Speeches by Cooper.

“One of the areas where there is clear divergence in the Bill is the provision to exempt the duty to offer guaranteed hours in certain specified circumstances. I think that Mr Carberry and Mr Lillis might be on opposite sides of that argument. So can I ask you first, Mr Carberry, and then I will come to Mr Lillis, who, …”

“Temper is a strange sort of outsourcing. I do not know if you can tell me—I do not know; I am not familiar with this—if there are many of these sorts of apps. Is this a thing that is growing? Is Temper the only one in this market or are there several like this? Do you know?”

“You were involved in the decision to try to go down this route. How did you come across Temper? Did you seek them out? How did it work? How did you come across them?”

“Okay. Again, I do not know if your background is particularly in the law, but did you run the rule book over this? Did you look at the legality of this? Obviously the company appears to be a legitimate company, but there do seem to be grey areas here. Would I be right in saying that?”

“Mr Carberry, there was concern there about a potential rise in redundancies. Is that something that you are concerned about?”

“Very useful. Mr Lillis, very quickly now, you must again also be concerned about a reduction in the opportunities for your members to find work. It is surely something that is setting alarm bells ringing.”

“The official readout from “Operation kowtow”, the Chancellor’s mission to Beijing, says that she “urged China to cease its support for Russia’s defence industrial base, which is enabling Russia to maintain its illegal war against Ukraine.” Did the Chancellor elicit any such assurances, and if not, what does it mean for…”

“We have heard in the House today about an over-reliance on gas, but surely, in reality, it is an over-reliance on imported gas. The forces of this Government seem to be driving us into the hands of foreign suppliers, and as much as 80% of our gas may be imported by 2030. Should we not support domestic sources of oil an…”

“I make no apology for returning to the vital question of copyright. Notwithstanding the consultation, the plan recommends that we follow Europe in having an opt-out model. Does the Secretary of State not agree with me and the News Media Association that that would be a watering down of our exemplary copyright laws?”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Lewell-Buck. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont) on securing this important debate. I was a teenage newspaper reporter when I was first confronted with the horrific reality of a collision between a car and a…”

“So back to my original question about risk assessment. What risk assessments do you undertake? What do you do? Do you go to these suppliers? Do you look at these things? How do you make sure that you are compliant with that modern slavery statement? What do you do? How do you achieve that?”

“Ms Lorains, could I start with you? The BBC reported that victims of modern slavery who were forced by the same gang that my colleague mentioned were forced to work for Speciality Flatbreads Limited. Speciality Flatbreads supplied products to you and to other leading supermarkets. I wonder if you could tell us when you…”

“You are both happy to stand by those; yes? A question for Temu, specifically, then. That 2024 modern slavery statement states that you conduct comprehensive risk assessment to your supply chains, “to identify and mitigate potential risks of modern slavery”. What do those risk assessments involve and why are they not pu…”

“Thank you for all that. Your latter point, that would allow consumers to make decisions, but would not necessarily stop you from selling that item. You would simply offer that product and say it contains items from wherever. It is up to consumers then.”

“It was a specific allegation that there was pressure from your company to continue using cotton from China. So, can you not address that specific example?”

“If I can just turn back to cotton, Mr Heary mentioned cotton there and it is a relatively small part of your business, you say, although you are a very large business. However, 1% of a very large business might involve quite a lot of cotton. There was a report earlier this year from the US website, The Information, and…”

“Following from that, and this is perhaps a question for both of you, what systemic changes did you make to your internal processes because of that case? Were you concerned that you had not picked up on the difficulties yourselves—that it took an external source to come to you and tell you about that? Did you make chang…”

“The same question to McDonald’s: what did you do differently? Again, I appreciate the difficulty here, that these people are bad actors but the system has to be designed to take account of that. You must realise that there are people out there like that. I was interested as well to hear that Tesco has a risk register. …”

“There has been a mention there of American standards. The US reviewed its treaty with Canada and Mexico, the USMCA, to allow goods to be stopped at the US border if there were questions about labour standards. Is that something that the UK should be looking at in our new trade deals? Should we have built into them the …”

“A question for both Temu and SHEIN. First of all, do you both stand by your 2024 modern slavery statements?”