Member

While UKEF maintains its own internal environmental and human rights policies, those have already been proven inadequate for the task of preventing investment in companies seriously exposed to human rights abuses, of which this is the worst of all. The Bill presents a rare and necessary opportunity to use primary legislation to bind UK outward investment to a zero-tolerance approach to modern slavery. The Government will say, I am sure—though I hope they do not—that the Bill is narrow, and that this is not the right Bill or the right time. I am afraid we have always heard that. When I was a Government Member, I used to say to Ministers, “There never is the right time, and there never is the right Bill. There’s just the wrong one that is sitting here for you to amend.”