Population Growth

Baroness Flather Excerpts

Monday 13th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Flather]

I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak on this subject, so I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, for introducing it. I think that we can no longer call this a toxic subject. I have always been involved in the issues of population and family planning, because I come from India, where you cannot avoid worrying about population increase. Until even 10 years ago, population was not a subject that people talked about as we are doing today. Even three or four years ago we were not quite so open about the issue. It is one of the most important issues that we have not tackled or considered and, as has been said, we really do need to think about it.

I should just like to say a few words about the history of Britain’s contribution to family planning. DfID has had some very strange Secretaries of State. Clare Short, for example, dropped family planning completely when she was Secretary of State. Hilary Benn took it up again, and since then DfID has been in a very good phase. It has given £20 million per year under a five-year grant to the UNFPA. Bilateral aid has also increased from £55 million under a three-year programme to £80 million and then, this year, to £110 million. That is for family planning and commodities, which is not bad for this country. I am very pleased to say that Andrew Mitchell’s heart is in the right place on population issues.

I commend DfID for another thing: this year it had a policy paper on abortion and now our Government and DfID accept it. It is an extremely important thing that women have access to safe abortion because so many of them die from botched attempts. And if women cannot feed their children, their children will die, or they themselves will die. That is simply not acceptable.

What is missing in all the words that have been said this evening is the position of women. Women make up half of the world’s population but in the poor countries they have no status and no ability to look after their own affairs. They cannot do anything or say anything because they have no power. We must help them gain some of the power, which we can do by helping them to earn money rather than through education. For 45 years people have been talking about educating women, but how do you educate each woman in a poor country? Let us start by giving them an opportunity to earn money. When they can do so, they will send their children to school and the next generation will be educated. That is the only way that education can come to poorer countries.

I was a little surprised when the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, brought up the situation in the UK. The situation here is also worrying. I was not going to talk about it this evening but, now that he has mentioned it, I feel that I can as well. Some of the minority communities have very large families and the health of these women always deeply concerns me. I do not care how many children people have but I care about the fact that women here suffer from the same health problems as they do in their countries of origin. When the cap comes in I do not know how they will manage.