Tesco group quality, technical and sustainability director Claire Lorains said the UK is at risk of “becoming a dumping ground for products that can’t enter the EU” during a session with the Business and Trade Committee yesterday (8 January) on the Employment Rights Bill.

The panel, which included Lorains alongside British Retail Consortium (BRC) director of food and sustainability Andrew Opie and McDonalds UK and Ireland CEO Alistair Macrow, centred around what improvements were needed to the UK’s Modern Slavery Act.

Lorains said that UK should be aligned to some of the more “progressive” steps forward happening in the EU to remain competitive. She particularly highlighted “essential” incoming EU legislation, which will require large companies to conduct due diligence to stop adverse human rights and environmental impacts in their value chain and operations.

Opie echoed this concern, and said that the EU had put forward some “really progressive legislation” around “mandatory human rights due diligence.”

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“We don’t understand why the UK wouldn’t want to go down the same route as that, particularly as we are tackling global supply chains here,” he continued.

Lorains explained that more progressive legislation would play a “very critical part in levelling the playing field” for retailers, who “know that our customers want products that are safe, legal, great quality and are sustainably and responsibly sourced.”

“My ask to government would be that there is a role to help all of us in the UK deliver better human rights for the workers in our supply chain, and make sure that the UK is progressive in that thinking.

“We are at risk of the UK potentially becoming a dumping ground for products that can’t enter the EU, and I think it would be a real pity.”

Opie slammed the current level of government scrutiny in the Modern Slavery Act as “woeful”.

He also said that greater collaboration between businesses was needed to tackle global supply chain issues, which would “send the right signals to the market that every supplier, whether it’s in China or India or Bangladesh, is doing the same thing – because they know without doing that, they cannot get onto these really high value markets.”

“Aligning ourselves through that with these other countries would be a really powerful tool,” he added.

Lorains concluded: “I believe as the UK labour market, we have such a position to drive forward labour standards across the globe and I would be delighted to see us continue to take a leading position there.”