Stone Federation have this month published a document called Selecting the Correct Stone, part of which has been used as a response to an early day motion by MPs last month that called on firms to avoid buying sandstone produced by companies using child labour.

Early day motions (EDMs) are motions submitted by MPs for debate in the House of Commons. Few are ever actually debated. They are used to publicise specific issues.

Last month’s EDM was put forward by Labour MP Jim Sheridan and signed by 56 MPs, including ethical construction campaigner Michael Clapham. It achieved its aim of gaining publicity as it was reported in Building magazine.

A lot of imported sandstone is used in hard landscaping projects particularly. As sandstone and granite now tend to be the materials of choice for hard landscaping, the volumes of imports from India and China have grown considerably in the past decade or so.

Anti-Slavery International has estimated that up to a million children work in India’s stone quarries.

Stone Federation’s Selecting the Correct Stone, which is available free to the stone industry’s customers, includes a section on ethical and social issues. The Federation emailed the section to Building in response to the report in the magazine.

Part of the section reads: “Child labour and bonded labour is still used in quarry sites in the developing world and companies that have been encouraged to abandon these practices should not find themselves penalised by the price being the only consideration.

“It is vital that the extraction site is visited and appropriate questions asked. The health and safety of these operations should also be assessed.”

However, one importer of Indian stone told NSS he had been told by his suppliers that his shirt was more likely to have involved child labour than the stone he was buying because children were not strong enough to work in block stone quarries. He said the best way of ending child labour was to trade India out of it.

Another commented: “There’s a danger of taking an imperialist view of ethical trading. There’s a cultural aspect. For us to do something like setting up a school for the children of our suppliers would be somewhat patronising. India is a rising superpower.”