Modern Slavery Act: Independent Review

Maggie Throup Excerpts

Wednesday 19th June 2019 Westminster Hall

[Maggie Throup (Erewash) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I, too, congratulate the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Frank Field) on securing the debate, and on the work that he has done, alongside my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), in getting such a fantastic report published. I thank everybody else who was involved, and I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister for her dedication to starting to rid our nation of the evil practice of modern slavery when she was Home Secretary. She led the way, not just nationally but globally, through the legislation that she introduced.

I first took an interest in modern slavery when I was first elected, because I heard the Bishop of Derby, Alastair Redfearn, speak about it. As a Derbyshire MP, it had a huge impact on me, so I have been following it ever since. Baroness Young, who was also involved in the report, introduced a private Member’s Bill, the Modern Slavery (Transparency in Supply Chains) Bill, in the other place in 2016 and asked me to take it through this place in 2017. It was designed to strengthen the transparency in supply chains and introduce the legislation to cover the public sector. Sadly, I did not get the Bill very far at that stage. At the time, the Minister reassured me that the Modern Slavery Act 2015 was just the start. We see today that those words were true, but it is still going far too slowly.

A lot of my constituents will think that modern slavery is about the sex trade and prostitution, but we all know it is more than just that. It is the nail bars and car washes—my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke mentioned that we now have an app where that can be reported, which is really good. I do not like washing my car, so I take it to a car wash, but I look so carefully at the people who work there, to reassure myself that I am not adding to the modern-slavery supply chain.

Modern slavery also applies to manufacturing. Once again, this issue has been quite close to home, because an agency supplier to Sports Direct was employing slaves. Some fantastic work was carried out by the Nottinghamshire police, resulting in convictions. So we need to tighten up transparency in the supply chain because we never know where we will find modern slavery.

My interest has never gone away. In fact, to promote this debate and to get it on the radar, I asked the Prime Minister a question earlier today. I was reassured because she said that the Government would

“shortly be publishing a consultation to look at ways to strengthen transparency in the supply chains, and...expanding transparency laws to cover the public sector and its purchasing power.”

As we know, the purchasing power of the public sector is huge. The word that concerned me was “consultation”, and we need action. We could see the report as a consultation and we need to speed things up. We cannot keep having consultation after consultation. We need action to make things happen.

Before I came into this debate today, I was at an event called “Send My Friend to School”, which is about making sure that the sustainable development goals include funding for education. If we get education right, we can give kids a future. Giving kids a future as they grow up is another way of eliminating modern slavery. We need to work across Government to make sure that whatever public money is available is spent on making sure that our supply chains are transparent and free from modern slavery, and we also need to spend public money in the right place overseas to make sure that modern slavery does not happen in the first place.

I look forward to the Minister’s response. I feel that step by step we are getting there, and that my private Member’s Bill, which I tried to introduce in 2017, played a small part in getting us to where we are today. I know there are people in this room who have played a much bigger part, and I thank them for that.