Pippa Heylings

I rise in strong support of Lords amendment 2B and the consequential amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion). The Liberal Democrats welcome this key step by the Government towards preventing goods linked to Chinese slave labour from being part of our renewables businesses’ supply chains. The decision, as we have heard, took time, and it is born of pressure from Members of all political parties and the sheer strength of feeling across both Houses. The Great British Energy Bill needed amending, and we thank the Government for reconsidering. I want to express in particular my appreciation of Lord Alton of Liverpool’s tireless advocacy. Together with Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, the Bill team and colleagues from across both Houses—with important input from the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China—there has been a constructive and cross-party effort to confront an issue that is too often left in the shadows: the scourge of modern slavery in our energy supply chains. Groundbreaking investigative research has helped to shine the necessary light on what is at stake. We have heard irrefutable evidence from the BBC, The Guardian, and the world’s foremost expert on Uyghur forced labour, Professor Laura Murphy, that forced labour is being used to produce the solar-grade polysilicon that powers most of the global green transition.