Fairtrade Certification

Ellie Chowns Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2025 Westminster Hall

[Dr Ellie Chowns (North Herefordshire) (Green)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Hobhouse. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Martin Rhodes) for presenting the case for Fairtrade, and for fairer trade practices overall, so compellingly. I also pay tribute to everybody who has been part of the Fairtrade campaign for many decades. I have been involved in it for at least 30 years, and it is a fantastic example of a widely supported public campaign that has, as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said, found its way into our schools and communities, and also into our supermarkets, making it easy for people to choose Fairtrade products. That is fantastic and to be celebrated.

This is not just about individual shopping choices, important though they are; it is also about ensuring a level playing field for all producers, so that good environmental, human rights and workers’ rights practices are not an optional add-on but fundamental to the way we do business. That is why I warmly welcome the Brew it Fair campaign and the petition handed in at Downing Street yesterday. I was involved in the delivery of a similar petition a few months ago with the Corporate Justice Coalition. Again, that had well over 100,000 signatures from citizens across the country calling for mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence legislation. We have to ensure that the positive practice encapsulated by Fairtrade is not just an optional extra, but how business is done.

More than 80 MPs have signed an early-day motion in support of the Fairtrade tea campaign and mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence legislation. The reasons for supporting such legislation are clear. Introducing that horizontal legislation that obliges all UK businesses to take steps to prevent human rights and environmental risks in their supply chains, all the way down to smallholder farmers and workers, is the single most cost-effective measure we could take to support sustainability in the food system and to improve the UK’s international reputation for action to create a climate- compatible, sustainable, rights-supporting economy.

We have some legislation on supply chain transparency, but it is insufficient and riddled with loopholes. Section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 requires companies to report on their operations, but not to take reasonable steps to address and prevent the problem—and prevention must be central to this. Schedule 17 to the Environment Act 2021 applies only to commodities identified as key drivers of the UK’s deforestation footprint, such as cattle products excluding dairy and cocoa, palm oil and soy. That is important, but it is narrow in scope.

Human rights and environmental due diligence should not be addressed in silos, where businesses often face the challenge of potentially trading off one sort of risk against another. If we had mandatory requirements on human rights and environmental due diligence, that would provide the consistency and level playing field that businesses need. Businesses that already source their food responsibly—whether voluntarily or because they are covered by the direct scope of the European corporate sustainability due diligence directive—would not be put at a competitive disadvantage by mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence legislation in the UK.

If the legislation were designed correctly, it would reduce the risk of abuses or poor practices in supply chains, put farmers and workers on track to earn a decent livelihood to keep their families’ heads above water, and help end issues such as gendered, racial and pay discrimination, forced labour, child labour, undignified and unsafe working conditions, the denial of workers’ rights to freely associate, and lack of care and consideration for water sources and biodiversity. All those problems could be better prevented if we made such a change in the law.

I warmly welcome the Department for Business and Trade’s responsible business conduct review. It is a critical opportunity to introduce comprehensive, inclusive and enforceable legislation on human rights, labour rights and environmental protection in supply chains, and it is crucial that we take it forward.

Finally, I want to echo a point that a couple of other Members have made. We need to ensure that trade is fair. We need to ensure that these fundamental rights are built into the normal way of doing business. The UK’s foreign aid budget is a crucial element in supporting this work. It is vital that we restore it, so that we play our part in supporting and enforcing human rights globally. Will the Minister tell us whether the responsible business conduct review will include mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence legislation, and will he respond to my point on the aid budget?