As friends and families across the country dug out their picnic blankets for National Picnic Week, the UK Coalition for Corporate Justice, joined by Labour MP Richard Burgon and Green MP Ellie Chowns, delivered a ‘hamper of harms’ to Number 10 and the Department for Business and Trade. With it they brought an urgent message for the Government: British companies are devastating communities and ecosystems all around the world and 145,000 members of the public are demanding action.
Whilst the Government has recently taken welcome steps to address modern slavery in UK supply chains, including specific measures targeting NHS procurement and the activities of Great British Energy, these piecemeal efforts still leave gaps in the protection of other human rights and fail to address environmental harms.The Government must take stronger action.
Our summer berries are often picked by migrant workers enduring long hours, unsafe conditions, and poor pay in the UK and Europe. Our flasks of tea are produced on plantations paying poverty wages and perpetuating gender-based violence in Kenya and India. We snack on chocolate chip cookies made using palm oil – a key driver of deforestation and land grabs across Southeast Asia and Latin America. And there’s even a risk our cotton picnic blankets have been made with Uyghur forced labour in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China.
Importantly, these examples aren’t exceptions to the rule, they reflect systemic issues present in every UK sector. For example, there are growing calls to ensure that the UK’s much-needed renewable energy transition is not built upon the exploitation of child workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s cobalt mines or the displacement of Indigenous peoples by British mining companies operating in South America. And even within the public sector, there’s damning evidence of UK taxes being used to buy medical supplies for the NHS from overseas suppliers guilty of worker exploitation.
We all want to enjoy goods and services knowing that they are not tainted with human rights and environmental abuses. That’s why over 80% of the public want new laws requiring British companies to prevent human rights and environmental harms in their supply chains.
So what’s the solution?
UK parliamentary committees including the Joint Committee on Human Rights, the Business and Trade Committee and international human rights institutions such as the UN Committee on Economic Social, Economic and Cultural Rights have all called on the UK to implement mandatory human rights due diligence. However, just last month, the Government’s response was to double down on its position that “voluntary” requirements are enough, despite clear evidence that voluntary measures are failing to prevent serious abuse from UK companies. In fact, when surveyed by the British Institute for International and Comparative Law, almost 70% of UK businesses indicated that existing law does not provide business with sufficient legal certainty about which procedures are required to avoid legal risks for human rights abuses.
The petition handed in to Number 10 today sends a clear message to the UK Government that the general public, over 145,000 people, are calling for a new law to hold businesses, the finance and public sectors to account when they fail to prevent supply chain human rights abuses and environmental harms.
A Business, Human Rights and Environmental Act would do just that, it would re-align UK legislation with international human rights standards, introducing mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence that requires UK companies and public institutions to identify, prevent and address harms across their domestic operations and their international supply chains. Most importantly, it would ensure real consequences for companies that are doing nothing to prevent harm from happening and help to level the playing field for responsible businesses that are put at an economic disadvantage for doing the right thing.
This summer, let’s put ethics back on the menu and hold irresponsible companies accountable to protect families, workers and our planet.
Written by Poppy Facer