MY mum went to work at Tate & Lyle in 1968 and stayed there for 32 years. She worked in Tate's (pronounced Tayts-is), the big orange building in Silvertown. Mum has good memories of friends from those days and still socialises with former colleagues.

Although Mum had a high opinion of her bosses and her work friends, she didn't want me to join her on the factory floor. When she worked on the icing sugar packing floor the work was hard and exhausting. But Mum would not have recognised the factory that I visited a couple of weeks ago.

Gone are the work stations of dozens of women, and in their place is a modern, mechanised, highly efficient concern. Gone is the segregated workforce, where women traditionally earned less than men, and in its place is a skilled group of people with women at all levels and in all jobs in the factory.

Women are in key roles throughout the organisation, as scientists, engineers and in key production positions. Mum was a shop steward in her later years at Tate's, and she fought hard to have women's work recognised as being of equal worth to that of the men - something which she didn't quite achieve before she left in 1990.

For Mum, and women fighting for the same deal as men, the new Equalities Bill will be welcomed and celebrated.

Devised to address the serious inequalities that still exist in the workplace, the Bill will ban age-related prejudice, and force a greater transparency of any gender pay gap to enable women and their unions to challenge discrimination.

Tate & Lyle is the largest private-sector employer in Newham, standing in a 48-acre site on the river close to the Thames Barrier. It is one of the largest refineries in the world, where enormous amounts of cane sugar are refined all day, every day for 365 days of the year.

Besides a family attachment to their cane sugar - we were never allowed to have "the opposition's" sugar in our house - I found that Newham has much to cheer about with Tate & Lyle.

True, of the 1,000 highly skilled engineers and production workers employed on the two sites, fewer are from the locality than previously - they explain that people who work there stay with the firm, and many have moved away.

But on the plus side, this is a company which is at the vanguard of Fairtrade agreements with developing nations, is committed to being green in its energy requirements on site and in its transport arrangements by rail and ship.

I enjoyed seeing the 22,000-ton sugar "mountain", which takes only a week to process, the jetty where 36,000 tons of sugar were being unloaded and watching construction of the £20 million state-of-the-art eco-friendly biomass boiler.

It was great to hear about the efforts to ensure that sugar cane producers throughout the world are getting a fair deal through the company's Fairtrade commitments.

What impressed me was hearing how much this is affecting suppliers. In Belize, for instance, partnership working has led to a £2 million boost for farmers to offset EU cuts in sugar prices. In parts of the Central American country, 85 per cent of its people are dependent on sugar production.

At a conservative estimate, the livelihoods of 300,000 people worldwide depend on the company's sugar refining operations, which is a considerable responsibility. On my visits to Africa I have spoken to farmers, and I know the effect fair trade can have for people struggling in a way that we in the West, thankfully, can hardly imagine.

Its importance for education, health and the future of these emerging nations is immense, and I am proud that standing at the heart of my own constituency, Tate & Lyle is doing more than its bit for the future of the world economy, and the one on our doorstep.

Its excellent community-support programme includes providing a base for local groups Auction My Stuff and Community Links Events Solutions, hosting visits for 750 students each year to tie in with the school curriculum. Each year, the company gives financial, in-kind or employee volunteer support to over 200 organisations, the vast majority of which are in Newham.

Over 100 years ago, one of the firm's co-founders, Henry Tate, funded the construction of the National Gallery of British Art, now called Tate Britain. Perhaps, one day, we will have a Tate East art gallery in Newham, like their counterparts Tate Britain and Tate Modern in Central London.

But for now we need to do what we can, working together with the latest Government educational initiatives like Train to Gain and other skills programmes, to ensure that more of our young people are the scientists, engineers and apprentices in Tate & Lyle's future too.

If you have any comment on this, or other issues, or if I can help, write to me at Lyn Brown MP, House of Commons, London SW1A 0AA, e-mail me at brownl@parliament.uk or call my office on (020) 7219 6999.