International Development: Freedom of Religion or Belief

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sugg]

My Lords, the UK remains deeply concerned by the plight of the Rohingya and other ethnic groups in Myanmar. I saw the situation for myself on a recent visit to Bangladesh and Myanmar and saw the good work that both UK aid and the UN are doing in those camps. I am not aware of the situation that the noble Baroness raises, but I will go back, look into it and write to her.

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con)]

My Lords, is the noble Baroness aware of the acute suffering of the Yazidi people, particularly girls and women, simply because of their beliefs? Will she be willing to say—I am sure she will—that freedom of belief encompasses the Yazidi faith as well as everybody else’s, and that their suffering should never have happened?

[Baroness Sugg]

My Lords, I entirely agree with my noble friend and thank her for highlighting the plight of the Yazidis. The UK has played a crucial role in galvanising international efforts to secure justice for the Yazidi people and the many other victims of Daesh crimes in Iraq. That includes leadership in UN Security Council resolutions and support through our aid programmes. I look forward to meeting her guests later: we have some Yazidi ladies visiting us today and I join my noble friend in paying tribute to their incredible courage and resilience in the face of such challenging circumstances.

Modern Slavery (Victim Support) Bill

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Monday 7th October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I pay tribute to the ministry the right reverend Prelate describes, because I know that both the Church and the voluntary sector do a fantastic job in this area. Children can receive support through the independent child trafficking guardians that have now been rolled out in a third of local authorities in England and Wales—they are very welcome—and follow-on support, through the victim care contract, that victims can expect to receive after the trauma of their experience.

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con)]

I am sure the Minister will agree that modern slavery cannot be confined to these shores; it is a global horror story. I welcome her statement, but did she by chance catch sight of the particularly painful programme that BBC Arabic put forward on modern slavery of children under nine under sharia law in Iraq? Is she aware that there have been cases of this kind—I know of them myself—here in the United Kingdom? May we spread our work and share it with other nations in the same way that the right reverend Prelate has offered?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I did see that programme, and it was very disturbing: children as young as eight and nine being married for an hour, effectively so that they could be abused. In this country we would call it child abuse, and of course those girls suffer even worse because it damages the rest of their lives.

Facial Recognition Technology

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The Government do not intend to place a moratorium on the technology’s use, but the noble Lord is right that such use needs to be carefully governed and be in line with the law and human rights, and with a clear oversight framework. Use of the technology in the private sector—the noble Lord might have alluded to this—is currently being looked at by the ICO.

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con)]

Will the Minister consider the utter incompetence of the private and public companies which create facial recognition technology? You have these machines and you pay a vast sum of money for them, but when you put your face on them, they cannot recognise you for anything. Is it not better to press for the improvement of the system rather than trying to clamp down on something that is in no way ready to be used properly yet?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I hate to differ on this with my noble friend, but e-gate technology is in fact superb at matching facial recognition to passports—in some cases, better than humans. However, the human eye in these things is of course not to be dismissed and it can detect all sorts of other things in terms of e-gates.

International Widows Day

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Wednesday 19th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con)]

Noble Lords, I welcome—on behalf of us all, I am sure—the opening speech by the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, whose deep and enduring love and filial respect for his widowed mother has resulted in his caring for thousands of widows in the latter part of her life and hundreds of thousands of widows following her death. I salute him as a truly noble character with a record of magnificent achievement. I came to know the Loomba Foundation through my own work for widows with the AMAR foundation, which I chair. We have worked together for a little while now. I am so grateful to the noble Lord.

There are over 40 million widows in India, in a population of 1 billion. Widows in Iraq, where I and my AMAR colleagues work, now number 2 million in a population of fewer than 35 million citizens and refugees. Orphans in Iraq number around 5 million. War brings widows and makes children orphans. As Macduff remarked in “Macbeth” as he was approaching the final battle:

“Each new morn

New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows

Strike heaven on the face”.

The vulnerability and dependence that widows fear is well expressed by the Countess in “All’s Well That Ends Well” as her son goes off to war:

“In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband”.


I think that is why the seventh of the acts of mercy states:

“Comfort the fatherless and the widow”.


That is exactly what the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, does.

What are the key requirements he and others have identified for assisting widows and orphans? One, of course, is the law, which fits us very well in this Chamber. I was invited by the US Department of State to go and discuss the Magna Carta. I was the sixth speaker of seven. The remaining speakers were from the USA, and were very eminent and able people. I was invited to talk about the rights of women in the Magna Carta and had a lot of trouble with that. The rights of women are contained in articles 7 and 8 and are entirely about how to stop the King grabbing widows’ inheritances so that the barons could marry them and have the inheritances themselves. It was a tough hurdle. Of course, it reminds one that inheritance for women, particularly widows, is very difficult indeed.

Then there is the question of family health. Of all health service users globally, 80% are women. How do widows and their families get access to that, or to literacy and numeracy education—at least for the children if not the widows—without the funding?

Widows need money: they are not allowed to inherit and cannot work. Here I draw noble Lords’ attention to the great benefits of huge companies practising corporate social responsibility. For example, I worked with BP in Iraq. Corporate social responsibility there is the most amazing thing.

There is the recovery of any family to consider, which matters so deeply to widows and orphans. Bodies—even in mass graves—and knowing what happened are critical after losing family. I am working with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on its ancestry programme, which it offers to help people in refugee camps and displaced people, particularly the Yazidis. We hope to build up their ancestries again, even those that are lost. It is better to know what the pattern of your family has been.

It is hard to empower widows and orphans. Yes, we can give love and care in the context of value, but we need to value them as citizens and people to be listened to, respected and involved. I therefore suggest that our key topic is how to empower. The first thing must surely be identity in law and in the real population. How do we give the IDPs and the below-the-line population, for example, who might not officially exist at all, an identity and legal persona? In Turkey, together with Mrs Özal, the widow of the great President Özal, I formed the Daisy charity for people just below the line, whose marriages were not recognised by the state. They were purely Muslim marriages and divorces. That meant the children did not exist as people at all. They therefore could not get help or education. Their plight was bad indeed.

The right to vote, the right to stand for election and the right to run for office: all these rights to be a person with full identity in your society are crucial and give you the right to help and education. I and other noble Lords and noble Baronesses work on the right to physical integrity—in other words, the right not to be raped. One of the great difficulties when you are a widow is the right not to have to go on to the streets to save your life and feed your babies. All these rights should be enshrined in the law of the land, even if it is only by the ratification of the relevant UN conventions. This is what government is for. This is exactly what our Government strive to do and what I urge them to focus on even more—the rights to identity through all these opportunities.

Finally, there are the acts of mercy: comfort the fatherless and the widow. Most wonderfully, I had experience of that this week with BBC South West, with Jon Kay, Andy Alcroft, Kirsty Gardner and Alex Littlewood. They recovered the mother of a young man, to whom I was originally in loco parentis—I was his foster mother—after 30 years. If that can be done by private initiative, by the BBC, what more could we do to bring families together?

Sexual Violence in Conflict

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Wednesday 12th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con)]

While congratulating the British Government and the Minister for the tremendous work that the FCO has undertaken on sexual violence after and during conflict, might she be willing to think about pushing the issue further forward with the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association? At last year’s gathering here, I had the opportunity to present the PSVI, as the FCO has it, to the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association delegations. If we could get it into those parliaments, and every single parliament was supporting it, it would have a true long-term impact on this unbelievably beastly issue.

[Baroness Sugg]

Of course, it is important that we work with all our international partners on this. The UK, rightly, is speaking of this regularly, but we must ensure that it is on everybody’s agenda too. My noble friend’s suggestion of working more closely with our Commonwealth partners is a very good one, which I will take forward ahead of the PSVI conference.

Health: Alma-Ata Declaration

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Monday 22nd January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

That resilience work is important. We work closely with the World Health Organization and, importantly, with health organisations in the countries concerned. We are certainly putting more money into this than ever before and have made some big commitments: to the Gavi vaccine programme, with £1.4 billion; to the Global Fund, with £1.1 billion; and to the Ross Fund, which will do some pioneering work in researching this area of diseases, with about £1 billion as well. Significant amounts are going in but we need to do more.

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con)]

Since the Alma-Ata Declaration is based on the foundations of the National Health Service, albeit some years later than the foundation of the NHS, does the Minister think that our Government could promote the declaration within the concept of the National Health Service principles a great deal more than we do? It is, after all, the key rulebook of the World Health Organization and something that we helped to create.

[Lord Bates]

It is the key rulebook of the World Health Organization, but we should also remember that in the intervening 40 years we have had the sustainable development goals. Sustainable development goal 3 on health contains many of the provisions in the declaration. The sustainable development goals, unlike the millennium development goals, apply to all countries that sign them, not just least-developed countries.

DfID Economic Development Strategy

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Monday 27th November 2017 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne]

That this House takes note of the Department for International Development’s Economic Development Strategy, and Her Majesty’s Government’s plans to implement that strategy.

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con)]

My Lords, it is an honour to initiate this important debate because it marks a significant change in the Department for International Development’s thinking that has perhaps not yet been fully explored in your Lordships’ House. The change is highly important and there is already a new departmental strategy in place with some very senior staff already in post. As I read it, this has been triggered by Brexit, when we can no longer afford to run alone as different departments but must come together and work together for the wider British goals. The implementation the Government are offering will be largely, but I imagine not wholly, by CDC; the focus of the new policy—but I expect it will soon be beyond this—is on Africa and Asia; the collaboration, long sought, will be a close partnership between DfID, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Department for International Trade and the MoD.

The new policy continues DfID’s soft power. I had the honour of speaking for DfID at the UN’s first ever global sustainable transport conference in Turkmenistan recently—something that could not have happened if DfID had not financed it through the World Bank—but soft power has limitations. It is not visible in expenditure; it is, if you like, at second or third hand, and it is not possible to find the British imprint on that expenditure. Adding to that widespread portfolio with the new policy is, as I see it, a very good thing to do.

Already, the Commonwealth Development Corporation had an ancient track record of excellence in this field, and under its new guise since 2007 it is joining the stable of eminent institutions whose view is that the value of aid per se in conquering poverty has perhaps peaked and is dropping and that we must focus much more on the free market and the rule of law and on making stability through jobs and futures.

The common characteristics of those countries which rank high on DfID’s action list create most obvious barriers to investment. The first and clearest is our old friend corruption. All the countries that DfID is interested in assisting where poverty is rife are riddled with corruption. Alongside that goes weak, evasive or invisible justice, inadequate laws to protect the population and untrustworthy police. All these things open the door for international criminals, including globally active gangs of human traffickers. There will be a lack of international banks and a failure to honour UN conventions, which results in monstrous human rights breaches without apparent objections. There will be state ownership of national resources, concomitant with a lack of a private sector investment. All these unpleasant matters will add up to acute poverty—indeed, I would say that they cause poverty, particularly corruption. It is those characteristics which make aid the obvious answer to put forward, but I believe that aid should now diminish in its value because it does not help with employment or futures and we know that other things can do so.

Since my interests will inevitably flow through my remarks, as will be the case for all noble Lords, I declare immediately that I have the honour of being a trade envoy for Her Majesty’s Government in four nations: Azerbaijan; the federal Republic of Iraq; Kazakhstan; and Turkmenistan. I have a commitment to the creative industries: I chair the Booker Prize for Russian fiction; I am vice-president of the Man Booker Prize for English fiction; and I am a patron of the Caine Prize for African Writing. Perhaps most relevantly, I chair the AMAR International Charitable Foundation, which is in its 25th year. It has 1 million patients in Iraq and 500,000 pupils of all ages, all well below any poverty line that can be identified. However, I say immediately that no funding for that comes from DfID, and therefore I have no conflicts of interest in this debate. I am also a non-executive president of the Iraq Britain Business Council.

I have no conflict, but I have a deep and lifelong commitment in aid and trade. I see the United Kingdom today as offering a different approach. For example, what are the needs? The needs of the poverty-stricken populations in the countries that DfID goes to are food aid and nutrition. What have we got to offer from the United Kingdom? We have magnificent agriculture—some of the very best on the globe—with one of the smallest populations working on the land and some of the highest and best-value output. We have so much to offer, yet when I tour these countries I do not actually see the National Farmers Union, which is the body that should be there. I do not see the big industrial agricultural sector that is here in the United Kingdom; we should export that eagerly and willingly.

I see a tremendous need for public health. However many jobs may be available, you simply cannot work if you have dysentery or worse. Here in the United Kingdom we have something that is the envy of the globe, although we tend to mock it, and that is the National Health Service. We should be exporting that infinitely more than we do. We have tremendous public health capabilities here, and I hope and believe that DfID should work on that in its new guise.

As for education, our universities, as we know, are also the envy of the globe and among the topmost universities anywhere. We have the British Council, the BBC Trust and the BBC World Service, but without the language of English, without the capacity for students to put themselves forward speaking English, no university here will accept them. One of the key issues that should be looked at at the moment is the teaching of English and, with that, the teaching of information technology. With those two things, any young person these days can go anywhere and succeed in anything. I urge the Minister to think of that.

Regarding conflict diminution—I will come in a minute to the hearts and minds campaign—justice and the rule of law is another tremendously important factor. Here in the United Kingdom we do not seem to invest in our associations. For example, the American Bar Association has tremendous investment from the State Department, but I have yet to find a similar investment for the British Bar Council or the solicitors, yet we have so much to offer in terms of justice and it just needs a push from government. If the State Department can do it, why not DfID?

I can hardly mention enough the excellence of the City of London—it is so enormous that it takes speech after speech to praise it. Given the transfer of knowledge that we did so eagerly and well when eastern Europe came into the land of the living again following the ending of the Cold War, surely we should do that again.

Again, I refer to the State Department, which funds a tremendous amount of teaching. I joined them myself in Jordan and in Morocco, teaching women to be, perhaps, barristers, solicitors, attorneys. There is enormous potential there which enables countries to offer justice and the rule of law more strongly. We have professional standards here which are unique and wonderful. Such high standards of engineering, accountancy and auditing are rare indeed. We should be teaching those things; everybody wants to learn them.

Regarding the creative arts, when the Globe Theatre toured the world a couple of years ago for Shakespeare’s birthday, it won us more friends than anything else I have yet met on a single issue. Another thing we excel at is tourism. That is quite an easy thing to explain and to experience. We have wonderful tourist industries here in the United Kingdom.

For fighting corruption, we need transfer of technical knowledge—economist language, which is not at all easy for any of us to understand, even for economists. We have United Kingdom Export Finance, for example, with a tremendous offer these days of loan guarantees; yet the countries I know well do not understand that a loan guarantee is there to encourage western banks, British banks, to back a company, and that it is not, in fact, a grant or loan to government itself. I believe that the language, vocabulary and thinking of modern-day economics should be explained far more clearly. That is something else that can be done by government.

I have worked hard recently on corporate social responsibility, and I pay great tribute to those companies, big and small, which offer corporate social responsibility to local people. The classic, pioneering companies, such as the oil and gas majors, do magnificent work, but it is also possible to do this with a much smaller company. However, as the Secretary of State for International Trade commented recently, it is hard to stimulate interest in the small to medium-sized businesses in the United Kingdom at the moment. It is difficult because they have been so cosy in the club of the EU that they do not see that the wider world is infinitely more exciting and has far greater possibilities. Might I suggest perhaps that DfID might consider financing roadshows—per country, it would have to be—inside the EU, using the magnificent chambers of commerce system that we have in Britain, to explain how it is perfectly possible to invest in a country where you may be a little nervous at the moment?

This does not divert at all from the absolute commitment of DfID to conquer poverty, but my argument, which I think is impregnable, is that conquering poverty in the long term means jobs and futures, training, standards, opportunities, languages and international exploration—at least on the web if nothing else. The classic pioneering companies can find a way of looking longer term because they have the deepest pockets and the longest life cycles, particularly in sectors such as oil and gas, but it is perfectly possible to interest the smaller companies, the ones with the shorter life cycles, which are absolutely crucial for different types and styles of jobs. I would suggest that, in its new guise with its new policies, DfID should invest in success. Britain has plenty of it, all of which is the envy of others and all of which is relevant to the areas of the world in which DfID chooses to focus.

Last week the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, commented on how crucial it is to bring together diplomacy, defence and DfID. I would indeed say that DfID should look seriously at major support of the Ministry of Defence. Indeed, it is hard not to think that in that sense DfID is the,

“Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir”,

and the Ministry of Defence is the,

“Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke-stack”,

but the MoD is absolutely crucial. Fighting is only one phase in bringing peace; you have to have the hearts and minds following that.

Working in Basra with the British military in April 2003, I was dismayed when the funding was withdrawn and it could not continue with the wonderful things it was putting in and installing democracy. I moved up to Baghdad and worked for a number of years for the US Department of Defense, which I saw had the funding from Washington and was close to the people—no closer than the British in Basra but simply because it had the financial backing it was able to do much more of the job. I really commend that example to your Lordships. Safety and security are crucial for training, teaching and access to further education, which people need so badly.

I invite the Minister to consider, in the context of his new policy and of my own remarks, that the change from aid to trade is no great sharp leap from one side of a river to another. While it is a major shift of emphasis, which I believe our nation will highly welcome, aligning DfID with the Brexit horizon of a nation that is not just at ease with itself but with creating higher productivity and more prosperity for all is something that DfID is uniquely capable of doing, bringing together, as must be the case, the FCO, DfID and the DIT in—to use the phrase more properly—ever closer union. Who knows? Even that beacon of ethics, the Daily Mail, might feel happier. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne]

I believe it true to say that the Minister has given a full and comprehensive answer to the question posed to him by the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, which was how to empower people. The answer has been clearly identified: to create jobs and futures through the economic development strategy of the Department for International Development. If you add to that, as I did earlier, health and education, you get health, education, jobs and futures, which is what DfID can now offer, incorporating the wonderful work of the Commonwealth Development Corporation.

I draw attention to the note struck by the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin of Kennington, in her remarks—that transparency is a key requirement. To that was added remarks about the absolute necessity of close monitoring, flexibility, subject changing and regular reviews. With those in mind, I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Collins, should be comfortable and happy and that even the noble Lord, Lord Judd, will be satisfied, because it has become clear that, throughout the entirety of the debate, that the concern is with those in greatest need.

Motion agreed.

Kashmir

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Tuesday 21st November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

The practical situation is that the British high commission in New Delhi monitors human rights in the country and in Kashmir as a whole, or certainly in the Indian-administered portion of Kashmir. We look at that fairly closely. However, we have to recognise that the situation is extraordinarily sensitive and that our words and actions, even in this House, can contribute to instability in that area. It is in everybody’s interests that an open dialogue is maintained. We do not want to do anything that would detract from that.

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con)]

As the Minister will be aware, countless thousands of families seek to meet other family members from whom they have been parted for 30 to 40 years. Is my noble friend able to influence the Pakistan Government, who are the block on those families meeting, as I saw myself on the ground as the European Parliament rapporteur for Kashmir for many years?

[Lord Bates]

I recognise my noble friend’s great expertise in this area. However, I repeat that we believe it is for the Governments of Pakistan and India to initiate an open dialogue. As I said, we are encouraged that the Government of India have appointed an interlocutor but it is for them to initiate the process. However, the absolute wish of Her Majesty’s Government is that those talks should happen and be productive, so that there can be a solution and the types of issues that my noble friend raises can be resolved.

International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 18th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, for giving us this wonderful opportunity in your Lordships’ House to have such a full and important debate today. I have to admit that I am very attracted and drawn to the idea of giving the Department for International Development a bit more time to manage its expenditure. However, I am not a budget person—indeed, I do not think this is a suitable House of Lords topic—so I stand to be corrected either way. None the less, this opportunity is too good to miss and I thank the noble Lord immensely.

I congratulate my noble friend Lord Bates on his appointment as Minister. This is my first opportunity to do so, and to say what full support I am sure he has from the whole House in this important task. As many Members have already said, Britain is just about the largest aid donor in the globe. The poverty is acute and the difficulties are enormous; our aid is therefore utterly vital.

I think I am correct in saying that the bulk of our aid is, and has been for some time, used for soft power. My comments will therefore look at that soft power and I may make one or two suggestions which I will be glad if the Minister will take away, think about and comment on another time. Soft power is vital at the top. It has enabled the United Kingdom to sit at the topmost table when discussing conflict resolution, peacebuilding, the rights of women and girls, which my noble friend Lady Hodgson focuses on, and other aspects that noble Lords have touched on. There is also an opportunity for soft power at the other end of the scale, and I have one or two thoughts on how we might increase our influence at the far end of the line where aid is being delivered.

When we look at the top of the soft power possibilities for the United Kingdom, are the Minister, the Secretary of State and the department as a whole able to report the ways in which that soft power is exercised? I regularly visit places where people are in great difficulty in conflict zones. I came back from Iraq on Tuesday. There are one or two rather important things that have not been brought to the Minister’s attention with sufficient strength. For example, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most powerful of all conventions, was drafted in this Chamber and in the other place and put forward by the United Kingdom. It was pushed very hard and worked on by the United Kingdom, and as a consequence it was adopted, signed and ratified by almost every nation on the globe. Somalia is a little difficult, and the United States has signed it but has not yet ratified it. None the less, if you look at that convention, you will see that it covers the entirety of what a child needs. In that context, a child is someone up to the age of 18 and, if the person is in particular difficulty, up to 20 years of age. Given the low life expectancy in some of the nations which need overseas aid, such as Yemen, where life expectancy is 47, we are talking about nearly half of a person’s life.

I see a point here which the Minister might wish to address long term. As he and his department are aware, internally displaced people have no rights at all. They have no United Nations convention protecting them in any shape or form. Those nations that never signed the 1951 Geneva Convention on refugees also fall down a gap in terms of UN protection because it is extremely difficult to claim that anyone on their territory qualifies under UN rules as a refugee, but I return to IDPs. With probably about 40% of any refugee population or IDP population being under the age of 18 and therefore qualifying as children, those children have no protection of any sort. They are not given any special attention, there may be no registration system and they may not be reunited with their families. If you look at the figures, you will see that those children are the most vulnerable for human trafficking, sexual slavery and all sorts of awful futures. For example—I cannot check these figures, but they seem correct in terms of those who are quoting them—after the earthquake in Nepal 20,000 children disappeared. Indeed, this week on my return to the UK I saw in the papers that we have lost several thousand children. Children are very difficult to track unless you have a proper identification system and absolute clarity about who is responsible for what in terms of protecting them.

The point I wish to put in front of the Minister is that internally displaced children have no rights of any sort. When they are in camps, they are the most vulnerable to being trafficked, forcibly married and otherwise abused. They may have no opportunity to see their parents or any remaining members of their family again. Perhaps the Minister will consider using our soft power by demanding that the United Nations adopts an optional protocol on internally displaced children, thus allowing them the same level of protection accorded to refugees under international law. He might also consider pushing the United Nations to create a mechanism so that as soon as internally displaced children reach camps, whether run by the local Government or the UN, their identity is preserved to prevent their further abuse through rape, trafficking and forced marriage, and to reunite them with their family, which forms the heart of child protection mechanisms through the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Those recommendations are part of the set of recommendations that have come from a big conference I chaired in September at St George’s, Windsor, under the AMAR Foundation, LDS Charities and Cumberland Lodge. There are a number of recommendations, which I will leave with the Minister. On the soft power point, I particularly raise internally displaced children and their complete lack of protection. That is one way in which I would like to see the United Kingdom use a portion of its soft power at the top.

Another possible scenario the Minister might consider is that here in the UK we spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about a very small fraction of global refugees and internally displaced people and whether we will grant them a safe haven in the United Kingdom. When you look at the figures, you will see that nearly every displaced person or refugee wants to go back home. They just want a safer home. They do not want to be assaulted again. I am talking mainly about conflict countries, of which there are all too many. Yet the United Nations, which is a principal conduit of British overseas aid expenditure, understandably focuses on giving support to camps. I believe that once a person arrives in a camp, every possible effort should be made to help them get back home as soon as possible, if only because life in camps is terrible. There is almost nothing there. Very often, they do not even have the basics of life. I have recently visited camps which do not even have human sewage disposal and therefore people are sick all the time. Apart from that, the average length of stay in a camp is nine years, or 11 years, in some cases, and 24 years for squatters. Yet the UN, the World Food Programme and all other organisations focus on people in camps. Would it not be possible to think a little differently and push the UN to think about getting people back home again, which is what about 98% of people want to do? Of course this means rebuilding the health centre, the school, the roads and everything that has been destroyed, but all that is feasible. Speaking for half a moment as trade envoy for Iraq, I would like to see British companies being invited to do that because we are among the best in the globe and can do the work best, quickest and most efficiently.

In my capacity as chairman of the AMAR Foundation, I have just visited a number of camps and hospitals right on the front line very near to Mosul. I had the opportunity to give a whole load of medical equipment; it was very satisfying. It was a wonderful opportunity paid for by the Hunt Oil Company. I had another opportunity in a nearby new camp which was waiting to receive the refugees from the liberation of Mosul, just as the hospital was. I had the opportunity to open a health centre for the AMAR Foundation funded entirely by the Vitol Foundation—another very happy moment. None the less, when I looked around, I was gravely concerned at the level of implementation of British expenditure on the ground by, say, UNICEF, UNHCR or UNDP. I wonder whether some monitoring could be brought in. It is not very good for me to say something, as I am merely a stray visitor, but there should be some monitoring of the way in which the UN, in particular, uses British aid.

More than that, the final thought to leave with the Minister is about how British soft power could become visible on the ground. Everyone—by which I mean the various mayors and governors who I met and so on—said to me, “Where is British aid?”. I would say, “We have given this, this and this. We have just dedicated that, that and that. I have the correct figures in my head, which are enormous; we are far and away the largest donor”. But this is invisible aid. It comes through the UN and of course comes down through various subcontracts, which at the end of the day very probably mean that the funding spent is relatively small.

But irrespective of the size of the funding, my point is that I want Britain to shine. I want our aid to be known about, not just at the top table in Geneva or in New York, but so that the people on the ground understand that Britain cares for them. I want the local Governments to know that Britain is strong and powerful and is doing everything we can to fight the enemy, not just by supporting military efforts but by our huge amount of overseas aid. I have taken up too much time. I thank the Minister for listening, and I leave those thoughts with him, as I again thank the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, for giving us this opportunity.

Syrian Refugees

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Thursday 29th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (LD)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Truscott, for giving us the opportunity to speak in this highly important debate. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, for the extraordinary work that her department has been undertaking. In my remarks I will focus not on aid but on some of the other broader issues, so perhaps if the Minister cannot answer me without a departmental input immediately, she can ensure that written answers are provided to me.

My first question is a very simple one. What are Her Majesty’s Government’s plans for the aftermath of the current violence in Syria? We are faced with a society that, for whatever reason, has disintegrated. The international record of rebuilding societies in the Middle East and north Africa is not a good one. I would single out the United Nations, which, despite its immense attitude of well-meaning for the public good, is essentially powerless—people can just choose not to obey it. Sometimes the United Nations’ concepts in the region seem to be almost wholly unrealistic. I recall with pain and grief the first election in Afghanistan. The enormous complexity of the electoral system that the UN itself put forward was such that, when I invited the UN to comment on it privately—I was monitoring the election—I was told that it was a system that had never been tested anywhere in any democracy in the globe, yet it had been put in a country that had never had democracy in its entire history. So the record of the United Nations in rebuilding disintegrated societies in this region is not a desperately good one.

That leaves us with the coalition. I do not think that the different coalitions have proved adequate for this particularly complex and difficult task. You have only to look at Yemen collapsing, as it is, or at Libya. Indeed, there are other nations in the region and elsewhere where coalitions which come together to try to create peace are not equipped to rebuild a society. A good example of how that can be done is the European Union enlargement process. It is highly detailed and long-running, and is very descriptive of what should happen. I ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans we have for rebuilding Syria when the aftermath of violence has calmed. We must remember that the military make the space, but the question is: who will fill that space? Whom are we planning to put into that space? I suggest that the only people who could really rebuild the society are the people themselves.

I come to my second question. I had the opportunity recently to bring over to the United Kingdom three Yazidi victims. Mercifully, thanks to the good efforts of Germany, they are now in Germany or on their way there. Why are Her Majesty’s Government looking solely at Syrians? As I said a year and a half ago in a speech to your Lordships’ House, it would appear that genocide is being carried out against the Yazidis. Last night I was at the service in Westminster Abbey for the Armenian martyrs. We have a huge track record in Britain of picking up those who suffer from genocide. I ask Her Majesty’s Government very seriously: why not the Yazidis? It will be very difficult for them to return to any former home once the calming has taken place, as we anticipate it will.

My final question is a very simple one. In Germany there is a huge programme for the integration of refugees as they arrive. The Yazidi victims—the young ladies whom I hosted here—were in German language classes within a week of arriving there. They have futures: they may well go to university, and they are being offered training, jobs and skills development. I saw a similar excellent programme recently in Utah, America, called Pathway. It is run by LDS Charities, headed up by Sharon Eubank. It is a non-governmental programme and does not take any national or local government funding. What plans do Her Majesty’s Government have for the real integration of the refugees whom we take here? I believe that the plans should be transparent and open, and I firmly believe that the plans for reintegrating institutions, civil society and a community in Syria should be just as open and transparent. May we have sight of those plans now? I urge the Minister to speak.