Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of links between BGI Group and the People's Liberation Army; and if his Department will ban BGI Group in the UK in light of reports of that company's involvement in genetic data harvesting and involvement in abuses against Uyghurs.

The United Kingdom has an established policy to manage modern slavery risks and we continue to take action to limit exposure to human rights and modern slavery abuses in supply chains. Governmental commercial teams are required to undertake due diligence to ensure risks in supply chains are mitigated. Managing risks within existing contracts is the responsibility of those who are party to the contract and decisions will be made on a case-by-case basis.

There is no specified procurement evaluation criteria in UK legislation or policy related to entities of Chinese origin and to take account of the national origin of companies would be against the principles in UK law related to equal treatment. The Department evaluates bids and if there is sufficient evidence of human rights or modern slavery abuses in any of the supply chains, we take appropriate steps to exclude them from that procurement. Procurement rules include ‘exclusion grounds’ of mandatory grounds, where contracting authorities must exclude and discretionary criteria, where they may exclude. If a bidder is convicted of an offence under section 1, 2 or 4 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015, there is a mandatory exclusion. However, even if there is no conviction, strong evidence of breaches is likely to be grounds for discretionary exclusion.

BGI Genomics is a supplier on the National Microbiology Framework contract, launched in 2021. The mandatory and discretionary exclusion criteria was requested from all suppliers at the time the Framework was tendered. BGI Genomics was awarded a call-off contract from the Framework contract by the UK Health Security Agency in August 2021 which also involved compliance with mandatory and discretionary selection requirements. This call-off contract lapsed on 14 November 2021 and no further contract with BGI has been let.