The Secretary of State for International Development (Rory Stewart)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the Sustainable Development Goals.
It is a great privilege to speak on the sustainable development goals, and it is a very unusual one for the International Development Secretary because this afternoon I will be speaking about the UK’s performance at home, not abroad. The global goals apply not just to other people’s countries, but to our own. This is a fundamental principle—a fundamental principle about being honest with ourselves, but also about learning some humility and learning, through doing it in our own country, about some of the struggles that other people are going through in their own countries.
We will be reporting in a formal report to the UN after this debate in Parliament, and I hope this debate in Parliament will help inform some of the report we send. This is the result of 350 organisations having contributed so far, with 35 events, 200 case studies and now this parliamentary debate. I really believe that the single guiding principle of the Department for International Development, which is of leaving no one behind, should guide our approach to thinking about Britain.
In presenting my brief remarks to the House, I am reminded of another thing I have learned through this process about dealing with opposite numbers in countries abroad. It is the necessary balance between pointing out problems in our own country and balancing it with our pride in and our optimism about our own country. This would be true for a development Minister in Nepal or in Rwanda. They, too, often feel—as I must, a little bit, at this Dispatch Box—the necessity of balancing talking about the negatives with talking about the things that we are genuinely proud of as a Government.
The starting point is that this is, for all the flaws and all the things we grumble about, a truly extraordinary country. Quite literally and quite technically, this country has never been so healthy and it has never been so educated. Development in this country, if it is compared with development elsewhere in the world, has been quite staggering. In the mid-19th century, life expectancy in this country hovered around 40; it is nearly twice that today. In other words, in the mid-19th century, life expectancy in this country was roughly comparable to that of rural Afghanistan. Even relatively recently, we have seen a halving in infant mortality in this country since 1985. Well within our own lifetimes, we have halved infant mortality.
This is of course true across the world; it is not just Britain. In 1980, 41% of the people in the world were living in extreme poverty. Today, only 9% of the population of the world is living in extreme poverty. For all the criticisms we make, the story across the world is one of progress. In comparing Britain with other countries, it is important to remember that we are not comparing like with like; there is an apples and oranges issue. Here we have a significant issue with relative poverty, but that is quite different from the type of absolute poverty we are talking about in somewhere like eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)
I welcome the opportunity of today’s debate, and I congratulate the Secretary of State on his appointment. Is he able to confirm that, when the UK makes its submission to the UN, we will make reference to every single one of the goals, targets and indicators for both domestic and international implementation?
Rory Stewart
Yes, I am able to confirm that. I hope my distinguished colleague the Chair of the International Development Committee will also feel that we have been quite rigorous and quite tough on ourselves, and have set quite high standards. This is a very open society, and there is no point for us as a Government in trying to hide. The statistics are out there in public, and people can see them from the Office for National Statistics, so we have tried to be as fair and frank as possible about the challenges we face and what we have achieved.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
The Secretary of State will know that the UN special rapporteur described the levels of poverty in the UK recently as “systemic” and “tragic”—I think those were the words—and that seems to have been rather glibly dismissed by some of his colleagues. Of the five goals on which the UK is focusing when it comes to the voluntary national review, why is goal 2—ending hunger—not in there when we know that the extent of food poverty, particularly childhood food poverty, in this country is so extreme?
Rory Stewart
That is a good challenge, which I think will come up again and again in these debates and in the response to the reviews. We have significant problems in our country—people will refer to, for example, food banks. I recently had a conversation that got to the heart of the matter with a Nigerian pastor who has just begun his ministry in Croydon. He was reflecting on his experience of poverty in Britain and in Nigeria. He said that there was definitely poverty in both contexts, but that it was very different. His brother had just died in hospital in Nigeria because he was unable to access basic healthcare. Of course, in Croydon, he deals with people who have significant problems, particularly with income. He talked about women who are struggling to afford sanitary products and about food banks. However, he also said that it was worth bearing in mind that those people have completely free access to healthcare and education, a water supply and shelter, so we come back time and again to the relationship between absolute and relative poverty.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
Following on from the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) made, in any city in this country there will be areas where life expectancy is lower than in other parts of that city. We still have disparities in wealth and poverty, particularly in the north, but also in the midlands and the south. There is a lot of work to be done. Although we have a national health service and the third world does not have such things—I agree with the Secretary of State about that and that it is a matter of balance—I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will draw attention at the United Nations to some of the progress we have made.
Rory Stewart
That is the right tone in approaching the subject. There is an important fundamental issue: when we think about other people’s countries, we often forget about politics. We often talk as though development in somebody else’s country is simply a matter of experts from the World Bank sitting down with a piece of paper. Yet development in any country is deeply political. People who drive development in other countries are politicians—members of political parties—and there are Oppositions who challenge them. Many of the problems in development—defensiveness, cover-ups, lack of transparency and progress—stem from the fact that we do not understand the politics well enough. The debate is therefore a good way of understanding some of the challenges in, for example, eastern DRC. People might believe that the issue around Ebola is just a technical question of getting the vaccines on the ground, but the basic issue is that the area is controlled by Opposition insurgency groups, which have a big problem with the capital. Politics is at the heart of all that.
For this country, I will move quickly through the global goals, looking at them essentially through the lens of five Ps—people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnership—and trying in every case to give examples of where we are doing well, where we are doing badly and the strengths that we have to build on. Looking at the UK as a whole is well beyond my brain and that of anyone in the House—and I am well aware that there are many experts in the House who know far more about individual areas of domestic policy than I do. I will attempt to present now what we will present to the United Nations as a way of trying to take a snapshot of Britain in 2019.
There have been significant improvements in healthcare even relatively recently. For example, stillbirths in this country have reduced by 18.8% since 2010. However, on the negative side, we need to do a great deal more on particular forms of cancer, on heart attacks and on stroke, where we do not achieve the results of some comparator developed countries. We have a strength to build on—the NHS, which is a truly remarkable organisation. It is very difficult to think of equivalents elsewhere in the world that have that key point of being free at the point of access. There are countries that have done better than us on cancer survival rates where healthcare is bankrupting for a family. It can mean the destruction of a family and the absence of health insurance can drive people to the wall.
We have reached the extraordinary stage where nearly half our population now goes to university compared with only 3% when my mother went to university. That is a big change since my mother was young. However, we can do much more in education. We are not doing as well as we can on basic numeracy and literacy and technical education compared with some of our comparators. We are also perhaps not thinking hard enough about the effect that robotics and AI will have on the world of work. Hundreds of thousands of people are at risk of losing their jobs to new technologies and we need to have bursaries for people in mid-life to retrain for a new world of work. However, to come back to the basic point of building on strengths, in our country, as hon. Members will have heard again and again from the Dispatch Box, 85% of children are in good or outstanding schools.
We have heard about equality, on which we have very significant challenges. In addition to the question raised by the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), there are other areas in this country that we do not talk about enough—for example, the elderly poor. This area can genuinely be shocking. I feel that in my constituency if I see an 88-year-old woman looking after a 92-year-old doubly incontinent man, having to wake up every two hours through the night. That is a genuinely shocking thing.
I sometimes feel, coming back from Nepal or the Congo, that our family and community support structures for the elderly are not necessarily what they are in some other, much poorer developing countries. On the other hand, on the positive side, we can point out that in this country income inequality has, unusually among advanced countries, declined.
On the planet, there is a balance between three things. Yes, we are very proud that we have gone 300 hours without coal-fired power and that we have reduced our carbon emissions more than many comparable advanced countries, but nobody can get around the fact that we are facing a huge climate planet emergency. There is an enormous amount to do and there is simply no point being complacent or talking about our achievements in the past. There is a huge amount more that Britain can be doing on technology and research and development. For example, to stop China building another 300 gigawatt coal-fired power station, we should be developing solar technology, light spectrum technology and solar film to drive down the marginal costs. That is why, as the Secretary of State for DFID, I want to double the amount we spend within our budget on climate and the environment.
On prosperity, we are leading the world in certain sectors. We are doing very, very well in financial services and technology—I have been astonished by some of the robotics and AI companies I have seen recently—but we have a big problem with productivity. There is a big challenge in northern England in particular, where we really need to get infrastructure on the ground. We have not yet unleashed the potential that could come from, for example, properly connecting Newcastle, Carlisle and Glasgow, or properly connecting Leeds and Manchester, which is the huge opportunity.
There are, however, strengths we can build on. The most obvious is that, if one looks at the elections in the 1970s, the great issue in this country was of course unemployment. With all the challenges we have in our country, the achievements on employment have been quite remarkable. In particular, compared with 2015, 700,000 more people with disabilities are now in employment. There has also been a slight reduction—not a big enough reduction, but a slight reduction in that period—in the gender pay gap.
On peace—the penultimate issue on which we are measuring ourselves—crime has been falling. At the same time, however, we have a serious problem around knife crime. We have an enormous amount to learn from Glasgow’s public health approach to knife crime. We have lost only two soldiers on active service since 2014. We live in a much more peaceful world in relation to Britain’s activities overseas. That would have been almost unimaginable for a Minister to say from this Dispatch Box at any time, probably, in the past millennium—if this Dispatch Box had been around for a millennium.
Finally, on partnership, this country has an incredible voluntary sector and an astonishing civil society. We all feel that in all of our constituencies—I feel that in my constituency, as all hon. Members will in theirs—but we are still not harnessing it properly. Amazing community schemes on community land trusts, community broadband and community planning are not being properly reinforced and followed up.
There are a lot of things that we could address. In recent meetings, for example, people have pointed out that if your mother lives in Middlesbrough and you live in London, could we not have a situation whereby somebody whose mother lives in London while they live in Middlesbrough visited your mother while you visited their mother? A lot of people would like to do that sort of thing, but as a society we are simply not good enough at tapping that kind of voluntary energy and bringing it together.
Given that I am often accused of being too gentle with those on the Opposition Benches, I am going to provoke them by saying that there is an example of partnership from which we can learn. I am going to pick possibly the most unpopular subject for those on the Opposition Benches: the privatised water industry. The extraordinary thing about the privatised water industry since 1980 is that by privatising water we have brought in £78 billion of investment that would not have otherwise come in. Water quality in this country is now at 99.6% and we are five times less likely to have an outage on our water. That is at a cost to the person of £1 a day for your water, in and out—an extraordinary achievement.
Mr Jim Cunningham
I think the right hon. Gentleman was watching Margaret Thatcher’s speech on privatisation last night and is trying to imitate her here today.
Rory Stewart
That is the greatest compliment I could receive as a leadership candidate in this House—thank you very much.
In conclusion, we in this country, as all parties and all nations, have together achieved an incredible amount over the last 100 years. In my constituency, when my predecessor’s predecessor, Willie Whitelaw, was the Member of Parliament for Penrith and The Border, a third of my constituents had no indoor lavatories and a third had no mains electricity in their homes. We have moved completely away from that world since the second world war. We are in a very different world but it should not be one of complacency; it should be a world of us all working together to make things much better. The biggest challenge in this country, as I will indicate in my foreword to the UN, is adult social care.
I began with the thesis that one of the problems in development is politics. If the House wants a classic example of the way in which a good, technocratic solution to a problem in this country has been hampered by politics, just as good solutions are hampered in other countries by politics, take adult social care. There have been dozens of White Papers and Green Papers over decades, royal commissions in and out and parties in and out proposing solutions, and we still do not have the solution in place. What I shall be saying is that we need to show some humility. We need to learn from this. We need to reach across the House and work with other parties to solve the great unfinished revolution of our society, which began with the NHS dealing with people who are ill but did not properly deal with the vulnerable, the frail and the elderly. If we can tap that together, Britain can go back to the world not arrogant, preening or presenting itself as a model to the world, but presenting itself as a partner with the world.
Kerry McCarthy
The Secretary of State is giving a characteristically thoughtful speech. I do not want to cast any doubt on what he is saying—I agree about the need to cross party boundaries when we try to find solutions to these issues—but I wonder whether it is really possible for him to do it from the Department for International Development, as opposed to, say, the Cabinet Office, leading on the domestic delivery of the sustainable development goals. Will he say a bit about how he can persuade his perhaps less thoughtful colleagues to come to the table?
Rory Stewart
The hon. Lady has put her finger on a very important point. In the end, it is all very well setting these kinds of goals, wearing the kind of badge that I am wearing and signing up to the things that we believe in, but this is about leadership right the way through Government. It is about people sharing a vision of the kind of world we want to live in and of what sustainable development means, feeling in our bones and sinews the connection between our contribution to poverty and the environment and how cities, communities, clean water, clean air, gender equality, productivity and employment all come together not only to provide a society that we are proud of, but perhaps above all—as Britain continues as a partner with the world—a world that we can be proud of: a world that is greener, fairer, more united.
The Minister for Africa (Harriett Baldwin)
This has been a short but perfectly formed debate. We have touched the surface of a range of issues relating to the overarching framework that the whole world has signed up to for our journey towards 2030 as a global population. Today’s debate has been a milestone on that journey, enabling us to talk about not only the UK’s voluntary national review, but the journey on which the rest of the world is embarked. I am proud to stand at the Dispatch Box having been in the Government at the time when we enshrined our contribution of 0.7% of gross national income in statute. We are the first and only country in the world to have done that. Members on both sides of the House have expressed support today for the continuation of that approach; they can count on me to continue to support it, as, indeed, the Secretary of State made clear earlier.
This is the first time that we have carried out a voluntary national review. There are, of course, 17 goals. I do not know about the rest of the House, but I personally find that 17 is not exactly a catchy number to work with. I noticed that some Members worked that down to five Ps and others to fewer themes, but I find that 17 is a bit unmanageable. Within those 17 goals there are 169 targets and within that 244 separate indicators. Having worked in the private sector for many years before entering politics, I am a strong believer that it is important to measure these things, because what gets measured gets managed. Interestingly, as a result of this first voluntary national review we found that our independent ONS does not measure absolutely every one of those indicators; in fact only about 72% of those global indicators are already on our national reporting platform. That is the first thing we have learned, along with the importance of data around that. We have therefore decided to add to the data we commission.
We have had an excellent and wide-ranging debate with a range of contributions from the Opposition Benches, including by the hon. Members for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden) and for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill), and the hon. Members for Dundee West (Chris Law) and for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady)—the voices from Scotland, where of course the process has been done by the devolved Administration of the independent Scottish Government—as well as the hon. Members for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) and for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy). We heard a number of times about food insecurity. As a result of the voluntary national review and the discovery that we had statistics for only 72% of the measures, we have commissioned a new data series for the UK, with a measure that will take place in the household surveys around food insecurity. I hope that the whole House will welcome the fact that what gets measured gets managed, as I said earlier, and that we will have a measure for that for the first time.
A number of points were made in the debate about the consultation process. This has been an ongoing process since the UK played such a pivotal part in developing the goals in the first place. In the run-up to the voluntary national review we have engaged with 350 organisations, we have had 200 different case studies shared with us, we have had 35 different engagement events—this is of course within England—and we have had the opportunity to talk to some of the Select Committees about this process. I welcome engagement from all the groups, and am particularly keen to hear from a wider range of groups as we go into the process of publication this week.
Stephen Twigg
The Minister says there will be publication this week: is she able to confirm that we will publish as we submit to the UN so that it will be publicly available including to parliamentarians simultaneously with its submission?
Harriett Baldwin
We have published this week the main messages from the UK voluntary national review. Obviously we will save for the high-level forum some of the details of the report itself, but my understanding is that publication is imminent. I am not able to specify precisely on which day it is coming out, because I am not sure whether that has been decided; as the hon. Gentleman knows, beings way above my pay grade decide such things.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
In the Committee I asked—as the Chairman of the Committee my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) asked again today in the Chamber—about the inclusion of civil society in the delegation and presentation at the high-level political forum. I was given reassurances that discussions were happening on the youth side with the British Youth Council. The Secretary-General produced the youth and SDGs report this year, which will also be presented at the HLPF, and it is important to include young people. Can the Minister confirm that young people and other sectors of civil society will be included in the delegation? If not, will we take urgent action to get our young UK ambassadors—a system I know the BYC runs very effectively—engaged in the process so that they are able to be interlocutors with the Minister and go together?
Harriett Baldwin
The hon. Gentleman makes a powerful case. Baroness Sugg will be leading the UK delegation, and I know that she will be thinking about the make-up of the delegation. I note the compelling case he has made for a wide representation of civil society on it.
I want to mention some of the statistics that relate to this country. I have mentioned some of the gaps, but in terms of things that we measure, I am sure everyone in the House will welcome the overwhelmingly strong employment growth in the UK. Yet again today, we have seen how strong the job market is, and we have also seen that employment incomes are growing. In fact, the average income in this country is now £507 a week. That is the median income against which the poverty line— 60% of the median income—is measured. I am sure the House will also welcome the fact that there has been a disproportionately large increase in employment growth for the poorest 20% of households. These are an important part of the goals. We have seen a seven-point growth in the income of the poorest households. The percentage of people in this country in absolute low income is at an all-time low, and the percentage of children who are in absolute low income after housing costs remains at a historic low. However, hon. Members have pointed out—and we agree—that it is important to note that the goals call for zero poverty and zero hunger, and it will be valuable to see in the voluntary national review where there is still work left to do.
I particularly value the points made about people with disabilities. We have tried to show real leadership internationally on this, but we have also worked hard here domestically to increase the number of people with disabilities in work. There are 700,000 more people with disabilities in work since 2015. There is a lot we can learn from other countries, and the fact that this is happening in an international context with hundreds of other countries representing their insights will enable us to compare and contrast across the world, as the Chairman of the International Development Committee has said.
I fully acknowledge the importance of the world dealing with plastic waste, and the hon. Member for Bristol East will know how much work we have put into some of the pilot programmes internationally. We recognise the importance of the work that is done by a range of organisations including Tearfund, which we work with in Pakistan on waste management, and the importance of our learning from the great examples—the leadership, indeed—in other countries that have been quicker than we have to ban certain types of plastic that are difficult to get out of the food chain.
In summary, as I wait for the speaker who is going to respond to the Adjournment debate, I just want to highlight the fact that this is a journey that we are on as a world. The process of doing a voluntary national review has brought home the importance of measuring these things and the fact that, even with a very well developed and independent Office for National Statistics, we still have some room to improve on our measures. We can all learn from each other as a world, and I look forward to seeing a strong UK delegation at the high-level working group. I value all the inputs from our colleagues across the House in today’s important debate, and we look forward to working with the various Committees of the House as we continue to make progress towards the sustainable development goals for 2030.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered the Sustainable Development Goals.