced labour and human trafficking within their business and supply chains. However, Section 54 only requires companies to report action on forced labour in supply chains, not to take action. That is bizarre. As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, said, taking no action complies with the Act. If the Government are serious about ethical supply chains, as I believe they are, they must make sure that those companies with a poor record on supply chains involving forced labour and human trafficking show what action they are taking. Otherwise, this is in effect siding with those companies. It then distorts competition by denying companies that act responsibly a level playing field. That cannot be right. In their response to our report, the Government said that they were reviewing how they can strengthen penalties for non-compliance and create a proportionate enforcement regime. That was a year and nine months ago. In June 2025, Minister Bryant said that the Government had launched a review into the UK’s approach to responsible business conduct. That was a year and three months ago. Two months ago, in answer to a Written Question from the noble Lord, Lord Alton, my noble friend Lord Stockwood said: “The Government is considering the review’s findings and will set out its plans in due course”. That sequence of events brings to mind the rather acid comment of my noble friend Lord Blunkett when he said of Tony Blair’s first Government, of which he was a senior member, that it had “hit the ground reviewing”. That was one of the criticisms that Keir Starmer’s Government also received—an often overcautious approach characterised by incrementalism. The early signs are that Prime Minister Andy Burnham will be much less risk averse. One way of demonstrating that would be to introduce legislation to make human rights due diligence of supply chains mandatory. It is long overdue and absolutely necessary.

My Lords, I declare my interests as an honorary associate professor in the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham, which has done so much work in this area, and as a member of the Great British Energy advisory group on ethical supply chains. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, for including me in that structure. I point out—and I thank noble Lords who have mentioned it—that I have a Private Member’s Bill, the Commercial Organisations and Public Authorities Duty (Human Rights and Environment) Bill, to prevent forced labour and environmental harms in all their operations and throughout their value chains. I am waiting on a date for Second Reading for that. I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Sarwar, and invite him to have a meeting to discuss that, because my belief and that of many others is that it covers 99% of what people have been asking for for some time in legislation in this area. Of course, I also thank the Joint Committee on Human Rights and, particularly, my noble friend Lord Alton for his role in the fight against modern slavery, in which he has been engaged for so long. I want to have a deeper understanding of the Government’s response to the recommendations, and that is one of the reasons why I would like to have that meeting. I believe that we can clarify and find out whether there is a way of working together to a common end. I do not want to fight the Government on these issues, but I want to be critical of, first, the slowness with which they have approached them and the confusion which has been sown. This is caused by not being clear about what the approach is, where we want to go, how the different parts of the legislation that has been enacted so far fit together, and how that legislation will be incorporated into this area of business responsibility. I want to say something about the issue of placing a burden, which noble Lords have referred to. I wonder who is really bearing a burden. Who are the people suffering most from this inaction? Businesses should be addressing some of these issues through standard business risk mitigation. It is not about introducing a whole slew of bureaucratic structures to make people feel better about themselves; we want to change the landscape substantially. I have been working recently with the construction industry, and I raise this because the Government have a very ambitious programme of building not just homes but other parts of infrastructure. Yet again, people tell me that they want to engage with due diligence and to ensure that they are aligned with the EU and other countries, but they do not know what is going on here, so they do not know what they can do. This represents a good opportunity for leadership from the Government to ensure that the kinds of structures and principles we are discussing today can be incorporated into this rebuilding of Britain.

My Lords, I am grateful to be able to speak in the gap. I join noble Lords in welcoming the noble Lord, Lord Sarwar, to this House, and we look forward to working with him. Given his new responsibility as a Trade Minister, I will ask a question or two. I do not mind receiving a reply in writing if he cannot answer the questions now. What assessment has his department made of forced labour in UK supply chains in India? India is one of the most important trading partners, with bilateral trade worth over £40 billion. But according to the Global Slavery Index, India has one of the highest absolute numbers of people in modern slavery, and the ILO and UK modern slavery assessments have repeatedly flagged up high-risk sectors, including textiles and garments, brick kilns, agriculture and leather. My questions are threefold. First, what due diligence does the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade require of UK firms importing from high-risk regions in India? Secondly, under the developing UK-India free trade agreement, what binding labour provisions will ensure that trade does not profit from forced labour? Thirdly, what practical support, not just guidance, are the Government providing to help British SMEs which do not have large compliance teams to audit their supply chains, remediate where abuse is found and source ethically?

My Lords, we started the week by giving a Second Reading to the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, and we end it with a debate on the JCHR report. So ethics have permeated the week, as they should, but there is quite a crossover between specific issues as well. I was not a member of the committee when it held its inquiry. I was a member in the previous incarnation—of the committee, not me—in 2017, when it published its report on Human Rights and Business. Its summary said: “When UK companies source or manufacture goods in less developed countries where there are weaker mechanisms for protecting human rights … serious violations can occur. Human rights are just as important abroad … The Modern Slavery Act in 2015 has raised the profile of … modern slavery within UK companies and their supply chains abroad. However, more action is needed … the Government could make a positive start by facilitating the passage of Baroness Young of Hornsey’s Modern Slavery (Transparency in Supply Chains) Bill”. Well, that was then and this is now. It went on to urge the Government to “consider what extra resources” various organisations may require. As the Minister will realise, that is Lords-speak for, “They are badly underresourced”. We also commented on human rights being a matter for so many government departments, which should be communicating with each other on this. A lot of the 2025 report, therefore, was familiar to me. In the course of many debates, noble Lords have remarked that, at the time of the 2015 Act, we regarded our country as world leading on modern slavery and that, over the years, we have not kept up with international partners. I recall that, when that legislation was going through, I made the rather naive point that public awareness was valuable. We talked about business following the example of the most ethical and best organised, without properly acknowledging that they cannot be precisely emulated by those with smaller margins. I am not making an excuse for unethical behaviour, but I am taking up a point referred to by other noble Lords. In the context where you can be disadvantaged by doing the right thing—as the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, said—the noble Baroness, Lady Young, asks a very pertinent question on this. Promoting a product on, or partly on, the basis of green credentials is easier than of there being no forced labour, although I was glad to hear what the noble Lord, Lord Alton, said on this, reporting what evidence has shown. The sector still battles the notion that it does not happen here. The noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, who so skilfully chaired our post-legislative inquiry, brought that out very strongly. It does happen here; it happens here, and it happens there. I agree with the right reverend Prelate that it is difficult when you do not see it starkly and immediately, and it is difficult when you cannot really envisage it, which is perhaps a difference from the green credentials point, which I think we find a bit easier to get our heads around—or perhaps allow ourselves to think about. We do not want to think about modern slavery. The predecessor committee visited an office where we were given a presentation on the UN guiding principles, and it felt like completely unfamiliar territory to all of us, I think. Was that because of a failure to promote the UN GPs or because of our own lack of awareness? Maybe it was both. The Minister, whom I welcome to his position—although I think he must already feel a bit of an old hand after having been thrown into it yesterday—will discover that the middle name of the noble Lord, Lord Alton, is “indefatigable”. He will also find an impressive level of determination in the current Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, as with her predecessors. Most noble Lords have had a very restricted speaking time today. Although I could take quite a lot longer, that feels a bit rough on them, so I will discard the notes that I made a couple of weeks ago. I want to pick up on just a couple of the points made by Eleanor Lyons, the IASC, in her annual report of last December. She points out: “Exploitation not only harms victims but also imposes significant financial costs on the British economy and responsible businesses. Modern slavery costs the UK an estimated £60 billion each year—around 2 per cent of GDP”. She reminds us of the model legislative drafting, “drawing on the engagement and expertise shared by stakeholders demonstrating how legislation could be introduced in the UK”. As she puts it: “The public expect decisive action: 80% want retailers to be legally required to remove products linked to forced labour, and the same proportion support tougher government rules … only 9% fully trust companies to act without oversight, while most believe profit takes priority over worker protection”. One might say that many people would not want to be recorded as taking a different view, but these are significant figures—even allowing a reduction for my scepticism. I was very struck by the foreword to the IASC’s report, which was written by a “survivor consultant” working with, and no doubt supported by, the charity Unseen. I quote: “Mandatory Human Rights Due Diligence … is not simply another regulatory requirement … When the law draws clear lines, exploitation has fewer places to hide. When those lines are backed by accountability, oversight, consequence, and guaranteed pathways to appropriate remedy”— as I say, there is real crossover with the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, which has extensive support and will soon become law— “we move from reacting to harm to preventing it, and from inadequate responses to just and restorative ones”. If we as a country are to feel good about ourselves, forced labour in supply chains badly needs attention. I very much support the report, in which I had no hand.

My Lords, let me take this opportunity, first, to welcome the Minister to his place, and, if I may be so bold, to thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for securing this debate and introducing it so comprehensively. I do not think that any Member of this House needs persuading of the gravity of what we are discussing. Forced labour is obviously a grotesque abuse, and Britain, working alongside our international partners, has a genuine and important role to play in confronting it. This has been a comprehensive debate, and there is much to agree with in what has been discussed in the past hour or so, but I shall confine my remarks to pressing the House to drill into the detail and to look beyond the moral clarity of the diagnosis towards the practical consequences of the remedies on offer. We need to be very careful about how we deal with this subject: a one-size-fits-all approach will probably not achieve the necessary objectives. As the report notes, much forced labour takes place in middle-income and higher-income countries. As a percentage of the population, it is at its worst in the Arab states. How can that be acceptable? Perhaps the most recent high-profile case was the World Cup-related construction in Qatar. The world seemed to turn a blind eye to that, which I personally find shameful. Surely construction is one of the five sectors where forced labour is most prevalent. The solutions to that are unlikely to be corporate in this country; they have to be diplomatic. That needs to be considered when dealing with this problem. However, we also need to acknowledge that much of the forced labour we are debating arises in nations where corruption and weak institutions prevail and where, as a consequence, poverty is endemic. In that context, further burdens placed on British businesses, whether through mandatory due diligence and reporting requirements of the kind proposed in the Immigration and Asylum Bill, or through restrictions on trade with particular suppliers or sectors, risks doing real harm to the very people we intend to protect in those areas where there are very fine distinctions between “forced” and “desperate”. We do not wish to disadvantage further those who are already in dreadful circumstances. We must, therefore, be very careful to design systems that allow for nuanced judgment; that is not to argue for inaction, but for careful and detailed consideration. We must also be aware that small and medium-sized British businesses have faced cost after cost and millions of pounds in cumulative regulatory burdens since this Government took office. I fear that further mandatory reporting requirements will do very little to solve the problem they are aimed at while doing much to add to it. It will add cost, complexity and legal exposure to businesses trying, in good faith, to operate responsibly within an imperfect system. In many situations, supply chains are so complex that it would be practically impossible to ensure absolute due diligence and compliance. This is not to argue for inaction—not at all—but we need to argue that these businesses, particularly SMEs, will need help to ensure that they are able to comply. I ask the Minister to bear this in mind when responding and to ensure that SMEs are taken particular care of and have the necessary support to minimise compliance costs and maximise the efficiency of their practices and solutions to this problem. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester reminded us, we do not want to end up in a situation where all we are doing is, in effect, transferring inequity from one group of disadvantaged people to another. Again, I say this not to counsel inaction but to counsel humility about the limits of regulation imposed at a distance. The long-term and only durable solution to this problem is trade. Free and expanding trade with more international partners raises standards of living, drives development and fosters the competition—I stress that—that roots out bad practice. It is prosperity, not prohibition, that can eliminate exploitative labour practices in every economy that has escaped them, our own included—a point made extremely well by my noble friend Lord Hannan. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, also made an extremely important argument about UK business, unfair competition and national resilience. I will not rehash it but, to that end, the committee’s suggestions about consistency in adding clauses on human and labour rights to international agreements should be given very careful consideration. I welcome the Minister’s thoughts on that recommendation. The drive to net zero has created a substantial and, I suggest, insufficiently scrutinised reliance on imported solar panels from regions associated with forced labour. As much as 45% of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon—the essential raw material in the overwhelming majority of solar panels—has been produced in the Xinjiang Uyghur region, and the committee noted that the solar road map does not tackle supply chain risks. The United Kingdom imports the great majority of its photovoltaic hardware and China’s percentage share of global manufacturing runs into the high 90s at some stages of production. Similarly, some 70% of the world’s cobalt—a critical component in the batteries that power renewable storage and electric vehicles—is produced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country whose record on forced and child labour in artisanal mining is well documented by the Global Slavery Index. So even where we do not import these materials directly, we still sanction their use indirectly, but unmistakeably, every time we subsidise or mandate the deployment of renewable technologies built upon them. As others in this debate have noted, and particularly in debates on this sector, we must not overlook the fact that the public sector has a significant role to play in terms of its procurement policies, as pointed out by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and in the education of the public. That point was made extremely well by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester and the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee. The public need to be educated about the extent of the problem so that they can make better and informed choices. By definition, a lot of that education will have to come from the public sector. This is not to say that I am arguing against the Government’s energy policy when we are talking about this aspect of the problem, but a serious conversation is still needed about how forced labour ends up in UK supply chains. I was very pleased to hear what the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, said on that because sometimes the best of domestic intentions have disastrous unintended consequences thousands of miles away, out of sight, but, I hope, because of this thoughtful and expansive debate, not out of mind.

I thank noble Lords and I am pleased to respond for the Government. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, for securing this important debate and thank him for the characteristically powerful and principled arguments that he made and for the way in which he continues to campaign on this important issue. I say right at the start that I can tell there is an impatience among noble Lords to see progress on this issue. I reassure them that I am an impatient Minister. I want us to get things done and to get them done quickly and in the interests of people right across this country and of our international obligations, too. That is a firm commitment that I want to make to Members across this Chamber. I thank the Joint Committee on Human Rights for its thorough report, Forced Labour in UK Supply Chains, and all noble Lords who have contributed to today’s debate. I will digress for just one moment to thank the doorkeepers and all the staff who made me and my family feel very welcome and made yesterday a thoroughly enjoyable and memorable day. I also thank the Whips’ Office for making sure to have me busy, not just yesterday but today and on Monday too. I will endeavour to address as many of the points raised as possible within my allocated time. If I do not cover any points, I make a firm commitment that not only will I write to all noble Lords but also that my door is always open to any noble Lord who has raised an issue in this Chamber and wants to meet to discuss it. Let me be absolutely clear: forced labour is an egregious abuse of human rights. I think we are all in agreement on what we want the outcomes to be. What we have to work through is how we get to those outcomes. I have served in a Parliament where we were very good at putting words in pieces of legislation, but what we were not good at was changing the outcomes. I want to make sure that we are changing outcomes for businesses in this country but also for workers right across the globe. Forced labour strips people of their freedom, dignity and agency. It has no place in the supply chains of British businesses, goods purchased by the British Government or products sold to British consumers. The scale of the challenge is sobering. An estimated 27.6 million people worldwide are subject to forced labour, including more than 3 million children. Forced labour generates an estimated $236 billion in illegal profits annually. Behind those statistics are human beings—workers coerced by threats, children put in danger, families separated and communities denied the basic right to live and work freely. That is why I welcome the committee’s work and share its concerns. An estimated 70% of global trade now flows through complex supply chains. That tells us the challenge. Globalisation has delivered enormous gains in productivity, innovation and living standards, but it has made the trading system complex, and the opacity of modern supply networks can also hide exploitation. Some products may pass through thousands of suppliers across multiple jurisdictions before they reach consumers here in the UK. That means we have to think this through very carefully. Many noble Lords mentioned Xinjiang and the abuses faced by the Uyghur communities. This Government will remain absolutely resolute in opposing human rights abuses worldwide, including in Xinjiang, where substantial evidence indicates the persecution and arbitrary detention of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities. My Ministers in the other place continue to raise these concerns directly at the very highest level. The United Kingdom has a proud record of leading efforts to combat forced labour in supply chains. The Modern Slavery Act 2015 made us the first country in the world to require businesses to report on the steps they were taking to address modern slavery. It brought the issue into boardrooms, strengthened transparency and accountability, and prompted other countries to act. However, groundbreaking legislation should not remain unchanged. More than a decade later, we must honestly assess whether the framework is for purpose. Many noble Lords mentioned Section 54 and how it requires larger businesses operating in the United Kingdom to publish annual statements outlining the steps they are taking to prevent modern slavery across their operations and supply chains. But analysis shows that around only 60% of companies have met those basic requirements. Transparency is meaningful, but the outcomes should be based on the actions, and that is where we need to see progress. A statement must not become a substitute for effective due diligence, nor reporting be seen as an end in itself. That is why the Government are strengthening the regime through the forthcoming Immigration and Asylum Bill. It will establish clear reporting topics and deadlines, require the publication of statements on the modern slavery statement registry and clarify the rules governing group statements. It will also extend the reporting obligations to public authorities with budgets of £36 million or more and introduce penalties of up to £1 million or 1% of annual turnover—whichever is higher—for organisations that fail to comply. Together, these measures will raise reporting standards, strengthen accountability and help responsible businesses compete on a level playing field. Alongside these reforms, the Government have completed the responsible business conduct review announced in the trade strategy. The review assessed the effectiveness of the United Kingdom’s approach to responsible business conduct, with a particular focus on the global supply chains of businesses operating here. It considered a range of measures, including mandatory human rights due diligence and forced labour import bans, and it drew on the expertise of businesses, investors, trade unions, academics and civil society organisations. Importantly, it also heard from survivors and representatives of communities on the front line of supply chain abuses, including adults with lived experience of modern slavery. We have also engaged with international partners that have shifted from voluntary approaches to mandatory due diligence and import restrictions, and we are carefully considering what can be learned from those systems. As noble Lords are aware, the review is complete and the Government are considering its findings. We will set out our approach in due course. Let me reiterate that I appreciate the committee’s and noble Lords’ impatience for greater clarity. I promise that I will not test their patience, but I think noble Lords will accept that, with the formation of a new Government and new Ministers, we are looking at this with fresh eyes. I have been robustly clear with officials in my own department and beyond that I want systems that work and that change the outcomes. That is a commitment that noble Lords have from me, because any strengthened framework must change behaviour, not merely increase paperwork. It must be clear, proportionate and enforceable. It must support responsible businesses and ensure that they are not undercut by competitors willing to profit from exploitation. Proportionality is particularly important for small and medium-sized businesses, which lack the resources and commercial leverage of the multinational companies. That does not mean lowering our ambitions; it means establishing clear, risk-based obligations and providing businesses with the practical guidance they need to meet. The committee’s recommendation for an import ban has been a prominent feature of today’s debate, and the Government understand the full force of that argument. An effective import measure could protect victims, responsible businesses and British consumers alike. However, it does require credible evidence, reliable traceability, clear decision-making and properly resourced enforcement. We must ensure that any measure is legally robust and operationally feasible, and genuinely disrupts forced labour, rather than merely diverting tainted goods through less transparent routes. The Government are already using a range of other measures. The Procurement Act 2023 enables public bodies to reject bids and terminate contracts with suppliers known to use forced labour. The NHS procurement regulations require public bodies to assess modern slavery risks and take responsible and proportionate measures to address them. I note the point made about greater transparency on the outcomes of those measures, and I am happy to follow up with individual Members on that. Our trade policy also plays an important role. We pursue anti-forced labour provisions in our free trade agreements, while the developing countries trading scheme allows preferential trading arrangements to be suspended in cases of serious labour rights violations. A question was asked, for example, about the free trade agreement with India. Our agreement with India is one of the first that India has signed that includes a labour chapter. That is the kind of leadership I hope we can show in other free trade agreements. Another issue that has been raised is clean energy supply chains and the link to forced labour. These points were powerfully made by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and others. The transition to clean energy must not and cannot be built on exploitation. The Great British Energy Act was therefore amended to ensure that Great British Energy takes credible and proportionate measures to manage forced labour risks. We expect Great British Energy to demonstrate leadership, while the Solar Taskforce has worked to support resilient, sustainable and innovative supply chains that are free from forced labour. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, asked for an update on the solar road map. Since its establishment, we have established the Solar Council, which brings together key officials and Ministers with a clear commitment to deliver transparency on supply chains. I am happy to update the noble Lord on that in more detail. We must also place victims at the centre of our response because, when exploitation is uncovered, businesses should seek to prevent further harm and secure meaningful remediation, not simply terminate a contract and abandon vulnerable workers to an even more precarious situation. No single measure, whether a reporting requirement, a due diligence report, procurement rules, trade provisions, import restrictions or criminal enforcement, will solve this problem on its own. It needs a coherent, whole-system response backed by better data, greater traceability, effective enforcement and international co-operation. The committee’s report poses a serious challenge to the Government, business and Parliament, and I do not downplay or dismiss that. I again commit to noble Lords to do everything I can to work with them and make significant progress in this area. There were one or two other issues raised; if I do not cover them in the next 30 seconds or minute, I will happily write to individual Members. We are working with our Home Office colleagues on what more we can do to use the Proceeds of Crime Act, and I would be happy to follow up on that. On my noble friend Lady O’Grady’s question, I am looking forward to meeting the Corporate Justice Coalition very soon to discuss its campaign and what more we can do to deliver on the outcomes that it rightly demands of us. To the noble Lord who asked questions around the reports on the outcomes of the FTA with India and what assessments we have made, I am more than happy to come back on that issue. In closing, I reiterate that this is a collective challenge to all of us. It is an obligation based on our values as a country and to those less fortunate than us right across the globe. This Government and, I am sure, this Chamber will not step back from that commitment.

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Sarwar, in giving one of his first ministerial replies, has acquitted himself with some distinction. It is wonderful to hear a Minister describing himself as impatient, and someone who will look at things with fresh eyes. I also agree strongly with what he just said about there being no single outcome. All these different levers have to be applied, and he said that he will look at them carefully. I am very grateful to him. I thank all noble Lords who have participated in this debate, from left, right and centre. The right reverend Prelate said that we needed a greater sense of outrage; I think that has communicated itself in the speeches today. My noble friend Lady Finlay said that it is our duty to shine a light into dark places. Everyone has done that today. It struck me, from listening to the references to William Wilberforce, that 200 years ago it was the Select Committee on which he and others appeared—including the slave-trading sea captain from Liverpool, John Newton, who changed his mind and came to describe what he had seen on those vessels—that led to the changes in the law of which this country and Parliament can be so proud. They changed hearts, they changed minds, they changed culture and they changed the law. They did that as an alliance of people who came together from commerce, the law, religious backgrounds and secular backgrounds. They worked with one another. They had campaigners such as Thomas Clarkson, who abandoned his studies at Cambridge University to spend decades trying to bring through the legislation that ultimately made such a difference to the people living in those dark places to which my noble friend referred. I began by referring to the 50 million people who are victims. That is just a number. Behind every number and every statistic there is a story: a life that is not theirs; a suffering that no one knows about; there is pain, exhaustion and hunger; there are dreams of freedom and dignity. The victims of this blight must remain central to this debate. In the year since we published our report, we have heard new stories on the use of modern slavery globally in supply chains. I draw attention to reports in the Times and the Independent about North Korean labourers living in conditions “worse than cattle”, and to reports about exploited workers on Chinese fishing boats, children working in deadly conditions in the DRC—as the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, reminded us—and the BBC’s report, seen by the committee, of tomatoes being sold in the UK as Italian tomatoes, but which were actually grown by forced labour in Xinjiang. You do not have to look very far to see forced labour and modern slavery. What we are going to do about it not about historic reparations; it is about action this day—as Churchill famously demanded of his officials. He was an impatient Minister too, and I hope that that dictum might become one that the Minister will have on his desk as he considers this issue further. To conclude, it is an honour to have been the first Member of your Lordships’ House to be elected by the members of the Joint Committee on Human Rights as its chair. My tenure now comes to its conclusion. I have chaired around 60 sessions and produced around a dozen reports on everything from transnational repression and the failures to prosecute British nationals responsible for genocidal crimes against minorities in northern Iraq to our report, published only last week, on the human rights of children in social care. I end by saying that the hard work of our parliamentary Select Committees in crafting challenging reports on public policy is exemplary and a rebuke to those who have only negative things to say about Parliament and parliamentarians. Joint Committees of both Houses are rarities that we need more of. I am glad to see the Government Chief Whip in his place to hear that remark. Today’s debate and our JCHR report on supply chains and modern slavery is a superb example of parliamentary work at its best. I sincerely thank all noble Lords who have participated, both in the committee and in the House today.