Forced Labour in UK Supply Chains (JCHR Report)

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Friday 4th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Non-Afl)]

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.

European Entry and Exit System

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 9th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The system is operational. I have travelled to a European country in the last two months and had to ensure that my credentials were checked and established in the proper way. The operation of the scheme is a matter for the European Union. We are a third-party country. We are trying to ensure that it is as smooth as possible. We have had discussions with our European partners and will continue to do so. As I said earlier, we have put in some £3.5 million of UK taxpayers’ money to ensure that the challenges are at least ameliorated as far as possible.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I sense this is going against the masochistic mood of the House, but how is a failure of the EU our fault? The noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, in asking her question, said her fondness for the EU does not blind her to the fact that this is a chaotic and badly implemented scheme—for everyone, not just for us. Any third-country national trying to enter the EU will run up against these problems. How is that our responsibility? If there is a bad immigration system in Uzbekistan or Venezuela, that is not our fault. Incredibly, not everything is the fault of Brexit.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The noble Lord tempts me. It is not our responsibility and it is an EU scheme, but it is our problem if lorries and cars are backed up at Dover, if our citizens cannot get into a European country easily and if we have that general mess. The point the noble Baroness made, which I thought he would have recognised given that he is a strong advocate of Brexit, was that, had we not had the referendum and the Brexit decision, we would have been part of the decision-making process on that very system. Now we are not; we are a third-party country because of the decision he advocated, which I remind the House I opposed.

Retail and Hospitality Sector

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 22nd January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Monckton on securing this debate and will take us back to how she started—with the Woolsack, which is currently sustaining the graceful and delicate form of the noble Baroness, Lady Bull. The people who designed this Chamber knew what they were doing. England medievally was a one-sector economy, as dependent on the wool trade and as associated with that one sector as today Qatar is with natural gas or the Maldives is with holidays. They were reminding us that everything we do as politicians and people in government is literally supported by the surplus of the private sector. They knew that they needed to remind us of that, and they need to remind us still.

I have been struck ever since I arrived here by how readily people spend money that is not theirs and how easily we expect warmth and approval when we demand that more be spent on something, but we never—or almost never—talk about where it is coming from. I think that happens because of a bit of faulty wiring in our neural networks. When a politician talks about public spending, it is received as though he is talking about his own money. So when he proposes spending more, he is thought to be generous—as though it was his own—and when he proposes spending less, he is thought to be mean. In fact, of course, he is standing up for people who will never thank him—what the poet calls

“Your children yet unborn and unbegot”.


These are the people who are not there yet, whom he is sparing from our extraordinary debt levels.

I think a similar dynamic happens with the very unpopular thing that I am about to talk about now. It is specifically hitting the hospitality sector, as opposed to business more widely: the huge and unprecedented rises in the minimum wage. People always personalise this. Whenever anyone criticises the levels of minimum wage, the reaction is the rhetorically powerful but logically utterly irrelevant question: how would you like to live on £12.21, or whatever the current rate is?

For what it is worth, my first job, like that of the noble Lord, Lord Forbes of Newcastle—to whom I say welcome and thank you for speaking so well—was also in that sector. I worked as a waiter in a golf club. It taught me lots of things, some of which were really useful. For example, since then I have always been able to tell the difference between when a waiter has genuinely not seen you and when he is just busy—not for me a lifetime of making little squiggling gestures in the air ineffectively, because I learned that. It also taught me punctuality. It taught me how to deal with customers. It taught me how to deal with employers, and how they are different from your parents or your teachers; the relationship is an altogether more transactional one. For me, as for millions of others including my children and, I am sure, others in this Chamber, that sector was the beginning of how I got into the world of work.

The measure we should be applying is: are we making it easier for that sector to hire people, or are we, as we keep pushing up that wage level, privileging one section of low-paid workers over everyone else, particularly people who are looking for work, who are becoming more and more numerous? It is difficult to have this argument without emotion, but I invite noble Lords to ask a couple of questions about the mechanics of those rises.

When I joined your Lordships’ House the minimum wage stood at £8.72. Now it is £12.21—an extraordinary rise. It has gone from being so low that it did not make much difference, in the period that the noble Lord, Lord Forbes, talked about, to being, I think, the highest in the OECD after France and New Zealand. What has been the impact of that rise? We can see it in the unemployment figures. We can also see it in the skewed incentives.

Lots of things happen when the minimum wage increases. First, some employers will simply claw it back in other ways. They will be less forthcoming with offers of subsidised purchasing, help with travel or other perks. If it gets high enough they will go elsewhere, either to automation or, let us be honest, to the large pool of illegal workers in this country—perhaps more than 1 million people. It is almost never noted that the people most affected as low-paid workers are also consumers of the industries most affected. If the minimum wage is passed on to customers in the fast food sector, let us say, or indeed in hospitality generally, it is not so much Members of your Lordships’ House who are affected by the rising prices.

Prior to these rises we had 30 years of structurally low unemployment in this country. We had waves of people coming here from southern Europe because they had regulated employment sectors and high minimum wages, and therefore structurally high unemployment. All the way through previous Governments of both parties, we managed to stay away from that and to remain a magnet for young people. By heaven, we are going to miss that when it goes.

Shamima Begum

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Wednesday 7th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend, but I come back to the point that the decision to deprive Shamima Begum of her British citizenship, undertaken by the previous Government and supported by this Government, was taken because she was deemed to pose, under legislation, a national security threat at that time. That does not mean that we are not going to robustly examine and support protection of children and minority groups from the UK public more generally. However, in the individual case that my noble friend mentioned, a decision was taken to deprive her of citizenship based on information that led to national security decisions. That is currently being contested in the European court, so I cannot comment further on the Government’s position, but he can be assured that there were reasons that the decision was taken in the first place.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, previous speakers who have raised questions so far have made a big play out of the age of Shamima Begum. She was one of three Bethnal Green schoolgirls; they were either 15 or 16 at the time they went to join Daesh. Will the Minister join me in assuming that all the people campaigning on the grounds that they were children who were groomed and were not adults will be strongly against giving the vote to people of that age?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I can always rely on the noble Lord to take a serious issue and bring it down to a unserious point. I will ensure that we have the vote at 16. It is Labour Government policy; it was provided for at the general election. People will still choose how to vote at the age of 16. If you can join the Army, get married and do other things at 16, that is reasonable. This is a serious issue about deprivation of citizenship and the noble Lord throws the question away.

Elon Musk

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Tuesday 4th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for his question. As with the noble Baroness’s question on Muslim women earlier, it is absolutely important that people are not attacked for a characteristic that they cannot change. Part of the problem with the approach of Mr Musk is that he plays to people who wish to generate activity against special-characteristic individuals—who have a view politically or who have characteristics such as being Muslim or being from the Sikh community. My noble friend will know that the Policing Minister is meeting Sikh MPs this afternoon to learn about the challenges they are facing and to provide reassurance and will, no doubt, report back to my noble friend as well.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, we have just had 10 minutes of people on the Government Benches saying why they disagree with Elon Musk. Do not basic fairness and reciprocity imply that he has an equivalent right to say what he thinks about this Government, including that free speech is in retreat in this country, which is a view shared by a great many people in the United Kingdom?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

Let me find the actual comment, if I may. Does the noble Lord then agree with the following comment from Elon Musk, which he portrayed down the television line to the rally?

“You’re in a fundamental situation here. Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die”.


That might be free speech, but I regard it as borderline incitement to violence. I do not think it is the part of Elon Musk or anybody else to incite violence in America or, indeed, in the United Kingdom. I will defend having that free speech, but I hope that the noble Lord recognises that free speech brings responsibilities and Elon Musk did not have that responsibility on that day.

Employment Rights Bill

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 21st July 2025 Lords Chamber

Finally, there are 6 million workers working for small and medium-sized enterprises; I think it is around a third of the private sector workforce. The idea that they would be denied that right just because they happen to be employed by a small employer seems wrong to me. I remind noble Lords one final time that this is about the rights of workers to speak to unions in their workplaces and doing so with agreement. The CAC becomes involved only if you cannot come to an agreement between the union and the employer. I am afraid I very much oppose these amendments and support the Bill as it stands.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, last week the chairman of the junior doctors—or, now, resident doctors—committee of the BMA put out a tweet saying, “You do not have to tell your employer if you are striking”. I thought of that as I listened to the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, talking about how reasonable, collaborative and useful this union participation was. There is a difference between people wanting to work together and people seeking to inflict maximum disruption, as is plainly the case in the doctors’ strike. I have to say, by the way, that the Secretary of State for Health in another place has made the same point that I have: he thinks it is extremely disruptive and has said all the right things about it. But can we really blame the BMA or any other union for walking through a door that is being so ostentatiously unbolted with the passage of this legislation?

I do not want to get into a Second Reading speech, but I agree with my noble friend Lord Leigh of Hurley: we have done extremely well with low unemployment, unlike almost every other country in Europe. With the financial crisis and Covid, we have had structurally low unemployment because of a flexible labour market. That is beyond this amendment, but I do not see how anyone could reasonably oppose the amendment just put forward by my noble friend Lord Moynihan of Chelsea. If we are in a world of wanting to be collaborative, it seems to me that informing an employer before coming and organising in that company is a matter of minimal courtesy. It seems to be an oversight in the legislation, and I hope that Ministers will at least be able to concede that point.

Asylum Hotels and Illegal Channel Crossings

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Wednesday 26th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

As with those of the noble Lord, Lord Laming, I take on board the points that the right reverend Prelate makes. It is important that we ensure that children who arrive here unaccompanied are safeguarded. That has been a failure in the past and it must be prevented now. I will examine with my colleagues in ministerial office with direct responsibility for these issues how best we can ensure safeguarding. I will report back in writing to the right reverend Prelate and the noble Lord.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I return to the question of the noble Lord, Lord German, about employment rights. The ban on these migrants working dates, in its current form, from about 2002 and was tightened a bit in 2005. Prima facie, the rise in claims since then suggests that it has not worked very well. There may be other factors, but it certainly has not deterred all the illegal migration. In the spirit of saving money, instead of banning them from working, might Ministers look at banning asylum seekers from claiming benefits—at least for four, five, 10 years or whatever—as a more effective and much cheaper deterrent?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

If the noble Lord visits the Library and asks which benefits migrants receive, he will find that the Government have a responsibility to pay certain amounts of resource for upkeep but it is not a question of access to a benefits system. We are trying to ensure that we assess those individuals extremely quickly. If he is interested in illegal working then, as I mentioned earlier, we have increased visits and working arrests for those who have slipped into the country and are now working here illegally by 38%.

UK/US Free Trade Agreement

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Monday 20th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Leong (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for that point—it is absolutely true. As I said, our relationship with the US has to be strong. We have so many partnership agreements, whether it is on defence, trade co-operation and so on, so we have to work with the incoming Administration, come what may.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, the US is not just our single biggest market; it is bigger than our second, third and fourth markets put together, and nearly as big as our second, third, fourth and fifth put together. A million Brits turn up every day to work for US-owned companies, and a million Americans turn up every day to work for British-owned companies. Will the Minister confirm that, if we followed the suggestion of the Lib Dem Front Bench and joined the EU customs union, not only would we not be able to negotiate a trade deal, either with the US or with anyone else in the world, but we would be subjected to all the tariffs that Trump is likely to impose on the EU in return for no benefit whatever?

[Lord Leong (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for that question. We have taken back control. We work with the US, the EU and every other country. We are an open trading economy, and that benefits both our businesses and consumers.

Illegal Migration Act: Northern Ireland

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Wednesday 15th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

The noble Lord makes the very good point that immigration is a reserved matter and that the Government have consistently applied immigration law on a UK-wide basis. This judgment relates to the Illegal Migration Act, so it does not impact our planning or operations for Rwanda. I am afraid that I cannot speculate as to the other matters that he raised.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

Will my noble friend the Minister follow through on the implications of what he just said? As the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, pointed out, the Windsor Framework was sold in this House and in the other House as something that would apply only to pork pies and technical standards. If it is now being interpreted that the Windsor Framework can be used to strike down primary legislation passed in our Parliament, surely that is not operating as we understood it. Does it not call into question the whole basis of it and make the case for a fundamental renegotiation of the entire agreement?

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, as I stated in my original Answer, which I will repeat to my noble friend, the Government intend to take all steps to defend their position, including through an appeal. Of course, these are the matters that will be debated in that appeal.

Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 29th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, it is easy to list the defects in the Rwanda proposal; it is expensive and cumbersome and, as we were told at the beginning of the debate, has taken up an inordinate amount of parliamentary time without any guarantee that it will not yet be challenged in the courts. Let us admit that there is something slightly distasteful; there is an aesthetic objection to shifting the problem half way around the world. I get all that. I have heard all the arguments, including from many of the people in the Chamber now. As the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, reminded us, we have spent a great deal of time debating this—three times in as many years. I have heard those arguments very eloquently articulated, but I have not heard a plausible and credible alternative.

Politics is often a choice between imperfect outcomes. These days it is almost always such a choice. In an ideal world, there would be no need for a Rwanda scheme. We would have a Rolls-Royce Home Office bureaucracy where all claims were processed swiftly and immediately. In an ideal world, we would have no judges who push the limits in an attempt to overturn deportation orders. We would have a judiciary that rules solely on the basis of what the law says, rather than what it feels the law ought to say. We would have neighbouring countries that played by the rules of the game and took back people who had entered our territory improperly from theirs. In an ideal world, international conventions would have kept up with changing circumstances.

But the world we live in is not ideal; it is gross and sublunary, and we have to make choices that are less than perfect. We are deluding ourselves when we repeat pieties about smashing gangs, as though somehow, if you took away the people offering the supply, the demand would dry up. The demand comes not from gangs but from the fact that people understand what the figures say—that once you have entered this country, it is highly unlikely that you will ever be removed from it.

I also think there is a certain wishful thinking in what seems to be the main argument of the Opposition—I am willing to be corrected—which is that all this can be solved with better collaboration across the channel, as if that is something that nobody has thought of or tried before. I looked up the figures from when we were last subject to EU jurisdiction and covered by the returns agreement. In 2020 we attempted to return to other EU countries 8,502 people who should not have been here—people who had arrived here improperly—and succeeded in removing 105 of them. The rest of the EU tried to remove 2,331 people to the United Kingdom and we accepted 882, which is a significantly higher proportion. It seems very difficult to argue that a returns agreement with the EU would mean anything other than taking more people from the EU than we send there.

I will not argue that the Rwanda scheme alone will be enough to solve the problem; it will not even be the biggest component of it. There is more to be done on individual return agreements. I think there was agreement on all sides about the efficacy of the Albania scheme, as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said. There is more to be done in speeding up claims and, yes, there is probably more to be done on collaboration. But it is part of a package to have some element of deterrence. The facts of geography mean that people have to pass through several safe countries on their way here. If they think there is a prospect that they will end up in Rwanda, even if it is a percentage chance and not a certainty, that is bound to have some impact on whether they make their final claim here or in another safe country en route.

It is in that spirit, and not in any great mood of joy or enthusiasm—rather in a spirit of grim realism—that I oppose the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord German, and support the legislation.