Tag: Liz Twist

The speech made by Liz Twist, the Shadow Levelling Up Minister, in the House of Commons on 22 February 2024.

I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms) for securing the urgent question.

Inter-faith and multi-faith dialogue are absolutely essential components of society, not only to resolve differences but to build strong and collaborative communities that are able to come together in times of need. Given recent events—the war and violence in Gaza—that is more important than ever. As I am sure the whole House recognises, the Government have a special responsibility to facilitate positive relationships between different faith communities, and although I appreciate that the Minister has now given some explanation of why they have chosen to withdraw funding for the IFN, outstanding questions remain.

Let me ask the Minister some straightforward questions. When was the decision to withdraw funding from the network made? What impact assessment was made, and what discussions were had about the vital need to continue to promote understanding about and between different faith groups, and to encourage co-operation? When was the Inter Faith Network notified of the decision? Does the Minister have plans to increase support for other groups to make up for any loss of provision arising from this decision?

Every Department will inevitably monitor and review the grants that they award, but the House should expect that to be done in the spirit of due process. As politicians, we have a responsibility to bring communities together. At a time when divisions are being exposed, I hope that the Minister can assure the House that the Government remain committed to inter-faith and multi-faith dialogue.

Felicity Buchan

I thank the hon. Member for her comments. Again, I stress the importance of inter-faith work. I see it in my own constituency; it is very important. The Government are already supporting other institutions that do such work.

The hon. Member asked specifically for timelines. The Secretary of State wrote to the IFN on 19 January saying that he was “minded to withdraw” the offer of funding in light of what we have discussed. He invited the Inter Faith Network to make representations to him on this matter, and he received its response on 22 January. After careful consideration of those representations, he confirmed that he wishes to withdraw the offer of funding to the Inter Faith Network for the reasons that we have discussed. He wrote to the co-chairs on 21 February to inform them of his decision. I stress again that the Department has been very clear that the Inter Faith Network should have been developing other sustainable sources of funding.

The speech made by Liz Twist, the Labour MP for Blaydon, in the House of Commons on 13 July 2022.

I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to provide for a Code of Practice to be followed by retailers of fashion clothing, footwear and accessories in their relationships with their suppliers; to set up an Adjudicator with the role of enforcing that Code of Practice and encouraging compliance with it; and for connected purposes.

The covid-19 pandemic saw major disruption within the retail sector. As shops shut, retailers cancelled orders from suppliers, refused to pay for goods already in production or in process, delayed payments by long periods and demanded reductions in price for clothes that had already been shipped. Meanwhile, issues of worker exploitation and covid-unsafe working environments made their way into the headlines. In June 2020, workers in Leicester garment factories were found to have been paid as little as £3 an hour and were alleged to have been trafficked, to have been forced to go to work despite testing positive for covid-19 and to have been involved in furlough fraud.

The revelations about working conditions were not confined to the UK: 2020 saw millions of workers—largely women—made destitute in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Vietnam as suppliers were forced to lay off workers and were unable to pay living wages. Indeed, the garment sector has been identified by the United Nations International Labour Organisation as one of the hardest hit by covid’s disruption of trade. It estimates that 86 million garment workers worldwide are now in extreme hardship and unable to pay their rent, feed their families or send their children to school.

These problems are not new, but they are connected. They illustrate much wider problems in the garment production system. For decades, UK retailers have imposed purchasing practices on their suppliers that have at times amounted to illegal breaches of contract and can be abusive. The volatility facing suppliers as a result of these practices, and the need to meet their fixed costs, have led to the problem being passed down to workers in the form of wage reductions and mass unemployment. This problem was reported on in 2019 by the Environmental Audit Committee, which identified a

“race to the bottom culture”

in the fashion industry that

“creates an environment for precarious employment.”

The covid-19 pandemic shed fresh light on the power imbalance between buyers, suppliers and workers in the ready-made garment chain that drives these unfair practices. For example, in December 2021, retailers were still paying the same price for garments that they had been paying in March 2020, despite costs associated with the rising prices of inputs and covid-19 mitigation. These practices amount to an example of gross market failure and poor contract enforcement, which has become the mechanism by which a desire for cheap and flexible supply translates to poor working conditions and insecure employment. Many contracts do not have clauses enabling such practices, but supplier dependency on their consumers has created a climate of fear that has prevented suppliers from taking retailers to court.

So far, engagement with this issue by the Government has amounted to affirmation of their commitment to review issues of non-compliance with labour rights legislation. This demonstrates a misunderstanding of the relationship between abusive purchasing practices and labour law violations. Enforcement of labour laws will not prevent the conditions that drive their evasion. When suppliers feel that they cannot meet the demands of retailers without violating statutory minimums, their poor treatment of workers will be driven underground. Furthermore, the failure of retailers to make long-term commitments to purchase from suppliers precludes the possibility of establishing better working conditions in the future. There is an upshot to this predicament. Although the UK Government may be limited in their ability to intervene in the enforcement of worker protections overseas, introducing a fashion watchdog to regulate the purchasing practices of domestic retailers would reduce supplier incentives to evade labour laws both here in the UK and in supplier countries, creating a better foundation for establishing good working conditions across the globe.

Sadly, UK retailers are considered to be among the worst in the world according to analysis by Bangladeshi suppliers. According to evidence submitted by the charity Traidcraft Exchange to the Environmental Audit Committee, by June 2020 more than 80 UK retailers had cancelled orders worth more than £750 million owed to suppliers in Bangladesh alone. The decisions of individual companies have a significant impact. For example, as of June 2020, Primark had cancelled more than £98 million-worth of orders that had previously been placed with more than 100 Bangladeshi suppliers, impacting hundreds of thousands of workers. I am glad to say that Primark later committed to pay for outstanding orders.

We also saw in Traidcraft Exchange’s evidence that, in the worst cases, suppliers received an email cancelling an order with no possibility of a follow-up or resolution. In this manner Peacocks, part of the Edinburgh Woollen Mill Group, sent emails advising its suppliers that products already landed in the UK would not be paid for, and cancelling more than $4 million-worth of orders from Bangladeshi suppliers. One supplier wrote to their trade association:

“They are holding the goods at the destination port to pressure us to give huge discount. These unethical buyers don’t care of our people starving and struggling…we are communicating with them every day and request them to release the goods, but they never reply.”

And workers have been struggling and starving.

In Bangladesh, where the garment trade produces 85% of export earnings and employs 4 million workers, an estimated 50% of factory owners and managers say they have been subjected to one or more abusive purchasing practices. During March and April 2020, at least 25% of workers in Bangladesh lost their job.

A recent survey of female garment workers in Cambodia—where 1 million people are employed in the sector—by the University of Nottingham and Royal Holloway found that 85% had been suspended from work by October 2020 and that average take-home pay had fallen by 20%. This disruption drove the problem of food insecurity and exacerbated an existing crisis of over-indebtedness among garment workers.

The victims of these practices are not only workers but small and sustainable businesses that are unable to compete in such an unfair environment. Paragraph 135 of the EAC’s report says,

“We heard concerns about the extra costs and barriers that the UK’s sustainable fashion businesses face. Innovators are faced with competition from businesses who are focused on reducing costs and maximising profits regardless of the environmental or social costs.”

To end these abusive purchasing practices and regulate the relationship between retailers and suppliers, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy should set out a timetable for establishing a garment trade adjudicator. This fashion watchdog would prevent fashion brands from cancelling orders without compensation or making last-minute changes, thereby levelling the playing field for fashion retailers and suppliers, and creating an environment in which suppliers are not compelled to evade labour law enforcement.

This proposal should be modelled on the Groceries Code Adjudicator, which was established in 2013. The evidence suggests that this adjudicator’s enforcement of a fair purchasing code has drastically reduced the prevalence of abusive purchasing practices that were once widespread in the sector. In the annual supplier survey conducted to assess the effectiveness of this regulator, 79% of suppliers experienced a breach of the statutory fair purchasing code in 2014, reducing to 29% of suppliers in 2021.

The Government need to consult on what is included in the statutory code. It should include the principle of fair dealing to enable suppliers to act with certainty, and it should replicate the characteristics of the Groceries Code Adjudicator. These measures are necessary to break the climate of fear that has thus far prevented suppliers from challenging retailers.

Question put and agreed to.

Ordered,

That Liz Twist, Peter Aldous, Sir Stephen Timms, Mr Barry Sheerman, Mrs Pauline Latham, Kate Green, Catherine McKinnell, Daisy Cooper and Mary Kelly Foy present the Bill.

Liz Twist accordingly presented the Bill.

Below is the text of the speech made by Liz Twist, the Labour MP for Blaydon, in the House of Commons on 25 June 2020.

I am glad to have secured this debate on the Government response to job losses at the De La Rue site in Gateshead. I know that you, Madam Deputy Speaker, take a particular interest in this debate, as you have a De La Rue site in your constituency of Epping Forest. I thank you for the concern you have expressed for the staff in Gateshead.

On 25 March 2018, I stood in this Chamber as a fairly new MP to ask an urgent question of the Home Office about the awarding of the contract to produce UK passports to Franco-Dutch company Gemalto rather than to De La Rue, which produced the passports at Team Valley in my constituency.

The De La Rue site, which quite literally prints money as well as producing passports, is one of the industrial jewels in the Gateshead crown. It produces high-quality, nationally important projects with great skill and in highly secure conditions. The staff are highly skilled and trained and well paid. These are quality jobs and staff are proud of the work they do. They do not just come from my constituency; they travel from a wide area around. Hon. Members from across the north-east will also have constituents who work at the site.

In 2018, despite huge public support for keeping passport production in the north-east and in the UK, despite newspaper campaigns and despite meetings with Government Ministers, the contract was eventually awarded to Gemalto. UK passport production was to be offshored, with blank books—a highly valuable commodity—being produced overseas and the personalisation being done in the UK.

Decisions were based primarily on cost in the procurement process that started in 2017. In my view, the Government should have taken a more strategic view from the start, as some other EU countries have done, believing that passport production is essentially a part of the integrity of our security system.

I do not absolve De La Rue’s senior management at the time for getting the price wrong, but my concern is for the staff who worked so hard and with such great pride to produce a secure quality passport for Great Britain. We must learn those lessons for the future when we reconsider the passport contract, but meanwhile, De La Rue employees are bearing the after-effects of that decision.

The loss of the passport contract meant the loss of 200 jobs as the contract came to an end, with a start date for the new contract of July 2019, but more job losses were to follow. In June 2019, a further 170 jobs were lost at Gateshead, from the currency production side. One of the two currency production lines printing banknotes was closed down as the company looked to reduce costs in the aftermath of the loss of their passport contract. Work was again transferred from Gateshead to the company’s other sites, including those in Gibraltar and Kenya.

To add insult to injury, chief executive Martin Sutherland stood down with a bonus worth more than 30% of his executive pay of £197,000, as staff pay was frozen, 48% of shareholders voted against De La Rue’s remuneration ​report in June 2019 and the future of the company looked very uncertain. Staff at the Gateshead site were facing redundancy. The Guardian wrote in November 2019:

“The farewell bonus for Sutherland, who finally departed last month, now looks like a wretched joke about a licence to print money.”

Sadly, it is not a joke for the staff who actually printed the money for De La Rue.

Each time I visited the site, I talked to staff, who are incredibly proud of the work they do and the responsibility that they carry. I talked to the union Unite about trying to save those jobs. Each time, top management told them that they would be looking to bring more work to Gateshead to replace the passport contract. None materialised.

Last week, as the company financial reports were released, news came of the proposal to end production of currency at Gateshead, with the loss of 255 jobs, leaving only 90 jobs in highly specialised functions at a site that just a few years ago had more than 600 jobs. For many staff not on shift when the stock markets opened, the news first reached them via the Chronicle website, social media, a text from friends or local TV and radio news. The staff deserve better than that.

Once again, work previously done in Gateshead will be moved to De La Rue’s other sites in the UK or overseas. There is a direct link between the decision to award the passport contract to Gemalto and the job losses across the Gateshead site. Because of the number of redundancies, there is now a consultation period of 45 days, so I will be working with Unite and echoing its call for this decision to be reversed and for work to be kept at the Gateshead site. Last week, I spoke to the current chief executive and chairman to let them know my anger at the decision and to support Unite’s call for it to be reversed. I will keep on pushing hard for that throughout the consultation period.

However, the Government have a responsibility in this too, and I am asking the Minister to help me and my colleagues to retain these skilled, high-quality jobs in the north-east. I want to know what the Government are going to do to ensure that jobs such as these are retained in the north-east. We simply cannot afford to lose them. These highly-skilled, well-paid jobs will help to stimulate our regional economy. We need sustainable jobs in the north-east. The Government say that they want to level up the north of England, so they must take practical and decisive action to keep those jobs and to secure more of them for our workers.

Behind those numbers are individuals, families and livelihoods. With the loss of those jobs comes a loss of security, of safety, of hope and of aspiration. Many will be shaken and shattered by this news, and those affected will emerge from the current pandemic even more uncertain about their futures. I join with Unite, the staff trade union, in calling for the company to reverse its plans and maintain production at its Gateshead site.

As I have already said, in 2018 and 2019 the previous management of De La Rue told staff at Gateshead that they would work to bring new work to the site and that the site was important to the company. Those promises were not delivered. Empty words mean nothing to people in my constituency, so I urge the Government to ​act now. They can start by ensuring that De La Rue’s site is maintained and that the contract to produce passports is returned to the UK as a matter of urgency. They can also help by taking action now to help me to keep those jobs in Gateshead. We must act with immediacy not only to protect local quality jobs, but to safeguard our local economy and strengthen our place in a rapidly changing world. The staff of De La Rue Gateshead deserve no less.

I will finish with one final irony. Today, almost one full year after the new contractor was due to take on the passport contract, some passports are still being produced by De La Rue staff on the Gateshead site in Team Valley in my constituency. That work is due to end at the end of June, just a few days from now. The remaining 80 passport staff will lose their jobs and passport production will cease on the site. I thank those staff and all the staff at the Gateshead site, and end with the hope that we will see a resurgence of the high-skilled, high-quality jobs we so need in the north-east.

Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)

I thank the hon. Lady for graciously mentioning that I share her concerns, as De La Rue is a major employer in my Epping Forest constituency.