Baroness Young of Hornsey (CB)

My Lords, I declare my interests as an honorary associate professor in the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham, which has done so much work in this area, and as a member of the Great British Energy advisory group on ethical supply chains. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, for including me in that structure. I point out—and I thank noble Lords who have mentioned it—that I have a Private Member’s Bill, the Commercial Organisations and Public Authorities Duty (Human Rights and Environment) Bill, to prevent forced labour and environmental harms in all their operations and throughout their value chains. I am waiting on a date for Second Reading for that. I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Sarwar, and invite him to have a meeting to discuss that, because my belief and that of many others is that it covers 99% of what people have been asking for for some time in legislation in this area. Of course, I also thank the Joint Committee on Human Rights and, particularly, my noble friend Lord Alton for his role in the fight against modern slavery, in which he has been engaged for so long. I want to have a deeper understanding of the Government’s response to the recommendations, and that is one of the reasons why I would like to have that meeting. I believe that we can clarify and find out whether there is a way of working together to a common end. I do not want to fight the Government on these issues, but I want to be critical of, first, the slowness with which they have approached them and the confusion which has been sown. This is caused by not being clear about what the approach is, where we want to go, how the different parts of the legislation that has been enacted so far fit together, and how that legislation will be incorporated into this area of business responsibility. I want to say something about the issue of placing a burden, which noble Lords have referred to. I wonder who is really bearing a burden. Who are the people suffering most from this inaction? Businesses should be addressing some of these issues through standard business risk mitigation. It is not about introducing a whole slew of bureaucratic structures to make people feel better about themselves; we want to change the landscape substantially. I have been working recently with the construction industry, and I raise this because the Government have a very ambitious programme of building not just homes but other parts of infrastructure. Yet again, people tell me that they want to engage with due diligence and to ensure that they are aligned with the EU and other countries, but they do not know what is going on here, so they do not know what they can do. This represents a good opportunity for leadership from the Government to ensure that the kinds of structures and principles we are discussing today can be incorporated into this rebuilding of Britain.