Ethical Fashion in The House of Lords

Yesterday was a ground breaking day for the ethical fashion movement, as Baroness Young of Hornsey secured the first ever parliamentary debate on the subject, asking Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to support and promote the ethical and sustainable fashion and clothing industry. The debate lasted an hour and a half, and showed the importance and the support to drive the issue further.

Baroness Lola Young, was appointed a life peer in 2004, having been awarded an OBE in 2001. Her career includes successful roles both in academia and in the arts. I first met Baroness Young a couple of years ago when she came to a steering meeting for our DFID funded Spotlight on Sourcing project at Ethical Fashion Forum. As somebody that has worked in parliament (for John Battle MP in 2005) it has been a personal dream of mine that debate in parliament on this subject happen. The conversations that I have had with MPs and staffers over the years since I started working in sustainable fashion, have always demonstrated a disconnect at being able to see the issues that directly effect people and the planet from the clothing and retail industry.

Baroness Lola Young of Hornsey

Over the past two years Baroness Young has worked passionately supporting the movement, as an ambassador for both the Ethical Fashion Forum and Made-By, and contributing greatly to the debate and awareness raising of the issues. In 2009, she created the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on the subject, and has been growing its support in parliament ever since. I have had the pleasure of working very closely with Baroness Young, over the past nine months through the Cultural Leadership Programme – Leadership Advance, Making Diversity Work, on which I am an associate. The facilitation and mentoring support of Baroness Young has been incredibly challenging and rewarding part of the programme which will be reaching its climax at the end of this month with our project showcase at the V & A. A few weeks ago, as part of the Leadership Advance  I went with the other associates to meet Baroness Young in the House of Lords for afternoon tea. This gave us a chance to learn how the House of Lords really works from the inside, I had never really understood the protocol and ritual of even though which even though I had worked in the House of Commons.  Although progressive in some ways, the House of Lords really is still run in a very old fashioned way. They still record all the bills on vellum (goat’s skin) for example. In this light, you can what a feat securing a debate on a topic in the House of Lords really is.

The House of Lords

Baroness Young’s Speech was followed by responses from Lord Haskell, Lord Addington, Lord Sheikh, Lord Sugar, Baroness Rendell of Babergh, Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall, Baroness Quin, and Lord Henly (The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for DEFRA) There is a lot of interesting information shared and questions raised and I recommend watching the debate for yourself, or reading through the complete transcript on Hansard. Here are a few quotes and points that I found to be particularly striking from the speeches.

Baroness Young of Hornsey:

“Fashion and clothing are sometimes seen as frivolous, or only of minority interest…Many noble Lords have interest in human rights, forced labour practices, environmental issues, international development, organic farming, corporate responsibility, animal welfare—et cetera, et cetera—and can make substantial, well-informed contributions on this subject as it touches on all these areas.”

“Creating and making, selling and buying fashion and clothing clearly are not marginal activities. The BFC estimated that in 2009 the UK fashion industry directly contributed £20.9 billion to the UK economy. There are some 815,000 jobs directly arising from it.”

“Fashion carries social and cultural meaning, and thus how we feel about clothes is subjective and prone to change. This has always been the case, but we seem to have reached a moment where the renewal of the self—the demonstration of our sense of belonging—is achieved through overconsumption of clothing, the costs of which include damaging agricultural practices; resource-intensive fibre, fabric and garment manufacturing; and the exploitation of garment workers and passive consumers who follow trends prescribed by the industry, and who are ill informed about, and distanced from, the creative and labour practices attached to their clothes.”

Baroness Young raised several questions and calls to action for the Government:

1 – Can we introduce tax breaks for Green Businesses? Read about Harold Tilman’s call for this.

2 –  Do the Government have a strategy for using their potential to lead by example and to embed ethical and sustainable principles in their procurement processes? (The government currently £1.186 billion a year on textile-related items, there are currently no core requirements that these meet ethical standards.

3 – Will the Government commit at least to investigate if the fashion retailers are using their purchasing power to treat suppliers fairly, and their impact on ethical clothing production, to establish whether the remit of the supermarkets adjudicator should be extended to cover fashion retailers as well?

4 – In terms of Cotton,DfID should recognise the developmental and environmental benefits of organic cotton production and fund projects to develop this sector.

5 – The subsidies in the EU and USA for cotton farmers, forces farmers in developing parts of the world such as West Africa to try and compete on a global market against subsidised cotton. How does the department intend to demonstrate that it is seeking to influence directly the EU Commission’s proposals on the future of cotton subsidies, or has it begun to build the necessary coalition among member states and MEPs to end this subsidy?

6 – We need to support the honourable Member for St Austell and Newquay Early Day Motion on the matter of forced child labour to harvest cotton in Uzbekistan. In January 2011, the Council of the European Union announced that it had agreed changes to the EU-Uzbekistan Partnership and Cooperation Agreement protocol with Uzbekistan to extend the provisions of this PCA to the trade in textiles. These have yet to be approved by the European Parliament.

7 – What plans do the Government have to help the consumer who wishes to make ethical choices by working with the industry to improve traceability throughout the supply chain? Hopefully this will in part be addressed by such bodies as the recently formed Sustainable Apparel Coalition.

8 – Can real fur stop being used within the House and Palace? The Queen’s Guard caps are still made from the pelt of cruelly treated Canadian bears, there does seem to be some movement to change this, but the progress is slow. In addition the ceremonial robes worn in the House of Lords, have a rabbit fur trimming (it was perviously ermine) Faux Fur replacements are available, can these replace all the fur robes in trimmed robes in the House?

Lord Haskel: “Ethical consumerism and sustainability in the textile industry is something that we should all support. It is an issue which gets support from some of the big players in the industry—for example, Levi Strauss; the Government, with their sustainable clothing map; and ethical retailers such as Marks & Spencer. But that support is often expressed more in word than in deed. In addition, although the support passionate, it is also fragmented and uncoordinated.”

Lord Addington: “If we are going to make sure that the workers in these overseas industries are better treated, making sure that the textiles and the product we consume here are valued is a good first step—making sure that you invest in these people to get a better return… Can the Government tell us what they are doing to encourage those employers and those states that are involved to represent and cherish these people?”

Lord Sheikh:

“Promoting ethics in fashion is one of the biggest challenges facing the industry. Due to our own success and leadership in this field, I thought it best to begin my contribution with a few words on the British fashion industry. London is one of the key fashion capitals in the world. According to the British Fashion Council, designers and retailers spent approximately £13 million on shows during London Fashion Week last year. The fashion industry makes a contribution of £21 billion to the British economy, which makes it the country’s 15th largest sector.

Garments are said to account for 5 per cent of consumer expenditure in Britain. It has been estimated that Britain spends £46 billion per year on imported clothing. The civil unrest in north Africa, Egypt in particular, has slowed the supply of textile products to the UK, thus affecting a number of leading British retailers, including Marks & Spencer and Debenhams. These recent events can perhaps serve as a catalyst for retailers to look for more suppliers based in Britain. This will have the added benefit of boosting the UK textile manufacturing base. Clothing companies have warned that the price of garments will increase due to the rising cost of cotton, which has risen by 150 per cent since the beginning of 2010.

With our prestige in this industry comes social responsibility. Ethical fashion practices will broaden opportunities and improve the standard of living for millions of citizens in the developing world. The low cost of producing garments overseas is to be welcomed, but should not be at the expense of decent working conditions. I wholeheartedly support the important work of the Ethical Fashion Forum in seeking to improve working conditions in the fashion industry. One of the key aims of the Forum is poverty reduction. This is a subject that is very close to my heart. The global fashion industry is said to generate profits of $1 trillion each year. However, the working conditions and salaries of those who contribute to the success of the industry are a huge cause for concern. Many who work in the fashion industry are on frightfully low wages.”

Lord Sugar: “The retail trade as we know it today seems to rely solely on cheap imports. Compared with the past, when a young woman’s decision to buy a dress took perhaps a couple of weeks to build up to, bearing in mind the large financial commitment, by today’s standards the price of clothing has tumbled-so much so that a dress that once represented a week’s wages now costs the equivalent of a round of drinks on a Saturday night. Because of that, demand has gone up tremendously, which in turn has created an appetite for more and more designs, so there is now a continuous flow of new products through the stores. I believe this has created, in effect, a kind of “buy weekly” mentality whereby the old traditional autumn, winter and spring collections seem to have gone by the wayside, particularly with the low-cost stuff. As a result, it is fair to say that we have lost the manufacturing industry for high-volume production in this country. We seriously need to recognise this fact.”

Baroness Rendell of Babergh: “At present, the industry suffers from unreasonable deadlines imposed by retailers, contracts with suppliers that are never written down, variations in terms and conditions after delivery, even to a reduction in price, and unreasonable penalties imposed on suppliers for defective products. Does the Minister agree that a change is needed here and that the Government’s encouragement of other textile and clothing firms in the UK to follow the example set by the few retailers who work on ethical principles is much needed? Are not these green and humanitarian issues that everyone who cares about their fellow men and women and animals, as well as looking good and keeping warm, should support? It would be good to know that they care about those issues as much as they care about our forests.”

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: “The fashion industry divides opinion. For those involved in it, it is all consuming and endlessly fascinating. For others, it represents some of the most repellent aspects of a vain, consumerist culture. Personally, I confess to being more fascinated than repelled. I love clothes and I love fashion. What has not yet been said in this debate is that we have to recognise that fashion is part of the entertainment industry, at least to some extent. There is a lot of fun in fashion, and that is what attracts people to it. I particularly love the imagination and creativity of designers, and I admire the artistry of the photographers and stylists through whose eyes we understand their work. Frankly, most of us never get on to the front row, or even the back row, of a catwalk show in fashion week. It is therefore a tremendous pleasure to have the opportunity to talk about these matters in this House.”

Another thing that has not quite been teased out-and I am not going to try to-is the definition of the difference between fashion and clothes; but there is something there that is quite interesting. I want to concentrate on “sustainable” and “clothing”, but in a slightly different way-in perhaps a micro, rather than a macro, way. I want to talk about the old fashioned concept of “make do and mend”-perhaps appropriately in these straitened times.

“We have already heard that most of the clothes available today on the high street are made far away in China, Asia or eastern Europe by people who we will probably never meet, working in conditions we would prefer not to think about, for wages that would barely buy us a cup of coffee. These clothes are, as a consequence, absurdly cheap-as we have heard-which allows them to be regarded as disposable. The human, economic and environmental consequences of our overconsumption have been graphically spelt out by other speakers. However, this is a fairly recent phenomenon. Other speakers have touched on how different it was when they were growing up. Certainly, when I was growing up, clothes were relatively much more expensive and there was much less choice. If you go back a bit further into the 19th century and beyond, the picture is even more starkly different. Clothes had to be made by hand, either by the person who was going to wear them or, for the better off, by a professional tailor or seamstress in the community. Making clothes was hard work. They had to last and they were often therefore reinvented by the addition of small embellishments, such as lace or ribbons, remade to suit changed shape or fashion, or passed on to others.”

“The fashion industry is highly influential, particularly on young people. If it began to move away from its focus on cheapness and disposability, and started to construct some messages about the importance of conserving, reusing and repairing-it would be very difficult for it, I entirely understand-then the generation that needs to hear might begin to listen. There are some signs that this is about to happen. I hope that they will grow.”

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Henley):

“Once we have bought clothes, there are the significant factors of water, detergents, greenhouse gas emissions associated with washing and drying them, and the waste produced at the end of life. Waste issues are close to my department. They have hit the headlines recently. Concerns about the impact of fast fashion are well founded. I was given an interesting statistic earlier. We buy about 2 million tonnes of clothing a year and discard about 1 million tonnes. It seems to me that our wardrobes are growing at an unsustainable rate, but I ask all noble Lords and Ladies to look at their wardrobes to see what is happening. Where are the clothes going?”

You can watch the debate online here, it starts at 17:47. You can read the full transcripts from the debate here.