The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) is expected to hold a Commons’ hearing session investigating the risks that UK-based businesses presently face in engaging with supply chains that originate in China.
The committee has said that its inquiry would investigate how UK-based retailers are making use of the forced labour of people from the Uyghur minority ethnic group in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. The group of retailers include fashion giant Boohoo which was recently embroiled in a separate controversy around “poor working conditions” for employees in the UK who were allegedly also paid below minimum living wages.
Nusrat Ghani MP leading the BEIS Committee for the Forced labour in UK value chains inquiry said, “There have been a series of accounts of products being sold in the UK which can be traced back to forced labour at camps in China. On the BEIS Committee, we want to get a clearer sense of the extent of this problem, how seriously businesses ask questions of their own supply and value-chains, and to also examine the steps both Government and business could take to ensure that businesses and consumers in the UK do not perpetuate the forced labour of Uyghur.”
The Committee also welcomes views on whether existing legislative and audit requirements for businesses in the UK are sufficient to prevent them from contributing to the human rights abuses experienced by Uyghurs. The Committee is also keen to understand what action stakeholders believe the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy should take to eradicate forced labour from the supply chain of goods and services sold in the UK.
