Here are the positive suggestions from MPs in the debate, distilled for your delicate attention, dog:
Catherine West (Lab)
- Public Procurement: Prioritise ethical sourcing and local manufacturing (e.g., uniforms for military, prisons, NHS) via the Procurement Act 2023.
Imagining the opposite argument, the taxpayer can't afford to pay for social care and dentists and defence, so how can UK-made uniforms be a higher priority? A lot of people were brought-up on economics text books that said this kind of thing was down-market and stupid and cynical as well; they don't get the "ethical" side of buying from the UK.
I think that tax-funded buyers should be offered a list of relevant UK manufactuers and asked to inform each one about the order, and publish any feedback about whether a smaller order or a more precise order - maybe boots instead of general PPE - could have helped them compete. This could be a cheap way of finding local contractors who can help with just a tweak to the contract.
- Support for Small Firms: Capital expenditure aid, R&D funding, and training/apprenticeship promotion.
- Fashion Watchdog: Proposed to protect small manufacturers from unfair practices (e.g., late payments, order cancellations).
Modelled on the grocery watchdog. I'm not sure how this works in practice but - given accounts of how retailers treat their wholsale suppliers - this can only be good. There's a question about whether overseas firms can use the same watchdog. If so, can we charge a tariff to pay the cost? If not, surely a buyer will bully an overseas supplier to pay airmail instead of bullying a supplier with a watchdog.
Two side-notes.
(1) We pay a little towards this idea of fast fashion through British Fashion Council, which is an office at the Greater London Assembly so not what it sounds like at all. We might also subsidise fashion courses, which find it easier to teach sketching than production. The graduates sometimes end-up as buyers for those very retailers which bully suppiers.
(2) The idea that it feels good to wear British is a way of keeping orders in the UK.
I saw two idential bundles of socks in Primark a year or two ago.
One was made in Portugal, a democratic welfare state with a good human rights record.
One was made in China with "Primark Cares" on it, because there was some kind of recycled yarn. So the sock-buying public is not averse to buying things from China that have "Cares" written on them. There is scope for some kind of public education here but it's hard to know how and I should come back to this.
- Sustainability: Invest in recycling, used garment collection, and regenerated fabrics to make the UK a global leader in sustainable fashion.
- Skills & Education: Partner with universities (e.g., Manchester Metropolitan) to integrate automation/robotics into fashion education.
This is a major flaw in any course - specially fashion and footwear. Courses concentrate on what's cheap to teach and does not upset the overseas students. They don't concentrate on how to fix a sewing machine bacause it's wrong to buy from an autocracy. They don't offer a lasting machine or a lasting service for stretching uppers over the shape of a foot. This can be changed.
(a) if an international student wants a visa to a fashion course, there can be a condition that it's a good course
(b) "good" can include a requriement that the course
- mentions the problems of countries without human rights or a welfare state undercutting the rest and not developing as hoped.
- teaches soemthing about making
Shockat Adam (Ind)
- Military/NHS Uniforms: Mandate UK manufacturing for national security and economic benefits (e.g., British Army’s £80M annual clothing budget).
- Garment Trading Adjudicator: Modelled on the Groceries Code Adjudicator to enforce fair purchasing practices (e.g., penalise brands for order volatility).
- Tax Incentives: Break for companies using waste/deadstock fabrics to tackle fashion waste.
I don't understand how this could work.
I do think that the fabric recycling companies - the ones that make shoddy or speaker cones or even bales of clothing for export - could be paid to put on exhibitions in high streets.
- "Made in the UK" Trademark: Restrict label to genuinely UK-made products (currently exploitable loophole).
...this has been done but government can do it better. The people who did it used a registered trade mark for use only as defined under some piece of legislation, current or not, that had a definition.
The loopholes can be tidied-up for use of the union jack symbol.
Ebay sellers often use it to show that they sell from the UK. Maybe someone could design them a logo for their purpose.
Portugese bootmakers use it to show that their boots are inspired by the UK, making sure that "made in Portugal" is visible on packing. I have met these people. I think that maybe the message is too complicated and needs simplifying for consumers; I think a union jack should mean a product has final and significant assembly or manufacturing in the UK and someone better qualified than me can find a definition.
MadeInBritain.org have already done it. The trouble is that it's £234 including VAT and as one MP said, if you are making in the UK you have a lot of costs that overseas manufacturers do not have; it is a surprise you are in business at all. A proportion of UK businesses will be loss-making, waiting to close, in recievership, or in the hands of people who are doing a lot of jobs at once and may be young, old, ill, or not tuned-in to the idea of a Made in Britain brand. No wonder there are only three footwear manufacturers on the list. My wholesaler used to buy from a slipper manufacturer that used these tags which cost about 2p + VAT and delivery. I kept some and used them in photos of other products, but, again, these products didn't fly off the shelves.
- Consumer Awareness Campaign: Fund initiatives to highlight local manufacturing benefits.
"Made in a Democratic Welfare State" is what I write in small print on my products, but they don't fly off the shelves! On the other hand, a lot of buyers don't know that Bangladesh or India has no welare state while competitors in Leicester do, and this raises costs. Some of these people write trade deals. Others write economics text books. There's a need for a range of slogans in case some of them work. They need
...why buy British? and not Belgian? or Chinese? And put in a positive way in a range of sentences? Now that lots of us are quite international in where we live or come from, the idea of supporting British products like supporting a British football team still makes some sense, but there needs to be more to say why I should feel good wearing a British sock. Put another way, you can already buy union jack swing tags at Moorplan, but, by themselves, they don't make things fly off the shelves if the competition is cheaper or better advertised or more often re-styled.
- National Body: Create a director of manufacturers to advocate for the sector and foster regional clusters (e.g., Sheffield, Manchester).
National register of factories with options to opt-in or opt-out of add comments like whether the factory is interested in outside orders and what their usual minimum order is, what kind of machinary they use and what they are set-up to make. Much of this information could and probably would be added-on by freemium private sector providers, but the basics could be provided from HMRC data - VAT and income tax - as well as improved Companies House detail and import/export data. This is something that central govenment can do best. Regional government has to ask for the data each time they have an idea.
If other nearby governments join-in, better still.
Sarah Olney (LD)
- Legislation: Introduce a duty of care for environmental/human rights in supply chains, with full traceability requirements.
I suggest that a factory label on each garment should satisfy the tracability requirement.
In India, this is normal anyway.
In military clothing, it used to be normal to have a factory name stamped inside: I know from old army surplus trousers.
I think government needs to help retailers. If a country like Myanmar has one of the worst human rights records and no welfare state, I think it should be government that schemes-up a system of tariffs to make Mayanmar goods more expensive but rewards those countries that get better. I don't think Temu or British Home Stores or Amazon are the best people to do it individually; I think government should do it for everyone in the UK and preferably acting with other governments.
- Joint Liability: Hold retailers accountable for sub-contractor violations (e.g., forced labour in Xinjiang cotton).
- China Strategy: Ban UK listings for companies using slave labour.
- Skills Upskilling: Government-funded training to address machinist shortages.
- Export Support: Reduce Brexit-related barriers for small businesses (e.g., knitwear exporters).
This is a huge thing for me as a sole trader under the VAT threshold - some way to pay EU VAT in advance and know what the bill will be, so I can somehow type it into my software that quotes ecommerce shipping costs. There may already be modules for some platforms like Shopify but I don't know about them; I think government has a role trying to make this avaialable.
Better still would be to synchronise VAT so that if something is sold legally in the UK, that's good enough for the VAT authorities in France or whatever EU country. If Brexiteers have some emotive slogan against this, deport them to Rowanda.
Rebecca Paul (Con)
- Cost Reduction: Lower energy costs, business rates, and regulatory burdens to improve UK competitiveness.
- Skills Pipeline: Strengthen technical education routes for garment/textile manufacturing.
- Trust Rebuilding: Address past labour compliance issues to restore confidence in UK sourcing.
- Export Growth: Leverage UKFT’s trade show support and London Fashion Week to boost global brand reputation.
London Fashion Week should
- ask UK factories to nominate good customers to show (this requires a list of UK factories)
- display the names of the UK factories alongside the person who has designed a sock or whatever (let's be honest: rapid changes of fashion are over-rated and pretty crappy idea)
Chris Bryant (Minister for Trade)
- Procurement Reform: Use Procurement Act 2023 to expand ethical/local sourcing across all government departments (e.g., MOD uniforms).
Software and web sites could be cheaper than more legislation.
I haven't done a job like buying hospital gowns for a Sodexo hostpital, but guess I'd like a simple checklist if I had to do it:
- inform UK contractors on a website written for the purpose and ask for comment about how the order could be changed to suit them
- buy from the same person as before who puts-in cheap bids
- the web page publishes feedback, often anonymised
- wait for the boss to tell me if I should do anything different next time
- look for ideas myself like sending smaller more specific orders such as "100 gowns" rather than "1000 units of PPE including helmets gowns and footwear".
- R&D Funding: £4.3B allocated for manufacturers, including fashion (e.g., antimicrobial fabrics, automation).
- Trade Promotion: Enhance support for SMEs in exports (e.g., London Fashion Week, British Fashion Council).
- Responsible Business Conduct: Review to curb forced labour/sustainability issues without overburdening businesses.
- Late Payment Crackdown: Address cash flow issues for small suppliers.
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