Responsible retailers should make sure they have their own systems to check the quality of supply chains.

This is the view of Tesco's group director of ethical trading, Giles Bolton. He claims businesses are too quick to blame foreign governments for a lack of regulation when something goes wrong and should be more active in monitoring what is going on themselves.

Reporting from the Sedex Global Responsible Sourcing Conference, Supply Management stated Mr Bolton highlighted the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh as a key moment where businesses took a step back to make sure such a disaster never happened again.

He commented: "There has been a great push to collaborative working across global unions and brands. We have seen some real progress in individual supply chains."

Fellow speaker Justin Bettey, European director of supply chain consultants Elevate, stated it was a constant struggle to achieve change in the industry unless there was a good business case. He pointed out the same amount of money being poured into Bangladesh in the wake of the factory disaster is not being allocated to other areas where there are similar risks, simply because firms are finding it too difficult to justify the expense.