My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Rosser on this amendment. I feel extremely strongly about this as, throughout this evening, we have heard about not having enough money but we have to remember that we are talking about people. They are not robots or goods; they are human beings. It is really important to remember that when we talked earlier about the costof implementing this, we are talking about saving people’s lives and ensuring that they have a life as good as we have, or even better.
The way I see this operating is that accountability in companies should be handled by their procurement department. Every large and small company has a
procurement department or somebody who goes to the middle companies that they order from. We should not say that the middle people should be responsible. The companies should be able to tell us and, if necessary, go and inspect where and how the goods are made, and how the people are paid. They spend enough time on decorating, branding and PR, but instead of spending so much time and money on those things, they should spend it in their new procurement department. Some of them have these procurement departments; I see them as being as important as health and safety has become, thanks to the way that Governments have pushed that forward.
It is so that the companies can say, when the audit is done every year and in their annual report, that they have visited the factories and the building sites. It may be something that the construction industry here is responsible for in Bahrain, Beijing or Qatar. This should apply not just to companies but to government departments, when we are assisting as museums or parts of new universities are built abroad. What we are trying to say is that every company and organisation involved in labour or goods, abroad or here, should be audited and that the procurement department should be responsible. “May” is not strong enough; we have to say that this is to be done annually in the audit and that it can be inspected and questioned.