Forced Labour and the Powers We Refuse to Use

By The Panda

Why the UK’s problem is no longer law — but activation

The United Kingdom does not lack legal tools to address forced labour in global supply chains. What it lacks is the habit of using them.

For too long, the debate has focused on whether new legislation is needed. That question now obscures a more uncomfortable truth: much of what is required can be done immediately, under powers Parliament has already conferred. The continued presence of forced-labour-tainted goods in UK markets reflects not a legal vacuum, but a pattern of institutional hesitation.

What Can Be Done Now — Without New Legislation

The most effective levers are already in place. They are administrative, financial, and procedural — and therefore easy to overlook.

Parliamentary scrutiny: ask different questions

Members of both Houses do not need new statutes to exert pressure. What is missing is not condemnation, but interrogation.

Committees with oversight of public spending, health procurement, energy, and trade can require departments and arm’s-length bodies to account for how often existing powers are exercised. Not whether policies exist, but:

• how many tenders have been flagged for enhanced supply-chain scrutiny,

• how many contracts have been modified, suspended, or terminated on slavery-related grounds,

• and what evidential thresholds are being applied before public money is released.

The distinction matters. Aggregate assurances conceal risk; disaggregated data exposes it.

Procurement: treat conditions as conditions

Public procurement remains the state’s sharpest enforcement tool.

Under existing procurement law, contracting authorities may exclude bidders or terminate contracts for grave professional misconduct or misrepresentation. These are not ethical aspirations; they are justiciable grounds grounded in public law. More recent procurement regimes governing health and social care explicitly require supply-chain disclosure and traceability across the life of a contract. A newly constituted public energy body has been placed under a statutory duty to ensure that slavery and human trafficking do not occur anywhere in its supply chain.

The question is not whether these powers exist. It is whether they are being used.

Where tender documents require assurances about supply-chain integrity, failure to test those assurances is no longer neutral. It is a decision — and one that carries legal risk.

A note for general counsel and contracting authorities

For those advising bidders or awarding bodies, the risk landscape has shifted.

Once credible evidence links a product or input to forced labour, continued reliance on generic supplier assurances becomes difficult to defend. Misrepresentation risk arises where tender responses cannot be substantiated. Contracting authorities that ignore accessible evidence may face public law challenge on grounds of irrationality or procedural unfairness, particularly where statutory duties to prevent slavery and trafficking are engaged.

The prudent response is no longer minimal compliance, but defensive diligence:

• documenting how risks were assessed,

• recording escalation and mitigation steps,

• and evidencing the basis for continued sourcing decisions.

Inaction increasingly looks like exposure.

Why the System Still Fails

If so much can be done now, why does forced labour remain embedded in UK supply chains?

The answer lies in how the law has been framed — and how institutions have learned to live within it.

Transparency without consequence

The Modern Slavery Act 2015 was never designed as a prohibition regime. Section 54 requires companies to publish annual statements describing steps taken — or not taken — to address slavery risks in their operations and supply chains. The obligation is procedural, not substantive. There is no duty to prevent harm, no requirement to disengage from abusive supply chains, and no penalty for producing statements of minimal value.

Even the Act’s limited enforcement mechanism — injunctive relief to compel compliance — has not been meaningfully deployed. Oversight exists in theory, but its exercise has been largely invisible.

The result is a system in which disclosure substitutes for accountability, and repetition substitutes for improvement.

Complexity as alibi

Global supply-chain complexity is frequently invoked as a reason for regulatory restraint. It is also increasingly untenable.

Recent investigations into tomato products sold on UK supermarket shelves — branded as European but traced through forensic testing and shipping records to high-risk regions in China — demonstrate that provenance can be established where scrutiny is applied. Ethical trading bodies and parliamentary inquiries had flagged these risks years earlier. The information was available; the capability existed.

What was missing was obligation.

International practice confirms the point. The United States’ Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act introduced a rebuttable presumption that goods linked to Xinjiang are produced with forced labour and are therefore inadmissible unless proven otherwise. Imports from the region reportedly collapsed. The European Union has since adopted forced-labour bans and mandatory due-diligence regimes scheduled to take effect later this decade.

These systems do not rely on perfect knowledge. They rely on burden-shifting — placing responsibility on those who profit, rather than on victims or journalists.

Trade law is not the real barrier

Claims that trade-based enforcement would breach international obligations are overstated. International trade law expressly permits restrictions necessary to protect public morals and to exclude goods produced by forced or prison labour. Comparable regimes are already operating in multiple jurisdictions.

The reluctance to adopt similar measures domestically reflects not legal impossibility, but policy prioritisation.

From Reporting to Responsibility

If the forthcoming review of the Modern Slavery Act results only in refined guidance or improved registries, it will fail. The real question is not what companies say, but what public authorities do when statements are contradicted by credible evidence.

Mandatory human-rights due diligence, active use of procurement exclusion and termination powers, and trade-based controls for high-risk regions are not radical innovations. They are the logical activation of tools the law already provides.

Progress in this field has never been inevitable. It has always followed pressure, consequence, and the willingness of institutions to use the powers they already possess.

Whether those powers remain dormant is no longer a question of capacity — but of choice.

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1. Modern Slavery Act 2015, s 54; s 54(11).

2. Public Contracts Regulations 2015, reg 57.

3. Health and Care Act 2022 and associated procurement regulations.

4. Great British Energy legislation (as enacted), statutory supply-chain duty provisions.

5. BBC investigation into Italian tomato supply chains (2024).

6. Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act 2021 (US).

7. Regulation (EU) 2024/… on prohibiting products made with forced labour.

8. General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1994, art XX(a), (e).