UN Sustainable Development Goals

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, I also thank the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, for this important debate, in particular for focusing on the human experience at the end of his remarks. I too will tell a story.

Like many other noble Baronesses, I am sure, I somewhat dread International Women’s Day—it feels like a tyranny for busy women to be even busier for a day—so this year, I decided to do something completely different: I visited Kakuma, a refugee camp in northern Kenya, as an ambassador and patron of a charity, iamtheCODE. Imagine my surprise as I walked into a metal hut in the middle of the camp, where maybe 150 girls were studying artificial intelligence on laptops, with the sustainable development goals written on the walls as the reason why they should be learning and being educated. I felt some optimism as these young women—completely unaware of the situation they were really up against—bounced around, danced for me and gave me so much reason to believe that they were going to be able to create the dynamics of change in their very tough environment.

I do not know how many noble Lords might know Kakuma, but it is a visual representation of why the sustainable development goals and, in fact—I say this to the noble Lord, Lord McConnell—this debate are so important. It sits beside Sudan; you can practically see people leaving that area because of the conflict they face in the hideous landscape behind them. There is no water, because the largest river that had run beside the camp for the past decade has now dried up. There is extreme poverty in the camp but, as always, extreme entrepreneurship taking place alongside it. There are these remarkable attempts at education, with charities delivering extraordinary services in the most difficult circumstances. I feel very lucky to have seen this up close and to have really appreciated so many of the goals face-to-face: SDG 4 on education; SDG 1 about poverty, which has been mentioned; SDG5 on women and girls’ inequality; and SDG 9 about infrastructure. I will make my first remarks on the latter.

I have worked in the world of technology for far too long, but even I find it hard to keep up with the pace of change, which we have frequently heard about in this Chamber over the last two or three years. When I look at the goals, I have a fear and anxiety that they do not adequately reflect the modern world in which we live. They do not adequately put technology and digital skills, and the pace of change in AI, at the heart of how we drive forward change. I would be very interested in the Minister’s response on how the UK can continue to modernise the SDGs and make sure that they really are fit for purpose, particularly against a backdrop of knowing that we are not achieving so many of them effectively. There is no explicit mention of digital skills, AI, data or many of the things that we know will be important to ensure that people living in those most difficult of circumstances have the skills and capacity to help in their local lives.

Not only that, but we also know that digital access can be a transforming technology for people. I saw those girls, who had no fixed status and often no families and will probably never leave the camp, believe that they had a future and the capacity to work because they were learning coding skills. I know I probably have a natural bent towards some of this stuff, but I know that everybody here would have been amazed at their resilience and optimism that they could create a career and future, and earn money, because of the opportunities that they were being given. Yet I do not see this adequately reflected in some of the frameworks around the SDGs. It will be so important to put data and understanding at the heart of them but also to continue to fight to close that digital divide, because it really impacts on all the other parts of the puzzle and the whole ecosystem.

One girl I met as I was leaving, who was a particularly brilliant dancer, told me that she wanted to become a climate activist. She said that she was going to use her coding skills to build awareness and to build apps to help people see what was happening to the local water supply, in order to be able to directly show—particularly to the corporate sponsors that were helping in the camp and with iamtheCODE and the work it does—the exact impact and devastation of the drought and the meteorological changes happening around her. I have absolutely no doubt that she will go some way towards doing this, but this relied on her being given this opportunity with technology. So my first question for the Minister is, how will we make sure that the SDGs really reflect the modern world we live in?

My second point is on the role of business. I am happy that the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, feels so optimistic that more progress has been made in business than in government. To some degree this is true. At this point, I declare my many interests, particularly as president of the British Chambers of Commerce but also as a member of the multiple boards from which I see this particular aspect of the SDGs. There is no doubt that in every boardroom I have ever sat in over the last 10 years, the SDGs have at least been mentioned, or sustainability goals are now at the heart of every board priority. We have many British success stories. I particularly highlight Belu Water—a member of the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry. I am sure many noble Peers know this company. It has a deep commitment to many of the SDGs—100% of its net profits go towards WaterAid and it does extremely interesting things with recycling its bottles. With such an overtly deep commitment to the sustainable development goals, it is an entrepreneurial local business that we in the UK should be proud of.

There are many other brilliant examples of British success, as I am sure all noble Lords would agree. However, I have an anxiety. As many noble Lords are aware—it has been vaguely referenced in the debate already—there is a move to undermine many of the ways businesses see ESG. That is perhaps the most obvious expression of some of the SDGs and the tangible way that both institutional investors and companies are looking at how to benchmark and deliver on commitments.

ESG did not exist a couple of decades ago. That is progress, and yet, when I think about US institutional investors in particular, there is a move to somewhat undermine its competence and importance and to put too many of the important ESG metrics in the camp of “wokeness”, or just diversity and inclusion gone crazy. This is wrong and dangerous—we need business and institutional investors looking at public companies to continue to apply high standards to companies and to invest based on their clarity of purpose in delivering on ESG metrics. I hope that this somewhat knee-jerk and unpleasant reaction to some of the DEI initiatives over the last decade does not take root here in the UK, and that we hold financial institutions, too, to a high standard. We know that it is that cycle that will deliver the change already mentioned in today’s debate.

I finish by asking the Minister those two questions. How will we make sure that we continue to put the latest thinking about technology at the heart of SDGs? How will we make sure that businesses have the necessary, understandable and not too complex frameworks to continue to deliver on the targets towards which we have made so much progress over the last decade?