I shall provide a brief background to amendment 3 and to the other amendments tabled in my name.
I am chair of the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union parliamentary group. We meet that union, which represents the workers in the baking and confectionary industry, on a regular basis. We have had a long campaign over a number of years to express our concerns about below-cost selling in the baking and confectionary sector. The concern relates to the Bill’s general provisions, but because I raised it on Second Reading, I shall not delay us further except to explain that the same pressure suppliers have felt from supermarkets has had its effect on the baking industry, as it has on farming and elsewhere.
The pressure to cut overall costs has reduced the quality of the product. Concerns have also been expressed over the years about the safety of ingredients. Some consumer organisations have pointed out the deterioration of the quality of bread as a result of the amount of water introduced into bread production, which has undermined the nutritional benefits from eating bread and has had an impact on the population’s health.
The anxiety is that the same sort of pressure has been applied to the baking industry. The result for members of the bakers’ union has been reductions in wages and job cuts, and the reduction in overall pay means that this sector has significant levels of low pay; in fact, it is one of the most low-paid sectors in our industry at the moment. Another impact of that pressure is deteriorating working conditions and terms of employment. Bakers have expressed the concern that skills within the sector have been undermined, too. With people’s potential to be upskilled undermined, it means further pressure on wages.
These are vulnerable workers, therefore, and they are fearful of raising their concerns about what is happening in this sector. That is why the bakers’ union has combined with employers and others to welcome this Bill. It feels that it gives its members protection when they blow the whistle on some of the supermarket practices that lead to deteriorating conditions in the industry. That, then, is the background to the amendment.
The bakers’ union welcomes clause 13, which enables the adjudicator to recommend to the Office of Fair Trading changes to the code as issues arise over time. It is important, however, that this process is seen to be open and transparent. That is what amendment 3 is designed to achieve. It would simply ensure that the Office of Fair Trading is required to publish its response to the recommendations in the groceries code adjudicator’s review. The response should explain whether the OFT has acted on those recommendations. The amendment would introduce a process of openness and transparency that will lead to accountability. It would place a statutory duty on the OFT to make its functions patently open to scrutiny from the general public and the industry itself.
I expect that my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray) will speak about amendments 34 and 35, which relate to the wider concern that we now feel about the nutritional content of some of the consumer goods that are placed before us. My amendment responds to some elements of that concern by proposing that recommendations whose implementation would improve the nutrition of our country and the operation of a particular food sector are in fact implemented, or reasons are given for the fact that they are not being implemented.