Member

On the other amendments in this group, the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, said he expected that I would appreciate Amendment 52, and I very much do. It rather reflects, but approaches the matter in a different way from, my Amendment 28, which the Committee debated earlier. It reflects a meeting I hosted this morning with SOAS ICOP entitled “The price of a product: who really pays?”. The noble Lord, Lord Holmes, referred to fuzzy supply chains and the lack of transparency in the supply chains of so many ordinary products that all of us are forced to consume every day. Yet hidden behind that fuzziness are human rights abuses, environmental destruction and an enormous amount of misery. We occasionally find out about that when a group of journalists do a great deal of work and go to great effort to write an exposé of a particular product. However, we actually need to say that this has to be taken out of all our supply chains. This amendment to a Bill about product regulation is potentially taking us in that direction.