It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Rees.
I start by congratulating the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) on securing this debate and on all his hard work, alongside Members such as my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), on this significant issue. It is important to debate the supply chain for NHS PPE, to learn lessons from the past and to ensure that robust systems are in place for the future. I reassure him, and all hon. Members, that this matter is a priority for the Department and we continue to take steps to ensure that there are robust systems to safeguard against the coming into the system of supplies that may be
linked to slavery or forced labour. I am pleased that this issue was debated during the passage of the Health and Care Act 2022, and further legislation will be introduced to address it.
However, I must put it on the record that our priority during the pandemic, as Members will understand, was to protect our frontline staff. This was a global crisis, in which we were competing against many countries to secure PPE for our frontline workers. Nevertheless, we had and still have a responsibility to those across the PPE supply chain to make sure that when PPE is procured, it is done responsibly and does not put people in any part of that chain at risk. It is absolutely important that we do that both globally and domestically, because although the hon. Member for Strangford rightly mentioned the Uyghurs in China, we have heard only too well this week from Mo Farah that slave labour and slavery exist in this country as well.
I take the point that the hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Steven Bonnar) raised about his concerns about the Government’s approach, but I will gently say that the Herald on Sunday stated that during the pandemic, half a billion pounds-worth of procurement in Scotland did not go through the usual scrutiny process, either—and that was just one report. That reflects the fact that all countries during the pandemic had to make tough decisions to get supplies through, safeguard frontline services and ensure that those pieces of equipment were in place. Where lessons need to be learned, we absolutely will do so. Since the pandemic, almost 40 billion items of PPE have been ordered and almost 20 billion were distributed by March 2022. We are still distributing over 600 million items a month. That shows the scale of the amount of PPE that we have had to distribute. Hon. Members will be aware that covid rates are still high at the moment, so PPE is still very much needed by our frontline staff.
Global chains were used to procure many supplies, whether aprons, gloves or masks, but where possible we have tried to escalate domestic supply, because while it is not 100% failsafe against slavery, it is more likely that there are robust systems in place. To effectively distribute the supply across health and social care settings, we have built a distribution network from scratch and adopted a sophisticated sales and operations planning system to regulate supply and distribution. We have a clear understanding of where the stock has come from and the processes in place to ensure that slavery or forced labour was not used in any part of that chain. Part of the network is using technology to track and trace where that supply comes from, and if there are queries or concerns in the future, we are able to look back and see where those supplies came from. Since April 2020, over 6.9 billion PPE items have been ordered through that e-portal system.
As we move to living with covid, the decision has been made to step down some of the Department’s work on the PPE programme, and we are handing that over to the NHS supply chain more generally. Safeguards in the Act ensure that some of that work will continue to happen. Modern slavery encompasses the offences of slavery, servitude, forced and compulsory labour and human trafficking. The NHS has a significant role to play in combating modern slavery, including by taking steps to ensure that the NHS supply chains and business activities are free from labour abuses. The Government
rely on their suppliers for the delivery of many important public services, and we expect high standards of business ethics from our suppliers—and their agents. They will be routinely checked for that.
The Department follows a procurement approach, as set out in the UK Government modern slavery statement, that includes a zero-tolerance approach to modern slavery and a commitment to ensure that respect for human rights is built into all our contracts, self-assessments, audits, training and capacity building. I reassure the hon. Member for Strangford that if there is a complaint or a suggestion of any supply being involved in slavery or forced labour, we can lock down that stock until an investigation is concluded. We can then unlock it if no evidence is found, but we can stop some of those contracts if there is evidence of forced labour. We look at what happens in other countries—he touched on the US—and if other countries are finding evidence of slave labour used in any part of the supply chain, investigations will start on UK stock as well.