Health and Care Bill

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Report stage
Thursday 3rd March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 108, while supporting the other two amendments introduced so powerfully by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and my noble friend Lady Northover, and to which the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, spoke so eloquently.

I am completely in support of those amendments, but I wish to speak briefly to the genocide amendment today. On various occasions during the Covid pandemic questions were asked of the then Health Minister about the procurement of PPE. He was not able to give me a straight answer to say, “We can guarantee that no PPE procured could have had anything to do with slave labour or could have come from Xinjiang.”

The NHS seeks to be world leading. We all support it and want it to be able to deliver for every citizen in this country. But that should not be at the expense of the lives of those in other parts of the world. It is not good enough to say that we have the Modern Slavery Act if that will not lead to a change in practices. It is absolutely essential that our supply chains do not include anything that comes from forced labour.

If one looks at what is going on in Xinjiang, it is possible to barter to get numbers of people, just as it was 200 years ago during the slave trade. That is not acceptable. It may be the case that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, pointed out, we will be told, “This is not the right piece of legislation.” If it is not, what will the Government bring forward that will mean that every point of our supply chain—every part of government procurement—ensures that we are not procuring things that have been made using slave labour?

We must not be complicit. This House should support the amendments, and if the Minister is not able to support the amendment, perhaps he could come back with a revised and better version of the amendment that will do what we all seek to achieve.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly only to Amendment 108, which I understand the Government are likely to resist when my noble friend the Minister comes to speak. I say simply, very briefly, that to be persuasive, my noble friend has to explain how through administrative measures the National Health Service will achieve the effects of this amendment. He has to explain that in a credible way and that the effects will be rapid and comprehensive. Any idea that this will be kicked into a long review that ambles on and may or may not produce the effects required by at least the first two proposed new subsections of the amendment will lack credibility; I am less concerned about the chairman of the Select Committee part that comes in the third one. I would like my noble friend to know before he speaks that that is what I think we all want to hear.