Malcolm presses the First Minister to reinforce ethical trading in Local & National Government

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Upholding Fair Trade practises in publicly fundedcontracts Malcolm Chisholm (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab): To ask the First Minister what action the Scottish Governmentwill take to ensure that fair trade principles are applied to the awarding ofpublic contracts. (S3F-811) The First Minister(Alex Salmond): Althoughthere are limitations on the ability to discriminate between fair trade and non-fairtrade products under public procurement legislation, we support the guidancethat was issued to all public bodies in Scotland in 2005 and which explains howpublic procurement can, nevertheless, support fair trade principles MalcolmChisholm: Was the First Minister concerned by thisweek's BBC Scotland report that several public authorities have entered intocontracts with companies accused of serious abuses of workers' rights, includingchild labour?

Will the Government first take action to ensure that productscurrently procured by the Scottish public sector meet minimum ethical and fairtrade criteria; and secondly, will it go beyond that to include ethical and fairtrade criteria in its own procurement contracts, mindful that several other Europeancountries do that, and that the International Development Committee of the WestminsterParliament, based on evidence from the United Kingdom Government, has statedthat " there are no legal reasons why public authoritiesshould not include fair and ethical trade criteria in their procurement practices"? TheFirst Minister: Iam sure that Malcolm Chisholm knows - because he was a minister when the previousguidance, which we support, was introduced - thatthe challenge that we must all overcome is that under the procurement legislation,the criteria used to determine the winning bid must be linked to the subjectmatter of the contract, which is to say to the product and not the supplier.The examples given in the BBC Scotland report concerned local authorities. TheGovernment is concerned about that and will consider the matter further. May 22nd 2008, (Columns 8915)