Health: Maternal Health

Lord Green of Hurstpierpoint Excerpts

Wednesday 12th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Green of Hurstpierpoint]

My Lords, as I rise to make my maiden speech, I am conscious that it is customary to thank the staff of the House for all their help, as I begin like a new boy at school to find my way around. Although everyone promised that this would be so, it is an absolute delight to find just how true it is. My thanks are absolutely the reverse of perfunctory.

My thanks go, too, to my sponsors, the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach, and the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe. Both are close friends of mine. The fact that one sits on these Benches and the other on the Benches opposite matters to me not a jot. I am normally happy to follow the conventions of the House, but on this occasion at least I can say that both, and indeed others on various Benches of this House, are my noble friends.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Patel, for introducing today’s debate on maternal health in the context of the millennium development goals. I am keen to contribute, as I have taken on the role of Minister of State for Trade and Investment. I believe passionately that there is a vital connecting thread between trade and investment and the millennium development goals. My own perspective is formed not only by having worked in international management consulting, followed by an extensive career in international banking, but by having begun my working life in DfID, or rather its predecessor, the Overseas Development Administration, as it was then known.

I make four brief points. First, the various millennium development goals are of course intrinsically linked. The most obvious example of that, and directly relevant to today’s debate, is the connection between progress on gender equality, which is goal 3, improved maternal health, which is goal 5, and reduced child mortality, which is goal 4. The evidence is clear: children in poor communities are 10 times more likely to die before the age of five if the mother has died. The link, too, with disease—goal 6—is clear. HIV is the leading cause of death in women of reproductive age in sub-Saharan Africa and malaria alone is responsible for 20 per cent of child mortality there.

Secondly, progress in meeting the goals is mixed. There have been some important gains, with good progress in eradicating extreme poverty—goal 1. Some countries have made astonishing progress. China, for example, has lifted literally hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in recent years. Yet the mountain is still high and there is a long way to climb. Demographic patterns have meant that absolute numbers have declined much less sharply than the ratios of poverty, and the absolute numbers remain high by any standard. More broadly, across a range of targets, there is a long way to go. We have heard from a number of noble Lords about the difficulties in respect of maternal health.

Thirdly, specific interventions can be powerfully effective. Well targeted ODA and NGO-supported programmes in areas such as fistula can make a real difference to many people’s lives and indirectly to even more lives through the effect on children.

Fourthly, none of this will ever add up to sustainable, comprehensive well-being without progress—real progress—on goal 8. On the face of it, this is the woolliest goal of all. It seems like a ragbag of ideas bundled together as the last goal but it includes the all-important challenge to further develop,

“an open, rules-based, predictable, non-discriminatory trading and financial system”.

This is critical to everything else that we do. It is certainly not sufficient but it is absolutely necessary. Historians will note the importance of the words of the G20 communiqué from London in April 2009, where the heads of the Governments of 80 per cent of the world’s economy said that we start from the belief that,

“the only sure foundation for sustainable globalisation and rising prosperity for all is an open world economy based on market principles, effective regulation and strong global institutions”.

I see this as the basis for real hope. It is easy to be cynical, but that would be wrong. There is plenty to do. Progress is mixed and there are many lessons to be learnt from the global financial and economic crisis. One lesson not to learn, if we really care about the aspirations that infuse the development goals in general and goal 5 in particular, is the notion of some alternative to a central role for open, market-based engagement—properly supervised—as the main engine of the economic and social development that is essential if we are to banish today’s unacceptable levels of child and maternal mortality for good.

Trade and investment is an area of policy focus for the UK that is critical not only to the UK’s own ability to deliver sustainable growth for its citizens, which it certainly is, but also to the wider goal of a prosperous, open, growing world economy that is sustainable and inclusive. This aspiration is both our wider responsibility and in our wider interest.