Grand Committee
(1 year, 9 months ago)
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The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)
Good afternoon, my Lords, and welcome to the Grand Committee. The time limit for this debate is one hour.
UN Biodiversity Conference: COP 15
(1 year, 9 months ago)
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Lord Randall of Uxbridge
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the outcome of the United Nations Biodiversity Conference: COP15, held in Montreal between 7 and 19 December 2022; and to what extent the United Kingdom is fulfilling all of its international obligations to protect biodiversity.
Lord Randall of Uxbridge (Con)
My Lords, this is my first entree into the Grand Committee Room, so I may get things wrong. I really welcome the opportunity to raise these important issues. Coming top of a ballot is rather unusual for me, so I think I will just give up now—I will not try the lottery or anything else like that.
I should start off, as usual, by declaring some interests as in the members register. I am a council member of the RSPB, a trustee of the Bat Conservation Trust, a vice-president of Fauna & Flora International, a chair of the Thin Green Line Foundation, which looks after rangers, and a council member of the UK Overseas Territories Conservation Forum. there are one or two more that may appear in the register; I may refer to some as I go through my contribution.
First, I pay great tribute to both my noble friends who are working on this: my noble friend Lord Goldsmith, who is here, and my noble friend Lord Benyon. Not only have they worked really hard, particularly on this issue with their dedication, but I know they are completely committed to the cause. I have no complaints at all about them. Any complaints that might occur a little later are directed more generally into the governmental ether, not to them directly.
I saw the COP result from a distance. I know there were a couple of complaints that the British media did not give it the import they could have, but as I was not there and could not see who was, I could only see what happened. However, I was so heartened to see a headline in the Guardian shortly afterwards by somebody who is not normally going to be necessarily complimentary: Craig Bennett, who is the chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts. The headline to his article was, “What’s this unfamiliar feeling I have after the Cop15 meeting? It might just be hope”. That is praise indeed, I would have said.
We have to be absolutely delighted that although, as I will go on shortly to say, more could be done, including what we have to do at home, we should be able for a short while to sit back and congratulate ourselves. I remember in my days as a retailer that once a year, when we had the sales figures in for that year, you could normally sit back and relax for about an hour and say, “We did very well”. Then, you all have to start all over again. This is that moment where we say, “We’ve done very well; now the work begins again in earnest”.
I have been fascinated and engrossed by nature from a very early age. My grandfather made me a member of the RSPB nearly 60 years ago, and only today I got a renewal from Butterfly Conservation, pointing out that I had been a member for 40 years when I thought I had only recently joined. The depressing thing is that I have seen in my lifetime at least one species of bird become globally extinct: the slender-billed curlew. It probably is extinct, although there may be relic populations breeding somewhere in its wintering grounds in Siberia. I was recently in Chile and saw a hummingbird there, a Chilean woodstar, which I think is down to its last couple of hundred individuals. It is all very gloomy and, looking through my old notebooks, it is not just internationally. Where I live in Middlesex, west London, 30 or 40 years ago I was seeing 20 or 30 turtle doves just by walking around the local gravel pits. They are now a complete rarity.
It is not only birds, of course. Throughout the world, every month, we are only just beginning to discover new species of, for example, insects. To be honest, some of them may become extinct just after they have been discovered. We know most of the reasons for this: climate change, habitat loss, human interference and indiscriminate use of pesticides.
I am sure that my noble friend the Minister will go into more detail on this but, at COP, some particular goals were raised, such as substantially increasing the area of natural ecosystems, ensuring that nature’s contribution to people is valued, maintained and enhanced, and sharing the monetary and non-monetary benefits of utilisation. I say this to all Members in the Room and further afield: we do not do enough publicity on the magnificent work of the Dasgupta review, which put out hard research into the economic benefits of biodiversity.
Another goal was to ensure that all parties, specifically developing countries, have adequate means to implement these aims. This includes financial resources, building capacity, technical and scientific co-operation, and access to technology. This is important because it is very easy to lecture countries, particularly developing ones, and say, “You must do more. You must protect this. You must protect that”—especially when we are not so good ourselves, which, to a large extent, we are not at the moment. However, we cannot expect them to be able to fund these things.
I want to put one idea forward. I am one of several vice-chairs of the all-party group for UK Aid Match, through which ODA money is matched by private money from institutions. It is already being done and could be increased to go towards biodiversity projects.
The other thing that should be mentioned is the requirement for transnational companies and financial institutions to monitor, assess and disclose the impact on biodiversity of their operations, supply chains and portfolios. I am still trying—I tried again in the financial services Bill—to get an amendment down about deforestation and making sure that UK money is not in some way aiding it.
The scale of the biodiversity crisis is huge. There is so much to do. However, I have to say that we are not exemplars in this country. I am delighted that I have 10 minutes to speak; I could probably go on for a lot longer but I am a stickler for these things. We talk about 30by30—it is a great idea—but are we doing enough? I see SSSIs being threatened. Are we doing enough to ensure that they are in a nature-ready state? Frankly, our national parks do not live up to the expectations of the ordinary member of the public. You think a national park is where you see herds of migrating wildebeest; in fact, our ones are pretty poor on biodiversity.
There are some good things. I am delighted about the measure on pesticides because insect loss is a huge problem. I am slightly surprised that the Government agreed to it because it is not necessarily what they want.
I have been extremely lucky in my life—from my grandfather making me an RSPB member all those years ago to my parents encouraging me. I have seen wildlife around the world and here in the UK. In those early days when I used to work on things that most Members in the Room at the moment are far too young to remember, such as Peter Scott’s “Look” programme—I remember David Attenborough from “Zoo Quest” rather than some of his later things; you can see how very far I go back on this subject—I could never have imagined, watching a black and white screen, that I was going to be lucky enough to visit some of those places and see some of those species, both here and abroad.
In the same way that I was lucky to see them, I have been extremely lucky to find myself in Parliament, first in the House of Commons and now here in your Lordships’ House. I made a vow to myself that the one thing I would concentrate on more than anything else, because wildlife, nature and conservation are my passions, was doing whatever I could to ensure that future generations can benefit from and enjoy the wonders of nature, just as I have.
Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, on coming top of the ballot and taking this opportunity to introduce a debate on this crucial subject, which deserves a lot more thought than the House tends to give it. He spoke feelingly about biodiversity. Biodiversity is inextricably linked with climate change. Our natural systems are crucial to economic and social stability, as well as to well-being and health, from mental health through to zoonotic diseases. This week, a report in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives has estimated that the global loss of pollinators is causing about 500,000 early deaths a year by reducing the supply of healthy foods. The health of people, animals, plants and ecosystems is interdependent.
In their strategic plan in 2011, the Government acknowledged that biodiversity is
“key to the survival of life.”
They also acknowledged then that there was a “biodiversity crisis.” However, the Government’s own evaluation in 2019 found that, of eight targets, five had been missed, while three were either at risk of being missed or data were lacking. In 2021, the Treasury published the Dasgupta review, which warned that biodiversity was declining faster than at any time in human history, leading to “extreme risk” and uncertainty for our economies and well-being. The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report in 2022 makes grim reading. We have all observed in our daily lives the rarity of what used to be familiar species, whether it is butterflies, bees, insects on our windscreens, wildflowers or birds— the noble Lord mourned the loss of the slender-billed curlew.
Yet there is far less focus by the public, the media and politics on biodiversity than there is on climate change. COP 27 on climate change was extensively reported as front-page news; coverage of COP 15 on biodiversity, equally an existential issue, was cursory and on inside pages. World leaders, even our own Prime Minister, flocked to Sharm el-Sheikh; only two leaders, not including our Prime Minister, turned up at Montreal. There was not the political pressure for them to do so. This is strange. Rachel Carson, in a hugely important book, Silent Spring, explained to the world back in 1962 the cataclysmic dangers of indiscriminate pesticide use. The response was to ban the use of DDT, but little more. Why this global fecklessness and improvidence? It is due partly to the power of lobbying by agribusiness, partly to the allure of cheap food and partly, perhaps, to the psychological difficulty for societies to acknowledge that their practices may be self-destructive.
Anyway, I welcome of course the Government’s signing of the global biodiversity framework at Montreal. I ask, however, what this may mean in practice. After all, by 2020 Governments across the world had failed to meet any of the targets they set themselves at Aichi in 2010, and Britain’s was among the Governments that did not do well. According to Wildlife and Countryside Link, only about 3.2% of land in Britain is well protected and managed in terms of biodiversity, and Natural England has found that half of Britain’s sites of special scientific interest are not in a good state. However, while in the latest Autumn Statement the Chancellor spoke about climate change, he said nothing about biodiversity.
There is too much wriggle room in the vague language of the GBF. For example, Target 7 on pollution commits signatories to
“reducing the overall risk … by at least half … and working towards eliminating plastics pollution.”
That does not put countries under any useful discipline. Will the 30by30 Kunming-Montreal commitment in Target 2 be the biodiversity counterpart of the 1.5 degrees Paris commitment? Fourteen of the 23 targets do not state a 2030 deadline. Moreover, the agreement at Montreal is not legally binding. Do the Government accept that honouring it is, however, morally binding and a prudential necessity?
At Montreal, the Government pledged “up to” £29 million in funding to support developing countries to deliver the 30by30 target on biodiversity, plus £5 million for British Overseas Territories, which are important in terms of biodiversity, plus a contribution to funding via the World Bank. They cannot be accused of extravagance. Will that £29 million go into the special trust fund? Will it be new money, or will it come out of the overseas aid budget or other existing budgets?
Target 4, on the need for “urgent management actions”, requires Governments to produce their national biodiversity action plans by 2024. What consultation will the Government undertake? There is complicated work to do. They will need to designate extensive new areas for protection and restoration, and these will have to be carefully delineated to include essential habitats. The Environment Act targets that Ms Coffey belatedly announced just in time for COP 15 included plans to protect only another 4% of habitats by 2042. This falls far short, in physical extension and timescale, of matching what is required.
Are the Government prepared to set aside their shibboleths? Instead of obsessing about abolishing EU law, will they focus on producing good new law? Target 15 is about regulation of businesses. Will the Government accept that biodiversity is an area where tough regulation of business is essential? Target 15 also concerns the provision by businesses of information to consumers, and Target 16 is about ensuring that people
“are encouraged and enabled to make sustainable … choices”.
Will the Government make sure that we are informed and, frankly, nanny all of us to do the right things?
Will the Government ensure that their own scientists are seriously committed to the GBF’s objectives? I ask this in view of intense concerns that Defra scientists have not properly examined the toxic effects on marine species, as well as on fishermen’s livelihoods, of dredging in the Tees. The biodiversity disaster that recently occurred in the North Sea off the coast of Teesside raises worries about the performance of the regulators, the Environment Agency and the Marine Management Organisation. Will the Government ensure that, in their haste to create freeports around the country—two more have just been announced—construction work does not have devastating effects on wildlife?
We will want to see that the Government are sturdy in resisting lobbying by vested interests, particularly the agricultural and food industries, against the necessary measures to preserve and restore biodiversity. Target 18 is to:
“Identify by 2025, and eliminate, phase out or reform incentives, including subsidies harmful for biodiversity”,
substantially reducing them by 2030. As things are, Governments across the world are providing $1.8 trillion—2% of global GDP—in subsidies that exacerbate biodiversity loss and climate change. Mr Gove expressed a clear willingness to tackle this problem; it is less clear that Ms Coffey is seriously committed to doing so. I hope that the Minister, whose personal commitment is not in doubt, can reassure us. Will our Government repurpose their agricultural support spending to prioritise the protection of biodiversity in the fight against climate change? The opportunity is there to create many new jobs in the protection and enhancement of nature, and in making a positive experience of nature more accessible to people whose well-being and health can benefit from it.
Do the Government accept that the GBF is an opportunity for businesses of many kinds to remodel themselves to stop damaging ecosystems? Will the Government support this process by redefining reporting requirements for businesses, regulating constructively and offering positive incentives? Will they encourage UK businesses to lead in this revolution?
Target 14 calls for the integration of biodiversity policies across all sectors. In their 2011 plan, the Government admitted that nature was “consistently undervalued in decision-making”. What procedures will the Government follow to ensure that the whole of Whitehall and its relevant agencies are involved in delivering GBF commitments? Will we see that reflected in impact assessments from all departments? How will the Government report to Parliament on their methodology and process?
We look to the Government for leadership on this massively important issue of biodiversity. I hope, in the wake of COP 15, that they will no longer be found wanting.
Baroness Walmsley (LD)
My Lords, I think the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, for introducing this debate. I assure him that I and the 100,000 little worker bees I have at home in my hive will continue to do our bit. However, while it must be accepted that the UK has shown a considerable lead on biodiversity protection internationally, it must be acknowledged that we have lost half our biodiversity since the Industrial Revolution. We are now ranked in the bottom 10% of the world and are the worst of the G7 nations for biodiversity. From this challenging starting point we embark on our response to the agreement into which we entered at COP 15.
These Benches are delighted that the UN Biodiversity Conference COP 15 saw a significant agreement, with 23 action targets to halt and restore biodiversity loss. One of the key targets was target 3—to manage 30% of land and sea for nature by 2030. The best way we can show leadership in this respect is to achieve that target ourselves.
The UK Government adopted 30by30 two years ago to great headlines—that is leadership—but progress since then has been very limited. We were starting from a very low base. Only 3.22% of England’s land and 8% of our seas were effectively protected in 2022. This means that we need a tenfold increase in the protection of land habitats and a fourfold increase in maritime protection by 2030. However, between 2021 and 2022, there was an increase of only 0.22% in land protection and 4% in sea protection. At this rate, we will not get anywhere near our target by 2030. The big question for the Minister is how the Government plan to up their game.
The wording of the COP 15 agreement is very specific:
“to ensure and enable that by 2030 at least 30% of terrestrial, inland water, and of coastal and marine areas, especially areas of particular importance for biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services, are effectively conserved and managed”.
The crucial words here are “enable” and “managed”. That means action now and ongoing sustainable action into the future.
The implementation mechanism is a crucial part of the agreement. It is meant to underpin the framework with a clear agreed structure for how countries will make national plans and monitor, report and review their progress. We were therefore disappointed that the Government failed to produce new environmental targets on time last year. However, when they were published there were glaring omissions, including missing targets to protect and improve water quality and important natural sites.
Water companies in England have dumped sewage 772,000 times over the past two years, lasting for almost 6 million hours. Last summer, beaches across the south coast were closed because of sewage dumping, impacting both domestic holidaymakers and our international tourism business. National parks such as the Lake District have not been spared such spills. River pollution is now so bad that no river in England and Wales is free from pollution, but what have the Government done? They have pushed back targets to clean up the majority of England’s rivers, lakes and coastal waters by more than 30 years to 2063, yet the water companies continue to pay their managers massive bonuses for this failure. What is really needed is massive investment in infrastructure to separate rainwater from sewage water, and to improve treatment facilities and water use efficiency measures.
To achieve the clean water objective, we on these Benches would halt sewage discharges by mandating major sewage infrastructure upgrades as well as reducing other river pollution by reforming the planning system to ensure that decisions are compatible with nature recovery and climate change mitigation, while designating more areas for wildlife. Along with many others, we believe that tackling the nature crisis must go hand in hand with tackling the climate emergency, but, while we support investing in new technologies, we understand that a healthy, biodiverse ecosystem offers us the surest means of storing carbon and reducing emissions. That means that, as well as investing in renewable energy and energy efficiency, there must be large-scale investment in restoration of peatlands, heathland, native woodlands, salt marshes, wetlands and coastal waters, helping to absorb carbon, protect against floods, improve water quality and protect habitats. Of course, it also means tree planting. The second report of the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology, on nature-based solutions to net zero, published on 27 January 2022—an inquiry on which I had the honour to serve—made numerous recommendations about this.
Our farmers can be key allies in enhancing nature and tackling the climate emergency, and target 10 of the COP 15 agreement covered agro-ecological approaches. As the Select Committee emphasised in the report, a shift to sustainable agriculture will be key to addressing climate change, ensuring a healthy and secure food system and a restored natural environment, as well as bringing economic benefits.
It is vital that the new farm payment system gives farmers confidence to predict the future profitability of their businesses while ensuring they can continue producing good homegrown food for our tables. I hear that, under the new regime, the Government now plan changes to the ELMS farm payment system, which has already been announced and under which farmers have been planning their businesses for at least two years. Some of them are now withdrawing their co-operation with sustainable farming initiatives because of uncertainty. How does this help? Can the Minister say how the Government’s new environmental land management schemes will encourage farmers to co-operate on achieving their objectives under COP 15?
The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 was game changing in the protection of our important habitats, protecting sites of special scientific interest, which became known as SSSIs. I well recall this important legislation and noted that one of the earliest sites to be designated was the sandhills where I played as a child on my summer holidays. While the network of SSSIs is crucial to the protection of biodiversity, it is only a representative sample of priority habitats, and many existing sites are not in a good state. Indeed, too many are regarded as being in a poor state and therefore not protecting biodiversity very well. It is therefore essential, if we are to achieve our 2030 target, that we both expand the area of priority habitats protected under the SSSI legislation and improve the management of existing sites. As with much other legislation, it is all very well creating a new law, but its success lies in both initial implementation and sustained monitoring and management to ensure that the original objective is achieved for posterity. It has been proposed recently that in order to achieve the COP 15 objective we need to create 100,000 hectares of new SSSIs by 2030. The Government have not accepted this target, which is a pity, because it would create green jobs as well as protecting nature and helping to mitigate climate change. However, only 3,000 hectares of new SSSIs are created every year. At this rate, we would not achieve the 100,000 hectares until 2056. Will the Minister say whether the Government plan to accept the proposed target and what measures will be put in place to achieve it?
I mentioned earlier that the word “managed” was crucial in the COP 15 agreement. What I had in mind was the state of management of many of our SSSIs. The Environment Act 2021 is an opportunity to set in legislation ambitious and indeed essential targets to bring the management of SSSIs up to scratch. Nature NGOs have proposed a target of 75% of sites being restored to a favourable condition by 2042, with five-yearly interim targets to track progress. If we create a lot of new SSSIs and then allow them to go to wrack and ruin, we are wasting both the time and the cost of their original creation. Will the Minister therefore accept this target for restoration and renewal of existing sites?
The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, currently going through Parliament, presents a major threat to other measures already in place to protect nature. I hope that the Minister can tell us that something will be done about that.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Randall, for securing this debate. We would have had a Statement to discuss otherwise, so it is important that we are addressing this issue. I agree with the noble Lord that the Minister is genuinely committed and works hard on environmental matters. It is good to see him here.
The noble Lord, Lord Randall, clearly laid out all the pressures on our wildlife and his reasons for bringing this debate forward, so I will not go through the different goals in any detail. He and my noble friend Lord Howarth went through them. However, I agree that not enough work has been done on the importance of the Dasgupta review. My noble friend Lord Howarth also made the important point that COP 15, compared with COP 26, was very much passed over. What do we do about this? How do we, as parliamentarians, work with the media, for example, and within ourselves, to raise awareness of the challenges that biodiversity is facing and how important it is to tackle this alongside climate change, which is discussed so often?
I was really pleased that my noble friend Lord Howarth mentioned the disaster in the Tees. The Government must do more work on this. I hope that the Minister has some positive things to say on how we will move forward and ensure that such a disaster does not happen again.
Turning to the GBF, which is what is mainly being discussed following COP 15, the reaction to it was mixed. Two particular issues came up. First, there were concerns that the final text was forced through. According to a Guardian article, the Chinese President appeared to force it through moments after the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Environment Minister said that her country would not support the final text. The DRC objected to it because the GBF did not create a new fund for biodiversity separate from the existing UN fund, the GEF. The Chinese President’s interventions were reported to have then prompted further objections from Uganda and Cameroon.
These were all dropped afterwards but it does show that there are serious tensions in a conference such as this. Carbon Brief also said that there were tensions between the developed and developing countries regarding developed countries wanting to increase ambitions while developing countries needed assurances about sufficient resources. The noble Lord, Lord Randall, talked about money and resources to deliver. The Minister has experience in this, so it would be very helpful to understand better those tensions and whether they are any kind of threat to delivering on decision-making as we go forward, and to understand how we manage those competing interests between developing and developed countries.
Secondly, concerns were raised about the impact of the GBF on indigenous people’s rights. Target 3, the 30 by 30 deal, states that 30% of terrestrial inland water, coastal and marine areas must be conserved and managed by 2030 through systems of protected areas and conservation measures that recognise indigenous and traditional territories where applicable. Some felt that this was simply not strong enough. Amnesty International, for example, said that it believed that this threatened the rights of indigenous peoples by failing properly to recognise their lands and territories as a separate category of conserved area. Amnesty International’s adviser on this said that it only partly acknowledged indigenous people’s outstanding contribution to conservation.
Certainly, when I was at COP 26, there was a very strong presence of indigenous peoples there. I was not at COP 15, but I would assume that the same was the case. I would be very interested to hear the Minister’s thoughts on this and on whether he believes that more needs to be done in this area. If so, how would we go about it? If not, how do we reassure indigenous peoples that we are taking their concerns seriously?
A final concern that I want to raise is that some people have talked about an apparent lack of accountability within the GBF. In particular, a senior associate at PricewaterhouseCoopers UK argued that the GBF lacked “quantifiable measures”. In other words, it is more difficult with the way that it is drafted at the moment to hold countries and Governments to account. Clearly, without that ability to hold countries to account, it is much more difficult to ensure that we deliver on these ambitions. Again, I would be interested to hear whether there is any further work to be done on how you hold countries to account and ensure that action is taken.
Despite having raised those concerns, I think it is very important to recognise the enormous amount of progress made at COP 15 and to praise the GBF for what it is attempting to do and what it wants to achieve. It is incredibly important that, despite the concerns that I have raised, we manage to reach that agreement.
The International Institute for Sustainable Development said that “significant efforts” were now required from all societies and Governments to achieve the framework’s goals and targets. That is true, but it is true only because there is such an ambition within it. It is really important to acknowledge that. I follow the Minister on Twitter and I am aware that he described the GBF as a “huge, historic moment”. He is absolutely right—it is just a matter of how we move forward with this.
The key question now from our perspective is: how do we ensure implementation? My noble friend mentioned what happened at Aichi. We need to ensure that we do not have another failed set of agreements. From a UK perspective, I know that, to try to do this, the Government have committed to publishing a plan setting out how they will implement the GBF. A Written Question was put down in the other place on biodiversity in December and, in response to that, the Minister for Natural Environment and Land Use, Trudy Harrison MP, said that the Government would publish the environmental improvement plan “in 2023”—this year. The Minister said that the plan would
“set out our ambitions and approach to nature recovery”
following COP 15.
The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, made some really important points about the loss of biodiversity in the UK and talked about many of the challenges and concerns that have been raised over and over in your Lordships’ House and the other place. She made an important point about how we have failed to properly protect and manage our existing protected sites. That does not send out a very good message for how we are going to take this forward. She particularly talked about SSSIs, which have pretty much failed in recent years. How does our ambition to deliver on COP 15 sit with the missed support and targets that we have had in this country in recent years? She said, very importantly, that we need to lead more strongly in this area. We need to make more progress than we have recently. I know that the Minister is very committed to this, so I would be interested to hear what plans the Government have to genuinely turn this around? We have been disappointed by the Government’s lack of ambition, including in their own environmental targets, which we have only recently seen published.
I want to end by asking the Minister this: when will we see the environmental improvement plan? Will it be truly ambitious? There is cross-party support—the Government have our strong support to deliver on these ambitions. Please, give us something to support strongly.
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park) (Con)
First, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Randall, for tabling this debate and for his continuous championing of the environmental issue ever since I have known him. I also thank other noble Lords for their contributions.
As many noble Lords appreciate—this was said in all the contributions—the catastrophic decline in the abundance, connectivity and diversity of life on earth is not only a tragedy but an existential threat. Everything that we have and need is dependent on nature and on our ability to reconcile our lives, our economies and our politics with the natural world. The Covid pandemic showed us what the world can do when it senses danger.
The reality is that the consequences of runaway climate change, biodiversity collapse and environmental degradation are vastly more serious. That is why tackling climate change and biodiversity loss is rightly a top international priority for the Government. It is why we have been campaigning internationally for the world to agree a “Paris moment” for nature. It is why we celebrate the outcome of the COP 15 UN Biodiversity Conference and all the progress made there to protect and restore nature.
The noble Lord, Lord Randall, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, asked why the media have shown so little interest in this issue. My guess is as good as theirs. It is depressing. It is hard to imagine a more important international summit than the one we saw in Montreal just a few weeks ago, but the media seem to reduce all environmental considerations down to the one issue of carbon. Of course, climate change is massively important, but the environment is much more than carbon. It is everything, as I have already said and as noble Lords said in their speeches. It is somewhat depressing that the press do not focus on this issue; perhaps it is a yearning on their part to focus on only the bad news. The UN conference in Montreal was good news; it was not perfect, as I will come on to in a second, but perhaps there is no market for good news in the UK media nowadays.
I note that the Independent has a new editor. Notwithstanding his many qualities, he is a climate sceptic, which I find worrying. We seem to be seeing a disconnect between the media and what we know exists in people: desperate concern for the natural world and a yearning for more biodiversity and improved nature. It does not matter which constituency our colleagues in the other place represent—there is not a single constituency in this country where a majority do not want more nature. They want leadership from government.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, asked about the potential discrepancy we see between developed and developing countries; I will come on to that in a second. I have been there. I have engaged with countries—north, south, east, west, rich, poor, nature-rich, nature-depleted—for as long as I have been a Minister. This matter is somewhat overstated. The majority of the engagement I have had with countries has left me feeling more, not less, optimistic. Yes, one or two African countries were concerned about the manner in which the agreement was reached, but many more were wildly enthusiastic. That is not to say that they did not have concerns, but those concerns were addressed, which is why we ended up with this agreement.
Let me add this: shift your focus to the small island developing states in the Pacific or the Caribbean, for example. They, too, had concerns about finance and many of the issues that have been raised today, but there is no doubt that their voice was louder than anyone’s in calling for an ambitious agreement. They wanted ambition. These issues are existential for small island developing states. It is not really a north/south or developed/developing divide; there are divides but they are overplayed. Overwhelmingly, the world is moving rapidly into the right position on this issue.
In the early hours of 19 December, world leaders finally agreed an ambitious global framework for action to put nature on a road to recovery. It was that “Paris moment” for nature that we had been asking for. Of course, the job now is to honour it in full. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework gives us a clear mission to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by the end of this decade. It includes a highly ambitious package of 23 targets for 2030 and four goals for 2050. These include global commitments to end human-induced species extinctions and to protect 30% of our global land and 30% of our global ocean by 2030—by the way, if that is not a newspaper headline, what is? This is an extraordinary commitment; of course, we have to make it real, but it is huge. It will be delivered through a package of nature financing, including a new international fund and the expectation that $30 billion will flow into developing countries to protect biodiversity every year by 2030.
We also agreed to establish a new multilateral system to share the benefits from the use of stored genetic information from plants and animals. To ensure that countries deliver on their commitments, the international community, for the first time, agreed a package of scientific indicators to track and report progress.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, mentioned the critical issue of indigenous people in local communities, and she is absolutely right. This has been central to our approach in the UK. She knows from COP 26 that we created as many platforms as possible to amplify the voice of indigenous people. That was noted, recognised and appreciated by the groups representing indigenous people and by the people themselves. We have continued that work.
For example, the delivery and design of LEAF—the biggest public/private partnership to support forests around the world—writes indigenous people all the way through its text and criteria. That has been appreciated. We also help to co-ordinate the donor group to ensure that the money promised to indigenous groups is properly delivered. I talk very regularly to representatives of those organisations to ensure that they are happy with the direction of travel and that we are getting advice from people on the front line. Some 80% of the world’s forest biodiversity is in land controlled and lived in by indigenous people. That is not a coincidence; they are the most effective at protecting nature and they need to be supported. Even if it were not for the moral issues, and just for practical considerations, the cheapest way to save nature is to look after the people who are doing it.
I do not say this lightly or with hubris, but I place on the record my boundless thanks to our excellent negotiators, because COP 15 was a triumph for UK diplomacy and soft power as well, with outcomes at the upper end of what we expected. Our negotiators—I saw this myself—played a critical role in raising ambition and galvanising momentum. I do not believe that we would have secured anything like the ambition we did without their Herculean efforts.
Our team was central to securing consensus on the highly contentious issue of digital sequence information; our science leads developed the important framework of indicators for tracking progress; we led the High Ambition Coalition and the Global Ocean Alliance, which helped secure the 30by30 targets, with relentless engagement and campaigning across the board; we convened and I led the High Ambition ministerial group to try to improve cross-regional co-ordination and strengthen ambition; and we worked over many months, alongside Ecuador, Gabon and the Maldives, to develop the credible 10 Point Plan for Financing Biodiversity, which has now been endorsed by 40 countries from five continents and was an initiative that played a visible and measurable role in unblocking ambition in the run-up to the CBD.
I also announced the Joint Donor Statement on International Finance for Biodiversity and Nature, alongside my friend and colleague the European Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius and my French counterpart Minister Christophe Béchu. That included new commitments from donors for the protection, restoration and sustainable use of nature, and a significant increase in nature financing, which was crucial for securing a consensus on finance in the GBF.
The outcome of the CBD COP was the culmination of years of hard work. I believe we can be proud of the role played by the UK. In Glasgow, in 2021, we brought nature from the margins of global climate politics and put it at the heart of our response. We secured an unprecedented package of commitments on forests and land use. Forbes described it as
“a Paris moment for forests”.
WWF said:
“Nature truly arrived at COP26.”
The Tropical Forest Alliance wrote:
“we’ll look back and realise that this was the day when we finally turned the tide on deforestation”.
We took the momentum we created from COP 26, as well as the networks we needed to secure it, and used that to help drive ambition at COP 15. Our responsibility now is to turn those commitments into action.
That is why the UK has committed £3 billion of our international climate finance to climate solutions that protect, restore and help manage nature sustainably. I want to take up the point that the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, made on extravagance. He cited a few examples of things we are spending money on in this regard, but implied that they were the totality of our commitment. They are not. The commitment is £3 billion, within which a lot of other new commitments are being made.
I would just say this. Who knows what will happen at the next general election, but part of this commitment will be delivered after the election. If we have a new Government then, it is absolutely crucial that this remains the cross-party issue that it very clearly is. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness opposite for the manner in which we always debate these issues. It is crucial that we keep that promise, because our commitments led other countries to make their commitments. If we break our pledge, they break theirs, and we will let a lot of poorer countries down all around the world.
At COP 15 we announced some specifics, some of which the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, mentioned: £29 million to support developing countries with their land protection commitments, helping to deliver 30by30; around £6 million for projects to study and restore nature across our overseas territories; £20 million in grants to protect healthy marine ecosystems and reduce overfishing; £17 million to the World Bank’s PROBLUE programme to support marine ecosystems; £7.2 million to a new nature positive economy programme, which will support Governments, central banks, businesses and financial institutions in developing countries to integrate the value of nature into their decision-making; and a nature facility to help integrate and safeguard nature in our own official development assistance with other countries. That is key because, as noble Lords will remember, we persuaded the G7 last year to make a commitment—which again was not reported but was huge, in my view—to ensure that all our ODA and our aid is aligned with nature and eventually nature positive. We will need these tools to deliver that promise as well.
Having worked so hard to secure these targets, and put finance in place to help achieve them, it is key that the UK also leads by example, a point made by all speakers. The Environment Act gives us all the tools we need to do so, including putting in place a new set of ambitious domestic targets on nature, air, water, waste, et cetera. Later this month, in our first statutory environmental improvement plan, Defra will set out the measures we will adopt to achieve them.
As has been said by I think all speakers, a key tool to deliver nature recovery is radical reform of farming subsidies in England. The noble Lord, Lord Howarth, and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, made this point; I think my noble friend Lord Randall did as well. Over a seven-year transition period, we are phasing out area-based agricultural subsidies and shifting our support for farm subsidies to deliver environmental goals.
That matters hugely for us in the UK, but it has global implications too. We are told that the cost of turning the tide on nature destruction is around $500 billion a year. By coincidence, that is roughly what is spent by the top 50 food-producing countries on subsidising often highly destructive land use every year. If we can persuade them to shift their focus in the way we are here, a gigantic finance gap can be closed. That is yet another reason why this Government, and successive Governments, absolutely must not allow this programme of reform to be derailed. That is critical. No matter what pressure is felt from those entrenched vested interests, it must be resisted.
Finally, we know that the global challenge ahead is huge, and that no country will face it alone. That is why the UK is at the centre of efforts to bring coalitions together of donor countries, philanthropists, nature-rich countries and the private sector to try to help turn the tide for some of the world’s key natural systems on land and at sea. Over the course of this year I hope I will be able to talk more about some of those initiatives in the Congo basin, the Amazon rainforest, Indonesia, et cetera. This is an absolute priority for me and, I am thrilled to say, for the Foreign Office and Defra.
COP 15 has provided momentum and a framework within which nature can recover and thrive. The UK Government played a really important part in the international effort to build that framework. Now we are and will remain committed to playing our part in full in a decade of global action to secure the abundance, diversity and connectivity of life on earth, and, in doing so, building not only a better future but a viable, liveable future for generations to come.
UK Mortality Rates
(1 year, 9 months ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Lord Sikka
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the paper by the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health Bearing the burden of austerity: how do changing mortality rates in the UK compare between men and women? published on 4 October 2022.
Lord Sikka (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to open this debate and to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Evans of Rainow, to the House and to the ministerial merry-go-round. I look forward to hearing his maiden speech.
All too often, Ministers come to Parliament to present cold numbers about taxes, spending cuts, wages, pensions or benefits freezes and make absolutely no mention of the human cost associated with their plans. Never-ending austerity continues to deprive people of good food, housing and healthcare. It creates hunger, disease, anxiety, insecurity and mental health problems, huge waiting lists for hospital treatment and, ultimately, premature death. I have been in this House for just over two years now but have never heard any Minister explain the ethics of austerity or the human consequences of their cold decisions.
The paper Bearing the burden of austerity: how do changing mortality rates in the UK compare between men and women? was written by four renowned international scholars and published in October 2022. It reported that between 2012 and 2019 there were nearly 335,000 excess deaths in England and Scotland. The death toll includes over 250,000 men and 84,000 women. The cause of death is austerity imposed by the Government. The research methodology behind the paper is well articulated in it, if anybody is interested in critiquing it. Between 2012 and 2019, the Government handed billions in tax cuts to corporations and the rich. They also handed hundreds of billions in quantitative easing to speculators and gamblers. This free money fuelled asset price inflation and produced a record number of billionaires. However, the same process was not used to alleviate poverty, and the Government condemned millions to poverty. By 2019, some 14.5 million people, 22% of the population, were living in poverty. This included 8.1 million working-age adults, 4.3 million children and 2.1 million pensioners.
Since 2010, the Government have incessantly attacked low and middle-income families. The real wages of workers have been supressed and even today, the average real wage is lower than in 2007. Public sector workers have been especially targeted and have received below inflation pay rises. This hits women hard because more than half of the public sector workforce is female. Workers’ share of GDP in the form of wages and salaries is barely 50%, compared to 65.1% in 1976. No other industrialised nation has experienced this rate of decline in the wages of its workers. Low wages result in low savings, so people do not have an adequate buffer or resilience for a rainy day. The less well-off have a shorter life expectancy. The cause is not some invisible hand of fate but the visible hand of a Government who have impoverished people and condemned them to early death.
Lone parents, the disabled, carers, the unemployed and those experiencing hard times are particularly targeted by the Government. Women make up the majority of social security recipients and have been more affected by social security cuts and benefit freezes, which basically punish the poor for being poor.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has stated:
“From 2013-2019, ministers chose to reduce benefits in real terms by freezing their value or increasing them by a lower rate than inflation”.
If that was not bad enough, the Government also increased taxes on the less well-off. In 2010, the Government increased the standard rate of VAT from 17.5% to 20%. Inevitably, a greater proportion of less well-off people’s income goes in taxes. An analysis published by the TaxPayers’ Alliance, which is much closer to the Government’s ideology and cannot be accused of being a leftie organisation, stated that families in the lowest income categories paid 47.6% of their gross income in direct and indirect tax in 2017-18, compared to 33.5% paid by the richest 10%. Regressive tax policies continue.
The underfunding of public services has condemned perhaps millions, but certainly thousands, to hardship and death. In 2010, NHS England had a hospital waiting list of 2.5 million. By 2019 that had ballooned to nearly 4.5 million, due to underfunding, and now stands at 7.2 million. In 2016, the outcome of Exercise Cygnus informed the Government that the NHS would not be able to cope with a flu pandemic, but they still reduced the stock of PPE and the number of beds. Too many people have paid for that decision with their lives.
The Government’s taxation, wages, social security, public spending and other policies have inflicted death on innocent people. The paper which is the subject of this debate particularly draws attention to the gendered nature of the austerity, and notes that among poorer populations, death rates have worsened to a greater extent among females than males. Yet I have never seen a Conservative Budget that explains the gender impact of the Government’s policies. The last Budget, in November, mentioned women just once. There was really nothing there for women at all. I look forward to the Minister’s response and hope that he will refrain from citing the usual gaggle of this or that support being given to people, because none of that has prevented the death toll to which I referred.
We have just celebrated Christmas and its message that “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”, yet it hard to see any of that spirit in the Government’s policies when they focus only on the richer neighbours. Despite all the evidence, the deadly austerity policies continue. Can the Minister explain what the squeeze on low and middle-income families has achieved? People can clearly see that it has increased neither prosperity nor the happiness of the people. Millions rely upon food banks—tacit confirmation that government policies have failed. Schoolchildren are going hungry, while senior citizens are forced to make choices between heating and eating. Social squalor is increasing. Austerity has impeded economic development and deepened inequalities. It has increased insecurity and anxiety, and the need for health and social care. The underfunding of essential services has denied life to many.
During the Second World War, bombings by the Luftwaffe caused about 70,000 civilian deaths. Yet this Government have condemned 335,000 people to death, all in the name of some defunct economic ideology. Have any other UK Government inflicted this level of harm on their own people? If so, perhaps the Minister will name them. Every deceased person was someone’s relative or friend. Millions will live with that pain, knowing that their deaths were avoidable. What satisfaction do the Government get from their austerity policies? I would be grateful if the Minister, who speaks here for the Government, could commit to three specific pledges: first, to appoint an independent inquiry into the deaths caused by the Government’s policies; secondly, to redistribute income and wealth to reverse grotesque levels of inequality; thirdly, to ensure that the impact assessment of all Bills is accompanied by an assessment of the human consequences of the policies they contain.
The Lord Bishop of London
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, for securing this important debate. I also look forward to hearing from the noble Lord, Lord Evans, in his maiden speech.
The paper at the heart of this debate provides a useful focus, because it highlights one of the worst health outcomes that we have seen in the past 10 years: that of widening inequalities. It is also helpful because, by focusing on the impact of austerity, we begin to see that public health is impacted by many factors besides healthcare access—factors called the social determinants of health. Those include housing, our jobs, our environment, our education and much more. They can be summed up as the opportunities that we have to lead healthy lives. The Heath Foundation noted that 50% of people in the most deprived areas report poor health by the age of 55 to 59, which is more than two decades earlier than in the least deprived areas. It is not just about life expectancy; it is also about healthy life expectancy.
The debate is poignant also because it comes at a time of great strain on the NHS and on social care, and at a time when those other determinants of health are challenging for many of us. We are also at a moment when I hope we are beginning to realise the importance of prevention of ill health, which is essential for the sustainability of our healthcare system.
Over the years, many organisations have agreed on the need for a strategy for health and health equality, but the long-promised and long-awaited health disparities White Paper is nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, those subject to health inequalities are more likely to be affected by healthcare pressures and to struggle in the coming economic climate. It is in these conditions that inequalities in health can only worsen.
In the absence of a strategy to tackle health inequalities, I propose that recognising and supporting the work of faith groups could be key to a real improvement in both prevention and access to healthcare. Faith groups hold the deep trust of the people they serve, with unrivalled knowledge of their communities. I recently had the opportunity to convene the Health Inequalities Action Group, which brought together faith leaders, healthcare professionals and civil society leaders to explore the intersection of faith, health inequality and health in London. London currently has the biggest gap in life expectancy between its local authorities of any region in England.
Through two townhall sessions, we heard some extraordinary stories of faith groups which had stepped up in the pandemic to advocate for public health and deliver healthcare solutions in, for and with their communities. For example, we learned from a senior leader in the Jewish community in north London who had designed a vaccination service that hosted separate sessions for men and women with the Jewish Hatzola ambulance service. They also made sure that rabbis were vaccinated, because they understood the influence they carried in their communities. Another example was the setting up of a mortuary by a mosque in east London, because many were dying in the pandemic and “there was a lack of cultural knowledge about how a burial for the Muslim community happens, so we did it ourselves”.
Faith groups know well the people who often fall into the “hard to reach” category in public health. They are already serving them, not just with health services but for other needs. It is hard to overstate the value of this relational capital to advocate for good public health. There is a track record of successful partnerships between faith groups, local authorities and healthcare providers. For example, the South London Listens campaign saw community and faith leaders come together with citizens to work with three NHS trusts in south London to improve mental health services there post pandemic. The Faith Covenant, established by the APPG on Faith and Society and FaithAction, also does good work on collaboration and tackling mistrust between faith groups and local authorities.
However, there is still a variation of experience and a lack of literacy among both local authorities and healthcare professionals in how they relate to faith groups and vice versa. There is a lack of systematic recognition of the importance of faith to those who have one, which means that people do not feel that they have access to health services. On top of that, the extent of health inequalities can be misunderstood. There is also a lack of collection of ethno-religious data. As the Marmot Review 10 Years On makes clear, this is needed in the academic analysis of inequalities because, without such information, understanding ethnic inequalities is difficult.
We have had the opportunity to work to reduce health inequalities through both access to healthcare and the social determinants of health for prevention. Faith groups have something to offer here and could be transformational for health. What efforts are the Department of Health and Social Care making to engage with faith groups genuinely to ensure that health provision is being made more accessible? What effort is being made to ensure that effective data is collected so that we might have a clearer picture of local health inequalities?
Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble and, might I add, numerate friend Lord Sikka for obtaining this debate. It is a topic of much discussion and no little misunderstanding. I look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Evans. I cannot help but remember my maiden speech, which I had to give in Grand Committee; it does not have exactly the same grandeur as making your maiden speech in the Chamber, so the noble Lord has my sympathy, but it is the content that counts.
I want to talk more about mortality in general. Figures and comparisons relating to mortality always need to be considered with care. The report before us is important and topical; my noble friend Lord Sikka set out the issues clearly. I just want, in the few minutes available, to put them into a wider historical context and then say something about what we know from the latest mortality figures.
Throughout the 20th century, the United Kingdom saw significant increases in life expectancy, influenced not just by medical advances but, more significantly, by better incomes and living conditions, as well as changing habits—particularly the reduction in smoking. Yet, while mortality rates continued to improve during the first decade of this century, the improvements have stalled since 2011. For certain groups, they have gone into reverse. The work before us today, along with other reports, unequivocally points the finger for this regrettable turn at the impact of austerity since 2010—no little coincidence.
Of particular concern is the fact that inequalities in life expectancy between the richest and the poorest have widened since 2011. While people in wealthier areas of the UK continue to live longer, for those living in the most deprived areas, life expectancy is stalling or even reversing. What this tells us is that the adverse trends affecting the less advantaged groups in our society are not inevitable. It is a question of social policies.
To turn to the current situation, why are there reports in the press about very high excess deaths? It is because most of these reports compare historical data, but this underestimates deaths and demographic evolution and, as a result, overestimates excess deaths. What we need to do is to use the gold standard for this type of analysis, which is to use age-standardised mortality rates, removing the effect of the changing age structure. Clearly, as the population ages, we should expect more deaths.
However, if you dive into the figures, you find something interesting and important: there is little excess mortality explained by the demographics and Covid among the population over 65, but you find excess deaths in younger age groups, particularly those under 44. Two possible reasons for this can be dismissed; the pattern of excess deaths simply cannot be explained to any significant extent by the rollout of vaccines or the deferral of medical treatment due to the Covid epidemic that would otherwise have taken place. Absent these explanations, everything points to the increasing pressures on the NHS—particularly since last April—being the trigger.
I must refer here to the work of the Stuart McDonald, a partner at the consulting actuary firm LCP and star of this week’s BBC Radio 4 programme “More or Less”. I should mention in passing that I was once employed by LCP as a trainee many years ago. Stuart and his team have concluded in terms that:
“Our analysis suggests that a significant number of patients could be dying because of long delays accessing emergency care. We estimate this number at over 400 deaths each week between September and November, though it might be higher.”
He tweeted earlier today that:
“Data for December has just been published and paints an even worse picture. 2,200 additional deaths associated with A&E delays in December alone. That is 500 per week.”
Putting these two things together, the level of excess that we see is, to a significant extent, due to the long-term increases in waiting for medical treatment, exacerbated more recently by delays in accessing emergency care. This is the sharp end of austerity. The sooner it comes to an end, the better for the health and longevity of our whole population.
Lord Patel (CB)
My lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, for securing this debate and I welcome the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Evans of Rainow, to the House and his ministerial role. I wish him well and look forward to his maiden speech. It is a tough ask to give a maiden speech and answer the questions raised, but I have no doubt that he will do it well. I am aware that, not only as an experienced parliamentarian but with his background, he is well aware of the human cost of social deprivation and the resulting health inequalities and mortality.
The subject of today’s debate is austerity and its subsequent effect on health inequalities, including mortality. I will focus more on the latter—the health inequalities—but I accept the conclusions of the observational study reported on the subject in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
It is 60 years since the Black report highlighted the association of deprivation and ill health. The Marmot reviews of 2010 and 2020, already mentioned by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London, spelled out in detail the health inequalities related to deprivation. Apart from the years from 1999 to 2009, no Government have tried to put in place policies to reduce health inequalities.
As already mentioned, deprived populations have lower life expectancies, spend many more years in ill-health, fewer years in good health, have a high incidence of long-term health conditions including cancers, and poor outlooks, not to mention an increased number of stillbirths and infant deaths. Health inequality means that the most deprived spend a significant part of their lives in misery. Government policies and major health events may exacerbate the situation, as I have no doubt that the current cost of living and NHS crisis will, but the root cause of health inequalities is social deprivation.
As inequalities are well characterised, the focus now should be on what interventions are effective and how they can be used. The perceived impression is that there is a lack of value placed on taking a long-term, whole-system approach to create a connected and cost-cutting policy and learning from previous approaches to reduce health inequalities. There is also an impression that the NHS is not given sufficient focus to reduce health inequalities. The message is that there is a lack of attention given to social determinants of inequality in current policy-making. The important question today should be: what plans and policies will the Government put in place to reduce health inequalities and therefore increase mortality in the deprived population?
I hope that the Minister can inform the House of the Government’s plans. The absence of NHS policies in the levelling up Bill is a missed opportunity to address the serious issue of health inequalities. We are told that there will be a disparity Bill, but when will that be? Perhaps the Minister can say. The increasing health inequalities will continue to drag the NHS down. The resulting ill-health will mean low productivity and less economic growth. The Government have suggested that a Cabinet-level forum will be established, and the Prime Minister has promised to tackle this issue. Therefore, I hope that we will soon have government policies to do so, although I fear maybe not.
There is an urgent need to develop cost-cutting policies that will affect positive change and take a long-term view, reflecting that success is predicated on leadership by government and action from a range of organisations, outside help and care systems. Will we see such a plan from the Government before next summer?
Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, for tabling this debate and bringing this important paper to our attention. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s maiden speech. I made mine some time ago, but I have only recently taken up a Front-Bench position. It is quite a transition to move from Back Benches to Front Benches in terms of workload and the need to learn quickly.
I congratulate the researchers on looking into this question and on the clarity with which they have presented their findings. As content licensing is a long-standing interest of mine, I was pleased to find that this is an open-access publication, licensed under a Creative Commons licence. This maximises the opportunity for people to share and build on the work done by the team, as long as they provide the correct attribution.
The paper helps to fill out a picture which has been emerging through a number of different research projects into the harmful effects of severe cuts in government funding on life and good health expectancy, particularly the cuts which took place in the early part of the 2010s. The linkage between austerity policies and mortality rates seems clear, as described very effectively by the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, and is something that we must have top-of-mind when considering policies for the new recession which unfortunately appears to be headed our way. The noble Lord’s call for Bills to be accompanied by an assessment of the human impact was well made.
While the paper does not reach definitive conclusions on its original hypothesis that women’s mortality would have been affected more than men’s, it adds to the evidence base for austerity affecting different communities and highlights the need for continued research in the area. I hope that the Government and the Minister encourage this, as there is a tendency for Governments not to look at things that appear to criticise previous government policy, but, in this case, the public interest strongly lies in us continuing to understand what happened during that period of austerity in order to inform future policy.
While the paper looked at lifespan, with its focus on mortality rates, I want to mention the importance of looking at health span, defined as the period of life we spend in good health, free from chronic conditions and the disabilities of ageing. This builds on the comments made by both the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London and the noble Lord, Lord Patel.
Health span is also likely to be affected by spending squeezes, especially if there are reductions in preventive health measures and delays in the treatments necessary to restore someone’s health. We can look at examples such as a delay in getting surgery to replace a hip or knee. That may not itself change your lifespan, but it certainly means more time spent living a life restricted by the health condition. This is the real cost of the increased waiting times we are seeing for elective surgery at present, which many people are sadly paying today: their health span has been reduced because they are unable to access surgery or other treatments that would enable them to live a fully healthy life again.
Similarly, a failure to provide timely advice and support to somebody who is at risk of developing type 2 diabetes may lead to them facing health problems that could have been avoided, or at least mitigated, with the provision of the right public health services. Again, any impact on their lifespan may be years down the line, but their health span is more quickly and immediately shortened. I hope the Minister’s response covers points related to health inequalities, as well as those related to mortality.
Reflecting on some of the points made by other noble Lords, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London rightly drew our attention to the multifactorial nature of the determinants of health. We certainly need to look at issues such as housing, as well as more obvious issues related to health treatment. The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, helped us to understand how we should look at the mortality figures. In the debate yesterday, I learned a lot about how actuaries think, and the noble Lord is providing an incredible resource for all of us in understanding how to look at the data.
I close by again looking forward to hearing the Minister’s response. I congratulate him on his arrival to the Front Bench, and I hope he will be equally supportive of encouraging and—dare I say it?—funding more research into the kinds of projects and questions looked at in this paper. It is essential from the public interest point of view that we do not shy away from difficult questions about the effect of policies on people out there, in the real world, that we and this Parliament have decided on.
Baroness Wheeler (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend for securing this debate and for his comprehensive introduction on the context and key findings of the study. I also congratulate the authors on an authoritative piece of work underlining, in particular, the disproportionate affect that austerity has had on women, with a greater financial impact and the loss of key support across vital health, social welfare, housing and education services. I also welcome the Minister and look forward to his maiden speech and response to the debate, and to working with him in the future.
As noble Lords have said, this debate is timely, especially in view of the shocking figures from the ONS, which were discussed in your Lordships’ House earlier this week and were the subject of a brutal analysis on the front page of yesterday’s Times. Some 50,000 more people than normal died over the past 12 months and there were 1,600 more deaths during Christmas week, as the long wait for ambulances, cold weather and surging flu infections took their toll. Excluding the two pandemic years, 2022 was one of the worst years on record, despite the Government continuing to cite the pandemic as the main source and cause of the dire problems we face. I understand that, today, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities is publishing its excess death report on the causes that have contributed to these deaths. Can the Minister update the Committee on this and provide further insight to help us understand the extent of the crisis and the actions the Government need to take?
The study ranges across key community care and health inequalities, which have been ably covered by other speakers in this short debate. I look forward to the Minister’s response to the thoughtful and expert questions that have been raised. The study shows the adverse changes in mortality rates in the UK from the early 2010s onwards, with increasing death rates among more deprived areas, which the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London and other noble Lords spoke very forcefully about, particularly in relation to the work of the Black and Marmot reviews.
The study adds to the growing evidence of the deeply worrying changes to mortality trends in the UK, with a clarion call from the study’s authors to the Government to reverse harmful austerity policies and to instead implement measures that protect the most vulnerable in society. I look forward to the Minister’s response on this.
I have spoken many times on the adverse effect of austerity measures on women, as have noble Lords from across the House. These are clearly set out in the study: women are recipients of huge cuts in social security as lone parents, the carers of children, the elderly, people with disabilities and single pensioners without joint incomes. The axing of and cuts to vital public services in which women are employed, or which support families and caring activities, compound the impact on women and their physical and mental health.
I commend the excellent work of the Women’s Budget Group, which reinforces the extent to which public services have been weakened by 10 years of austerity going into the global pandemic in 2020. Its impact was reinforced by the statistics from my noble friend Lord Sikka and others. Government spending on public services as a share of GDP decreased from 47% to 40% in 2019, and central government funding for councils in England was cut by over 49% between 2010 and 2017-18. The group’s work with the Runnymede Trust showed just how austerity hit particular groups of women hard, especially black and ethnic minority women.
The JECH study refers to the intersectionality of gender, poverty and ethnicity in assessing and quantifying the impact of the cuts. For example, comparisons among the poorest of the population showed that white women lost 11% of their income compared with 8% of poor men, but for black and ethnic groups this was 14% and 9% respectively. Can the Minister tell the Committee what cross-government work is being undertaken to ensure joined-up work to address this?
I will focus especially on those with learning difficulties. The learning disabilities mortality review sets out the stark reality of the impact of increasing mortality rates on this key group. Currently, men with a learning disability die on average 22 years younger, and women 26 years younger, than their peers among the general population. Only four in 10 people with a learning disability live to see their 65th birthday, and in 2021 a shocking 49% of reported deaths were avoidable. Some 1,200 people die avoidably every year when timely access to good-quality healthcare could have saved them. These inequalities are national and systemwide, with huge regional differences in how services meet their needs. For example, those living in the north-west and the Midlands are at greater risk of avoidable deaths. Can the Minister explain what action the Government are taking to address the specific barriers to receiving good-quality healthcare for people with learning disabilities, regionally and nationally?
Finally, the charity Mencap has stressed the vital role that the GP learning disability register plays in raising awareness, but less than one-third of the estimated 1.2 million people in England with learning difficulties are recorded on it. Crucially, the register helps doctors and healthcare staff to understand the support needs of this key group. Mencap has called for a national campaign to increase the numbers on the register. It has also produced specific guidance to explain its value, aimed at black, Asian and minority ethnic communities. What steps are the Government taking to support the increased use of the GP register and ensure that GP surgeries actively encourage sign-up?
This has been an excellent and very thorough debate. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Lord Evans of Rainow (Con) (Maiden Speech)
My Lords, it is a great honour to be here to make the final contribution to this debate. I thank all your Lordships for your kind words of welcome. As a newly appointed Lords Whip, it falls to me to respond on behalf of His Majesty’s Government to this interesting debate. As your Lordships have all noted, this happens also to be my maiden speech.
If I may, I will now turn to the customary part of a maiden speech. I must thank noble Lords for the great welcome they have given me to this place. I also thank Black Rod, the Clerk of the Parliaments, the doorkeepers and police, and particularly my supporters: my noble friends Lord Davies of Gower and Lady Williams of Trafford. We are all very lucky to have such outstanding public services in this place. Needless to say, I am most grateful to my wife Cheryl and my children, George, Tom and Sophie, who have been very supportive in my political and business career. Unfortunately, that has meant I have not always been around in Rainow as often as I would have liked. For things such as homework, sea cadets, rugby, horse-riding and ballet, I have not always been there to support them. But Rainow is of course an idyllic, ancient and rural community; it is a wonderful place to live and work, and to bring up a family.
On a personal note, I am the product of a working-class family, born in a post-war south Manchester council estate. I attended a local comprehensive school, which I left with few qualifications to stack shelves in a local supermarket. However, I developed a passion for politics and an aspiration for business development. I studied at night school for 10 years to get qualified during that period. Working in the technology, aviation and hospitality sectors in senior business development roles, I was able to earn a good living and provide for my family. I hope and believe that my business background will add value to this place. Change is a constant and it is something we need to get right if Great Britain is to prosper in an increasingly competitive and uncertain world.
Turning now to the debate, I am pleased to respond to noble Lords who have contributed on this important issue and thank the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, for securing this debate. I pay tribute to the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health for its report, which explores whether there is a link between the Government’s action to reduce national debt and women’s stalling mortality rates. It concludes that the causal effect “remains unclear” but it raises important policy issues regarding gender differences in work and health, as well as health disparities more broadly.
As set out by the Chancellor in his Autumn Statement and reiterated in the Prime Minister’s address, the Government are committed to reducing the national debt. This is a top priority but noble Lords will agree that a better future is one where our economy grows. It leads to better opportunities for all, particularly in work. We are improving job opportunities for women and ensuring that when women are in work, they are paid equally to men. We achieve this through a range of initiatives including our Great Britain-wide network of jobcentres, the job entry targeted support and restart scheme and DWP’s new progression offer for those already in work. We are committed to working with businesses to accelerate progress and make workplaces fairer. This is enabled by our ground-breaking pay transparency pilot, a number of new returners programmes and our task force on women-led high-growth enterprises.
Turning specifically to women’s health, we know that work and health are inextricably linked. Improving health improves wealth, with long-term ill health a leading cause of economic inactivity. Therefore, as well as addressing women’s access to work, we must ensure women have equal access to healthcare that addresses their specific needs. Although women in the UK on average live longer than men, women spend a significantly greater proportion of their lives in ill health and disability when compared with men. Greater focus must be placed on women-specific health issues such as miscarriage or menopause, and much progress must be made to ensure that women are better represented in vital clinical trials.
The Government are absolutely committed to improving women’s health outcomes. Our recent call for evidence received over 100,000 responses, which informed the first ever government-led Women’s Health Strategy for England. This approach marked a reset in the way the Government are looking at women’s health. The strategy set out how we can improve the way the health and care system listens to women’s voices and boost health outcomes for women and girls.
The final point from the report I want to address is the assessment of the disparities in mortality trends. There are stark disparities in how long people live and how long they live in good health across England. The Government remain committed to the ambition set out in the levelling-up White Paper to improve healthy life expectancy by five years by 2035. As a significant proportion of ill health is preventable, as the noble Lord mentioned, we are focusing on the major conditions which contribute to early mortality and reduce years of good health, as well as on factors such as smoking, poor diet, and alcohol, which disproportionately impact some communities. For instance, we have funded 220,000 blood pressure monitors for people diagnosed with uncontrolled high blood pressure, to empower people to monitor their own health.
We are also modernising NHS health checks, which prevent heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and some cases of dementia and kidney disease, including developing a digital version to increase participation. The Government recognise how important it is to protect and promote the job opportunities and health of the British people, particularly the most vulnerable. The measures I have outlined today will help do that and I look forward to working with noble Lords across this House to share progress and improve the outcomes for women and girls.
I will attempt to answer as many questions as I can in the time available, but if I am unable to do so, please forgive me: I will write after this meeting. The noble Lord, Lord Sikka, asked me to explain why the Government have chosen to squeeze lower and middle-income families. We have announced further support for next year, designed to target the most vulnerable households. This cost of living support is worth £26 billion in 2023-24, in addition to the benefits uprating worth £11 billion to those of working age and the households of disabled people. I might also add that the Government increased the personal allowance to take some of the lowest paid out of tax altogether, while at the same time removing the personal allowance for the highest paid.
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London asked about health equality in the White Paper. The Government are committed to supporting individuals to live healthier lives and at the heart of this is improving access to and levelling up healthcare across the country. No decisions have been taken in relation to the White Paper, but we will publish further information on addressing health disparities in due course. I congratulate the right reverend Prelate on the faith work that she has done. I too do that in my own parish of Rainow, walking from church to church, but there are a lot of hills and valleys in the way and you have to be committed to do it.
The noble Lord, Lord Patel, asked what plans and policies the Government will put in place to reduce inequalities. The Department of Health and Social Care is investing £170 million in essential services in the 1,001 days of the Best Start for Life period. We have funded 220,000 blood pressure monitors; we are also modernising NHS checks to drive prevention of heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes.
The noble Baroness, Lady Wheeler, and the noble Lord, Lord Davies, asked whether the Government will comment on excess deaths. A detailed assessment is not yet available but it is likely that a combination of factors has contributed to the ONS measure of excess mortality, including high flu prevalence at the moment, ongoing challenges post pandemic, Covid-19 and health conditions such as heart disease and diabetes. As I say, I will write further to noble Lords after the meeting.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)
My Lords, the disadvantage of the Minister making his maiden speech at the end of the debate is that there is nobody to welcome him at the end of it, so I shall just exceed my brief and congratulate him on an excellent maiden speech. I welcome him most warmly to the House.
Oak National Academy
(1 year, 9 months ago)
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Lord Vaizey of Didcot
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact of their funding for Oak National Academy on the publishing and education technology sectors in the United Kingdom.
Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to have an opportunity to discuss this important subject. I want to take this opportunity to put on record my praise for the maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Evans, which I was lucky enough to hear as I came in to prepare for this debate. May I also put on record my nervousness at appearing between my noble friend Lady Barran, one of our most formidable Ministers, and my noble friend Lady Evans, our former Leader of the House? I know this at least: both of them are going to give me both barrels. I have no idea what the other noble Lords and noble Baronesses in the Room are going to say on this issue.
I must quickly declare my interests. I advise a number of education technology companies, including Digital Futures and Perlego; they are not affected by Oak National Academy. I chair the UK-ASEAN Business Council, which includes Pearson as a member. I am a governor of St Paul’s School. I also advise an investment fund that invests in an education technology company that is nervous about Oak.
About 15 years ago, when I was a Member of Parliament in Oxfordshire, which has a significant number of education publishing companies, the BBC set up a free education service for schools called BBC Jam. It was a noble endeavour. We will talk about the pandemic in a moment—and we saw what a great and important role the BBC played during that time in terms of supporting our children. However, a lot of my constituents who worked for those education publishers came to me to raise their concerns, which I, as their MP at the time, felt were perfectly legitimate. They were in private companies that had to make a profit and compete in the marketplace but, frankly, when it comes to providing curriculum resources for schools, it is very hard indeed to compete against what is free. They felt that the BBC was overreaching itself, despite its noble aim in doing this, and had not taken account of the impact that its resources would have on the thriving private sector market that existed in the UK. I campaigned against it. It is not popular to campaign against motherhood and apple pie, but we were successful because, luckily, unlike the Government, the BBC had a regulator at the time, the BBC Trust, which looked at this matter and was under an obligation to look at the market impact of BBC initiatives. It decided that BBC Jam was a step too far, and withdrew the service.
Now, we switch to today and the Oak National Academy, which I would assert is a similar intervention in what is a very important marketplace. Again, Oak was set up with the absolute best of intentions. It was there to support our children during the pandemic, when they had to learn at home. It was a platform for education technology companies and education publishers. Indeed, I am given to understand that education technology companies gave something like £24 million-worth of resources, as they quantify it, to the Oak platform for free, while education publishers donated something like £8.5 million-worth of free content to Oak.
At the time it was, I believe, regarded as a temporary and appropriate intervention at a time when almost all pupils were having to take lessons and be taught online to ensure that a core curriculum of resources was available online. Obviously, it would be quite difficult for technology resources that a school had procured and that existed on its own systems then to be translated to individual pupils while they were working at home. However, unfortunately, it has proved not to be a temporary measure. Last year, the Oak National Academy became an arm’s-length body. It has £43 million of funding over three years, it is apparently intending to recruit, or has already recruited, something like 83 staff over the next three years, and its mission is to distribute a full set of curriculum resources. The announcement was made in March 2022, and the business case was published only in November after, in fact, Oak had already been established as an arm’s-length body.
Oak has one achievement to its name: it has already united the British Educational Suppliers Association, the Publishers Association, the Society of Authors—not known for its radical nature—and the teaching unions to oppose it and raise their concerns. My concern is that, in publishing, we have one of the most successful creative industries in the world and, in our education technology sector, again, one of the most successful sectors in the world. The education publishing sector alone in this country is worth some £552 million, about £354 million of which is exports. Some 40% of European investment in education technology companies goes to companies based in the UK. It is the fourth-largest sector in the world. In terms of joined-up government, the Government have announced their intention to achieve a target of £35 billion in education exports by 2030. Obviously, a lot of that includes our highly successful universities attracting foreign students to come and study here, but there is no doubt that an education technology sector that has a thriving home market has the opportunity to expand around the world.
The creation of Oak has already had an impact. We find ourselves in the insidious position whereby individual companies that come and talk to me will not go public. That is for two reasons: first, they do not want, as it were, to bite the hand that could potentially feed them—they do not want to make an enemy of the Department for Education. Secondly, they rely on their investors to have confidence, so they will not go public and say, “I’m sorry. Our domestic market has been upended”, but they tell me that their investors are already saying to them, “We’re not going to put more money into you if you’re going to concentrate on the UK market. We want you to look at markets elsewhere because we don’t think the UK market is going to be viable in the long term.”
Another point, and this is not just to promote the private sector overall, is about understanding what teachers actually want—and I am sure that other noble Peers will have a much greater understanding of that. Lots of opinion polls and surveys are going around about whether Oak is helping or not helping teachers, but my fundamental concern is that teachers want access to the bespoke resources that suit them as individuals or as schools, and they want a wide choice in curriculum materials but, in effect and slightly insidiously—because Oak is not making it clear that it is effectively a creature of the Department for Education —they are getting a nationalised, one-size-fits-all technology resource on which they have to draw. The more this goes on, the less competition there will be in the sector, the less innovation there will be, and the less autonomy teachers will have in choosing the resources they feel are appropriate for them and their pupils. It is a kick in the teeth to the many entrepreneurs who have a genuine passion for the kind of companies they are creating to provide resources for our schools, and it is a threat to the employment of the many hundreds of thousands of people who work across the education publishing and technology sector.
The Government and my noble friend should perhaps address three or four important questions at the conclusion of this debate, but no doubt she will hear many other opinions. First, there appears to have been no real consultation about why the Oak National Academy would be turned into an arm’s-length body or on this incredibly important intervention in the education market without taking account of the wide variety of opinion on whether it was the right thing to do. There has been an impact assessment—but my second question is whether the Government are really going to keep a watching brief on what will happen to the sector, because they rejected the submissions they received about the potential impact on the market. There are also questions about the data protection policies of the Oak National Academy and its ability to share data with third parties. Is it going to be clear about how it uses the data that it gleans from teachers and schools and who it shares it with?
My final question is: what is the Government’s fundamental thinking behind creating the Oak National Academy? What do they want it to look like in three, five or 10 years’ time? Will it be, as people suspect, the one-size-fits-all resource for education technology? Will schools be discouraged from going out to other providers to find the resources that they need and want? Instead of being defensive about Oak, or trying to obfuscate the purpose of establishing it, the Government should be clear.
One of the greatest difficulties we have had, of course, is that we have had dozens of Education Ministers coming and going over the last couple of years—I think we had one who served for 24 hours. I first got engaged with this when Nadhim Zahawi was the Education Secretary; then it was somebody else and it is now Gillian Keegan. We need a Minister who is the department for slightly more than 10 minutes to take an interest and have a long-term view on this intervention.
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
My Lords, I start by declaring my interests as a director of CENTURY Tech and of Suklaa. I also thank and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, for securing this debate and opening it in the way he did. I must also pay tribute to the founders of Oak for quickly establishing a useful set of resources during the early stages of the pandemic. Their success in attracting large amounts of public money has also been impressive; their continued success in doing so with limited process and scrutiny is of course extraordinary.
Five years ago, I was part of the executive team at Tes Global selling our large education business from one owner to another. I fielded countless questions about the impact on our recruitment business of the DfE setting up a rival recruitment platform. I did my best to reassure them that the teacher vacancy service would be a waste of public money because, however good the product, the Government do not understand the behaviours in the market. I am happy to have subsequently been proven right but, meanwhile, the DfE actions spooked investors and cost us millions in lost value. I now hear from similar investors who are assessing a British digital publisher of educational resources that is up for sale. What will be the impact of the DfE pouring £43 million into Oak? Why have the Government acquired a publisher? Are they going to start buying other publishers? I can reassure them on most points, but it is an added uncertainty that will cost another British business.
This is at the heart of my concern about the establishment of Oak as an arm’s-length body. It will damage the ability to grow of British businesses which need significant overseas investment, but which will be put off by this inexplicable intervention. I know this is not the intention of government or the people at the top of Oak; it is an unintended consequence of blundering into a successful, functioning market.
The reality is that there are plenty of high-quality educational resources being published all the time for teachers in England. Plenty are free and some are charged for. When I managed Tes resources, we regularly had over 1 million downloads every day by teachers of content created by other teachers. We made very little money from it but teachers loved us for it because we saved them huge amounts of time. There are many more—from Twinkl to more video-based offerings from the likes of Oak, to more personalised AI-powered resources that also include assessment, like CENTURY. These digital publishers then also compete with more traditional textbook publishers. There is lots of quality and lots of provision—why intervene? There are three possible reasons: to make it easier for teachers to find what they want; to further improve quality or value; or to increase central control over what resources are used.
I am not against an arm’s-length body for curriculum resources—one that specifies standards, agrees with the sector an API to improve the interoperability of resources from different publishers, and ensures that copyright and data protection are fully respected. These would all be valuable and appropriate functions for a government intervention to improve the functioning of the market. It could even call itself Oak for old time’s sake; it might even hold the old Oak content on its platform. But the takeover of Oak by government is about control. Why else would the DfE acquire an educational publisher? It has its own narrow view of what a good lesson should look like in pursuit of its narrow vision of a knowledge-rich curriculum. It wants to dictate to teaching professionals, not to respect their judgment in their contexts. And it wants to impose this through its new teacher training reforms, its prescription of the curriculum and this influence on pedagogy. This arm’s-length body is bad value for money, bad for education and bad for growth in education business.
Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)
My Lords, I too welcome the opportunity to participate in this debate and I thank my noble friend for securing it. I am sure all noble Lords agree on the importance of providing teachers with high-quality resources to support them in delivering the curriculum to the highest possible standard.
I know from my time running the New Schools Network, which worked with groups setting up schools, particularly in deprived areas, that establishing and delivering an outstanding curriculum is a complex and challenging process. Research suggests that teachers spend up to five hours a week searching online for resources or creating lessons from scratch, adding to their already significant workload. With workload regularly cited as the number one concern of teachers, and indeed a significant reason for those leaving the profession, it is absolutely right that measures be taken to help reduce this burden.
I entirely agree that a vibrant and competitive market for curriculum resources which enables teachers to pick what is best for their pupils has an important role to play in this area. But rather than fatally undermine that, as we have heard and as I am sure we will hear more, the establishment of Oak National Academy as an arm’s-length body provides an opportunity to collaborate with and complement this commercial market, as well as to increase the variety and quality of resources available to teachers.
As has been said, Oak was created during the pandemic to provide free access to thousands of teacher-made, fully resourced lessons. Its focus is on improving teachers’ curriculum expertise while reducing their workloads. Independent research has found that Oak reduces workload by about three hours per week for around half of teacher users. In the context of today’s debate, Oak’s own data shows that there is plenty of space for it alongside commercial offers as, according to its most recent findings, no teachers were using Oak as their only source of material.
To allay some of the understandable concerns of firms currently operating in the publishing and educational tech sector about Oak’s potential impact, the Government have made it clear in their business case that it will not overlap with key elements of the commercial curriculum resources market. For instance, it will not create aids for phonics or A-levels, or provide CPD. Furthermore, Oak’s material will be accessible only digitally; it will not provide physical resources such as textbooks. In another step to encourage collaboration with the commercial market, Oak will share its code and data with the sector to allow other providers to build on or improve their own offerings with information from Oak if they so wish.
As an ALB, Oak will not create new resources. Rather, initially it has made £8 million available via an open procurement for primary and secondary maths, English, science, history, geography and music resources, providing investment into the market. As the Government say in their impact assessment, they plan to use Oak Academy to signpost to other high-quality commercial products.
To prevent further unfair advantage, the business case clearly states that Oak’s resources will be
“non-mandatory, and not endorsed by Ofsted”,
and that schools will be encouraged
“to continue using high quality commercial resources where this works best.”
So it is simply not the intention that teachers will solely rely on materials provided by Oak; rather, they will continue to draw on those that best suit their pupils and school context. I hope my noble friend the Minister can once again confirm that this is the case.
As we have heard, Oak was born out of the pandemic. Having spent taxpayers’ money on its creation and development so far, surely, rather than bin it, it must be right to make use of it where it adds value and supports hard-working teachers without distorting the commercial market. I believe that Oak is a positive development, but of course we have heard concerns and we will hear more today about its potential impact. I hope my noble friend the Minister can provide an assurance that, as Oak National Academy develops and expands its resource offering, the Government will continue closely to monitor its impact on commercial sectors and work with all parties to address any negative impacts, should they occur.
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, and thank him for bringing this to our attention. We should have had a longer and deeper debate on Oak National Academy before this point and the Government should have brought it before us, as this important initiative could change the education landscape. I agree with every word my noble friend Lord Knight said, and am probably going to say similar things—only not as well.
I want to make two points. The first is about the motivation for this. The impact assessment says that it wants to save teachers’ time and reduce the workload. One of the reasons given is that the 2014 national curriculum changes took away the framework of support for teachers, which now has to be replaced. That was eight years of things going wrong because of the inadequacy of the 2014 curriculum reforms and this is about trying to put that back in place.
What worries me most and what I just cannot get my head around is this. If you went to teachers and said, “We are the Government and we have millions of pounds; what do you most want us to do to take workload off your shoulders?”, none of them would say, “Give a pile of money to the Oak National Academy and let it produce off-the-shelf lesson plans and curriculum packages.” The irony is that the DfE and Ofsted have argued for this. If you asked teachers who they would most cite as putting pressure on them, they would say the DfE and Ofsted.
I just cannot think through the fact that we seem to be creating a system in which it is easier for teachers to use off-the-shelf lesson plans, as that would give them time to fill in returns for Ofsted and the DfE. I taught for 18 years and the thing I most wanted to do was a lesson plan. That is what I went into the job to do. It was my skill and my training. If teachers spend half an hour a day looking for information on the internet, then thank goodness; they are professionals. That is what they are meant to be doing. Why would you put in place something that meant that a science teacher or similar was not spending half an hour a day looking for up-to-date information on the internet? If the Government want to reduce workload, I suggest that they are going about it the wrong way.
I think this is about control. The evidence for that is in the impact statement. The summary asks why Oak was chosen. It could not be the DfE, because the teachers would not trust it. It could not be private sector procurement, because it would not be “aligned with government policy”. Think about that: the Government are not doing it themselves, because they know that teachers do not trust them, and they are not putting it out to tender, because they do not trust private sector publishers to align with government policy, so they have set up an arm’s-length body to—as the impact statement says time and again—align with government strategy. That is the giveaway.
I have a great deal of time for the person who runs Oak. He is a star. He is a young educationalist who I hope has more and more influence on our education system in years to come, but this has not done Oak any favours.
My second point is to reiterate the point that the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, made about the BBC. It is the reason; it is the whole rationale. If you need one argument against this, it is: use the BBC. I tried a digital curriculum from the BBC prior to this, and what we were going to do was wonderful. We lost in the courts and some people’s professional careers were damaged because of that. It would have been good, and it would have had all the accountability, visibility and openness that the BBC would have brought to the process. I justified that because it is a public sector broadcaster, but Oak has none of that: it is not a public sector broadcaster, it does not have a public sector remit and it does not have that accountability. There are a number of reasons why we should ask the Government to reconsider.
Lord Liddle (Lab)
My Lords, I do not have any personal interests to declare in this discussion, as other noble Lords have—not that I use that to blame them for speaking about this, in any way. However, I happen to be a close personal friend of one of the people who was principally involved in establishing the Oak National Academy, who is probably the person my noble friend just referred to.
I learned about this during lockdown or, at least, in the periods during Covid when we could meet and talk about this. I was very impressed by what was being done to help education continue in this crisis. It was a noble endeavour and the academy should be fully congratulated on it. The tone of this debate does not recognise the contribution it made to keep education going when, I have to say, some—the education unions, for instance—were not very keen on going into classes. That point should be made.
Secondly, again for family reasons, I know all about the BBC thing and recognise that there are problems, but for goodness’ sake, this is a very small-scale public intervention. It is not the BBC. The tender is £8 million. Also, I have been told regarding Oak’s activities that there are two important differences from what the private sector offers. First, it is trying to have universal cover of all the subjects in the curriculum rather than just the ones out of which a lot of money can be made. That is an important difference that we should recognise. Secondly, use of its materials is heavily concentrated among schools that are teaching deprived kids. That does not surprise me, given the financial pressures on those schools and on their teachers, who deserve every possible help.
Therefore, I do not think that there is a problem with this. I do not understand why the publishers are trying to take Oak to court. I do not understand the point about this being an instrument of central government control, of a Tory Government who want to strangle the independence of the curriculum. This is an arm’s-length body. The definition of an arm’s-length body is one that is independent of ministerial control.
I recognise that these are industries of the future in which Britain has an important role to play, these being some of our competitive strengths in the world. However, what the education publishers are saying is like saying that you cannot have the NHS because it would stop all the investment in innovative medical activity. Let us be sensible about this. It needs a sensible conversation between the publishers and Oak National Academy.
Lord Strathcarron (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interest as a publisher, although in this case the interest is purely theoretical as none of my publishing group’s imprints is in the academic market. I therefore have nothing to win or lose from any of Oak National Academy’s proposed activities.
However, I am a taxpayer and a publishing professional, and I know that publishing is an extremely marginal business in which even the most experienced and successful managers find it hard to make a profit. How the Civil Service is going to equal them is a complete mystery. Why they should even be trying to do so is an even bigger mystery, and why a Conservative Government are proposing to set up a state-owned and taxpayer-funded publishing operation in direct competition to private enterprise publishing companies is an even bigger mystery than that.
The headline figures are that the taxpayer should invest £43 million to hire 83 officials over the next three years. I would treat all three figures with a great degree of scepticism. Let us take the £43 million. A quick Google search will show that the average government contract goes over budget by 29%. Of course, we will not know until three years from now how Oak has fared, but as the budget was prepared using taxpayers’ imaginary money, with no accountability and to prove a business model, there is no reason to suggest that the £43 million will not conform to the national average and become £55 million.
Then we have the 83 officials. If anyone can wade through Oak’s 75-page acronym and jargon-laden business case, they will find that there are not 83 officials but 82.6 so-called full-time equivalents, so some poor soul is going to be 0.4 of himself or herself short. We then find that their main responsibility is procurement: £16 million-worth of material over the period. Anyone can do the maths; that is £193,000 per person. As these procurements break down into 12 lots, that is £16,000 per procurement item.
Bearing in mind the costs of those 82.6 people and their overheads, I have never come across a less efficient purchasing KPI. But they have nothing to worry about because, amazingly, nobody is in charge. We eventually find somebody called the senior responsible officer, but that role turns out to have two names to it followed by “job-share”, in brackets.
Lastly, we come to the three years. Unfortunately, my four minutes will soon be up so I can only ask: has anyone ever come across a government department, quango or arm’s-length body that voluntarily liquidated itself after three years, no matter how worthy that liquidation may have been? I fear that, unless we prevent it from starting, we will be stuck with Oak for ever.
This is an absolutely classic case of departmental overreach: an ill-conceived and unnecessary waste of taxpayers’ money, which can only undermine the private sector for no benefit to anyone, except the people who work for it. I urge all concerned to hand the programme back to publishing professionals who know what they are doing, are accountable for their success and failure and do it for a living.
Baroness Blower (Lab)
My Lords, I have no interests to declare, except that I was extremely interested in the speech from the previous noble Lord. I have, from time to time as a teacher, of course, availed myself of textbooks and many other materials from the commercial education publishing sector. My brief intervention in this short debate, on which I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, is just to make a couple of points.
My first point is in relation to school funding. I understand that the current per capita funding for a secondary school pupil is about £6,000 per annum, which is not enough. As many of your Lordships know, schools are facing significant financial pressures and while the Minister will no doubt say that the Government are increasing funding, it remains too low. The fact that both the trade unions whose target audience is specifically heads and school leaders are either balloting for strike action or considering so doing is ample evidence for this.
I turn to the Oak academy. I have, as I have expressed previously, significant reservations about the Oak National Academy. My engagement with Jonathan Dando of the academy and my own perusal of the materials on offer, along with previous responses from the Minister—given, I have no doubt, in good faith—have done nothing to allay my concerns. I freely accept that the intervention of Oak academy materials during the pandemic played an important role in ensuring that distance learning could carry on, but that was of course supported heavily by the British Educational Suppliers Association and the Publishers Association—the figures have been previously given—to set Oak academy up in the first place.
However, the creation of Oak academy as an arm’s-length body, at a cost of £43 million to the taxpayer, is a different order of activity entirely. This £43 million will come from the DfE’s schools budget, which in my view is already too low. Yet research done by the British Educational Suppliers Association shows that only 5% of teachers polled by YouGov thought that centralised resources should be a priority, while 43% believed in funding schools so as to allow them to invest in materials that they thought worked best for them, and 36% believed that reducing class size would be a far better use of government money and would produce better outcomes for children and young people.
I think we all know that teacher workload is very high and burdensome, but it is not clear to me that the Oak academy materials, having spent time looking at them, would reduce workload—unless the Government intend to deprofessionalise teaching to a role of clicking play on a pre-recorded, one-size-fits-all, government-approved lesson. That is not an attractive proposition for a professional teacher, but it is in the same vein as the direction of travel for ITT referred to by my noble friend Lord Knight.
Of course, cost is a significant issue. The noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, put it completely aptly when he said that it is hard to compete with free. There is a big concern that the Oak academy materials will be perceived as being, if not compulsory, certainly preferred. This perception is reinforced by the promotion of Oak academy materials by Amanda Spielman, His Majesty’s chief inspector, at a conference in April last year and by Ofsted’s strong presence on Oak’s subject expert panels, which, according to the Oak briefing for this debate,
“will advise and shape our curriculum”.
Notwithstanding that the briefing note also says,
“Our materials will always be optional with no expectation of use”,
I think that Ms Spielman’s intervention tells schools a very different story.
I do not need to make the case for education publishers; they are making it themselves. However, in closing, I want to ask the Minister what she makes of the report I have had from an experienced colleague that they have been offered an Amazon voucher to join an Oak expert panel. Is that an appropriate use of taxpayers’ money? This colleague will, I am sure, use that voucher to buy some books.
Baroness Hooper (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to have been allowed to make a brief intervention in the gap. I thank my noble friend Lord Vaizey for his introduction and the issues that he raised, with which I agree fully; indeed, I agree with most of what has been said in this debate, both in favour of Oak and what it has achieved as well as everything else. I declare my interest as the honorary president of BESA, the British Educational Suppliers Association, which represents the interests of many small and medium-sized businesses involved in edtech.
It seems to me that what is important is how children are taught and how well they are taught. To achieve the best possible results, it is also important that teachers are able to be creative and responsive to the needs of their pupils—as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, clearly was—and not bound by rigid, inflexible rules. However, in saying this, I appreciate that some teachers are more in need of support than others. My question for my noble friend the Minister is this: what provision is made in teacher training courses for digital awareness, including ways in which edtech can support and supplement their teaching skills?
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, we must thank the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, for drawing the issue to our attention. I do not think that half of us would have known that this was going on had it not been for a couple of the interventions he has made. It is probably a case for the use of Parliament.
This is a very odd one. Initially, I looked at the debate and said, “Yeah, online teaching—great. Wonderful. Online tools and technology—let’s use them”. I remind the Committee of my interests in those fields. However, I suddenly thought, “If the private sector is doing this, why are we intervening?” Is it because we are saving a lot of money? It does not really seem that the case for that has been made so let us hear it. Let us hear whether we are creating money to give extra resources to classrooms because that would be a case for it. If we are damaging one of our commercial sectors—there seems to be a well-argued fear, shall we say, that this could be happening—let us hear what the Government are going to do to mitigate that.
For instance, are we going to go to the publishing sector and say, “You have the contracts to make sure that the Oak academy is up to date”? If you want to make sure that something works, you have to keep monitoring it. Have we established that relationship? Is it going to happen? Are we going to make sure that we have some incentive for people to carry on writing new material that is relevant and keeps up to date with developments? Look at the textbooks from 10 years ago and take a field such as archaeology. We all know now that the hippies were turning up at the wrong time for their big party and that it should have been in mid-winter. This is because scientists and archaeologists have gone out there and had a look. So all those primary school projects got it wrong. How do we get in and make sure that things are happening? Maintenance is a big issue here. If that supplier and incentive have been removed, you may well damage the quality of education in the medium term.
Also, when it comes to supporting classrooms, a basic model may be acceptable but how on earth, with the variability of a classroom’s components, can a standard model ever be anything other than the briefest of guides? I have made it a mission of my own to mention special educational needs on every occasion until the Government tell us when that review will be published. January was the target; there is not much of that left. If you have a higher percentage than average in one class, you will need a different plan and, if it is different types of special educational need or there is one dominant pupil, you will need a different plan. If you have different levels of ability and interest in that class, you will need a different plan. You need variation; there is only so much benefit to be taken from that. I hope the Minister will take this opportunity to let us know exactly what the Government think they will get out of this.
When you have the free market being defended by the Labour and the Conservative Benches, and greater government control being spread around the House, something is wrong—or very right. Let us get an idea. The Government have to give us some answers on value for money and how they will refresh this. Will they give us some answers on both those points? I hope I can go away slightly more comfortable about the answer and the situation when we come back. Let us see.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey of Didcot, for securing this Question for Short Debate. I do not normally speak on education matters so I was pleased to see so many experts with much more knowledge than me in the Room to take part in the debate. I expressed my concern to a colleague outside the Grand Committee. They replied, “I don’t know what you’re worried about; it’s never stopped you speaking before.”
Turning to Oak National Academy, it is clear from today’s debate that it is not without controversy. My noble friend Lord Knight of Weymouth was clear in his concerns that it could cause damage to the market, could cause huge difficulties and could have a detrimental effect. He set out a number of questions for the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, to answer; I am sure that she will address those when she responds to the debate. I would also appreciate it if she could set out what she envisages the relationship between Oak and Ofsted will be. If the former is setting the standard for what the modern curriculum and lesson planning should look like, will Ofsted be responsible for assessing its outputs?
The Institute for Government has called for proper evaluation and assurance of Oak since it has had only limited formal evaluation in the three years since its launch. Does the department intend to conduct an independent impact evaluation of Oak materials? Otherwise, how can stakeholders—teachers and the public —judge how well it is working, and how can we tackle issues that emerge? My noble friends Lady Morris of Yardley and Lady Blower made really important points about what teachers would want this money spent on if they were asked. They made it clear that it would not be what we have got here today. That is a fair point: what would the teachers want this money spent on? What do they need to make themselves more effective in the classroom?
Can the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, say something about the operational independence of Oak? That has certainly been a concern of many noble Lords in the course of this debate. I note that the chief executive of United Learning, Jon Coles, has pulled out of the initiative, citing concerns about its running and the direction of travel. The Minister may say something in her response about how Oak will remain optional. How can we ensure that it remains optional? If Jon Coles and others are pulling out, the risk, of course, is that other suppliers will be crowded out, choice will diminish and schools will end up effectively being forced to use Oak. Can the Minister tell the Grand Committee what the mechanism is to ensure that that does not happen and reassure noble Lords? I would also like to hear from the Minister about how any negative impact on publishers might be mitigated and how innovation might still be encouraged in education resources and the edtech space.
I recognise that Oak was a help to many during the lockdown and had a positive impact on teacher workloads. That was highly welcome. However, we also need the robust evaluation that I mentioned earlier. Given the potential impact on an important and valuable sector for our economy—edtech is worth £3.5 billion—I hope that the Government are exploring every option to assess Oak National Academy thoroughly and address any unintended consequences. I will leave it there.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)
My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating my noble friend Lord Vaizey on securing time for this short debate. I am delighted to be exercising a pincer movement on him together with my noble friend Lady Evans, who is strategically placed at the other end of these Benches. I am also grateful to all noble Lords for their interest in Oak; I understand the strength of feeling in the Committee about protecting a thriving and competitive market for authors and publishers. I hope that, in the few minutes I have to speak, I can address those points as well as the absolutely critical reasons for our support for Oak, which the noble Lord, Lord Knight, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, questioned.
There are many in the Committee who are far more expert and have done the real job of teaching but we all know that designing a high-quality, carefully sequenced curriculum is both complex and time-consuming and requires significant subject-specific expertise. We also know that many teachers develop their curriculum from scratch, with the average primary teacher searching online for resources for between one and three hours per week. All this adds to their workload; teacher workload is one of the greatest threats to teacher retention. We fundamentally believe that Oak can help with this. I am surprised that there has been less emphasis in this debate on the impact on teacher workload, given how strongly I know your Lordships feel about it.
We understand the concerns that Oak may negatively impact on the market. Our analysis suggests that that impact is likely to be low but we are taking steps to mitigate the risk, which I will go through, and will continue to monitor it; I say that in response to a number of questions, including from my noble friend Lord Vaizey. Ultimately, it is the public benefit Oak will provide that must be the Government’s priority. I will cover this.
My noble friend talked about Oak’s achievement in uniting the publishing sector—for the first time, I assume. I cannot comment on that but a greater achievement, as my noble friend Lady Evans pointed out, is that almost half of users save three hours a week on average in terms of their workload. I say in response to my noble friend Lord Strathcarron that Oak users are more likely to stay in the profession of education. In the scheme of things, in terms of spending taxpayers’ money and in the context of a budget of £58.8 billion in two years’ time, if our £43 million goes some way to keeping teachers in the profession—although it is not our primary aim—it will have been money spent incredibly well. On funding, which was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, the IFS has confirmed that, in 2024-25, school funding will be the highest it has ever been in real terms; I hope she will bear that in mind.
My noble friend Lord Strathcarron made comments about handing back publishing to the professionals. In the case of schools, teachers are rightly creating their own content and their own curriculum. We believe that Oak will be an important catalyst in supporting them to do that even better than they do already.
As my noble friend Lady Evans pointed out, Oak was launched in April 2020 in response to the pandemic. During its busiest week, 2.5 million pupils used it. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, for so eloquently recognising the contribution of Oak; I absolutely support and echo the sentiments that he expressed.
Despite what some noble Lords have suggested today, we believe that Oak has developed into a respected national resource and that evidence of the need for its continuation is strong. We know that, in the first six months of 2022, on average 32,000 teachers and 170,000 pupils used Oak resources every week. We now see how teachers benefit from the adaptability of the resources by using them in the way they see best, opting to use parts of the materials to enhance their lesson design rather than taking the off-the-shelf, tick-box approach that was unfairly described by some noble Lords. I remind your Lordships that only 1% of teachers are using Oak resources exclusively.
As your Lordships set out, in September 2022—my noble friend Lord Vaizey mentioned March; it was actually September—Oak was established as an arm’s-length body, which is strategically aligned with but, like every other arm’s-length body, operationally independent from the department. We took the decision to establish Oak after careful deliberation, including engaging the publishing and edtech sectors and an assessment of market impact, which my noble friend Lord Vaizey asked about. Your Lordships can review the full assessment of the business case, which was published in November and is available on GOV.UK. To repeat: we will absolutely keep a watching brief on developments in the market, along with the impact on competitors and on workload, teachers and, most important, pupils.
Oak will bring significant benefits for teachers by providing high-quality, adaptable and, I stress, optional support, reducing their workload and increasing curriculum planning expertise. The noble Lord, Lord Knight, gave us three options on why, because he argued that there are plenty of resources. I would not disagree. His first option was whether they were easier to find. The answer is yes. The second was whether it would drive quality. The answer is yes. The third was whether it was about control. The answer is no. It is absolutely not because, as he knows, it is up to every individual school and trust to choose what materials they use.
I encourage all noble Lords, as some clearly already have, to look at the procurement that is already going on and the engagement with teachers and professionals in the sector to ensure that the resources produced are as good as they can be. Also, a significant proportion of the £43 million set aside over the next three years to support Oak is expected to be provided to publishers, schools and other organisations for the creation of resources—I think to many of the organisations that some noble Lords have been concerned about today.
In November, Oak launched the procurement for resources in six priority subjects, which was worth £8.2 million. In response to the question from the noble Lord, Lord Addington, about mitigation, that offers the commercial market an opportunity to be involved in the creation of Oak’s new content.
On the issue of children with special educational needs and disabilities, which I know is very dear to all noble Lords’ hearts, and rightly so, the adaptability and accessibility of Oak’s resources provide a real opportunity to improve the quality of education for all pupils, including those with special educational needs and disabilities in mainstream schools. Oak will continue to provide more than 600 lessons supporting specialist teaching.
We know that teachers in the UK benefit from a diverse commercial market of educational resources. Oak aims to complement and stimulate this market, not to displace it. My noble friend Lord Vaizey described a sort of Stalinist economy, with no choice and no limits on what Oak can provide. I would like to set the record straight on both those things. I think that I have talked about choice already but, on limits, Oak’s activity will be restricted to key stages 1 to 4. There are several thriving sections of the market into which it will not enter, including the publication of textbooks, certified assessments and CPD. It will also not be pursuing domestic or international sales to schools, teachers, parents or pupils. It will not be producing phonics resources or key stage 5 resources.
Importantly, Oak is working collaboratively to develop its content. It will also signpost users to excellent curriculum offers available elsewhere—something which I think concerned the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy—so teachers will have more, not less, choice in deciding what is right for their pupils. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, suggested that teachers do not want Oak, which is a little unfair. Of the teachers surveyed, 93% of those who use Oak plan to continue using it in the current academic year.
My noble friend Lord Vaizey asked why there was no consultation on the establishment of the ALB. There is no duty to consult when establishing an ALB and, as he acknowledged, a market impact assessment was carried out and the department spoke to the market on several occasions. In response to the question from my noble friend about data protection, Oak will obviously be subject to all data protection duties.
I will write to noble Lords whose questions I did not reach, but I would like to finish by reminding your Lordships what Oak means for children and for teachers. Teachers surveyed in the impact evaluation of Oak said that it increased their confidence in curriculum design, increased the quality of their lesson planning, improved delivery and improved the quality of the school curriculum. Most importantly, Oak users were 35.3% more likely to report that above 20% of their pupils were exceeding expectations. That is what we want for our children, and why we are supporting Oak.
Commonwealth: Zimbabwe
(1 year, 9 months ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Oates
To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to work with other Commonwealth nations to block Zimbabwe’s readmission into the Commonwealth until it is compliant with the principles of the Commonwealth’s 1991 Harare Declaration.
Lord Oates (LD)
My Lords, I have initiated this debate to emphasise the severe damage that I believe would be done to the reputation of the Commonwealth, to the Zimbabwe people’s struggle for democratic and human rights and to the upholding of such rights throughout the Commonwealth, if Zimbabwe were to be readmitted while its Government remain in flagrant violation of the Commonwealth charter and of the Commonwealth’s 1991 Harare Declaration. Yet this is what we are told may happen following the visit of a Commonwealth delegation to Zimbabwe in November—possibly even ahead of Zimbabwe’s elections due later this year.
Members of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Zimbabwe, on which I declare an interest as co-chair, have all written to the Secretary-General on this matter and I thank them for that. We understand that the UK Government are not minded to oppose readmission, because they do not want to be seen as isolated on the issue. I understand the Government’s sensitivity given the UK’s deeply troubled history in Zimbabwe. However, ignoring the oppression faced by the people of Zimbabwe today does not atone for past oppression inflicted under colonial rule. On the contrary, it compounds it. I hope that, rather than bowing to the pressure of others, our Government will work with fellow member states to ensure that the core principles of the Commonwealth are not fundamentally undermined by Zimbabwe’s readmission, while being clear that, if necessary, the UK will stand in defence of those principles, even if it has to do so alone.
At the conclusion of the Commonwealth visit, the secretariat issued the following statement:
“Zimbabwe has made significant progress in its journey to re-join the Commonwealth family … This mission by the Commonwealth forms part of the broader membership process and we look forward to advancing this further.”
It is not clear what progress the secretariat had in mind, as little further detail was provided to support this assertion, but all the evidence from independent observers points to the opposite conclusion.
The Commonwealth statement was particularly puzzling as the Harare Declaration is unambiguous in asserting the Commonwealth’s belief in
“the liberty of the individual under the law, in equal rights for all citizens regardless of gender, race, colour, creed or political belief, and in the individual’s inalienable right to participate by means of free and democratic political processes in framing the society in which he or she lives”.
Zimbabwe’s paramilitary regime believes in none of those things, and is currently in breach of every single one of the principles of the Commonwealth charter that relate to them. Far from making progress towards these principles, levels of repression are ramping up as elections approach.
Just 13 days after the conclusion of the Commonwealth visit, a joint meeting of the APPG on Zimbabwe and the All-Party Parliamentary Human Rights Group heard in-person testimony from a young Zimbabwean activist, Netsai Marova, who was arrested in May 2020 for taking part in a protest, along with fellow opposition activist Cecilia Chimbiri and opposition Member of Parliament Joana Mamombe. They were taken to Harare Central police station, from which they were abducted and subjected to torture and sexual assault—an ordeal that lasted over 36 hours. I defy anyone to hear Netsai Marova’s harrowing testimony and to continue to argue for Zimbabwe’s return to the Commonwealth while such abuses take place.
While recovering in hospital, Netsai and her colleagues were charged with taking part in an illegal protest and later with faking their own abduction and making false allegations of sexual assault and torture. On 10 June 2020, five special procedures experts of the UN Human Rights Council issued a statement calling on the Zimbabwe authorities to
“urgently prosecute and punish the perpetrators of this outrageous crime, and to immediately enforce a policy of ‘zero tolerance’ for abductions and torture throughout the country”
to ensure the effective protection of women against sexual violence and to bring those responsible to account. They also expressed grave alarm over concerns that this was not an isolated instance, reporting that, in 2019 alone, 49 cases of abductions and torture were reported in Zimbabwe, without investigations that would lead to the perpetrators being held to account.
Two years on, Joana Mamombe and Cecilia Chimbiri continue to be harassed through the courts on these charges, despite their evident lack of merit. Netsai Marova managed to escape from Zimbabwe and was granted a scholarship by the Norwegian Government under their students at risk programme. Her life and those of her colleagues have been upended by the actions of the Zimbabwe state and they remain severely traumatised.
On 1 December last year, another youth activist and former leader of the Zimbabwe National Students Union, Makomborero Haruzivishe, spoke at an event at South Africa House hosted by Action for Southern Africa, formerly the Anti-Apartheid Movement. He laid out the gross abuse of human and political rights being perpetrated by the Zimbabwe regime and the need for the world to speak out against it. Mr Haruzivishe, who I hope will be with us later—unfortunately, his train has been delayed—has been arrested 37 times over the past decade and was detained without trial for nearly 11 months in Chikurubi maximum security prison.
In March last year, parliamentary by-elections saw widespread violence unleashed against opposition campaigners across Zimbabwe. Open incitement to violence in a speech by Vice-President Chiwenga at a rally in Kwekwe led to an attack the next day by ZANU-PF thugs on an opposition rally in the same city, leaving one opposition supporter dead and many more injured.
Every day, democratic space is closed down further. On 23 December, the regime gazetted the so-called Patriotic Bill, which grants extraordinarily repressive powers under the guise of “defence of sovereignty” and imposes sentences of 10 years on those who expose the nature of the regime to international audiences, while stripping them of their rights to vote or stand for election. The same month, the draconian Private Voluntary Organisations Amendment Bill, representing an all-out assault on civil society in direct contravention of Article 16 of the Commonwealth charter, passed in the lower House of Parliament. The new law allows the regime to designate NGOs as high risk, thereby allowing them to revoke their registration and remove or replace their leadership.
Meanwhile, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission continues to be packed with ZANU-PF supporters, including—extraordinarily—the daughter of former Vice-President Kembo Mohadi. The ZEC continues to refuse to provide access to the full voters’ roll, while opposition rallies are regularly banned and political repression increases. Only this weekend, footage emerged of the brutal beating of elderly people in villages for having attended opposition meetings.
As we participate in this debate, the opposition’s deputy chairperson, Job Sikhala MP, languishes in Chikurubi maximum security prison, where he has been held without trial since his arrest in June. At the time, Mr Sikhala was acting as the lawyer for the family of a murdered opposition activist, Moreblessing Ali. Her brother, Washington, to whom we offer our sincere condolences, will also join us here later. In response to Mr Sikhala’s detention, the Inter-Parliamentary Union stated on 22 October last year that it
“fails to understand how his detention in a maximum security prison could possibly be justified and is alarmed by allegations that Mr Sikhala is being held in inhumane conditions”.
It also said that it
“fails to understand the factual basis for the arrest of Mr. Sikhala”.
It is now clear beyond doubt that the Zimbabwe Government are intent on using violence, intimidation and the full power of the state to crush all opposition ahead of this year’s scheduled general elections. I therefore urge our Government and all Commonwealth member states to make it clear that Zimbabwe will be readmitted to the Commonwealth only when all political prisoners are released; when prosecutorial harassment of the opposition ceases; and when the rule of law, the constitution of Zimbabwe and the principles of the Commonwealth charter and the Harare Declaration are upheld.
In a powerful letter written to his fellow Zimbabweans from prison this month, Mr Sikhala said this:
“I understand you might be outside, and I am inside, but our suffering and pain is the same. We are all under attack … If I am killed … I am prepared to meet the fate in defense of values and principles I hold dearly; values of a free and open democratic society, exuding happiness, free of impunity and fear.”
He also said:
“What I know is that the world will not allow you to perish on your own dearest Zimbabweans … all outposts of democracy shall speak out in defense of our people under siege.”
That is Mr Sikhala’s hope and his faith. It remains to be seen whether our Government and those of other Commonwealth member states will live up to it. If we do not, a clear signal will be sent to the vicious Zimbabwe regime that it can continue to violate the democratic and human rights of their citizens with impunity. In such circumstances, the responsibility for subsequent events will lie heavily upon our shoulders and those of every member state that chose to stand aside, rather than stand up for the principles of the Commonwealth and the rights of its citizens.
Lord Swire (Con)
My Lords, I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Lords’ Interests in my capacity as deputy chairman of the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Oates, for introducing this topic. He paints a fairly bleak picture of what is going on in Zimbabwe and raises some astonishingly serious points. I suggest that they are slightly at odds with the finding from the most recent visit of the Assistant Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, Professor Luis Franceschi, in November 2022 and the subsequent statements from the Secretary-General, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland, who said that Zimbabwe is
“putting a great deal of energy and commitment to be readmitted back into the Commonwealth”,
and likewise the statement by the former Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, who said:
“The UK stands ready in friendship to support a Zimbabwe that fully embraces the rule of law, human rights and economic reform.”
I am delighted to say that, as part and parcel of the eventual rehabilitation of Zimbabwe into the international community, the Zimbabwe national trade and investment arm, ZimTrade, joined the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council in November 2022 and participated before CHOGM in the business forum that we ran in Rwanda in June, indicating that it was open to discussion and I think is seeking rehabilitation.
Clearly, there are some underlying problems that sit uncomfortably at odds with almost everything the Commonwealth purports to stand for. Given our long and not uncomplicated history with Zimbabwe—it is amazing to think that the Lancaster House conference was in 1979 and that Zimbabwe left the Commonwealth 20 years ago, although it started the process of reapplying in 2018—I ask the Minister about the amount of aid, if any, that we currently give to Zimbabwe. How much of it is hypothecated towards alleviating pensioner poverty, which has been debated in both Houses for many years and is admirably advanced by organisations such as ZANE, for those who worked in what was Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe who either have seen the value of their pensions greatly diminish by inflation or do not have pensions at all? I would like to know that, if possible.
When I talked to the Zimbabweans in Rwanda, we discussed farming. It is absolutely shocking that what was once described as the grain basket of Africa is today a net importer of foodstuffs, having exported wheat, tobacco and corn all over Africa and the wider world at its height. This is at a time when countries not far from Zimbabwe are suffering from malnutrition and starvation, and when there is a global wheat shortage due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I believe we can do a lot to help Zimbabwe in this respect, but we know that there were 4,500 violent evictions of white farmers. There has been a lot of talk about $3.5 billion of compensation, made up by a mixture of long-term bonds and international donors. Farmers believe that they should be entitled to something nearer to $9 billion, which is probably right. How is that going? It was meant to be within five years. Are we monitoring this? Are the white farmers getting the compensation? How is that being funded? We are beginning to see greater co-operation between white former farmers and farmers who seized the land to increase productivity. That is also something that should be welcomed.
All is not perfect within the Commonwealth. Some countries get expelled when they fall short of Commonwealth values, most recently Fiji, the Maldives and so forth. They then have to reapply by complying with Commonwealth standards. At the end of the day, Zimbabwe is looking at Commonwealth Africa and the opportunities afforded by a £13 trillion market. It is a question of how much more carrot and how much more stick; it is a mixture of them both. Membership of the Commonwealth is a huge prize for any country, particular one seeking to rehabilitate itself in the eyes of the international community. It is not a prize that we should give away lightly, but where there is willing and hope we should be there to encourage, not always to criticise.
Lord Leong (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Oates, on securing this short debate. I declare an interest as chair of the Council for Education in the Commonwealth. In this role and others, I have worked on finding solutions to a range of issues within the complex political sensitivities of this unique international organisation.
Zimbabwe enjoys a special historical relationship with the Commonwealth. In 1991, it was in its capital city that the Commonwealth Heads of Government agreed the Harare Declaration, committing their countries to a set of core values including democracy, the rule of law and human rights. These values are reflected in Zimbabwe’s 2013 constitution. Although there have been some positive developments in recent years, they have not been as significant, rapid or numerous as many of us had hoped, especially post President Mugabe. The country retains the death penalty and the rights and freedoms of women and girls are unequal, as they are for the LGBT community.
However, with Zimbabwe holding general elections this year, I draw your Lordships’ attention to the democratic process in the country. Official observers were critical of how the last elections were conducted in 2018. A colleague of mine who served on a Commonwealth observer group told me that he
“personally witnessed scenes of violence and direct intimidation by government forces”
and noted that an
“unlevel playing field”
had been created, which
“the Government considers it to its benefit to maintain”.
Moreover, there are serious concerns about an escalation in enforced disappearances and intimidation, including the torture and sexual abuse of political opponents of the regime, journalists and student activists. They are compounded by concerns over government control of the media and political interference in the police and judiciary.
In the context of Zimbabwe’s application to rejoin the Commonwealth, the 2023 election could and should be an opportunity for the Government to demonstrate their democratic credentials. Sadly, the portents are not good. However, I am both a pragmatist and an optimist. I believe that Zimbabwe’s willingness to rejoin the Commonwealth and to engage with the first stages of the process demonstrates a desire to change for the better. That is where I would encourage your Lordships to consider this question: will continually blocking Zimbabwe’s readmission to the Commonwealth help to move it in the right direction?
The Commonwealth is an immense force for good in improving the lives of its 2.4 billion citizens—almost a third of the world’s population. However, that does not make me blind to the flaws and inconsistencies of the organisation and of its constituent nations. On the issue of capital punishment, for example, only 37% of Commonwealth countries have abolished the death penalty in law, compared with 57% of all countries internationally. Indeed, several Commonwealth nations have fervently defended their sovereign right to retain it. Although we should loudly condemn many of the atrocious abuses of power being enacted in Zimbabwe, let us be wary of making demands of a country that, sadly, some current members would not themselves meet.
The Commonwealth can more effectively influence and change hearts and minds, and ultimately national laws, by working with the countries within rather than outside our family of nations. If we are too intransigent, we risk driving Zimbabwe to look elsewhere for international allies. Do we think that the lives of Zimbabweans will be improved, or their human rights better protected, if the country becomes dependent on powerful countries that are extending their influence in the region, especially China?
Democracy is not a destination but a journey. The UK, as a mature democracy and an influential member of the Commonwealth family, should be prepared to be pragmatic and take the long-term view. We must not lose sight of the ultimate goal—improving the lives of the Zimbabwean people—by making the perfect the enemy of the good.
Lord Loomba (CB)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Oates, for tabling a debate on this important topic. Since 1995, five countries have faced periods of suspension for failing to uphold the values set out in the Singapore and Harare Declarations—including Zimbabwe, which withdrew altogether in 2003 when its suspension was extended.
A number of humanitarian organisations have detailed continuing human rights violations since President Mugabe left office a little over five years ago, including post-election violence in 2018 and killings and rapes during the January 2019 protests. There are concerns about whether abuses against opposition politicians and activists are meaningfully investigated. New laws threaten further suppression and there are problems around the use of criminal law against opposition.
Such issues cannot be swept under the carpet; they must be addressed to achieve lasting improvement in Zimbabwe. The question is whether exclusion from the Commonwealth is useful in doing so. I am firmly of the opinion that it is not. The Commonwealth is founded on what is for most members a painful past and turns it into a force for good. Understanding wrongful behaviour, both intended and unconscious, creates an opportunity to put it right. That applies to all of us. For the Commonwealth to foster improvements in democracy and human rights, its members must be willing to work together towards that goal. The reason why Zimbabwe walked away in 2003 is that it had no intention of doing so and there was no prospect of a process that could see the suspension lifted. For all the questions that hang over Zimbabwe’s current record, I do not believe that to be the case now.
Let us remember that, in 2021, the British Government expressed concern about democracy in Bangladesh, Nigeria, Pakistan, Rwanda and Tanzania. In almost two-thirds of Commonwealth countries, homosexuality is illegal, mostly based on laws inherited from Britain. Today, 26 member countries have blasphemy laws and 16 million people across the Commonwealth are estimated to be trapped in modern slavery. On the positive side of the ledger, whereas widows face similar discrimination as elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, Zimbabwe passed a law last year giving equal inheritance rights to women in common-law marriages, which is a definite improvement and development. This is the point: if Zimbabwe, a country with as much claim as any to have suffered from its colonial past, wishes to be readmitted to the Commonwealth on the basis of its values and its charter, we should welcome that as a positive step and work with it, as we do with other members, to achieve progress.
The Commonwealth is a key channel for raising awareness of issues concerning democracy and human rights. I therefore urge the UK Government to engage constructively towards that end and support the readmission of Zimbabwe to the Commonwealth.
Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)
My Lords, this is a very timely debate—I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Oates, and congratulate him on securing it—because we are likely to see elections in Zimbabwe in the next six months. The rumours are getting stronger that the Commonwealth Secretary-General wants Zimbabwe back in before such elections. I am not sure legally that that could be done, but it seems to be the rumour and it comes from fairly senior people within other African countries. I hope that it is no more than a rumour, because the country has made no progress on human rights since it was suspended in 2003, with Mugabe then taking it right out. There has been no change. There has undoubtedly been a worsening of the situation. In the short five minutes I have, I shall not add to all the things that the noble Lord, Lord Oates, said, but there are many examples of what has been happening. Anyone stepping out of line is beaten up and arrested. It is an arbitrary situation, and the rule of law has gone—all the things that we believe are fundamental to a democracy. Today, we should show our solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe and those fighting back for justice; it is very difficult for them in a country such as Zimbabwe to show their opposition.
The coming year will be incredibly difficult in Zimbabwe. We will see a volatile social, political and economic situation. I do not see how anyone could think that getting Zimbabwe back into the Commonwealth before those elections would not be used by ZANU-PF simply to ensure that its election is carried through with the support of the international community and the Commonwealth. It would be a huge thing. It would give all that publicity to ZANU-PF and absolutely no help to the people of Zimbabwe.
We have had lots of new information recently about the lithium that has been discovered and has now been handed over to Chinese companies to look after. Some 3,000 commercial farms that were taken over and given to Zimbabweans have now been taken back to make a platinum mine. One looks at the land reforms and asks what on earth they actually achieved.
All this up-to-date information on the situation shows that the Zimbabwean Government, the police and armed forces are combining to plunder Zimbabwe’s resources with disregard for the rule of law and human rights, and it shows how the corrupt ZANU-PF elite is able ruthlessly to control every aspect of life in the country, including freedom of speech, movement and assembly, all of which are prerequisites to a free and fair election. Freedom from fear of retribution is also vital. Restoring that and rebuilding trust in the confidentiality of electoral processes take time, especially in rural areas, where even the distribution of food for subsistence has cunningly and methodically been placed in the hands of ZANU-PF loyalists and stooges.
I know that the United Kingdom cannot stop this happening if the majority of the Commonwealth countries decide that it should happen, but I hope that our Government will do all they can in diplomatic terms to ensure that other countries give support. I have heard from one or two noble Lords about the visit in November by the Commonwealth Secretariat. We saw a short press release about it. I wrote to the Commonwealth Secretariat and asked whether it could give me some more information. I asked whether there was a more detailed statement, as what I saw did not give a very detailed analysis of the real situation. I got a response which gave the impression that I would not understand how the situation worked. It said:
“The process of re-admission entails several rigorous steps and a Commonwealth member state that has withdrawn or been expelled … wishing to reapply … is expected to demonstrate that it upholds the principles and values of the Commonwealth.”
It said that a detailed report would later be submitted to the Commonwealth Secretary-General for review. I have written and asked whether we will see that report, because it is quite important that the Commonwealth itself gets serious about transparency and openness. We have seen nothing about who they saw when they were in Zimbabwe.
The report is made only to the Secretary-General and there is no opportunity for a wider assessment of the findings or to judge whether in any way it reflects the reality on the ground, or even addresses the concerns of those who have them for the rights and well-being of the people of Zimbabwe. It is not even possible to judge whether a suitably broad and representative range of people and institutions have been consulted. Who did they actually see? Let us see who it was. When the Commonwealth observer group is deployed, that is all open and can be seen.
Finally, we cannot go through all the Harare principles, but principle number 1 of the Harare Declaration is that the rule of international law be upheld. It is great to see Ben Freeth here in the Room, because the SADC tribunal proved that that was not being complied with. None of the things that the SADC tribunal said has been carried out. I say to the Minister: I know it is a difficult situation and that it might be embarrassing to be seen as out on a limb again, but we are not doing anything for the people of Zimbabwe if we support in any way Zimbabwe being allowed back in.
Lord St John of Bletso (CB)
My Lords, I join in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Oates, for introducing this topical debate. In fact, I got back from South Africa this morning, so I have been fully appraised of some of the developments in Zimbabwe.
In considering the case for Zimbabwe to rejoin the Commonwealth, it is important for us to analyse the reasons why it was suspended in 2002 and, more importantly, what has changed since then—for the good and for the bad. As we are all aware, in 2003 the so-called Commonwealth troika of South Africa, Australia and Nigeria refused to lift the suspension. It was on that basis that Robert Mugabe decided to leave. But when Mnangagwa became the President in 2017, I recall clearly him promising in an earlier speech that Zimbabwe would fulfil the required Commonwealth readmission conditions. He committed to trying to rejoin the Commonwealth, and those conditions were: meeting the preconditions of good governance; having media plurality and media freedoms; and to reset and respect the rule of law.
The noble Lord, Lord Swire, said that we need to have a balanced debate and I believe that credit needs to be given where it is due. There have been some achievements by President Mnangagwa. He has partially removed the indigenisation laws, which made it difficult to do business in Zimbabwe while choking the economy and increasing poverty. There is also more fiscal transparency and there has been an increase in exports. Moreover, interregional co-operation has improved, with several successful regional infrastructure projects. Here I refer to the Beit Bridge project as well as the Kazungula Bridge, which have both made a major difference by bringing revenue, but revenue which is not in the back-hand. This is revenue which comes by toll roads and goes directly to government.
That said, there has unfortunately been an escalation in corruption. Several senior operators in the country have vested interests in maintaining the status quo and, sadly, Zimbabwe has been arresting journalists, including Hopewell Chin’ono, who we all know well, for exposing corruption, along with arresting opposition leaders for fighting tyranny. The noble Lord, Lord Oates, made mention of just a few of those arrested and their horrendous maltreatment while in detention. Opposition supporters have been regularly beaten up, as happened just last week in Murehwa, just 110 kilometres from Harare. As noble Lords know, others who have been mentioned have had death threats, particularly the leader of the CCC. His supporters have been harassed by the ruling party’s regional leaders. When the evidence of these threats have been presented to the police, absolutely nothing has happened. This is inexcusable.
The noble Lord, Lord Oates, also made reference to the passing of the Private Voluntary Organisations Amendment Act. In effect, it immobilises NGOs, which are there to assist the poor and work to try to improve governance. This is in contravention of Article 16 of the Commonwealth charter. Time restricts me from talking in more depth about the impact of the Patriotic Bill but it would prevent the opposition and civil society engaging with foreign government organisations either to report violations or to seek help. If it is passed, in effect, Zimbabweans could be jailed for speaking to British Members of Parliament.
In the year of a general election—the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, mentioned that this is likely to happen in the next six months—a key hurdle must be addressing an up-to-date voters roll. However, this is highly unlikely to happen. A row has erupted over the redrawn constituencies and new boundaries, raising concerns about gerrymandering. Can the Minister elaborate in his winding-up speech on what technical assistance is being given to the Zimbabwe Government to support better governance and policy-making? There is also a dire need for more support to be given to the promotion of better education and improved healthcare.
I want to make it abundantly clear that I would be totally supportive of Zimbabwe rejoining the Commonwealth but the conditions have not currently been met. Readmission now without the preconditions being met would simply reward impunity.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
My Lords, as always, it is a real pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord St John. I admire his resilience, with his fresh experience of coming back overnight. He gave an eloquent response to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Swire, that the Commonwealth is not merely a transactional organisation but a family with a different set of mechanisms. I think that he also provided the evidence base against the assertions from the noble Lord, Lord Loomba. He is to be commended—as is my noble friend Lord Oates, who is to be commended both on securing this debate and on how he has demonstrated his consistency and passion on this issue.
As my noble friend mentioned in his opening remarks, we have been joined here by Makomborero Haruzivishe and Washington Ali, who are personal examples of suffering and those who have experienced loss at the hands of oppressors. They are testimony to why we are debating these important issues today.
The charter and the Harare Declaration have a purpose. A desire to be in the Commonwealth is not sufficient to be a member of it. I therefore take task with the noble Lord, Lord Leong. It is not intransigent to say that there should be a verification process to determine whether progress that satisfies the requirements of those declarations has been made. Setting aside due process, simply looking at geopolitical considerations and whether it would be desirable for a country to join the Commonwealth is regrettable.
Noble Lords do not need to take my word or that of my noble friend Lord Oates. The noble Lord, Lord Swire, thinks that my noble friend’s comments jarred with what the deputy Secretary-General said. I have taken all my evidence for my short remarks today from the Government’s report, Human Rights and Democracy, which was published in December 2022 for 2021. So, if the noble Lord takes to task anything I say, he is taking to task his Government and the FCDO report. Zimbabwe remains a priority country in which, as the FCDO has said, progress is not being made on civil and political rights, on judicial reform, on security sector oppression, on press freedom, on closing civil society space, on social policy supporting children, and on women and gender.
Therefore, the jarring element is in the statement by the deputy Secretary-General. I agree 100% with the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, that we are accustomed to having debates in this House based on published reports of fact-finding missions. I know that the Commonwealth is not a government organisation but I would prefer a statement that says that progress is being made and then to look at the substantial report on which that judgment is based. But I cannot see that on the secretariat’s website. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Swire, has had sight of it but I have not.
So I will refer to the FCDO, which cites that the
“Zimbabwe Peace Project recorded 2,391 humans rights violations, a similar number to 2020.”
This is not progress. The constitutional amendment in May for the President to appoint Supreme Court and High Court judges without interview was a retrograde step. Our Government said that the Zimbabwe Government
“failed to increase security sector accountability.”
Our Government have used the sanctions regime to hold to account four security officials responsible, as they say,
“for some of the worst human rights violations”.
Those individuals are under sanction by the United Kingdom. I ask the Minister whether we support membership of the Commonwealth for countries whose senior officials we have sanctioned.
With regard to intimidation, the Government say:
“The UK has not yet seen evidence of meaningful police investigations into these incidents.”
On press freedom, the Government highlight that Zimbabwe was ranked
“130 out of 180 countries in 2021”.
We have seen civil society space closed and, just this week, we have seen reports of intimidation and violence leading up to what may be the election.
I close with a question to the Minister that relates to our relationship with the Commonwealth. When she responded to the application by Zimbabwe to rejoin, the Secretary-General said:
“I urge the government, opposition parties, the election management body, civil society, and all stakeholders, to play their part in ensuring a credible, peaceful and inclusive process that restores citizens’ confidence, trust and hope in the development and democratic trajectory of their country.”
Everybody agrees with that. The question is whether it is being met. The Government’s FCDO report says that it is not, so what is the last dialogue that Ministers have had with the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth? I note that she met President Mnangagwa in December; has there been ministerial contact with the Commonwealth Secretary-General on Zimbabwe since then? As its membership is based on consensus, will the UK make its position public in advance of the discussions? If there is to be a gap, it will be if the UK supports rejoining while the FCDO report maintains that progress is not being made in some very clear areas.
Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)
My Lords, I apologise for the delay in starting; the previous debate overran. I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Oates, for initiating this debate and for his continued, powerful advocacy for a democratic Zimbabwe. It is for the people of Zimbabwe to determine their own future but continued violations of human rights, including impediments to free and fair elections, remain a significant barrier to their ability to determine that for themselves.
Unfortunately, state interference in elections, as well as broader violations of human rights, remain a significant barrier. The March elections last year were clearly neither free nor fair and formed part of a much wider undermining of democracy in recent years. In addition, civil society, including trade unions, is still routinely repressed and political arrests are still frequently reported.
We have heard the Private Voluntary Organisations Amendment Bill mentioned in this debate. I have raised it in previous debates and Oral Questions, and the Minister has responded. That Bill has now passed in the lower House. If it becomes law, it threatens to crack down on civil society in general and organisations that both expose human rights violations and hold the Government accountable.
When I last raised this in an Oral Question, the Minister expressed concern about its impact, acknowledging the risk to the delivery of development and humanitarian assistance. Of course, with the elections due in 2023, the Bill could be used to restrict the ability of civil society to operate, in a way that would be out of line with the Zimbabwe Government’s commitment to reform.
The Minister has said in previous debates that the Government continue to engage very widely, not only with civil society in Zimbabwe and through our overseas development assistance but also with neighbouring countries, including South Africa. Can he tell us what recent engagement has taken place with Zimbabwean civil society, including trade unions? I also stress the importance of talking to global trade union federations, which frequently offer support and assistance to Zimbabwe within the country. The UK Government have been right to implement asset freezes, arms embargos and travel bans on the Government; for the period that these remain necessary, it would be wrong to support readmission to the Commonwealth.
The Minister has said before that President Mnangagwa desires more engagement with the UK and that, in many respects, he shares that aspiration. However, he acknowledged that deeper re-engagement with the UK will require meaningful political and economic reform and respect for human rights and the rule of law, in line with the President’s own stated commitments when he took office. So, what is the latest assessment by the Minister and the FCDO of progress made? We have heard in this debate that it appears to be very little. Can the Minister update us on the implementation of these sanctions and any assessment of their effectiveness?
Finally, as noble Lords have mentioned, admission to the Commonwealth is a decision for all members, not just the UK, so it is important to hear from the Minister what discussions, if any, have been taking place with other national Governments in the Commonwealth on the question of Zimbabwe’s readmission.
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park) (Con)
My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Oates, for tabling this debate and for his ongoing commitment to promoting human rights, democracy and prosperity in Zimbabwe as co-chair of the APPG. I also thank other noble Lords for their insightful contributions.
The United Kingdom would like nothing more than to see Zimbabwe rejoin the Commonwealth. As noble Lords are aware, that is a collective decision for all members to make if the Secretary-General makes a formal recommendation that Zimbabwe has met the criteria and is ready to be readmitted. The 1991 Harare Declaration and the 2012 Commonwealth charter were landmark moments that redefined the Commonwealth and cemented its place as a modern, forward-looking organisation. The core principles of freedom, democracy, peace and prosperity are as important now as they were then. They remain the basis for assessing any application to join or rejoin this family of nations.
The United Kingdom is committed to maintaining a constructive dialogue with the Government of Zimbabwe, including on the principles underpinning the Harare Declaration. The former Minister for Africa held frank discussions on many of these issues with Zimbabwean Foreign Minister Shava last summer. During his visit to Harare in November, Professor Luis Franceschi, the Commonwealth Secretariat’s Assistant Secretary-General, had a meeting, which has mentioned a couple of times in this debate, with a range of stakeholders from the Government, opposition parties, civil society groups and diplomatic missions. This included a meeting with our own ambassador to Zimbabwe, as well as a meeting with all Commonwealth ambassadors to Zimbabwe.
Discussion focused on the evidence of progress against the Harare Declaration principles and some areas of progress were noted, particularly on economic reforms. However, equally, concerns were raised about instances of political violence, the harassment and detention of opposition activists, and efforts by the Government to restrict the freedom of civil society to operate. I assure the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, that we, too, would like to see the Government of Zimbabwe meet their international and domestic obligations by respecting the rule of law, safeguarding human rights, and delivering genuine political and economic reform for all—obligations that are clearly articulated in the Harare Declaration and the Commonwealth charter.
All that as a package is the precondition of membership, whether new or renewed, of the Commonwealth. We will wait to see the Secretary-General’s assessment—we will see it but, as I understand, it is not a public document; I will get back to the noble Baroness on that if I am wrong. We will be able to see her views of the progress, or otherwise, against the Harare Declaration principles and her subsequent recommendation following the mission by the secretariat last November.
As the noble Lord, Lord Leong, said—in fact, it was a point made by a number of speakers—the general elections expected this year present the ideal opportunity for the Government of Zimbabwe to demonstrate progress against the principles of the charter; namely, respect for human rights and freedom for the political opposition, civil society and media to operate. The noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, made this point very clearly. She referred to some of the rumours of when submissions might be made. I would like to reiterate on behalf of the UK Government that we see the general election as the moment for the Zimbabwean Government to prove and to demonstrate their readiness to rejoin the Commonwealth. It seems to be the most obvious moment for that signal to be sent by the Government.
Of course, the UK does not support any particular candidate or political party in Zimbabwe. We will continue to engage with all parties across the political spectrum, as noble Lords would expect. It is for the people of Zimbabwe alone to choose their president and Members of Parliament. It is essential that this choice is exercised through peaceful, credible and inclusive elections in line with Zimbabwe’s own constitution. We will therefore continue to encourage the Government to implement the recommendations of the 2018 electoral observation missions ahead of the 2023 elections. Unfortunately, we note, as others have, that there has been only limited progress on most of the recommended reforms to date. Of particular importance are the independence of the electoral commission; an accessible voter registration process; publication of an accurate voter roll; the transparent use of state-owned resources; a transparent and accountable result-tallying process; and equal access to state-owned media for all participating political parties.
We will also continue to encourage the Government of Zimbabwe to allow space for the opposition and their supporters to—
Lord Hayward (Con)
My noble friend has made comments in relation to the upcoming general election. The noble Lord, Lord Leong, referred to the Commonwealth observers at the last election, of which I was one. I was party to the report that was prepared on that occasion. Given the positive comments that my noble friend made about the importance of the 2023 election, I ask that that message is given to all members of the Commonwealth so that they understand the judgment—which I think most of us would share—that no decision could be made before the general election and before observers’ reports are published.
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)
I thank my noble friend for his intervention. There is no question in relation to our position on this. Our view, as I have just stated, is that the importance of the general election is hard to exaggerate in the context of the discussion that we are having now. That is well understood across the board.
As I say, we continue to encourage the Government to make space for opposition candidates and their supporters to campaign without fear of violence and for civil society organisations and journalists to operate without harassment, in line with the country’s own constitution.
As I said in the House last October, the UK has observed a trend of lengthy pre-trial detention of government critics in Zimbabwe. A number of examples have been cited already in this debate. While most of the opposition Members arrested in Nyatsime in June have now been granted bail, Members here have raised the specific case of Job Sikhala MP, and we are continuing to monitor his ongoing detention. In response to a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Oates, we of course remain concerned by the failure of the Government to address allegations of abduction and abuse of three opposition Members who he named—Joana Mamombe, Cecilia Chimbiri and Netsai Marova. We have raised our concerns with the Government and publicly called for an investigation into the allegations. We are, as I say, concerned by the trend of lengthy pre-trial detention of government critics and we regularly call for due legal process to be followed and for human rights—including those of prisoners—to be safeguarded.
Noble Lords will be very aware of the case of Makomborero Haruzivishe—I apologise for my appalling pronunciation—an opposition activist who I understand is here with us today. I welcome him to the House. As noble Lords will know, he spent 11 months detained without trial in Chikurubi, a maximum-security prison, and that his case is far from unique. I take this opportunity, not least because we have Washington here with us too, to echo the condolences to Moreblessing Ali’s family and friends, which were passed by our ambassador to Zimbabwe publicly. Our ambassador called for those behind that terrible crime to be brought to justice.
I also highlight our concern at the violent incidents around by-elections in Zimbabwe last autumn. We urge all political parties to refrain from violence and to adopt measured language, which will support peaceful campaigning. Any incidents of violence should be investigated in full.
Zimbabwe must allow space for civil society organisations to operate properly and fully in the run-up to the general election. The noble Lord, Lord Collins, mentioned the Private Voluntary Organisations Amendment Bill. Like him, our view is that if passed into law and implemented—which it has not yet been—it has the capacity to seriously undermine this principle and prevent civil society delivering critical development and humanitarian assistance across Zimbabwe.
The noble Lord, Lord Oates, raised how the UK will work with other Commonwealth nations on Zimbabwe’s application to re-join them. The UK, with our international partners, is committed to supporting Zimbabwe to make progress on reforms. We have deep and long-standing partnerships with many member states and we engage and consult widely on all issues of importance to the Commonwealth. For example, UK Ministers and officials speak very regularly to their South African counterparts, most notably at the recent South African state visit to the UK, on a broad range of issues, including Zimbabwe. I assure noble Lords that we will continue to engage constructively, openly and robustly with all relevant parties in the lead-up to this year’s elections.
The noble Lord, Lord Purvis, raised the issue of sanctions applied by the UK. As he said, our sanctions target five individuals—I think he said four—responsible for some of Zimbabwe’s worst human rights and corruption violations. I want to make it clear that those sanctions are not targeted at, and seek to avoid impact on, the wider economy and the people of Zimbabwe. They are not the cause of Zimbabwe’s economic problems. To lift the sanctions, the UK needs to see reasonable progress on political reforms and human rights.
My noble friend Lord Swire touched on our ODA, particularly pensions. The UK regularly underlines to the Government of Zimbabwe the importance of fulfilling their responsibilities to all those entitled to a Zimbabwe government pension, including former southern Rhodesian civil servants. The ambassador wrote to the Minister of Finance on 30 May 2022 on this issue, and the Government of Zimbabwe have assured us that they will resume payments when the economic situation allows. The Commonwealth veterans’ fund, which he mentioned, was in receipt of £430,000 last year, which I am told has provided direct support to 470 veterans.
We will continue to support the most vulnerable people in Zimbabwe through our broader aid programme. This financial year we provided £101 million, mostly focused on education and livelihoods, promoting health, standing up for human rights and supporting climate resilience. While we work constructively with government ministries on a range of those issues, none of this aid is channelled directly through the Government of Zimbabwe.
The UK wants to see Zimbabwe prosper for the benefit of all its people, including by rejoining the Commonwealth. We will continue to engage constructively with its Government wherever we can to help Zimbabwe achieve its ambitions, but meaningful reform is needed to achieve them. We sincerely hope that the Government of Zimbabwe seize the opportunities presented by the upcoming elections to demonstrate progress on meeting their commitments, by respecting the rule of law and safeguarding human rights. This would pave the way for Zimbabwe to be readmitted to the Commonwealth.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)
My Lords, that completes the business before the Grand Committee this afternoon.