Guardian story, 17 6 08
The fashion chain Primark has axed three longstanding suppliers in southern India for using child labour, after being alerted to the practice by the BBC.

The suppliers - from the Tirapur region of the Tamil Nadu province - were subcontracting embroidery work on dresses to children working from home.

The retailer, which is owned by the Associated British Foods group and operates 170 stores in the UK, accounts for £1 in every £10 spent on clothing.

It has grown to become Britain's second-biggest clothing chain by offering cut-price fashion, with T-shirts for as little as £1. Almost its entire range is sourced from low-cost suppliers in Asia.

The move comes two weeks after Channel 4 pulled from its schedules a documentary about the sourcing of low-cost high street fashion. The programme, called The Devil Wears Primark, was billed as an exposé of Indian clothing factories which would lift the lid on the buying practices of cheap clothes stores through hidden-camera reporting in India and an attempt to replicate the conditions discovered.

Primark said yesterday it had axed the suppliers - one of them has been producing garments for the chain since 1996 - for "failing to meet its strict ethical standards". ABF's chief executive, George Weston, said Primark had been alerted by a BBC Panorama investigation last month. The company said it immediately removed the garments supplied by the factories from its stores. The suppliers produce 200,000 garments a year for the firm. It is understood that they also supply other UK retailers.

Weston said Primark "would normally work with suppliers to fix practices that we don't like", but the suppliers had been guilty of "wholesale deception".

The suppliers, he said, had been audited - to ensure they complied with Primark's code of conduct - three times in the past 18 months. He admitted that Primark had "had suspicions" about the suppliers before the BBC provided the evidence that children were being used to make garments. Weston said the suppliers had denied the allegations at first and it was "their wholesale deceit that led us to fire them".

Weston denied that the use of child labour was an unavoidable consequence of selling goods at very low prices. "The way we get to a £2 T-shirt is not through letting children work on embroidery. It is because of low mark-ups and big volumes. Our overheads are low and we don't run expensive advertising campaigns."

He added that Primark paid its suppliers the same for a £2 T-shirt as other more upmarket retailers who charge customers a lot more. "We don't want kids working on our clothes. We bring a lot of good to the people who work in our factories in proper working conditions. We want people paid properly."

Weston added that Primark had sacked another supplier earlier this year, in Bangladesh, for breaking its code of conduct on workers' rights.

He said he was "very angry" about the sacked suppliers: "We thought we knew these people and thought we were doing good, and then we discover this issue. We feel very let down." He said Primark had informed the Ethical Trading Initiative, which monitors the working conditions of workers in developing countries producing goods for the UK market.

Primark said it "takes this lapse in standards in our embroidery supply chain very seriously indeed" and would now "tighten control" of suppliers. It has appointed a non-governmental organisation in southern India "to act as its eyes and ears on the ground."