Fashion Industry

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh]

Yes. I thank my hon. Friend, who is also an enthusiastic participant in this inquiry. I had to do a bit of convincing, but this has been quite a revelation for us as a Committee. To have a nil response from Kurt Geiger is extraordinary. It is not too late for it to give us its response. I hope it will listen—its public relations firm is probably writing it a desperate note at the moment—and I hope its chief executive will take this issue on board. I will make one other point to the House. This House passed the Modern Slavery Act 2015. It is not clear to me which brands have or have not submitted modern slavery statements. I hope journalists listening to this debate do their own research into that.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

Trying to make ethical choices as a consumer can be really difficult, whether for food or fashion. I must admit that after sitting through one session I came to the conclusion that we would all be walking around in brown paper bags—recycled paper, of course—because there seems to be a problem with almost every type of clothing. Does the Chair of the Committee agree that the onus cannot just be on the consumer to shop around? We must require manufacturers and retailers to step up to the mark and make sure that what they put on the market is ethically sourced, whether it be in terms of labour, materials or the way they treat their workers and so on.

[Mary Creagh]

I thank my hon. Friend for that question and for her incredibly dedicated leadership in the Committee, particularly on food waste on which she is a real national expert. She is right that it is impossible for the consumer to pick their way through this situation. The supply chains need to be guaranteed by retailers right down to farm level. That is very difficult because cotton is a global commodity. We heard that some retailers are attempting to do that by working with small-scale cotton traders. We live in a digital world where we have blockchain sustainability and sourcing. Some supermarkets can tell us more about the sourcing in their sausage supply chain—the factories and the abattoirs where their animals were killed—than they can about the lives of the women and in some cases the children working in factories. The International Labour Organisation definition of a child is someone under 15. There are 15 and 16-year-olds working in factories to make our children’s clothes. I want much more transparency in the fashion supply chain, so there is a real movement towards people having an answer to the question of who made their clothes.