Ending Exploitation in Supermarket Supply Chains

Carolyn Harris Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Carolyn Harris (Swansea East) (Lab)]

I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee, and to colleagues for their excellent speeches. What we have lost in quality we have certainly gained in quantity—or the other way round. [Interruption.] Or maybe not.

Human trafficking and modern slavery are thriving throughout our international economy, from our grapes and our coffee beans to the tuna we put on our sandwiches. The cost to human life and basic human rights is truly astonishing. Only 12% of Thai fishermen have said that they have fair working conditions, and an estimated 50% of Thai fishermen are known to have been trafficked. As we know, this is not just happening overseas. In Cornwall, in Kent and on the Cambrian coast in Wales, our car washes, our nail bars, our construction sites and the restaurants that we visit are all hotspots for the evil traffickers.

Oxfam’s recent report, “Ripe for change: ending human suffering in supermarket supply chains”, highlights the scale of slavery throughout the food and goods industry. In the UK, the grocery sector is one of the most diverse and sophisticated in the world, worth nearly £185 billion a year. Supermarkets have delivered low prices and year-round choice to many consumers in the UK, but they have done so by using their huge buying power to exert relentless pressure on their suppliers to cut costs while meeting exacting quality requirements, and they often use a range of unfair trading practices to do so. The depression of prices paid to suppliers, coupled with inadequate Government support in producer countries for small-scale farmers and workers, has increased the risk of human and labour rights violations and, as Oxfam has found, driven greater global inequality.

[Mr John Hayes]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Does she agree that supermarkets have also extended the food chain so that it is now much less likely for someone purchasing a good to know its source? They pay lip service to traceability, but in a greatly extended food chain, exploitation is much more likely to occur.

[Carolyn Harris]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and I totally agree with him.

Taking Indian tea and Kenyan green beans as examples, the research by Oxfam found that workers and small-scale farmers earned less than 50% of what they needed for a basic but decent standard of living in their societies. The report also found that the gap between the reality and a decent standard of living was greatest where women provided the majority of the labour. In South Africa, over 90% of surveyed women workers on grape farms reported not having enough to eat in the previous month. Nearly a third of them said that they or a family member had gone to bed hungry at least once in that time.

In Thailand, over 90% of surveyed workers at seafood processing plants reported going without enough food in the previous month. In Italy, 75% of surveyed women workers on fruit and vegetable farms said that they or a family member had cut back on the number of meals in the previous month because their household could not afford sufficient food. In less than five days, the highest paid chief executive at a UK supermarket earns the same as a woman picking grapes on a typical farm in South Africa will earn in her entire lifetime. That is simply not good enough.

Large UK supermarkets lack sufficient policies to protect the human rights of the people they rely on to produce our food. Supermarkets need to act on human and labour rights, support a living wage and radically improve transparency of their own human rights and those of their suppliers. This is vital if our supermarket supply chains are not to be a breeding ground for trafficking. We must be persistent on this matter. Unfortunately, we cannot depend on supermarkets to do this on their own. We need the Government to enforce compliance with the Modern Slavery Act 2015. They must set out how they will measure decent work practices, reform company law and support the adoption of a binding United Nations treaty on business and human rights.

[Judith Cummins (Bradford South) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act is a very welcome provision, but does she agree that its effective enforcement will require a central register of all the companies that are required to comply?

[Carolyn Harris]

I most certainly do, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response to that point. The Modern Slavery Act places a requirement on companies with a turnover of £36 million and above to publish a statement outlining what steps they are taking to tackle exploitation in their supply chains. However, the Act does not require companies to take action; it requires only that they make a statement saying what they are doing.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Perhaps I am pre-empting what my hon. Friend is about to say, but is it not also a problem that the companies’ statements sometimes say virtually nothing? They just have to tick a box to say that they have made a statement. They do not have to show that they are actually doing something to root out slavery in their supply chains.

[Carolyn Harris]

Exactly. There is also a huge lack of information held on companies that have provided a statement, with a significant amount of companies providing no statement at all. Only 50% of the agricultural companies that fall within the scope of the Modern Slavery Act’s corporate reporting requirement have published a modern slavery statement, and only 38% of those statements were compliant with the requirements of the law, meaning that overall only 19% of the agricultural sector is abiding by the terms of the Act. Section 54 as currently implemented is not fit for purpose and has significant limitations. This is due to the inability to monitor compliance by businesses and no assessment of the quality of modern slavery statements being published. The Welsh Government have put together an ethical code of practice on supply chains and the Co-operative party has launched a modern slavery charter which looks at local council supply chains. These are both progressive moves, but it takes leadership at national level to ensure consistency in this approach.

The Government recently announced a new two-year pilot scheme to bring temporary migrant workers from outside the EU to work in the UK agricultural sector. The stated aim of the pilot is to ease labour shortages in the sector during peak production periods. Lessons from the UK’s previous seasonal agricultural workers scheme and similar temporary migration programmes in other countries show how these types of schemes can create conditions in which modern slavery and labour exploitation can thrive. If the Government are going to introduce migration policies that will increase risks to workers, they must also take the necessary steps to mitigate and prevent such risks in order to ensure that modern slavery does not flourish in Brexit Britain. They must ensure that labour inspectorates have the resources to ensure they can inspect this programme and protect workers, and temporary workers must be provided with information on their labour rights and given support to raise cases of abuse.

We need to work together to end human trafficking and labour exploitation, and we must eradicate modern-day slavery. Companies must be held to account for the ethical impact of their activities, particularly where poor business practices directly contribute to the severe exploitation of workers. Currently, the traffickers are winning. Vulnerable adults and children are being exploited on an industrial scale across the UK and internationally. It is time to take action. We must stop this practice now.