International Women’s Day
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts(2 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)
My Lords, I am somewhat intimidated to follow three women who have spoken so powerfully and who I know have contributed enormously to taking forward women’s health in this country. I will not talk about women and health, and I will not even talk about a subject that your Lordships have heard me discuss before—the experience of women who have suffered sexual exploitation and violence—although I am still doing work on that through projects in Yorkshire. Instead, I will concentrate on international affairs.
Before doing so, I join the tributes to Baroness Boothroyd. Betty was a great family friend and would visit us in the north-east before I became an MP, so when I came here and she was running for Speaker, she gave me the firm instruction that I and Mo Mowlam, with whom she knew I was very friendly, had to sit either side of her when she was going to be dragged to the Chair so that we could look after her handbag. Of course, we did exactly as we were instructed.
I also welcome today’s maiden speech. I know Kate—the noble Baroness, Lady Lampard—because we both work as trustees for GambleAware. However, as she is its chair, she is very much my senior there, so I bow to her greater knowledge and understanding. I know that she will have a major contribution to make to this House. I wish her good luck with her speech; I know how terrifying these things are.
I will speak about international issues and the role that the Government have in relation to international development. Despite ambitious commitments that we were part of in the sustainable development goals, progress on women’s rights globally remains frustratingly slow. Indeed, the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, said recently that gender equality is still “300 years away”, so none of us will ever be there to see it.
According to the sustainable development report from last year, globally, 26% of women across the world who are in a long-term relationship—641 million women—experience violence at some stage of that relationship. Further:
“In 2021, nearly one in five young women were married before the age of 18 … 35% and 28% of young women were married in childhood, respectively in sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia”,
and
“Up to 10 million more girls are likely to become child brides by 2030 due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to the 100 million girls projected to be at risk before the pandemic.”
These things are going on. Over
“200 million girls and women today have been subjected to female genital mutilation”,
and
“As of … January 2022, the global share of women in lower and single houses of national parliaments reached 26.2% up from 22.4% in 2015”—
but essentially, that is still only a quarter. We still have a lot to do.
Many people have heard me pay tribute to Voluntary Service Overseas on numerous occasions for how it made me, enabling me to learn about myself as well as the world. I will say a little bit about its work. I am proud that VSO, for several years now, has worked with women and girls as a priority across all its programming. However, the tragedy is that government funding for organisations such as VSO has reduced significantly, which means that work with women and girls across the board is substantially reduced, despite the very good new publication from the Foreign Office about the international women and girls strategy. This is tragic, because not only does it mean that, while some of the issues I have been discussing may well be addressed in some countries, they now will not be addressed in others—VSO has certainly had to reduce the number of countries it is working in—but it also means in some countries the continuation of violence, abuse and war. The consequences of women’s involvement on the fringes of those sorts of conflict mean that those families will often seek to leave, and they will become the asylum seekers and refugees of the future.
This is short-term policy on our behalf, and we really need to address it. We now know that much of even the reduced budget is now being spent in this country on refugees and defence issues rather than in the developing world and on these development issues. I am proud of the work that international development organisations are continuing to try to do, but, my goodness, we should be doing more and we need to do more, because what happens here has a major effect on women around the world.
Levelling Up: Funding Allocation
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts(3 years ago)
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Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My Lords, we do not know of a better method for capital funding. There is not just the levelling-up fund but a suite of funding going out to local authorities for capital projects, including the towns funds, the community ownership funds, the freeports and the UK shared prosperity fund, which is given out in terms of percentages.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)
My Lords, many people see child poverty as the measure of where levelling-up funding should be targeted. Why then in the north-east did no authority north of the Tees get anything? What do authorities such as County Durham have to do to be recognised by the Government?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My Lords, the north-east got the third-highest level of funding per head of capital across the country. It is up to local authorities to bid for their priorities; I am sorry if they did not get them, but if they did not bid for them then I hope they will do so in the third round.
Called-in Planning Decision: West Cumbria
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts(3 years, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)
I am sorry; the Minister must respond to each question from the Back Benches.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My Lords, I knew that this would be a very passionate debate.
The first question from my noble friend was: why did the Secretary of State not turn this down? He did not turn it down because he took his time and read this very large report. Unlike the noble Baroness opposite, I am afraid that I have not had the time since lunchtime today to read it—but I have it and I will read it this weekend. So, why did the Secretary of State not turn this down? He did not turn it down because he read the evidence, he thought that it was sound and he agreed with the inspector’s report. The inspector is independent and this is about a planning application. He did his job and, as I said, the Secretary of State agreed with him.
On the rest of the world not agreeing with what we are doing, I have not seen the rest of the world having net-zero mines for coking coal. We are going to do that. We are showing the rest of the world how it should be producing this commodity, which is still going to be required to produce steel in the near future. That is extremely important.
On the other issues around where the coal will be sold to and how that will be done, this is not a Government-supported project; it is from the private sector. Private sector operators put in the planning application and it was decided on in the normal way. The Secretary of State read all the information and decided that he would support it.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)
My Lords, can I question the Minister from the perspective of steel? I represented a seat that used to have the most efficient steel-making company in the country, in Consett in County Durham, but the Government were quite happy when it closed and all those very good jobs were lost.
My contacts in the steel industry tell me that some of the coal is so full of sulphur that the industry in this country will not use it. Some of it can be adapted into coking coal, which it will be able to use, but some will not. The industry is concerned that it is already trying to move to decarbonise the steel-making process and that, by the time this all comes into fruition, it is hoped that it will be further down the road and not need anything like the 15% that the Government and the application are talking about. My contacts also tell me that the European Union is much further down the road on decarbonising the steel-making process than we are. Indeed, one of the companies working on this is working with the European Union on that decarbonisation. In these circumstances, the Government are putting the reputation of the steel industry at some risk, because it believes that the major efforts it is trying to make to decarbonise will be overshadowed by this decision, and that the pressure will be on the industry to take more coking coal, which will not help it to decarbonise.
There are other aspects of this; I accept that it is extremely complex. I have not read the inspector’s report, although I too am used to Ministers having to take decisions around such things. Can the Government tell us when they expect the coking coal to be processed? When will that actually happen? How far on will the British steel industry be on decarbonisation at that point? What is going to happen if the EU is in front of us on decarbonisation and is therefore not going to accept the coking coal from this mine, which will mean that it has to be exported even further? These are serious issues which ought to be taken into account. I accept that they are complex and include judgment, but I think the Government have made the wrong judgment.
Levelling Up
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts(4 years ago)
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Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
I always thank my noble friend for his comments and his probing in the right areas. I failed to mention in my response to the Front Bench that, of course, there will be an annual report that will measure progress on that mission to 2030 and beyond. The point that my noble friend raises is precisely right. We need to have transparency. It is important to track the money. I think a policy that was actually delivered under, I believe, the Blair Government, the Total Place agenda, is a very important one to ensure that we get the money into the right areas across the piece, whether it is funded by central government, regional government or, indeed, local government and make sure that the money gets to the people who need it most. Transparency is a key part of achieving success and we will take that point on board.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)
My Lords, the Minister has somewhat depressed me today.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)
We are fed up with joyous optimism which does not have much underpinning. Can we have real attempts to tackle the things that are affecting people fundamentally? In the north-east, the difference between those who are doing well in schools and those who are not has increased over the last two years. When does the Minister expect that they will be able to get the same sorts of opportunities because of them being levelled up to what, for example, young people in Surrey Heath will be able to expect? When, on behalf of my noble colleague from Darlington, will they have the jobs that they were promised by the Treasury—300 within the next month, or six weeks, I am told? They have not arrived at all. On transparency, I urge the Minister to look at what the National Audit Office has said and then come back to the House and tell us that the Government are following the advice of the National Audit Office on transparency.
Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
Sorry, maybe noble Lords do not want to hear my response. I was pretty depressed at leading a council from 2006 to 2012 in one of the most deprived parts of the country, according to the index of multiple deprivation: White City—
Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
Can I respond? I listened to the noble Baroness, and I hope that she can listen to me for just a moment. I was depressed to watch the grant farmers at work, filling in forms and collecting the money—whether it was local, regional or national money—and not making a blind bit of difference. That was during the Labour years; I saw no progress at all, so I was depressed. But here we have 12 key missions, all measurable, backed up by an annual report. Admittedly, this is not the end of the programme and plan for levelling up—I would say that we are at the end of the beginning—but it is now a substantial plan, with 12 clear missions set out and milestones to get there, which will be measured in an annual report. I do not think there has been a Government who have tried to be more transparent than this one.
Lord Kakkar (CB)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for taking questions on this Statement, and in so doing declare my interest as chairman of the Office for Strategic Coordination of Health Research. I welcome the focus on health and extending healthy life expectancy as part of this levelling-up agenda. Are the Minister and Her Majesty’s Government content that the opportunities afforded by the passage of the current Health and Care Bill through your Lordships’ House and this Parliament are being fully exploited and addressed in terms of the levelling-up agenda for health, with particular reference to the co-ordination between local government and institutions providing healthcare with regard to addressing the disparities that drive inequalities in health outcomes and the research agenda at a local level, which needs to be addressed to achieve these objectives?
Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
My Lords, it is an incredibly good question from someone who actually knows what he is talking about. I thank the noble Lord for raising this. I declare an interest as the son of a vascular surgeon who ran his service for more than 30 years in our local hospital. One of the great frustrations, of course, is the Berlin Wall between health and social care, which this Bill is trying to address. As someone who spent 20 years without becoming a vice-president of the Local Government Association—it did not give that to me, so I cannot declare that interest—I can say that it is important to address that. The systems need to come together, which is the commitment, to ensure that we do not have that friction between the two and that we get the care organised in the most efficient way possible to give people the best possible start and a healthy lifestyle so that they can reach their potential.
Covid-19: “Everybody In” Scheme
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts(5 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend because I agree that, through this pandemic, we have got much more of a grip of the quantum involved if we want to end rough sleeping. We also know there are people who may not be rough sleeping in the truest sense of the word—but they are sofa surfers on the edge of being rough sleepers. Understanding more about the cohort and what it will take to resource this is the only way to deliver on the Government’s moral mission to end rough sleeping for good.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I am sure the Minister will agree that Housing Justice has done a fantastic job in providing winter night shelters, with the rolling church model being central—particularly for those with no access to public funding. However, while the people involved should be commended and thanked, this model is not adequate during a pandemic. There is likely to be only one or two toilets and inadequate washing facilities, and people must move on each day. Can the Government guarantee there will be sufficient safe accommodation to close the night shelters and ensure that every rough sleeper is housed safely? We managed to do it the first time around. Will the Government show the leadership necessary to ensure it this time around?
Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
My Lords, I thank the front-line workers in those night shelters. It is important that we recognise that, in the current pandemic, they are putting themselves at risk. They need to be prioritised in the same way that we prioritise those working in the National Health Service and other care workers. There is a real commitment to getting people off the streets, into a Covid-secure and safe setting, and then to finding them the right accommodation. That is backed up by more cash than ever to ensure that we do, in time, end rough sleeping.
Towns Fund
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Greenhalgh (Con) [V]
In my answer to the previous question, I made it clear that this is a combination of using an evidence-based methodology and Ministers using their local knowledge. That benefited 101 towns in the first instance. There is more money to be spent on regeneration, but the foundation stone of the allocation of funds was using a clear methodology with multiple criteria, including productivity and exposure to economic shocks.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his responses, but his last response gives rise to some concern. It certainly looks as if many of the decisions were partial and, given what was said during the election by the Secretary of State to Conservative candidates about the likelihood of the towns in their constituencies receiving consideration in the towns fund, his view that Ministers used their personal knowledge gives folk like me from the northern part of Durham real concern. Will the Minister therefore be clearer than he was with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans and state that, in future, criteria will be published so that we can see that an independent, proper decision to allocate public money to towns that need it—and they do need it—is transparently fair?
Lord Greenhalgh (Con) [V]
I would point out that the National Audit Office looked into this. Its report sets out the town deal selection process in detail. The report showed that the more affluent towns were ruled out and the 40 most deprived towns were rightly favoured, with the remainder selected from a shortlist that considered a wide range of evidence. This process was developed by officials but there was political oversight, as there should be.