Development: Post-2015 Agenda

Baroness Tonge Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tonge (Ind LD)]

My Lords, in welcoming this debate and thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Kinnock, for introducing it, I add my congratulations and thanks to her for all the work she has done on development issues—over several decades, I suspect.

The first report by the UN System Task Team on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, published in June 2012, recommended:

“A vision for the future that rests on the core values of human rights, equality and sustainability”.

Looking at the current state of the world, one might as well ask for the lion to lie down with the lamb. Despite modest advances since the millennium development goals were set, it is going to be a very hard task indeed, but for the sake of our children and grandchildren we simply must face this challenge.

I must get this off my chest: I find all the reports I read on tackling inequality somewhat irritating, full as they are of goals, targets and indicators. The best one yet is “disaggregated data”. Can you have a target for disaggregated data, or a goal? I do not know. Sometimes I wonder what on earth they are talking about, or if they even know what they are talking about. They all say what should happen but are very short on how it should happen.

The briefing from Bond, which I found very helpful, suggested that economic inequality should be tackled by including it in the overall framework and not letting it be solely the concern of national Governments, which is something that the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, addressed. The former chief economist at the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, has proposed that a goal should be set so that by 2030 the post-tax income of the top 10% of the population is no more than the post-transfer income of the bottom 40%—discuss. Has anyone told George Osborne? But for inequalities to be ironed out we must also have universal public services. People are entitled to healthcare and education opportunities.

How is this to be achieved—by taxation? For taxes to be raised, people need to have an income and we have heard from many noble Lords that people in developing countries do not have incomes. What income the country has is often siphoned off into Swiss banks, tax havens—offshore this and that. The rulers siphon off the money before it reaches the people. Should the post-2015 framework include something on tackling corruption? I think it should. It is a very serious issue.

As chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health, I have a suggestion—more than that, a solution. The noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, has already referred to me in this context. The solution is really a very simple one. If we look at all the statistics and indicators—yes, and disaggregated data, if we must—produced by international authorities and academics all over the world, we see that no country has improved its economy and hence the well-being of its population without first stabilising population growth. It is a theme that I refer to over and again, I know, but it is true. It was always thought that it was the other way round: that once a country became prosperous, people would limit their family size, but it is not so. To stabilise population growth, yes, we need to make voluntary family planning available. No coercion is required, just readily available contraception supplies and advice. Women must be allowed to control their own bodies and fertility. The noble Baroness, Lady Flather, has alluded to that. It is a basic right of womankind to be able to control their bodies and the number of children they bear. We must discourage child marriage, on which our group has recently produced a report. I note with pleasure that Gordon Brown is now working hard on this issue in northern India and Pakistan.

By controlling their fertility, women can access education for themselves and their children, thus eventually adding to the workforce, to the potential for their country and to their own self-esteem and position in society. It is a provision that politicians in the developing and the developed world have tended to ignore until the recent initiatives by our own Government. I am proud that it is our own Government who have made family planning and maternal health so important in development issues, and indeed have achieved the target of spending 0.7% of GNP on aid.

Many women in this country whom I talk to have forgotten how important family planning provision is, and how important it is for women to be able to control their own fertility. They have got it; we have taken it for granted; nobody thinks about it any more; so it is not high on many people’s agenda. However, there are more than 220 million women worldwide who would limit their family size if only they had access to contraception. The noble Baroness, Lady Flather, alluded to religion being a factor in this. Yes, indeed, it is. I have to warn noble Lords that the influence of religion in these issues is rising again. On 10 April, there is to be discussed in the European Parliament what I think is called a “citizens’ initiative” which has come from the religious right all over Europe—they have gained enough support to get it debated in the European Parliament—to ban any aid from the European Union being used in any way for the destruction of an unborn child. That includes, as did the ban imposed by George Bush, not just provision of safe abortion but counselling about abortion and, in many cases, contraception too. All those programmes are as one. If you provide family planning services, you are also able to advise people on abortion. This initiative means that those funds will be cut. It is very serious that people should be seeking to curb what is the most essential form of aid we can give if we really care about development.

Free from endless childbearing and ill health, women could do so much to iron out inequalities in their countries, whether it is gender inequality or the inequality between the rich and the poor. As we have heard, women are the poorest people in developing countries. Two-thirds of the world’s poorest are women and they own only 1% of property.

By all means, let us insist that the new post-2015 framework tackle inequality by including considerations of ethnicity, of marginalised groups and of economic injustice, but let us not forget—and I am glad to say that our Government have not forgotten—that the most important thing of all which must be writ large in the post-2015 framework is the sexual and reproductive rights and empowerment of women.