Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if she will make an assessment of the prevalence of the use of child labour in the production of nicotine products.

The United Kingdom is committed to working with partners to deliver on commitments from the Call to Action at the Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour in 2022 including eliminating child labour from global supply chains. The UK supports voluntary human rights due diligence approaches by our businesses to respect human rights and the environment across their operations and supply relationships, as steered by the UN Guiding Principles (UNGPs) on Business and Human Rights and the OECD Guidelines on Multinational Enterprises.  The Government is clear that it expects all UK businesses to respect human rights throughout their operations, in line with the UNGPs.

Section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 requires commercial organisations that supply goods/services and have a total turnover over £36 million to publish a transparency statement annually to set out what steps they have taken to ensure that modern slavery is not occurring in their supply chains.

The Department of Health and Social Care has pledged to put an end to modern slavery in the National Health Service by meeting the Secretary of State’s duty to assess and mitigate modern slavery risk in NHS supply chains. New regulations will require public bodies procuring goods or services for delivering health services in England to assess the risk of modern slavery and implement reasonable steps to procurement and contracting activities with a view to eradicating the use of goods and services tainted by modern slavery.