Extracts from Parliamentary Proceedings - Oct 18

Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl): My Lords, I declare an interest as chairman of the Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership. We are now being asked regularly by businesses large and small about what the Government think the impact of Brexit will be on Cumbria. They want to know this to start planning for the post-Brexit era. It seems both ignoble from the Government’s perspective and very unhelpful from the perspective of businesses, which will be so important in the future, to have so little to say and to say it so vaguely.

The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Lord Bates) (Con): I do not accept my noble friend’s view that we have had little to say. I was in the Chamber earlier this week when the Leader of the House repeated the Prime Minister’s Statement and some people suggested we had too much too say. Some 106 technical notes have been put out, and we have had significant debates. The crucial thing is that businesses have known since the referendum took place, and certainly since the general election, what the outcome of the referendum was and the Government’s intention in implementing the outcome of that referendum. As a result, they have done incredible work in boosting their exports around the world. We are seeing that export growth is at record levels in terms of goods and that the fastest growth for those markets is in countries outside the European Union, such as India and China.

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Extract from Oral answer (Lords) on UK Visas and Immigration: Customer Charges

Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab): My Lords, £1.37 per minute plus the carrier costs and £5.48 for an email? This issue was drawn to my attention by a postgraduate researcher based in India seeking to clarify their visa position. The costs are not insignificant to such a person. The Minister mentioned commercial sensitivity because this is a privatised service. Presumably that means that, in this case, a graduate student would not even be talking to Home Office officials to get the answers they wanted. Can she place on record the quality impact assessment that was carried out when this was introduced, and tell us where the liability lies in the event of bad advice being given? Is it with the Home Office, the contractor or the graduate student in India?

Baroness Manzoor (Con): My Lords, certainly if a quality impact assessment has been done we will make that available. To be clear, I should say that the Government believe that it is right for those who use and benefit directly from the UK immigration system to make an appropriate contribution towards meeting the costs. Fees set by the Home Office border, immigration and citizen services are set at a level that partially funds the immigration system; the remainder is funded through general taxation.

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Extracts from Commons debate on Ending Exploitation in Supermarket Supply Chains

Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab):...The seafood sector is particularly notorious. In Ireland, a permit scheme for fishermen has seen African and Asian men trafficked on to trawlers, doing 20 hours a day of manual labour, legally bound to the employer and too scared to speak up for fear of arrest or deportation. Ireland now has a tier 2 ranking for trafficking—on a par with Indonesia and India—due to the Government’s failure adequately to protect victims and successfully convict traffickers...

...The examples that I have given are clearly abhorrent and illegal, but it is also unacceptable that small-scale farmers and workers producing Indian tea and Kenyan green beans—common items in our supermarkets—are earning less than half of what is needed to ensure a basic but decent standard of living. When women working on grape farms in South Africa were surveyed, 90% reported not having enough to eat in the previous month. These are things that we take for granted; a grape is, to an extent, a luxury item, yet the women producing them cannot feed themselves or their families. If buyers were prepared to pay just three cents more per melon to a producer in Honduras and less than two cents on a banana in Guatemala, that would give those workers a living wage...

Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP):...Oxfam reminds us of forced labour aboard fishing vessels in south-east Asia, poverty wages on Indian tea plantations, and the hunger faced by workers on South African grape farms, as was well set out by the hon. Member for Bristol East. We see gross global inequality and escalating climate change, which must be increasingly unsustainable...

...Alarmingly, of the supply chains Oxfam looked at, none enabled people to earn enough for even a basic standard of living, and in some cases, including the production of Indian tea and Kenyan green beans, it was less than half of what they needed to get by, as the hon. Member for Bristol East reminded us. Women face routine discrimination, often providing most of the labour for the lowest wages. More than nine out of 10 of the grape workers in South Africa and seafood processors in Thailand surveyed—most of whom were women—said they had not had enough to eat in the previous month, and several Members, including the hon. Member for Bristol East and my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh North and Leith, have pointed that out. We have heard from a number of Members about how the cheap food we buy in supermarkets comes at the cost of squeezing prices paid to suppliers, which then creates huge suffering for the women and men who supply this food, trapping them in poverty...

Carolyn Harris (Swansea East) (Lab):...Taking Indian tea and Kenyan green beans as examples, the research by Oxfam found that workers and small-scale farmers earned less than 50% of what they needed for a basic but decent standard of living in their societies. The report also found that the gap between the reality and a decent standard of living was greatest where women provided the majority of the labour. In South Africa, over 90% of surveyed women workers on grape farms reported not having enough to eat in the previous month. Nearly a third of them said that they or a family member had gone to bed hungry at least once in that time...

To read the whole debate, CLICK HERE