Fairtrade Certification

Rebecca Paul Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2025 Westminster Hall

[Rebecca Paul (Reigate) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Hobhouse. I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Martin Rhodes) on securing today’s informative and thoughtful debate. All the contributions have been insightful, but I particularly enjoyed the speech by the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) who spoke about the man from Del Monte, taking me back down memory lane. I had not thought about him for a long time, probably not since the ’80s.

This is a timely debate. It rightly draws attention to a topic that has relevance to how the UK positions itself as a responsible trading nation and global partner. Fairtrade certification schemes have become a visible and recognised feature of British consumer life. They are well understood by the public, well supported by major retailers and increasingly used by UK businesses to demonstrate transparency and ethical practices across global supply chains. This debate invites us to reflect on how Fairtrade sits within the wider landscape of British trade and business policy, and how it might continue to support responsible sourcing, environmental sustainability and long-term development goals.

At its core, Fairtrade is a voluntary certification scheme applied to consumer goods such as bananas, cocoa, coffee, tea and sugar. It sets minimum prices for producers, offers a Fairtrade premium to be invested in community projects, and lays out standards on labour rights and environmental protection. The scheme is built on a partnership model between producers in the global south and businesses and consumers in the global north. Over time, Fairtrade has come to play a role in supporting responsible UK sourcing practices. The UK has long been a leading market for Fairtrade goods, and British supermarkets were among the first in the world to adopt the Fairtrade label at scale. The distinctive mark is now found on thousands of product lines sold in every part of the country, from major supermarket chains to small independent stores.

Beyond consumer familiarity, the benefits of Fairtrade certification also flow into business practices here at home. For British companies, certification helps to meet environmental, social and governance expectations from investors and consumers alike. It offers reassurance on the ethical provenance of goods and helps to reduce reputational risk in complex and sometimes opaque global supply chains. More broadly, Fairtrade fits into a wider framework of responsible sourcing in which UK firms are increasingly engaged. For example, the cocoa industry has seen significant improvements in transparency and long-term planning due to Fairtrade and similar voluntary schemes. British food and beverage companies, in particular, have drawn on Fairtrade principles to strengthen resilience and quality across key import lines.

There is also a trade policy angle. Fairtrade is not only about individual transactions; it reflects a broader outlook on how the UK interacts with developing markets. As the Government have observed in the recent trade strategy, trade and development are not mutually exclusive goals. We can support UK business while also encouraging more ethical, sustainable and secure supply chains. The developing countries trading scheme, launched in 2023 under the last Conservative Government, is one such example. It reduces tariffs on goods from low and middle-income countries and allows for easier trade in value-added products, helping to support economic diversification.

The previous Government were also clear that they recognised the role that voluntary schemes like Fairtrade play in complementing formal legal frameworks, such as the Modern Slavery Act 2015, which continues to apply to large UK businesses. In this context, Fairtrade certification can be seen as one of several tools that enable the UK to act as a responsible trading nation, championing higher standards while maintaining competitive access to key goods.

One of the great strengths of Fairtrade is the strong grassroots support that it enjoys. I saw that at first hand earlier this year when I was contacted by my local Reigate Fairtrade steering group to draw my attention to the “Brew it Fair” campaign. The campaign highlighted that, while the Government have committed to protecting human rights and environmental standards by endorsing the UN guiding principles on business and human rights, and by passing the Modern Slavery Act, wages, incomes and working conditions remain inadequate for the majority of the people involved in tea farming. As such, the Fairtrade Foundation called on the Government to introduce a law on human rights and environmental due diligence.

Again, good work was done in that space under the previous Conservative Government. The UK was the first country to create a national action plan to implement the UN guiding principles on business and human rights, which are widely regarded as the authoritative international framework to steer practical action by Governments and businesses worldwide on this important and pressing agenda. More recently, the UK has taken a number of steps through the Modern Slavery Act to ensure that no British organisation—public or private, and unwittingly or otherwise—is complicit through their supply chains in human rights violations. I am sure that the Minister will have more to say on that in a moment.

I conclude by noting that this has been an excellent debate, and I repeat my thanks to the hon. Member for Glasgow North for securing it.

[Wera Hobhouse (in the Chair)]

There is plenty of time, but I remind the Minister to leave a couple of minutes for the hon. Member for Glasgow North to wind up.