The Right Honorable The Baroness Young of Hornsey OBE

The Right Honourable The Baroness Young of Hornsey OBE, a member of UK Parliament’s House of Lords, a key driver of UK’s Modern Slavery Act 2015, and Chancellor of University of Nottingham, is a featured speaker at the 2025 Design for Freedom Summit. As she wrote in the opening of Design for Freedom’s International Guidance & Toolkit, “There is real momentum and desire behind the drive for change in the ways in which supply chains operate across the globe.” “Legislation is helping to focus minds on the subject but we also need practical advice and informed support.”

During the Summit, global industry leaders will learn more about this momentum, as well as her extraordinary journey, from becoming the first Black woman to serve in the House of Lords, from growing up in foster care in North London. In her 2024 memoir, Eight Weeks, the Baroness writes about her remarkable life journey. She “assembles the pieces of her past into a portrait of a childhood in a system that often made her feel invisible and unwanted. Alongside glimpses into her life as a peer, activist, and campaigner it tells the powerful story of her determination to defy the odds,” cites her publisher Penguin Random House.

In May 2024, Baroness Young of Hornsey introduced to the House of Lords the Commercial Organisations and Public Authorities Duty (Human Rights and Environment) Bill, placing a duty on commercial organizations and public authorities to “prevent human rights and environmental harms, including an obligation to conduct and publish human rights and environmental due diligence assessments on their own operations, subsidiaries, and value chains; to make provision for civil liability, penalties, and a criminal offence for failures to comply with the duty; and for connected purposes,” according to UK Parliament.

In introducing the Bill, she said, “Where is the real will to deal with these issues demonstrated? For how much longer are we going to go on saying that it is too much of a burden? Think of the burden on those families and on people who live in poverty, because they have no choice about the kind of employment they can seek and so are continually exploited so that we can wear cheap clothes, have nice cheap food …. It is just not acceptable.”

In advocating for legislation to combat modern slavery, Baroness Young of Hornsey reminds us that fighting modern slavery goes beyond just crafting legislation. “Legislation is no good if you cannot implement it,” she said in a 2021 Peer and Parliamentarian interview. “It needs to be monitored and made sure that the relevant punishments are ready to hand out. But a lot of it is unseen and hidden away, so it is easier to deal with the most extreme cases that come into view, but not those that are hidden away.”

The Baroness goes onto say how industries such as construction, given its complexities and opaqueness, make it difficult to mitigate and prevent forced labor. But tools such as the International Guidance & Toolkit, besides raising awareness about the issue and materials most at risk, is “engaging the construction sector in meaningful dialogue, which will contribute to helping the move away from these abhorrent practices,” she writes in the Toolkit’s introduction. “Awareness is an important first step towards the eradication of forced labour from supply chains and there remains much hard work to be done if we’re to transform the way the construction industry goes about its business.”