The ‘once-in-a-decade’ chance to transform the UK’s footprint on the world
TBritain has a “once in a decade opportunity” to transform the country’s environmental and human rights impact around the world, aid campaigners say Independent.
As part of the UK Trade Strategy announced last year, the government launched a review of responsible business conduct policy focusing on the global supply chains of businesses operating in the UK.
These supply chains are the arteries of the modern global economy, spanning continents and sectors, and are often highly specialized and complex. Recent years have shown how vulnerable these countries can be, with events such as the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Brexit causing disruptions to food and energy prices.
But as well as posing risks to UK consumers, poor oversight of supply chains also poses significant risks to countries supplying UK businesses, including human rights concerns such as forced or child labour, as well as risks to the environment and the impacts of the climate crisis.
Government ministers publicly declare that Britain wants to become a state “investor” instead of “donor” As for foreign aid? During the period when Donald Trump cut foreign aid in the UK and the USAReforming UK supply chain laws could ensure overseas investment maximizes benefits to people in developing countries, campaigners say.
Groups including the Fair Trade Foundation are calling for what they call a “mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence (HREDD) bill” that would force companies to continually measure and address human rights and environmental issues in their supply chains.
Rather than the “tick-box exercise” required by many current plans, “proactive risk management” and “long-term solutions” will be called for to protect human rights and help reduce the impact of the climate crisis, according to Fairtrade senior policy manager Sophia Ostler.
“This is a pivotal moment: a truly once-in-a-decade opportunity to address environmental and human rights issues in our supply chains, with a government that can actually do something about it,” he says Independent. “This is about paying enough for trade so that workers in developing countries have enough money to have a good quality of life.”
This campaign has been building for years – civil society open letter from 2019, Another letter from 167 businesses From 2024, several important reports examine one Forced labor in UK supply chainsand one Parliament’s Westminster Hall Debate On Fair Trade at the end of last year.
“with Cuts to official development aid in the UK and globallyAnd ongoing climate emergencyMartin Rhodes, Labor MP and Chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Fairtrade, says: Independent.
“Principles such as poverty reduction, gender equality and environmental sustainability can all be advanced through strong due diligence laws and by increasing our trade with others who share the same high standards.”
Current legislation affecting supply chains is piecemeal and not comprehensive, and relies heavily on parts of the Modern Slavery Act and the Environment Act, according to Fairtrade’s Ostler. A new HREDD law could level the playing field for all major companies and ensure that the high climate and human rights standards that the UK strives to meet at home are also met abroad.
“We call for a holistic approach and understanding of what the problems are and how they are all interconnected,” says Ostler, who adds that specific HREDD standards must be compatible with European Standards. OECD Guidelines for Multinational EnterprisesWhich England has already signed.
“Human rights and environmental protection are interconnected in terms of how pollution affects health and livelihoods, or how environmentally damaging forced labor can occur in mining,” Ostler continues. “New legislation needs to see the bigger picture that reflects this.”
Supply chain scandals
With no mandatory due diligence law currently in place, there is no clear data on how many companies in the UK are effectively monitoring and responding to supply chain risks. The data we have shows that this number will not be very high. 34 percent In the 2023 assessment, 50 percent of global clothing and apparel companies implemented clear human rights responsibilities and training, and global food and beverage companies received an average fair score 15/100 In its 2026 assessment of the company’s efforts to combat forced labor in its supply chains.
Evidence of poor supply chain due diligence can be found in the regularly occurring scandals relating to imports consumed in the UK. solar panels And cotton fabric Critical minerals mined using linked to slavery allegations among the Uyghur minority in China Child labor in the mines of the Democratic Republic of Congoor animals fed soy Linked to the destruction of the Amazon Rainforest.
This is something Government advisers to the Committee on Climate Change are doing when it comes to building resilience to the climate crisis in our supply chains. warned many times is overlooked – Independent has seen firsthand how the climate crisis is destroying small-scale produce farms about one third Much of the food the world eats, including much of the tea, coffee, cocoa and tropical fruit we eat in the UK.
Last year we saw smallholder farmers in Kenya, which supplies around half of the UK’s tea, increasingly hit by extreme weather conditions such as drought and climate change. Dramatic hailstorms unlike anything farmers have ever experienced before in the country’s highlands.
In the shadow of last year’s COP30 climate conference in Belem, Brazil, we also met a cocoa farmer whose crop was devastated by recent extreme climate conditions. more climate adaptation funding could help it. Meanwhile, in Ethiopia, we met pastoral communities who settled in one place for the first time to farm. the severity of the extreme climate conditions we face.
Supply chain legislation ‘good for business’
Advocates of comprehensive HREDD reform emphasize that strengthening supply chains is not only good for workers in the Global South, but will also bring huge benefits to companies themselves.
“HREDD legislation will be good for business because it will support supply chains against climate risks and also help companies avoid scandals with their suppliers in the future,” says Fairtrade’s Ostler.
Maria Cronin, partner specializing in commercial crime at London-based law firm Peters and Peters, explains: Independent He said a “robust” new framework for human rights and environmental due diligence would provide UK companies with “a coherent, global approach that will provide greater clarity, consistency and legal certainty”.
“A mandatory due diligence regime will help level the playing field and provide companies with a defensible evidence base for the actions they take to identify, prevent and address supply chain risks,” he says.
Andrew Wallis, chief executive of anti-slavery NGO Unseen, also said that as long as some companies were able to integrate slavery into their supply chains, there was a risk that law-abiding UK companies would not be able to compete.
“The UK currently imports around £20 billion worth of goods a year, the production of which carries a significant risk of forced labour.” wrote recently. “In the absence of enforceable standards, responsible businesses in the UK are systematically undermined by competitors willing to tolerate or willfully ignore exploitation in their supply chains.”
While numerous businesses and civil society groups are lobbying for the ambitious HREDD regulation, there are also many companies pushing for a weak outcome given the complexities and costs it would impose on companies, according to Ostler. However, he disagrees with HREDD’s view that it would impose ill-timed, heavy costs on consumers. cost of living crisis.
“Large companies can certainly afford to make these changes. They may need to change some of their purchasing strategies and profit margins may shift temporarily, but Global South communities should not be treated as fundamentally secondary to a large multinational looking for business growth,” he says.
Equivalent legislation from the EU, which is some way ahead of the UK in supporting supply chains, has also been shown to have only extremely marginal effects on consumer costs; The EU Deforestation Directive only increases company costs by 10%. 0.1 percent According to one study, average compliance costs of the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) are expected to be around 0.13 percent of companies’ annual shareholder payouts. The European Commission found.
Much like the HREDD legislation called for by Fair Trade, the CSDDD also only targets companies with more than 5,000 employees, ensuring that smaller companies do not become bogged down by bureaucratic processes they cannot easily deal with. Ostler adds that the fact that the EU is ahead in the supply chain also increases the urgency of the need to reform its framework so that the UK does not become a “dumping ground” for products that are no longer welcome in the EU.
Fairtrade and other civil society groups are pushing for sweeping new legislation, but Ostler says a range of other outcomes are also possible, including a much less ambitious strengthening of existing policies. For now, there’s an anxious wait until the end of March, when the government says the review should be completed.
In response to this article, a UK government spokesperson acknowledged that the review continues to be carried out as part of the Trade Strategy and said it was “committed to eliminating human rights abuses, forced labor and exploitative environmental practices in UK supply chains, and we expect businesses to do everything they can to prevent these too.”
This article was produced as part of The Independent. Rethinking Global Aid project
