Queen’s Speech

Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick Excerpts

Monday 21st October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)]

My Lords, we return to the Queen’s Speech and I shall concentrate my remarks on the criminal justice aspects of it. My interests are well known and listed in the register: I was the co-founder of Catch22, of which I remain a vice-president; I was the chairman of Crime Concern for 15 years; and I am a regular prison visitor.

When the Prime Minister became Prime Minister and appointed the Home Secretary, the two of them were to be found rushing around the country with popular newspapers in tow seeking to grab as many headlines as possible about being savage and unkind to prisoners. It sounds like a good piece of election rhetoric to inflict as much injudicious pain as possible on those whose crimes are well known, but it is very petty policy. It is intended to reassure the public that the Government are tough on the nasty people but it comes from a nasty place. It comes from wanting to make us, in effect, more fearful and therefore to trust government institutions.

We do not need to spend more time in this House or over any part of the years to come on the subject of building new prisons and adding more prison places. We all know that our system is broken and does not work effectively. We incarcerate far too many people, we lock them up for far too long, and we ensure, by the bad manner in which we hold them behind bars, that very few are effectively rehabilitated and that they do not return to society as sound citizens. Our rehabilitation rates are poor and the return-to-prison rates far too high. What we really required in the gracious Speech was the recognition that we need to learn from other parts of the European Union and Latin America that are closing prisons, reducing the number of offenders who go to prison and moving towards civilising and supporting individuals with their mental capacity, their ability to learn and educate, and the option to contribute, again, as responsible citizens.

One thing that I have learned in my now extensive and very regular prison visits in the south of England, particularly in Kent, is that after a few years many of the men locked away for extensive periods learn the hard lessons of their foolishness and victimisation. However, under our system we are committed to retain them behind bars for maybe 20 or 30 years, paying an extensive cost, estimated to be between £48,000 and £50,000 a year—more than it costs to send a child to Eton—and, for young offender institutions, between £80,000 and £120,000, which, again, is a multiple of what it costs to send a child to the most expensive and some of the best private schools in the country.

Therefore, this multibillion pound system, which is piling on more people and more young offenders and regularly returning many more to prison, is simply not delivering success, opportunity, fairness or justice. It is not good policy to go around beating up those who are already destitute by their own failure and, on many occasions, are very highly repentant and determined to be responsible citizens of the future. Instead, we need policies committed to returning them safely to society and we need their support, as taxpayers, as contributors to the strong society that we all need.

I hope that the Minister will consider, and maybe reply, on the thought that it is about time that we had a royal commission to consider the nature of sentences, particularly for serious crimes, the length of those sentences and how the rehabilitative process should be better undertaken, learning the lessons of countries—especially Nordic countries—that have moved to much more open prison policies and offer educational and emotional support, dealing with fundamentals such as drug abuse and mental pressure issues, and taking the savagery out of a system that is not delivering us a safe society.

The comment in the briefing provided to us by the Library from Frances Crook, the chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, could not say it better:

“This is not about protecting victims. This is not making communities safer … it adds to increasingly punitive rhetoric emanating from government. The tenor of the debate on crime and punishment seeps into the public discourse insidiously. At a time when the nation is already divided and increasingly angry, adding this fuel to the fire is irresponsible”.


Therefore, we need a royal commission to at last open up this question and stop fearing the tabloid headlines, which just want to say, “Push them away more firmly”. I noted the Prime Minister’s visit with the Home Secretary to a prison in, I think, Leeds, where they rushed along the corridors and did not talk to any prisoners in an attempt to understand the reality of their lives, instead standing with prison officers and pointing out how dreadful the people behind bars were. They are citizens—members of our communities—and they will return to our communities. If we do not deal with them properly, they will repeat their crimes at great public cost. We have to learn from the pattern of failure.

I want to make a quick comment on the stop and search extension proposed under the legislation. I have said many times in this House that it is downright folly. Coming from one of the ethnic minority communities—a black community—and knowing many young men who have been stopped and searched, I can tell your Lordships that this does not drive an effective approach to safety or policing; it builds phenomenal resentment and causes additional unhappiness and crime, and of course it is an inappropriate way to handle young men.

Violent Crime

Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick Excerpts

Thursday 29th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Harris, for introducing this debate and allowing us to keep our sharp attention on the issue. As many in the House know, I was the founder of Crime Concern in 1988 and served as chairman for 21 years, and the co-founder of Catch22, where I have been vice-president for the past 10 years.

There is no shortage of intervention agencies, either funded by government, local authorities or charity-raising organisations, which all seek to do intervention on this complicated issue. We always get around these debates the intense hand-wringing of what is not working, and we need to do that. However, we also need to address quite sharply some aspects of conduct and behaviour that can change. I want to focus on four areas in this brief amount of time.

As many of your Lordships also know, I work with an extensive network of former gang members across London. I will say no more than that.

My first point relates to stop and search. It does not work. For the vast majority of black young people, it discriminates, irritates and detonates aggression in their communities. It is easy to pick someone up on profiling, but the consequent anguish that is spread through families and friends often inflames fury at the state and drives more young people to take rough measures.

Let me highlight one extreme example. Many watched George the Poet introduce a beautiful poem, broadcast live, on 19 May on the BBC coverage of the way in which the Royal Family were going to conduct the day. Within a matter of two weeks he was stopped and searched near his home. This was because, as a successful young black man, he was driving a decent vehicle. He was strip-searched and humiliated, having been adored in the public gaze, and he was not apologised to by the Metropolitan Police. The spread effect of this approach is simply unacceptable.

There are many other interventions, such as BoxUp Crime from Dartford, which was highlighted on the BBC news and given a great deal of attention. A fantastic young man, Stephen Addison, uses the potency of boxing rings in local communities, conducting more than 20 such events during the course of this August, with funding coming from the Mayor’s office. It has fantastic, valuable, downward impacts upon community crime.

However, as so frequently happens with all of the interventions that I have seen in my 30 years of involvement at the head of charities and organisations as big as Catch22 and Crime Concern, all these interventions are never brought together by the funding agencies, and notably by the Government. I have never once in 30 years been asked to attend, or ever attended, a single occasion in which meaningful interventions have been allowed to share expertise. I recall that on many occasions of lobbying Governments and Home Secretaries and seeking resources from them, they would hint that it was better to keep us quite small and have many of us than to have effective large intervention agencies.

The third area on which I wish to focus relates to prisons. We think in preventing crime we put people away. Tomorrow I will make my sixth visit this year to a category B prison in Kent. When I visit those prisoners, one of the things that creates anguish in them and in me, because of the letters I receive and the phone calls that are conducted by them and their families, is that many of them are on indeterminate sentences. The one whose case I took up recently was given a seven-year sentence and has served nearly 30 years. Some 1,800 mainly black men are in prison still on IPP sentences. The impact of this on communities is that of infuriation. It causes young men to follow suit and say, “There is no protection in law or certainty of justice”. They therefore find other ways to express their furious anger, often ganging together for protection, which of course many recent reports have admitted. Many young people who should not be carrying knives do so, sadly, for protective purposes.

I turn now to a controversial area. The noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, talked about the need for a catalyst in key communities, and the noble Lord, Lord Harris, described the need for hope and of course for purpose. It is no surprise that, in the course of the past four years, the areas of London where knife crime has risen most substantially are those where Kids Company had its best operations. We have to accept, like it or not, that in the character assassination of Camila Batmanghelidjh and in the decimation of that organisation, the community response was very clear: this is our home, our safe place; this is our place of love, support, affection and consideration. It provides a sound ear. I have seen young men come in with their knives—on one occasion six of them. I watched that great heroine of justice and tenderness and love disarm them by embracing them. Catalysts and interventions have to be relational. It is far more effective if the police work with irritated, angry, furious black urban communities than to pick them up, search them, sometimes thrust them about and irritate them to the point of detonation. We have to accept that Kids Company, whatever we say of its governance which in some cases is disputable, the person who led it had a response that worked. Without the organisation, those six key communities have suffered the worst rises in knife and violent crime in London. There is a correlation, and we should not try to escape it.

If we are going to be serious about how we respond to these things, there are conduct issues that relate to our police which must be addressed bluntly. There is the need to bring together effective interventions, and the Government have a massive role to play in doing that. Also, please can we stop changing prison Ministers and crime Ministers every time it is convenient to do so? At one point as chairman of Crime Concern, I dealt with 11 different crime Ministers during a four-year period. That is a simply unacceptable parading of ignorance. Please can we deal with IPP sentences and make sure that they are tidied up quickly? Also, can we recognise that the best catalyst of all for angry, hurt and wounded people is a relationship that really cares?

Police and Crime Commissioners

Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick Excerpts

Thursday 28th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)]

My Lords, it is already apparent that this debate has raised the opportunity for significant injustices and gross underperformance to be noted in this House. I declare two previous interests: first, as a founding member of the Metropolitan Police advisory committee appointed by the noble Lord, Lord Howard, in 1990; and, secondly, in a private capacity supporting the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, who is directly in front of me, for a number of years as an adviser to assist his progress as commissioner. I also worked with the noble Lord, Lord Ouseley, and in the latter years with the noble Lord, Lord Blair, who also participated in our meetings.

One of the issues that affronts me in thinking about the role of police and crime commissioners is the inadequacy of the London situation. Whereas police and crime commissioners are present in other parts of the country, and their performance is therefore debatable—as we have already heard this afternoon—in London it is up to the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. There is a great uncertainty and a vast vacuum of clarity as to who decides what about policing performance and commitments.

I want to focus specifically on the approach taken by policing in London currently towards the needs of ethnic communities, in particular the black-on-black violence that is evident in parts of London, let alone the fear that many young people have of the police themselves. Some of my own closest advisers who work in this House said to me last week that, had they relevant information about crimes, they would not take it to the police, because they know that they might be arrested themselves simply for bringing information forward. A case of this happened recently.

I want to cross a line, which is a difficult line to cross, in raising a question for the Minister to consider, and that is this question about operational independence. The website police.uk states that the police in all cases, including the Metropolitan Police—for which I have huge respect in particular from many years working alongside the noble Lords, Lord Stevens, Lord Blair and Lord Condon, when he was police commissioner—always aim to do their best. I have no question about that when it comes to the most senior ranks of policing and their decision-making authority and integrity.But if you are a young black person in London, you are four times more likely to encounter the criminal justice system than a white person. Your experience of policing and the criminal justice system is that it is significantly unfair and consistently unjust, irrespective of the negative aspects of many young black people’s own conduct.

In that case, the issue of police operational independence simply does not wash. It is one thing to say, as the websites say, that the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime is responsible for the performance and accountability of the police. How can it be responsible for performance and accountability if it cannot affect operational decisions? Those two things are a tautology, and there needs to be a new and distinct approach.

I wholly back the approach taken by my noble friend Lord Blair to say that it is about time we had a royal commission on the role and future of policing to think about whether this sacred cow of operational independence is sustainable in fearful communities who will not bring forward evidence to the police or who themselves feel that they will be consistently victims, irrespective of the integrity of their personal lives. It is about time that we addressed that old bogey, brought it to light, and possibly challenged it and changed it for good.

Human Rights

Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick Excerpts

Thursday 21st November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)]

My Lords, we are all immensely grateful to my noble friend Lord Alton not only for introducing this debate but for his long persistence and faithfulness on these issues over, one dares to say, a generation. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, for introducing in his excellent maiden speech the responsibilities of business and the corporate sector. I want to focus on that in some of my remarks.

We are all conscious of the UN human rights responsibilities as they were laid out in the 1940s, but they were updated in 2011 by the guiding principles on the responsibilities of business. The new principles and burdens which fall on business, in essence, oblige businesses to sign up to the Human Rights Council guiding principles. They require organisations such as my own, KPMG, to:

“Avoid causing or contributing to adverse human rights impacts through their own activities, and address such impacts when they occur”—

and—

“Seek to prevent or mitigate adverse human rights impacts that are directly linked to their operations, products or services”.

This is a golden opportunity to bring the corporate sector into line with the responsibilities of public authorities. It is a chance for corporations, which have long held in private their own concerns about whether they have witnessed, for example, trafficking of individuals, unfair discrimination or employment procedures in other companies that were unacceptable, to take a stand alongside public duties.

On 16 October, there was an interesting report in the Guardian on a new assessment survey rating called “Tomorrow’s Value Rating”, set up by an organisation that seeks to assess the way in which companies are living up to the guiding principles on business and human rights. It found some interesting points of note. For example, although a vast majority of companies, such as my own, are signatories to the UN Global Compact, only a third of those that said they were devoted to human rights had a policy in place or a mechanism for measurement. It also found that in the oil and gas sector only three of the 10 companies covered had a stand-alone human rights policy and that management of human rights often appears to be reactive rather than proactive.

One does not want unduly to punish companies that are in the early stages of assessing their human rights responsibilities, but this is a chance not just for a debate in this House but to look at the way in which the Government think about future legislation for the UK alongside our partner countries, to set a tone of expectation in the corporate world as well as in the political sphere. In 2013, a long list of obligations relating to the principles of human rights for companies was set out by the Institute for Business and Human Rights in the UK. Point 6 of its 10 points of emphasis is titled:

“Renewing efforts to protect lives in the work-place”.

I want to draw attention to a specific example with a positive outcome, and I hope that we will see companies acting in this way in future.

None of us will forget the events in April surrounding the collapse of a building in Rana Plaza in Bangladesh. We will all recall the loss of life—1,200 individuals—the maiming, in particular, of many women and the loss of livelihoods. However, I am immensely grateful to be able to report to this House and for the benefit of public understanding that many of the companies involved, including ABF—Associated British Foods—the owner of Primark, decided that they would take their responsibilities immensely seriously. They would not only pay out for those who had lost livelihoods but stand together to take a responsible position on building requirements, regulations and standards for the future. Not only was this a dreadful affair that saw the unjust loss of multitudes of lives but it has been a golden opportunity for corporations to take their duties seriously. I am very grateful for the leadership of George Weston, the chief executive of ABF, and for his stand in its annual report, published on 5 November.

In conclusion, we have an opportunity in the corporate sector as new markets increasingly emerge where many of the pressure points that my noble friend Lord Alton and others have mentioned are brought to bear. If we can bring about a process for better common working practices between corporations and public authorities, we could see companies taking a greater lead in preventing human rights abuses.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick Excerpts

Wednesday 15th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick]

My Lords, in the seven years that I have been in your Lordships’ House I have missed a gracious Speech on only two occasions, one of which was last week while I was attending the World Economic Forum on Africa in Cape Town. I was attending there with two roles in mind: one as the vice chairman of the Global Agenda Council on the Future of Civil Society—I was delighted to hear the two references to civil society in Cyprus by the noble Lords, Lord Northbrook and Lord Sharkey—and the other as a director of KPMG, in which I declare an interest and to which I shall refer later.

One thing that was abundantly apparent at the WEF on Africa was that among the thousand leaders who had gathered from politics, business and civil society there was a profound enthusiasm and great new optimism about the state of their countries and their continent. Enormous wealth was on display, not only from political leaders but from business executives who now see much of Africa’s wealth being realised. During the course of the week, Realizing Africa’s Wealth, a new report by the UNDP, was published about building inclusive businesses for shared prosperity. Poverty is being replaced with the language of prosperity. As the report indicates, some of the good news is that remittances at $50 billion a year and foreign direct investment of $58 billion a year is roughly, in total, four times that of foreign aid engagements within the continent. So there is good news to be had despite the continuing gloom of those remaining still desperately poor.

I was fascinated to note that the Prime Minister has broken away from his frustrations over Europe and Bills in the other place while in New York to spend a little time today at the UN, where he is discussing what will be the next sustainable development goals. On the sustainable development goals, which should replace the millennium development goals from 2015, the Prime Minister said, according to the Guardian, which is the only serious newspaper to carry a major report on this today, that there will be 10 new objectives, which are all believable, necessary, realisable, we hope, and intellectually defensible. They are obvious issues such as ending extreme poverty, ending hunger, ensuring the provision of safe and sustainable water, school development, empowering girls and women and so on. There is nothing that we would dispute.

However, the Guardian reports that the Prime Minister is busy disputing with the President of Liberia, one of the poorest countries in the world which probably will not achieve any one of the major millennium development goals, whether there should be a provision in the new sustainable development goals on removing income inequality. I find that odd. No. 10 says, according to the Guardian, that the Prime Minister wants to keep the focus on measurable concrete actions that are going to help to alleviate poverty and keep the focus on being something that people could judge whether we are delivering. If one thing is abundantly apparent in the new optimism in Africa it is that income disparity is becoming an ugly reality. There are booming numbers of new billionaires and multi-millionaires in Africa’s new wealthy cities who are becoming gated and divided from the poor that they once lived alongside. Those poor remain without water, electricity, social supplies, good hospitalisation, healthcare and adequate work. It is an absolute necessity to close the gap in that income disparity and I am somewhat despaired, if not shocked, at David Cameron’s approach. I hope the Minister will consider taking this aspect back to No 10. It is rather odd to dispute with the president of one of the poorest, most conflict-ridden zones in the world a fundamental principle point on removing income disparity.

Perhaps I may move on to a second area in the few minutes left to me—I declare a specific interest as a director of KPMG International—which is the work that my firm does on behalf of DfID in leading and supporting the work of the Independent Commission on Aid Impact. When the previous Secretary of State, Andrew Mitchell, took up office in 2010, he had established by 2011 the Independent Commission on Aid Impact, which reports to the Select Committee in another place. In the course of the exactly two years that ICAI has been in existence, it has published 21 reports of great significance. In fact, at this moment an ICAI commissioner, Mark Foster, formerly head of Accenture, and a group of assessors are in Jordan and the Lebanon looking at the refugee crisis for a report for DfID.

Some of ICAI’s reports have looked at DfID’s approach to anti-corruption, oversight of EU aid to low-income countries, electoral support through the UNDP, engagement with the World Bank, climate change, impacts in Bangladesh, the health sector in Zimbabwe, education programmes in Nigeria and so on. In total, ICAI has made 85 independent recommendations to DfID, of which the department has accepted 70 in full, 11 in part and has rejected only four. In other words, the case is proven that there is a need for an independent body that looks hard at £11.8 billion of public expenditure and comes to a sensible, independent adjudication on value for money and takes an adequate approach to ensure that the public get a sound investment. Indeed, ICAI has just published its latest report on the work of UNICEF, in which I am delighted to declare an interest as a vice-president and to mention the UK president, the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, who is in his place.

However, it is interesting to discover that ICAI is being reviewed by the Cabinet Office, which it has asked DfID to undertake, so the very body to which the recommendations of ICAI are meant to go is assessing whether it would like the commission to continue. That seems to me to be a significant potential conflict of interest. It is obvious that if ICAI can make 85 independent recommendations which had not previously been seen and have 70 of them accepted, there is a real and genuine need to maintain the independence of the independent commission and strengthen its role, not just for the remaining two years of its life, but beyond.

For my last point I want to declare another interest as a member of Trade Out of Poverty, a group chaired by Peter Lilley from another place. As we all know, there is continuing pressure on trade negotiations to be completed by the end of this year. Should trade opportunity be better liberalised as markets would require, it would release new energy into the market system, boosting the potential of poor communities, particularly agricultural communities, by an estimated further trillion dollars of income that would go to the poorest people. Solving trade issues will be up to the big decision-makers and the G8 must play its part. The group firmly believes that it is necessary to open up rich country markets unconditionally to the poorest countries of all, and that it is time to end the ridiculous subsidies, such as $2 per cow per day in the EU and $3 billion spent in the US to subsidise cotton and then dump it, which undermines the jobs of 25,000 cotton growers in the poor world, particularly in Africa. It is time to stop protecting our own agricultural base through subsidy and let the rest of the world have access to markets and thus generate jobs. It is time to let trade be what delivers the economic future necessary for the world’s poorest.

Poverty in the Developing World

Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick Excerpts

Thursday 28th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick]

My Lords, I am so grateful that on the day before we are enwrapped in the euphoria of the royal wedding, as we should be, we are focusing on the needs of the most marginalised abroad and at home. There are a thousand good reasons why we should keep the needs of those 1.4 billion to 1.6 billion people right in front of us. One reason is that we need to be continually embarrassed by the failure to achieve the millennium development goals and to be continually reminded of the necessity to try to hit them. We simply must not forget that. We need to ensure that where there is good governance, such as the significantly good governance shown by DfID now and in the past, it is used to seek to embarrass those who do not live up to their aid commitments.

On 12 April the US Government announced a cut in their aid budget roughly equivalent to the aid the United Kingdom gives from its Exchequer every year. The United States still remains the largest global cash giver but it is the smallest contributor in terms of the percentage of its GDP of any major nation. Will the Prime Minister face down President Barack Obama at the G8 about his responsibility and that of his nation to ensure that development does not take place on the back of the poor, which is precisely what this Government said they would not do with aid? The figures from the US budget review announced on 12 April indicated a very revealing statistic. This is relevant to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, a moment ago. US aid development assistance will amount to $2.525 billion within a total of $48 billion, but the operation of the US aid development assistance will cost $1.35 billion. In other words, roughly half of what is being spent to aid the poor will go on administration. Will the Minister indicate the trajectory of administrative costs borne by the DfID budget as the years progress? Will we too find ourselves sucked into allocating more money to administrative costs rather than spending it on direct development assistance? That is an important point.

I want to emphasise a particular area about which I feel very strongly as somebody who works in a business setting. Next week the World Economic Forum on Africa will take place from 4 to 6 May in Cape Town. The summit will be chaired by Peter Brabeck, the chairman of Nestlé, and by Tim Flynn, the chairman of KPMG International. I declare an interest as the latter body is the partnership for which I work. I will be attending the summit in two roles: one reflecting my responsibilities at KPMG International and the other as chairman of Millennium Promise UK. The summit is one of the positive opportunities in which leaders across the continent will gather. Pretty much every viable president who is not held down by travel restrictions will attend, as will many leaders of non-governmental organisations. A vast array of people from businesses and NGOs committed to development will gather for three days in Cape Town. We will sing a positive story of the growth of Africa’s countries. Poverty, of course, is not just an African issue but we will focus on that matter.

I come back to the important question of how we ensure more effective co-ordination of the multiplicity of agencies, as the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, said. Will the Minister comment on the extent to which DfID sees its role as enabling fewer charities with larger budgets to focus on development assistance rather than encouraging a plethora of charities and campaigns in this area? Brilliant as next week’s campaign will clearly be, it is another one joining the long line. Eating up resources on administration and back-office facilities cannot be the right way to ensure that we get the maximum resources to the front line.

The British Government are committed to ensuring that enterprise is part of the way forward in overcoming the next round of development challenges. Enterprise, business development and microfinance have a part to play, but global and indigenous corporations have a significant role in driving investment. It is not just a matter of relieving poverty but of driving investment that embeds prosperity in countries and builds up the capacity for local work and employment. That is why it is so good that the chairmen of both Nestlé and KPMG are facilitating and leading the summit in Cape Town next week.

World Malaria Day occurred on Monday this week. We have already been reminded that every 3.5 seconds a child dies as a consequence of extreme poverty, hunger and disease, but every 45 seconds the mosquito takes its toll in all the African countries that still struggle with malaria. However, the good news is that, because of the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, we are just a short breath away from seeing the end of the malarial mosquito’s dominance in a few years’ time. The Japanese corporation Sumitomo Chemical Company has provided more than 700,000 bed nets to ensure that every child and adult sleeping in a Millennium Promise village in 10 different countries are free of the impact of that mosquito. That corporation has given away the technology to allow local production of the nets in African countries. That is a responsible and appropriate engagement on the part of business.

The many businesses that have lined up behind the Global Fund, such as Chevron, News International, Standard Chartered, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and many others, prove that business has a critical role to play in partnership with bilateral development organisations and NGOs. My organisation has just taken on a five-year commitment to Pemba, a large island off the coast of Tanzania. I will visit it at the beginning of July to see for myself what a five-year plan will do for 7,000 people, with eight countries contributing the $2 million that are necessary to put in the infrastructure to provide water, healthcare, transport, businesses and educational services. Business has a role to play in this regard. It is in the frontline of ensuring that people get jobs that will provide them with prospects and opportunities, enable them to pay tax with robust tax systems being put in place, that local exchequers are able to invest in their own infrastructure and build up their own countries. I hope that the Minister will encourage DfID’s policy to bring enterprise to the forefront of development as that is the right policy.