Clothing Industry: Ethical and Sustainable Fashion

Baroness Rendell of Babergh Excerpts

Thursday 3rd March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Rendell of Babergh]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Young, on instituting this debate on a subject that is both unusual and highly topical, and for giving your Lordships' House the opportunity to examine matters that are so relevant in the present century.

Like my noble friend Lord Sugar, I will perhaps refer to fashion itself as much as the working conditions and environmental issues. Ask anyone who likes fashion, keeping up with trends and finding flattering and elegant design on all or any price level, and they will react to the term “ethical fashion” by describing the kind of clothes worn by the Bohemians of the 1960s and 1970s: hippy fashion, trailing skirts, dangling beads, frayed hems. This is still worn, particularly at pop festivals, but modern ethical fashion has left it behind.

That this hippy style might evolve and be transmuted into desirable and much sought after clothing would have been inconceivable to wearers of cheesecloth in 1970. That a designer of the stature of Stella McCartney might be producing haute couture and only producing it would have looked like a mistake on her part, not the total success it has proved. She is famous for taking a stand against cruelty to animals, using no fur or even leather, and now, thanks to determination and hard work, she is known as a chic designer label who happens to be green, but not principally as a green designer. She says herself that her customers like her clothes, how they look and fit, and see their being sustainable as an added bonus.

However, Stella McCartney is, in anyone's estimation, a maker of designer clothes on the highest level. What of the manufacture of cheaper clothes? It is well known that many outlets in the UK have as their sources factories in countries where conditions are squalid, hours are long and pay is as low as it can get. This ensures that a dress can cost £10 and a T-shirt £2. Human nature being what it is, it is hard to see how buyers can be turned from the desire for very cheap clothes simply on the grounds that some part of the world is being turned into a desert, or some group of people they have never seen is being deprived of health.

According to the Business of Fashion’s comment and analysis section, the demand for cheap cashmere from the growing Gobi desert has created an environmental disaster, while increasing herds of goats graze away every bit of green that is left. But if the demand for cashmere slows down, what becomes of the goatherds who tend their animals? Do they lose their jobs and their ability to support their families?

The noble Baroness, Lady Young, has referred to cotton production. Cotton provides much of the world’s fabrics, but growing it and treating the fabric that is its end product uses chemicals that harm the environment and are dangerous to the farmers who produce it. Hazardous chemicals used in the textile industry are lead, nickel, chromium IV, aryl amines, phthalates and formaldehyde. Cotton farmers face other problems. We are in Fairtrade Fortnight, and the Fairtrade Foundation is campaigning and lobbying the Government and the European Union to drop the subsidies paid to cotton farmers in European Union countries and the United States. While the price of cotton has dropped by 75 per cent, largely through western subsidies, west African cotton farmers are forced to compete globally against this subsidised cotton and as a result are unable to make a living and are leaving the industry in droves.

Her Majesty’s Government are among the largest non-retail buyers of clothes and textiles in this country. They should therefore lead by example, but ethical standards are not a principal requirement for government purchasing. This is regulated largely by the buying standards for textiles that exclude local government and the NHS. Does the Minister agree that a better system is required so that the Government can accurately assess the cost of buying ethically sourced textiles and make decisions based on this?

Other retailers have recognised that purchasers want to wear their clothes with a clear conscience. A few years ago, the deriding and insulting in the street of women wearing fur coats resulted if not in a ban than in considerably reducing the number of fur coats that were worn and brought about a rise in the fashion for wearing faux fur. This kind of treatment is not to be recommended; there are other more civilised and appropriately ethical ways of changing people’s minds, and other retailers have recognised that purchasers want to wear their clothes with a clear conscience.

A company based in London is Wall of Notting Hill. It has the same ethical principles as Stella McCartney but its clothes are far more modestly priced and are accountable and sustainable in the best possible ways. Certainly, it uses fur and it uses alpaca from Peru but it uses only the hides of animals that have died a natural death. Wall, by its nature, is unlikely to bid for a government contract but it sets an example that could be a standard for companies bidding to win government contracts. Wall has strong connections with Peru, where many of its products and the people who work for it come from. It inspects the factories that are the centres of production not just once but regularly so that no one has the opportunity to make things look good for a one-off visit. Perhaps the most admirable of its ventures is to take children off the streets of Lima—poor children with no apparent future—and put them on a two-year course to learn to use knitting machines, for much of their clothing is knitted. When the course is finished, Wall supplies each child with a knitting machine so that after training they may continue with what has become a useful career. This contrasts with the exploitation of child workers in other countries who are subjected to violence, abuse and very poor pay.

The group of women who constitute the Andean Collection also have strong connections with South America. Though the company is based in New York, they travel twice a year for extended stays with the workers of Ecuador, who share in the profits of the company as part owners. They pay for the education of artisans’ children and require them as teenagers to assist in the family’s business, thus breaking the cycle of poverty.

At present, the industry suffers from unreasonable deadlines imposed by retailers, contracts with suppliers that are never written down, variations in terms and conditions after delivery, even to a reduction in price, and unreasonable penalties imposed on suppliers for defective products. Does the Minister agree that a change is needed here and that the Government’s encouragement of other textile and clothing firms in the UK to follow the example set by the few retailers who work on ethical principles is much needed? Are not these green and humanitarian issues that everyone who cares about their fellow men and women and animals, as well as looking good and keeping warm, should support? It would be good to know that they care about those issues as much as they care about our forests.