UN Sustainable Development Goals

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, for securing this debate. It is a take-note debate on conflict, extreme poverty and climate-related emergencies and their impact on the sustainable development goals. My speech is in the nature of questions to the Minister about the action the Government are planning in two specific areas where they could clearly take action.

I begin with what is happening right now in Nigeria, Mali, Niger and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where floods have driven nearly 1 million people from their homes and killed more than 1,400 people. Save the Children tells us that around 10 million children in the region are being kept out of their homes. Mali has delayed the start of the school year for a month because so many people are sheltering in schools. In Chad, every province has flooded—and this is a country where more than 40% of the population lives in poverty and which is home to more than 2 million refugees. Those who question Britain’s contribution in taking refugees might like to consider that figure. These floods are, in part, a consequence of a natural weather cycle, but they are undoubtedly worsened by the climate emergency.

What does this actually mean at the human level? In the capital of Mali, Bamako, Reuters spoke to a grandmother, Iya Kobla. Her fishing village has been destroyed and many of the mud homes have been swept away. She told Reuters:

“We lost everything and now my grandchildren are all sick”.


Those grandchildren are sleeping on makeshift beds in the very school rooms where children should be learning.

Lest it be thought that this is happening in just one continent, in Latin America we have had a year of record heat, floods and drought, as the World Meteorological Organization reports. Those countries have suffered tens of thousands of climate-related deaths in the past year, at least $21 billion-worth of economic damage and “the greatest calorific loss” of any region. It has to be noted that nearly all the people suffering, people like Mrs Kobla, have done nothing to cause the climate emergency.

This brings up the context of loss and damage in COP climate talks. This is supposed to be compensation from those causing the damage to those who are mostly suffering from it. COP 29, which is fast approaching, is being touted as the climate finance COP, yet the Heinrich Böll Foundation reports that rich countries are fighting the inclusion of loss and damage as a thematic focus of climate funding in those talks. Can the Minister assure me that the Government support the inclusion of loss and damage as a thematic focus? What other plans do the Government have to advance the loss and damage agenda within COP and to deliver the funds that are so urgently needed?

I move on to my second theme. The noble Lord, Lord McConnell, spoke about business stepping up to support the sustainable development goals, and said that the City of London can make a real difference. I agree with that: it can make a real difference by cleaning up the rampant corruption that is robbing huge funds from the global South. The robbing of the global South that began centuries ago continues apace. I cite former Government Minister Andrew Mitchell, who was the Deputy Foreign Secretary. In May this year, he acknowledged that 40% of the world’s dirty money flows through the City of London and the British Crown dependencies. According to IMF figures, 5% of global GDP is lost to corruption.

I am particularly driven to this theme by a meeting this week of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Anti-Corruption and Responsible Tax. The topic of the session was Bangladesh and the return of stolen assets. We heard from Professor Mushtaq Khan from SOAS that Bangladesh has lost an estimated $50 billion to $100 billion. We heard from the central bank of Bangladesh how desperate it is to recover this money and how difficult it is expected to be. We heard very directly from Al Jazeera journalists how that money has flowed into this city, right here, right now.

It is not that people are not trying to do something about this. I note that a group of anti-corruption NGOs wrote to the Foreign Secretary on 3 September with three key recommendations: a surge in resources for the National Crime Agency’s international corruption unit to allow it to prioritise the urgent work in Bangladesh and elsewhere; greater external help for the interim Government of Bangladesh to allow them to identify stolen assets; and collaboration with key allies of the UK to identify targets for potential sanctions and visa bans. Susan Hawley, the executive director of Spotlight on Corruption, said:

“The UK really needs to put its money where its mouth is”.


In response to that NGO letter, a letter has been released from Catherine West, the Minister for the Indo-Pacific, dated 10 September. It listed all the existing organisations and structures that have been in place for many years and that have not stopped this rampant pillaging of the assets of Bangladesh. It concludes:

“We share your concern about the need to support Bangladesh. We will continue to work with the interim government in Bangladesh on their specific requirements including working with civil society, political parties and international partners”.


My direct question to the Minister is this: what are the Government actually going to do about this stolen money?

I need to tie together the two issues I have raised. Bangladesh has a population of 161 million people. It is the eighth most populous country in the world and it is acutely vulnerable to the climate emergency. Tropical cyclones now cost Bangladesh an average of $1 billion a year. Sea rise means that saline intrusion is affecting the drinking water and irrigation water of 20 million people, who are frequently forced to drink unsafe surface water as a result. One projection from the World Meteorological Organization suggests that one in seven people in Bangladesh could be displaced by the climate emergency by 2050.

But, of course, Bangladesh also needs power; it needs renewable energy resources. A 2018 study from Frontiers in Energy Research looked at

“the mean capital cost of a power plant in Bangladesh”,

which was

“twice … that of the global average”.

Bangladesh desperately needs investment. It needs support. It needs us to stop robbing it—to return the money that has been stolen through the City of London and is being held right around where we stand today.

Let us deliver possibility for the people of Bangladesh and the people of the world. This means not just aid, nor just loss and damage finance; it very much means a transformation of our own society.