My Lords, I am grateful to every noble Lord and noble Baroness who has taken part in the debate, every single one of whom spoke in favour of the amendment, apart from my noble friend Lord Howe—I perfectly understand that he had to
adhere to the DHSC brief. I am certain that, if every other noble Lord were to speak in the debate, each one would support the amendment as well.
I am grateful for the particularly powerful speech of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, on determining the provenance of goods. Just as an aside, I can tell the House that, before Christmas, I thought I would impress my wife by trying to buy a couple of Oxford pillowslips myself, without troubling her. I wanted something with a thread count of over 400—for my delicate little skin, of course—and it took me hours and hours on the web to try to find a supplier among the major retailers that could guarantee that it would not be from Xinjiang province. I ended up contacting one supplier and asking, and three weeks later it replied by email guaranteeing me that the cotton was not from Xinjiang. I bought the pillowslips, and I still do not know whether or not I have been sold a pup—but they are quite nice against the skin. The noble Lord is right: we can tackle this problem only if we can trace provenance, and using DNA or other scientific evidence may be the best way to do that.
I do not want to go down the route of criticising some of the initial contracts that the Government entered into, as some noble Lords have done. There is no doubt about it: we were ripped off by some of them, we bought some duff equipment, and there will have been some dodgy contracts. But I remember that, at the time, every medic was calling out, “Get us PPE from wherever you can!” The whole world was scrabbling to get PPE. If your house is on fire, you do not spend ages on the web trying to find the cheapest fire bucket; you buy whatever you can. So I do not want to spend time on whether those contracts were value for money; that is for another day.
Someone asked: when did genocide start? I recall that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, who was in the Chamber briefly, made a powerful speech a few months ago, saying that when genocide was happening, the whole world noticed that it was happening but did nothing about it, and then afterwards said that it must not happen again. We knew that Jews were being exterminated, and after 6 million were killed we said, “It must never happen again”. We knew what Pol Pot was doing, and afterwards we said, “It must never happen again”. We knew what Stalin was doing, and afterwards we said, “We must never let it happen again”. Then there was Srebrenica, and afterwards we said, “We must never let it happen again”. We know that genocide is taking place in Xinjiang province, yet we are just putting in place systems that may, one day, eventually, stop us trading with some of the people there who are committing genocide. That is not good enough. We must act faster than that.
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We are no longer in a situation where we must frantically buy PPE from wherever in the world we can get it. As I read in the Times today, about 5 billion bits are going to be dumped. They are not fit for purpose, or we do not need them, or whatever. There is no rush to buy PPE from any dodgy source.
My noble friend relied on the standard government line that only an international court can pronounce a judgment of genocide. I do not think a majority in this
House has ever accepted that. But we are not asking for that today; we are not asking for the Government to make a judgment on whether it is genocide or not. We are not asking for a declaration of that. We are not asking—as we did in the Trade Bill—for trade to be banned with parts of China if there was announcement of genocide. We are not asking for a Private Secretary to be involved. We are not even asking for the whole Government to stop trading with those committing torture, genocide and slave labour. We are simply asking that, in a very narrow case, the Department of Health be involved in this issue.
We are not asking the Government to ban trade, nor for a resolution to be passed by the House of Commons or this House so that trade suddenly stops. We are simply asking the Government to conduct an assessment. This is not my normal style of amendment. I normally like to begin with a bludgeon. I see a china shop, I attach my bull’s horns. But today, in this modest amendment, I am only using a little scalpel—an appropriate implement for this amendment—so that the Health Minister makes an assessment. Then, it would be entirely up to the Government to take action.
This was a modest little amendment, and I reject the arguments my noble friend had to advance. We are making statements and are supposed to be complying with all our own laws on slavery, yet we are still continuing to buy stuff from China. If my noble friend could tell me that within days or weeks, we will not be purchasing any more of this PPE from areas in Xinjiang province where we believe that genocide is taking place, I would be happy to withdraw the amendment and not bring it back on Report. But I think we have to return to this on Report, and I hope we shall then all make shorter speeches but have a massive vote, as we have had in the past, in favour of this amendment or something similar. Today, however, I beg leave to withdraw.