Industry and Exports (Financial Assistance) Bill

Iain Duncan Smith Excerpts

Monday 23rd February 2026 Commons Chamber

[Ms Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)]

I rise to speak in support of amendment 1, which appears in the name of the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith). The Bill is narrow, but it gives us an opportunity to raise this matter.

Thanks to the work of this House, public bodies such as the Department of Health and Social Care are legally required to eradicate slavery in their supply chains under the Health and Care Act 2022 and the National Health Service (Procurement, Slavery and Human Trafficking) Regulations 2025. We also strengthened the safeguards to ensure that public money is free from forced labour in last year’s Great British Energy Act 2025. There was a little bit of fuss about that at the time, but no slavery or human trafficking is present in any part of Great British Energy’s supply chain.

UK Export Finance still lacks those protections, but amendment 1 would fix that inconsistency. If we are increasing the financial limits available to UK Export Finance, we should ensure that British support for business abroad is never tied to exploitation. It would make the protection much bigger by covering everything across Government. We tried something like that with the Great British Energy Bill, and I was told I was right that this would not have been covered, but the Bill then went to the Lords and came back pretty quick. I thank the right hon. Member for tabling his amendment.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

Madam Chair, it is a great honour to speak to this packed Chamber on my amendments, and it was good of you to call me so soon—there are so many people ready to speak.

I rise to speak in support of amendments 1 and 2 that appear in my name and those of my colleagues and friends, and it is my intention to press them when the time comes. Why is this necessary? In this particular area, I refer to the hon. Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Ms Rimmer) as my hon. Friend, because she has been stalwart in campaigning against slave labour and forced labour. I bow to her because of her stalwart support. As she said of the amendments, it is vital to safeguard UK export finance and ensure it is legally protected from any exposure to forced labour and human trafficking.

We have been through this issue again and again, and I just hope the Minister, who has been a stalwart supporter of this drive, can give me a very clear sign when he responds to the debate that the Government want to adopt the amendments, which are critical to cleaning up what has essentially become a supply chain too often full of the products of slave labour.

I am in favour of the Bill, not against it. In principle, I think it is right basically to raise the limit to £20 billion and the aggregate limit to £160 billion to account for inflation. However, it is also absolutely right to ensure that this increased financial firepower is not used inadvertently to fund modern slavery. Together, the amendments would ensure that, if the Secretary of State has reason to believe that modern slavery is present in a recipient’s supply chain, the permitted financial assistance for that export drops to zero—in other words, no finance.

For those who may not have followed what has been going on, we had to amend the original Health and Care Bill to stop slavery being used in relation to the NHS. Last year, as the hon. Member for St Helens South and Whiston said, we had to amend the Great British Energy Bill. The Government decided to vote down that amendment, but the Bill was amended in the Lords. Many Labour Members suddenly realised that they were going to be asked to vote in favour of slave labour in the supply chains of Great British Energy, and they said no. The Government then decided not to oppose the amendment, which was absolutely the right thing to do in the end.

However, I wish we had not had to go through all of that. Surely there is a moral purpose in all this, which is that if we have any suspicion that a product or a supply chain has elements of forced labour—we know China does it endlessly, and Russia and other countries use it—we should not allow that. When we compare ourselves with the United States, the reality is that its Governments, no matter who is in power, have a very simple rule: it is the responsibility of companies importing to check their supply chains, and the excuse that they did not know or could not find out is simply not good enough, so they are prosecuted if there is slave labour in the supply chain.

The amendments are all about trying to shut down another possible loophole, in this case on finance. We believe that UK Export Finance is currently exposed to forced labour. For instance, in 2022-23, it supported businesses involving a subsidiary of AVIC—Aviation Industry Corporation of China—a company sanctioned by the US as a People’s Liberation Army entity. This is something that nobody, if they really ask themselves, on either side of the House wants, and I am sure that the Government do not want it, so the question is: how do we shut this down?

I want to quote a couple of really quite senior people in the Government who have spoken about this in the past. The Prime Minister has said:

“We’re not going to raise human rights standards if we ignore it in trade.”

He said:

“It shouldn’t be up to the consumer…to research every product and work out every ethical aspect of it.”

I say yes, because of course it is impossible to do so as an individual. When I had a row with Amazon and other companies, I said, “Why don’t you make it easy to find out what the route in your supply chain is? People don’t know where something was made until they actually have the product land on their desk. Why can’t they see that on their computers and be able to identify that?” However, those companies do not want to do that, because they think people may not buy the products.

In May 2025, when he was the Trade Secretary, the right hon. Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds) said:

“We are very clear on our position regarding the abhorrent practice of modern slavery. It is a terrible crime which we are determined to eradicate. I assure you that this Government takes this issue seriously and is continuing to assess and monitor the policy tools available to ensure we can best tackle forced labour in supply chains.”

The Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Ed Miliband), has also said that

“our clean power mission should not come at the expense of human rights…This involves confronting human rights abuses, including modern slavery, in energy supply chains”.

That is absolutely right, although I do not understand why it took so much for us to get those on his side of the fence to agree, finally, to take such abuses out of the supply chains for Great British Energy, given his stated views.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Bryant]

I note that the creative industries have now achieved 5% growth in the last year, faster than any other part of the economy—and I think we have seen quite a creative industry this evening, with Members managing to get amendments into this very tightly constricted Bill. I am happy to address some of the issues that were mentioned, but I think some of them strayed somewhat wide of the mark of the Bill itself.

Let me turn first to the amendment from the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith). He and I have participated in many campaigns on forced labour and other issues, and I am entirely with him on the aim of preventing all modern slavery. I will just correct him on one factual mistake that he made. He said that the UK was the first country to ban slavery, but it was Haiti in 1804. It could be argued that Napoleon abolished it, but then they returned to slavery afterwards. It was Haiti that abolished it first.

The right hon. Member makes the very good point that modern slavery is an abomination. It is morally wrong. Forced labour is morally wrong. It is also a taint on any kind of international trade, and it undermines fair practice from other countries that do not engage in forced labour. I am determined to do everything I possibly can, both in this role and in the future if I am not in this role, to make sure that we tackle forced labour in every single part of the way we run our economy. As a Labour Member, it would be shocking if I were not to say precisely that.

The right hon. Member knows that I am not going to accept his amendment—

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

What!

[Chris Bryant]

Fake shock does not suit him as a look. It would be wrong for us in this country to feed ourselves, clothe ourselves, and house ourselves on the back of forced labour. At the moment we are engaged in a review of responsible business conduct, and I very much hope that that will move us in the direction of being able to tackle this issue comprehensively, rather than just in this particular area.

I reassure the right hon. Member that UK Export Finance takes these issues extremely seriously. It is very diligent in the way that it analyses and looks at any of the investments it makes to ensure that environmental and human rights issues are fully addressed before making any financial commitment. We intend to produce our response to the responsible business conduct review very soon. I cannot give a precise date, as Ministers rarely manage to produce dates, which the right hon. Member knows.

UKEF uses OECD standards and the Equator Principles. It also reports extensively on this area, as it is required to do under the two Acts that apply to it. It works with the Office for Responsible Business Conduct’s dispute resolution unit, which provides a non-judicial grievance mechanism for looking at precisely all these issues. I am not saying a long-term no to the right hon. Member’s request. I completely agree with the aim of what he is seeking to achieve, but I think we already do that under UKEF. If particular issues arise in the future, I hope the right hon. Member will write to me. I would be very happy to respond to him.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

I understand what the Minister is saying very clearly, but a couple of the examples I gave where things had slipped through the net show that the system is not perfect. Does he think that the Government are likely therefore to deliver, as that said they would, on taking the Modern Slavery Act and beefing it up to such an extent that companies importing and exporting have a responsibility to check their supply chains, and if they do not it would be a criminal offence?

[Chris Bryant]

I cannot say anything more clearly than that I want to make sure that we in the UK are not reliant for our economic prosperity on the forced labour of others. We need to make that as comprehensive and effective as we possibly can. I know the two cases that the right hon. Member referred to, and I am happy to write to him, if he wants, in precise detail about those rather than to delay the House tonight. Funnily enough, the precise processes that we went through in the UK with UKEF in relation to those cases would have been met by the US legislation as well, which is arguably not as effective as it would like to be. I am as interested as he is in being effective in this space.

The hon. and learned Member for North Antrim (Jim Allister) gave an exceptionally good speech, I thought, on why we should not have left the European Union and why we should never have accepted the deal that was put on the table. I note that the people of Northern Ireland agreed with me and not with him on whether the UK should leave the European Union. I am afraid that—