Procurement Bill [HL]

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 30th November 2022 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

91: Schedule 7, page 106, line 41, at end insert—
“Involvement in forced organ harvesting
15A (1) A discretionary exclusion ground applies to a supplier if a decision-maker determines that the supplier or a connected person has been, or is, involved in—(a) forced organ harvesting,(b) unethical activities relating to human tissue, including anything which involves the commission of an offence under sections 32 (prohibition of commercial dealings in human material for transplantation), 32A (offences under section 32 committed outside UK) or 33 (restriction on transplants involving a live donor) of the Human Tissue Act 2004, or under sections 20 (prohibition of commercial dealings in parts of a human body for transplantation) or 20A (offences under section 20 committed outside UK) of the Human Tissue (Scotland) Act 2006, or(c) dealing in any device or equipment or services relating to conduct mentioned in paragraphs (a) or (b).(2) “Forced organ harvesting” means killing a person without their consent so that their organs may be removed and transplanted into another person.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is designed to give a discretionary power to exclude suppliers from being awarded a public contract who have participated in forced organ harvesting or unethical activities relating to human tissue, including where they are involved in providing a service or goods relating to such activities.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 91 I will support all the other amendments in this group.

In the Prime Minister’s speech to the Lord Mayor’s Banquet two days ago, he said that China posed a

“systemic challenge to our values and interests … a challenge that grows more acute as it moves towards even greater authoritarianism.”

I want briefly to draw the House’s attention to one aspect of that country’s behaviour in relation to the appalling forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience and to ask the Government to accept my very modest amendment as a small but important measure towards, I hope, ending this practice. This would give a discretionary power to exclude suppliers from being awarded a public contract who have participated in forced organ harvesting or unethical activities relating to human tissue, including where they are involved in providing a service or goods relating to such activities.

Forced organ harvesting in China is the removal of organs from a living prisoner of conscience for the purpose of transplantation, killing the victim in the process. It is state-sanctioned and widespread throughout China, with the Chinese Communist Party targeting individuals because of their religion, spiritual beliefs or ethnicity. The victims are known to be primarily Falun Gong practitioners and Uighur Muslims. There are also several lines of evidence to show that Tibetans and house Christians are likely victims of forced organ harvesting.

With regard to the Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights published its report into Xinjiang in August this year, which stated:

“Allegations of patterns of torture or ill-treatment, including forced medical treatment and adverse conditions of detention, are credible, as are allegations of individual incidents of sexual and gender-based violence.”


Both Uighurs and Falun Gong practitioners are arbitrarily arrested, detained in camps, tortured, face sexual violence, disappear while in detention and are murdered on a vast scale for their organs.

The evidence is now explicit. In April this year, a paper by Matthew Robertson and Dr Jacob Lavee was published in the American Journal of Transplantation titled “Execution by Organ Procurement: Breaching the Dead Donor Rule in China”, which was cited in the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China Annual Report 2022. Their paper found that, in 71 different Chinese medical studies published between 1980 and 2015 and sourced to 56 hospitals in 33 cities, brain death could not have properly been declared, and therefore the removal of the heart during organ procurement must have been the cause of the donor’s death. The authors state in a recent article in the Tablet that

“the act of execution was joined with the act of heart removal, and was carried out by surgeons on the operating table.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

They are mandatory grounds for exclusion, so if you find that you have a security issue—as we obviously found in relation to Hikvision—those become mandatory exclusions. On modern slavery, again, they are mandatory exclusions. Clearly, if a company is able to self-clean and has shown that it has changed the arrangements, it will not necessarily stay on the debarment list. I do not want to mislead the noble Lord.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, this excellent debate has been both moving and profound, because it has dealt with horrific human rights abuses in China but has also attempted to develop an argument about our strategic relationship with that nation.

The Minister said that she was disappointed by some of the remarks. She gave us a full reply, which I am very grateful for, but I too was rather disappointed by her response. Essentially, she said that our concerns are legitimate but that this Bill is not the right place for them to be expressed. But, as the noble Lord, Lord Fox, and my noble friend Lord Coaker both suggested, this is a Procurement Bill, setting the regime for government procurement for a number of years ahead. Where better to place values—not just the issue of the lowest common denominator price—than in this Bill, which sets the parameters under which billions of pounds are going to be spent by government and government agencies over the next decade?

The arguments that the Minister put forward were technical, and the Government could have come back and tabled their own amendments, which might have met the technical issues she faces. However, ultimately, the Government have set their face against expressing some profound values in this legislation, but I think that we should do so. I would like to test the opinion of the House on Amendment 91.