Ed Miliband buys off his critics on Chinese forced labor … for now

LONDON — Labour ministers have a vision. By the time of the next election, they want to see energy churning out across the country thanks to the power of the sun.

But the plans have alarmed some members of parliament and peers on Labour’s own benches who fear that, as the United Kingdom rushes to go green, supply chains will become ever more exposed to China’s grip on the global solar market — and to goods made using slave labor.

Sensing the pressure, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband this week executed a screeching U-turn. 

The government had resisted pressure for months to tighten rules on supply chains as flagship legislation for setting up the state-owned clean energy company, Great British Energy, made its way through parliament. Labour MPs were instructed earlier this year to defeat attempts by rebels to amend the bill. 

But on Wednesday, Miliband announced ministers would be clamping down on the risk of slave labor after all — by tabling their own amendment to the bill, which will commit the government to “measures for ensuring that slavery and human trafficking is not taking place in [GB Energy’s] business or supply chains.”

The move has, on the whole, assuaged anxieties among lawmakers. At least for now.

Forced labor exposure

“We didn’t necessarily need a law change. We needed to see the intent, [but] we now have both,” said Sarah Champion, a Labour MP and the chair of parliament’s International Development Committee, who twice led those rebel efforts to strengthen the bill. 

She withdrew her last proposed amendment after ministers agreed a string of concessions, including promising cross-Whitehall meetings to root out risks of human rights abuse. The government amendment is likely an attempt to package up those commitments in legislation.

“I genuinely didn’t think when I started this in September we’d get [the] government to go as far as it has,” Champion said.

Miliband’s move comes as the government prepares major spending on solar.

The government has already announced plans to start dishing out millions of pounds to get solar panels onto schools and hospitals this summer, partly using GB Energy funds. The bill itself — with the new amendment squirreled in — has almost finished winding its way through parliament.

Miliband has also greenlit a string of new solar farms since coming to power.

But as ministers move to decarbonize the electricity system, including plans to roughly triple power generated from solar by 2030, MPs, peers and human rights experts alike have been urging policymakers to get tougher on where and how those panels are sourced. 

Solar panels sold internationally are “very much exposed to Uyghur forced labor,” academic research warned in 2023, referring to Chinese domination of polysilicon production, a raw material used in solar panels and linked to human rights abuse against the country’s persecuted Ugyhur minority in the Xinjiang region.

“The U.K. is at extremely high risk of importing solar panels that have Xinjiang inputs in them, because there's no law prohibiting companies from doing that,” Laura Murphy, the research’s co-author, now senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, said. They were speaking before Miliband changed course. 

Ministers should ban the purchase of “millions of blood red solar panels,” argued David Alton, a crossbench peer and chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, also before the change.

He has, like Champion, tried twice to amend the GB Energy Bill. 

His most recent attempt — which would eradicate “goods and services tainted by modern slavery and human trafficking” from GB Energy supply chains — prompted a “productive” meeting with ministers, he said Thursday.

“The government said that … if I was agreeable to withdrawing my own amendment, they would table theirs to achieve the same objective. And, of course, I'm very happy for that to be the case,” he said. 

Alton has no plans now to push his amendment to a vote — but cautioned that the government must go further and introduce an “explicit provision in U.K. law prohibiting the import of slave made goods.”

The government’s amendment is a “start,” agreed Iain Duncan Smith, a senior Conservative backbencher and long-time China hawk. “It's narrow because it's aimed only at GB Energy. What I would want from them is an absolute commitment across all imports coming into the U.K.”

Net-zero race

This Labour administration is not the first U.K. government to find itself dogged by pressure to clean up supply chains. 

Solar panels exported from China to the U.K. were worth $411 million in 2024 (around £309 million), according to the energy think tank Ember. And as of 2023, between a third and a half of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon came from Xinjiang, according to Murphy’s report.

But it’s tricky to establish exactly how much of that could be destined for the U.K. — which is also part of the problem.

Supply chains are increasingly difficult to trace, Murphy explained, because Chinese companies are becoming more reluctant to name their suppliers, while the U.K. has no transparency rules requiring shipping records to be made public. Plus, polysilicon from Xinjiang is often melted down alongside other raw materials outside the region, experts say, making it hard to trace whether components were produced using slave labor.

“Opportunities for government contracts are a good incentive for companies to do the right thing,” Murphy said of the amendment. But ministers must “find a way to robustly monitor that work. And create a mechanism for excluding companies that are found lacking.”

Miliband’s conversion to tougher rules has also prompted debate over whether the U.K. will be able to meet its lofty renewables goals, if it becomes harder and pricier to get the solar supplies the country needs. 

The government should ensure the “knee-jerk U-turn doesn’t damage our environmental goals and the solar industry,” Conservative Environment Network Deputy Director John Flesher told The Times earlier this week. 

But Miliband insisted Britain is “absolutely able to meet our net-zero targets,” and could carry on purchasing from China.

“We already know that there are factories [in China] that produce five times more than all the solar panels in the U.K. that are independently certified as not using slave labor under the initiative of the solar industry,” he told the BBC Thursday morning, alluding to a Solar Stewardship Initiative scheme launched by industry group Solar Energy UK and its European Union counterpart in 2021.

The SSI involves a “robust framework of standards designed to ensure ethical, traceable and sustainable practices within solar supply chains,” Solar Energy UK said, by independently auditing and certifying manufacturing practices.

The move will not stymie efforts to hit clean energy targets, argued Murphy. 

“It’s critical to note that there is far more than enough untainted solar panels produced in the world to meet the U.K.’s needs,” she said. “Doing the right thing by Uyghur and other workers will not slow down Labour’s energy agenda.”

The Treasury always wins

Looming over all this is Labour’s pursuit of a Whitehall-wide “reset” in often-troubled relations between London and Beijing. The government is working on a long-delayed “audit” of U.K.-China relations, which, Whitehall officials say, are dominated by the Treasury’s all-consuming pursuit of economic growth.

Ed Miliband, on a trip to Beijing in March, raised solar supply chains with Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang. “I will be in the business of challenge as well as cooperation,” he said ahead of the trip. But details of the conversation — let alone whether the Chinese gave any ground — are scant. 

That hasn’t stopped Miliband promising to host Chinese officials next year to discuss, among other things, “enhance[d] cooperation” on cleantech.

And closer trading relations could open the way for more goods potentially tainted by forced labor to flood into the U.K. without stricter laws, experts warned.

That’s because rules in other countries already go beyond Miliband’s newly tweaked GB Energy Bill. EU countries voted last year for stricter rules banning produce from entering the bloc where there were human rights risks. The U.S. passed laws in 2021 barring imports of goods made “wholly or in part with forced labor” — especially from Xinjiang.

There’s also a cost argument, which may hold sway at the fiscally obsessed Treasury. Buying Chinese panels is “dirt cheap,” argued Adam Bell, once head of energy strategy in Whitehall and now a director at the Stonehaven consultancy.

That should not be a priority concern in government, though, said Duncan Smith. “They should be prioritizing the fact that, if they are going to go with clean energy, they need to have clean hands when it comes to slave labor,” he said. 

Alton, the JCHR chair, agreed. The amendment is “only one more step on the road,” he said.

“We shouldn't be building public procurement policy, including energy transition, on the broken backs of slave labor.” 

Caroline Hug contributed to this report.