College of West Anglia and Worksop Football Academy

Debate between Lord Mann and Jim Shannon

Monday 26th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)]

Mr Speaker, what long hours you have been working today. I have an important issue to raise. It is relevant to my constituency and the Minister is well aware of it, and I suggest to the Minister that it has wider resonance beyond my constituency. It is one example, although not isolated, of a significant problem that afflicts further education and the use of sports academies.

In January 2015, the Worksop Guardian ran a report on its website—it was later in the newspaper and on the local football club’s website—that outlined how a football academy was to be established in Worksop by Doncaster College, in partnership with Worksop Town football club. The report stated:

“Worksop Town hope to give local youngsters a future in football or guide them into further education, through their new Football Academy.”

It went on:

“Students will combine daily training sessions and matches with classroom studies, under the watchful eye of teaching staff from Doncaster College.”

The academy would offer academic qualifications, the possibility of going on to study at university, and perhaps a scholarship to America, with level 1, 2 or 3 BTEC sports diplomas, worth up to three A-levels, for each participant. According to the paper, Mr Russ Horsley, the sports academy development manager at Doncaster College, called it an exciting partnership

“in line with our new academy of sport”

founded by Doncaster College.

Unfortunately, having made this great announcement, Doncaster College did not fulfil that commitment to establish a football academy with Worksop Town football club, although the community and I discovered that only some years later. Instead, the contract went via another college, the College of West Anglia, which, at the time and throughout the existence of the academy, neither I nor anybody else in my constituency, or anybody connected with Worksop and Worksop Town football club, had any knowledge of or indeed had even heard of. The college subcontracted to a company called GEMEG whose director was one Russell Horsley, the major shareholder and company secretary since he formed the company in 2011. That is the same Russell Horsley who was the sports development manager at Doncaster College who had announced the initial partnership.

The Minister should be aware that the local further education college—known as North Notts College at the time—tried particularly hard to get in on the act and run this football academy with the local football club, but it was told in no uncertain terms that there was a better deal with Doncaster College. Despite my interventions on behalf of my local college, we were rebuffed and told that this was a perfect relationship.

What transpired was not quite what had been promised. The College of West Anglia was not known to us. It had previously had a relationship in a sports location called Gresham, near West Bridgford, just by the city of Nottingham. It was around an hour from my constituency—about 50 miles away. It was a place that none of my constituents had ever visited and a place that I had never heard of until I discovered that, apparently, the young trainees of the academy from Worksop were all at Gresham for the first six months of their £168,000 Government-funded course. I was able to demonstrate very quickly, within minutes, that zero of my constituents had ever visited Gresham. Most had never visited Nottingham. None of them had heard of the College of West Anglia. Their course had been in Worksop, and yet the College of West Anglia claimed—and has claimed right up to this year—that these students were being trained in Nottingham.

According to West Anglia, during a visit on 8 February 2016, no learners or staff were present. This cannot be a surprise because no learners had ever visited this establishment, yet the college, having taken £168,000 in Government money, was maintaining that it was delivering, through a subcontractor, this fantastic course in Gresham. With all the standards required, it said that it was guaranteeing the health and safety and the quality of the teaching and the output, but this never actually took place; it was a fiction, a fantasy. There were, of course, zero health and safety assessments, and zero quality assessment of what was going on in Worksop, which, suffice it to say, was not a success. This course cost £168,000 and nobody completed it—nobody, not a single student. The students had a bit of a view on it.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on bringing this matter to the House. Does he not agree that this case highlights very clearly the importance of accountability and traceability of public funds? May I congratulate him on the important, vital and creditable work that he has done in bringing this scandal to light?

[John Mann]

Absolutely.

What was the College of West Anglia doing with £168,000 of taxpayers’ money? Well, I can tell the House what it was not doing. It was not funding food for any of the trainees, who were expected to pay

“£3 a day for food at a pub”.

That was part of the course for every trainee every day. The trainees were also required to pay “£70 for training kit”. They were not assessed for bursaries. Now, I have met a lot of these students. I know my constituents; I have looked at their addresses. I know that most of them would have got a bursary. A girl with dyslexia would have got a good bursary under disability discrimination provisions. But they could not get a bursary because they were not assessed for one. Some should have received free meals, but they were not assessed for free meals.

The students should have been given the equipment they required to carry out the course, but they were charged for the training kit and were required to buy their own computers to take into a classroom. But it was not a classroom. In fact, this was a further subcontract because Worksop Town’s ground and clubhouse—known to the fans as “the bar”—in which this course took place is subcontracted from another organisation. So the College of West Anglia subcontracts to a company called GEMEG, which partly subcontracts to Worksop Town football club, which subcontracts part of the facility from another outfit and pays £2,800 for the privilege of doing so.

No travel costs were paid, unlike many other colleges with bursaries, so these young 16-year-olds had to pay to travel. One verified to me that travel was £5 a day. Another wrote to say:

“We never had set times to start and finish.”

Another said:

“I coached in schools and didn’t get paid.”

Coached in schools? Well, hang on a minute. Where is the safeguarding in the 12 primary schools where these students were expected to coach? These students have been put at theoretical risk for the rest of their lives for any claim that could be brought against them.

The schools were also at risk because they had no idea. Many thought they were paying a company called Tiger Enterprises, owned by the manager of their local Worksop Town football club. It was Tiger Enterprises that received the fine for non-attendance, paid by cheque by one of the participants. So hang on a minute—the College of West Anglia has £168,000 of taxpayers’ money, and one of its students is charged £100, which goes to a private company owned solely by the manager of the local football club, for non-attendance at the College of West Anglia course. Somebody is owed some money here—some of these students, who have some protections under the law. But the law does not really seem to have applied to them when it came to this course, this college and its actions.

Section 7 of the Children and Young Persons Act 2008 puts a requirement on the college for the general wellbeing of children. The Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006 also puts a requirement on the college, but it did not even know the location of these young people. It did not know that these young people were going into primary schools—untrained and without insurance—to coach four and five-year-olds in football.

This is a shambles and a scandal. My constituents were put at risk and none of them got qualifications. Other people made money. Worksop Town managed to get £20,726 out of the £168,000 as its share of the loot for what it was providing in some way. Yet the community sports ground that provided the facility required in the course for the playing of sport is still owed over £5,000 to this very day. The College of West Anglia, having failed to deliver a course that provided any real qualifications, having received £168,000 of taxpayers’ money, having failed to address safeguarding, health and safety, or quality control of any kind, and having not even known which part of Nottinghamshire, 50 miles out, these young people were at, has not even paid the bill for its course to a community club run entirely, 100%, by volunteers. That is the level of the scandal.

To reiterate the point made by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), what is going wrong when the College of West Anglia today refuses to meet me about this and refuses to pay its debt? The chair of governors and the principal say that they have dealt with the issues, but they have not dealt with the issues of this scandal whereby they used their name to rip off the taxpayer for this money, to provide no qualifications, to put my constituents at risk, to cost my constituents money, and to leave a community sports club about £6,000 out of pocket when most of the local kids’ teams are playing football in places where they are trying to raise money for toilets and changing rooms.

I want this college to pay its due moneys immediately. But I hope, as well, that the Minister will look at a system that allows this kind of scandal to arise. It would have been perfectly feasible to deliver a good course, run well, that motivated these young people and where the vast majority of them would qualify and have the chance to go on to further things, rather than the shambles faced by 23 young people in year one and an equal number in year two who did the course a month or two before it eventually collapsed, which is how I found out about it. As for those in the Football Association and the football world who have ticked every box to endorse this and allow it to happen, where on earth were they—lacking the safeguarding that is a pre-requisite to their existence? They were not there, and they have a lot of questions to answer. I hope that the Minister is going to change the system so that money from the taxpayer and from her Department—I know she was shocked about this—is never wasted in this way again.

Arts Council England Funding: Coalfield Communities

Debate between Lord Mann and Jim Shannon

Tuesday 20th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

rose—

[John Mann]

I will give way to my hon. Friend.

[John Mann]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. I merely say that when it comes to the English coalfields, we are talking about zero, zero, zero, zero, year after year. So the young people are reliant on the schools, which do their best, but we all know that schools funding has been tight. Schools funding for the arts has been tight for successive Governments—this goes back to the Labour Government as well. It has always been tight, but it has got tighter. Where someone wants to be creative in music in Bassetlaw, there is no facility available in the community for them. Where someone wants to go into the world of theatre, they find that no youth drama is being funded by the national Arts Council. The amounts of money that are there ought to be spread to some extent, to allow us to do things.

When we bid for money, the way the Arts Council works is that it says, “We’ll give you a consultant. One of our consultants.” That consultant will advise the Arts Council on what should be done. It is a closed shop within the arts world, where they give someone they know the contract to bid for money from themselves and none of it gets into the former coalfield communities. It is a scandal. The Arts Council needs to have the integrity to open up opportunities to give us the chance to demonstrate that where we do not have the arts infrastructure to bid for money, we can do it in a different way, with its assistance, without needing that infrastructure. Where people have the time, wisdom, inclination and skills, coming from the arts world, I do not begrudge them their brilliant ideas, inventiveness and claims in respect of facilities that already exist. If those facilities were in my constituency, I would be proposing the same. But is this fair on the national level? What about not just the education but the health, not least the mental health, of young people and the importance of the arts to them?

[Jim Shannon]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his contribution. He has just mentioned the very issue that I want to bring to his attention—the health institutions. Almost 50% of the nation’s healthcare institutions provide arts programming for patients, families and staff because of the health benefits of the arts to their patients. Surely if they can do it, we can see clearly the benefits that would be brought to the coalfield communities.

[John Mann]

It would bring a huge benefit. We are talking about small amounts of money to give us a chance with the few projects we ever put forward, which get knocked back repeatedly, as the evidence demonstrates. That requires a change of mindset in the arts world and in Arts Council England, which must say to communities—not only mine, but the many others from all corners of England—“You have the right to benefit from the arts. You have the right and we are going to help you. We are going to get in there. We are going to provide that little bit of funding that would make such a big difference.” I predict, Mr Speaker, that if the young people in my constituency were given that opportunity—you, Sir, are witness to this—we would see that they are as inventive, creative and brilliant as any other set of young people in the country, but they do not end up in the arts world because their skills remain hidden. It is hardly a surprise that the talent shows uncover so many people from areas like mine.

We once had in the miners’ welfares and institutes many educational, artistic and sporting structures, based on the coalmining industries. That gave an entire set of generations opportunities. Over the past 30 years, those facilities have gently crumbled away in most places. The miners are not there and the employer is not there to provide the time, facilities and, indeed, money that there used to be. The void needs to be filled.

Will the Minister meet representatives from the Arts Council to take them through these incredible figures and challenge them? I am more than happy to go with him. The big-picture issue is not whether it is my constituency or one of the many others that actually benefits. I shall of course fight strongly for my area, but if it was only my area that was not benefiting, one could see that we were doing something wrong. When so many scores of constituencies get no national funding whatsoever from the Arts Council, that shows that the system is wrong.

I say in a non-partisan way—the Minister will note that this affects constituencies represented by Members from different parties—that it is long overdue that this issue is addressed. The Arts Council is currently reviewing its priorities; here is a chance to direct a modicum of resource to the former coalfields to give our kids a proper artistic chance.

Domestic Ivory Market

Debate between Lord Mann and Jim Shannon

Monday 6th February 2017 Westminster Hall

[Jim Shannon]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[John Mann]

I will give way to my colleague from Northern Ireland, to demonstrate how wide ranging support is across the House.

[Jim Shannon]

That support comes from all the regions of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The hon. Gentleman referred to interaction with his grandchildren and to where animals roam on the plains. Does he believe that legislative action in the House must include help for countries that have elephants, hippopotamuses and so on to ensure that they have rangers and helicopters and everything necessary to make sure that those animals can roam and live freely?

[John Mann]

Those countries desperately need our support. With my mountaineering hat on, I recall climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in August 2016 through what was, 20 years ago, the wild route. It was wild because there were elephants and animals more dangerous than elephants prowling on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. In particular, there were a significant number of elephants in the forest and up on the Shira plateau, but they are not there now. Guides who were with me could recall during their guiding lifetime how many they had seen as adults, never mind as children. That demonstrated vividly to me the crisis in one small part of the world in Tanzania.

Pilgrim Fathers (400th Anniversary)

Debate between Lord Mann and Jim Shannon

Wednesday 9th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[John Mann]

I thank the hon. Gentleman. Should hon. Members, following the usual rules, deign that to be appropriate, I would be honoured to join him. The Bassetlaw-Plymouth amalgam cross-party group would be a powerful way to spread the message of the values and principles of the Mayflower Pilgrims.

The key 16th-century village of Scrooby was, as it is now, on the Great North Road. This tiny village was called

“a pleasing land of drowsyhead…broad meadowlands…hummocky plots of stiff soil”

and

“a raised area served by the River Idle.”

The postmaster—an important position in such a strategic transport route—was John Brewster, and the real story of the pilgrims begins in 1587, when his son, William Brewster, returned to the place of his birth and childhood. It was at the manor house that William Brewster created the religious separatist church, the Pilgrims, and held its first sessions. Who were the neighbours in attendance? Along with William Brewster, there was John Robinson, of Sturton le Steeple. The separatist church named after him in Gainsborough was opened in 1896 by the US ambassador, the honourable T.F. Bayard. That was the last time, but I am sure it will not be the only time, that an American ambassador visited the origins of the modern United States.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I am very interested in history, and I have come across the Pilgrim Fathers in my study of history. I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate, and it is a real pleasure to take part. Who would have thought 400 years ago that the Pilgrim Fathers would do something that would last 400 years? Does he welcome the strong economic, physical, emotional, cultural, military, and political ties between the United States and the United Kingdom, which are also united by language?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. I am not quite sure that that fits in with the Pilgrim Fathers on the 400th anniversary, and I think you need to sit down. We must be careful not to extend this debate beyond where the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) wishes to take it, and I am sure that he will not be tempted that easily.

Survivors of Child Abuse

Debate between Lord Mann and Jim Shannon

Tuesday 17th March 2015 Westminster Hall

[John Mann]

It has been letting down the hon. Lady’s constituents and mine alike. Three girls were repeatedly raped from age 5 onwards. There is no case to answer, because their statements taken at the time, when they were young kids, do not add up. The Crown Prosecution Service said, “Oh, there is nothing we can do. We will not win in court.” What support is there for them? I will tell you what support there is: me. That is who they come to. I will give them support, but what I need from the state and national and local government is properly resourced mental health services that do not, as they did to my constituent, send people away—she needed to be sedated for three days, having made a statement about the multiple rape and other violence—and say, “Come back in a month’s time.” That happened in Nottinghamshire this year to one of the victims. Mental health services are totally disjointed when it comes to support.

I am dealing with children’s social services, but some of these adults are in their 50s or 60s. They will not be going to children’s social services, so where is the support from adult social services? There is no system in place that gives them that. I have constituents who have been hung out to dry by the police and given no support. They were not even referred to the support agencies, having come and said, “We were raped as children.” What on earth is going on when we have no support systems in place?

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

The hon. Gentleman is making a very powerful case on behalf of victims of child abuse. In Northern Ireland in the past year, 50 offenders have been arrested and questioned in relation to sexual abuse. Does he feel that the first thing that survivors of child abuse want to see is the culprits arrested, investigated and referred to the courts for sentencing? Do resources need to be made available for that to happen?

[John Mann]

The survivors want justice, and the only way they will get that is by being believed and by perpetrators being prosecuted. The Crown Prosecution Service cannot cope with the volume. It has hardly any cases compared with the cases that will go to it. For the Crown Prosecution Service in the east midlands, we are talking about a manifold increase just from the cases I am bringing. How on earth do we expect such places as Rotherham to deal with the numbers? The expertise to take the cases forward is there, but the resource is not. What is being said is, “We will put it on the long drift for years and years.” That is what has happened with the police. They are not even getting to some of the people who should be questioned as potential perpetrators, because they do not have the resource to do that.

I am not criticising Government spending; what they spend on this, that and the other is a separate debate. It is important that we all get our heads around what is needed. We are not talking about the Government announcing another £100 million or £200 million here or there; we are talking about a far bigger resource than that. In my constituency, I am personally dealing with 25 victims—25 survivors of child abuse. That is so far. There are loads and loads more out there, just in my constituency.

The Crown Prosecution Service and the police cannot handle the prosecutions, the mental health services cannot handle the support services for the victims and social services cannot handle virtually anything to do with them. They do not have the resource. If we are to get on top of this huge legacy, we need to define what I put to the Minister as a Roll-Royce service. What does that mean? A standard needs to be put in place so that when someone comes forward, there is a benchmark that defines what they are entitled to. It is an entitlement. This man was forced into slavery and went to the police, and the police and the social workers returned him and his sisters to the abusers not once, not twice, not three times, but more. He did the right thing, and he is entitled to a Rolls-Royce service. That can come in different forms. What is his major demand? One-to-one literacy lessons, because he finds it a bit hard to get on, being unable to read and write because he was not in school because he was forced to work in a foundry by some predatory paedophile abuser who was the foster carer over him—and that is what they were. Literacy is the most important thing for him.

There is no system in place that says, “You will get this. You are entitled to this.” What is he meant to do—go to the civil courts, as so many thousands have already done? That is not a sensible approach, given that lawyers will not even share information, and are telling people in Nottinghamshire not to come to me, the media or anyone else. They say, “Stick with us, we’ll get you a little bit of money.” How much is a life worth in Nottinghamshire? Eight grand a settlement. It is not good enough, and it is not going to be good enough in future.

Whether under this Government or the next Government, whoever is in power in the next Parliament, whoever the Minister is, from whichever party, I need to see defined an immediately available Rolls-Royce service. Whatever resource is needed, we will have to find it. This is not about me getting up and having a go at the Government; it is about Parliament taking responsibility. This is about saying that a huge amount of the available resources needs to be given and broken down into different areas.

I have been contacted by constituents and many others from all over the country who have survived abuse. They want prosecutions to proceed. They want the police to be able to investigate. They want mental health and other NHS facilities and services to be available. They want support from adult social services. They need that, and they need it as they come forward.

There is one final thing that they need. The Government have made their decisions about the independent panel and Goddard. We can learn a lot from abroad. They do this stuff better in Scandinavia and New Zealand. We should be stealing all their best practice for how we deal with things. Whoever is the Minister, and whoever sits on the Select Committees and all the rest, should get out there, steal their good ideas, bring them back and implement them here. But survivors need their own forum. They have called for a national institute for people abused in childhood. They need that, because then they can provide some of the support and guidance, and they can contribute to the definition of a Rolls-Royce service.

I cannot be dealing with more people attempting suicide, having come to me because the support services are not there. I do not give a damn which heads are going to roll. If those support services are not there, I will get rid of the people at the top, because it is not good enough for my constituents, who are no different from people anywhere else.

I need from the Government a clear undertaking that the resources and expertise will be there. If someone has survived this trauma and lived with it all their life, they have a right to and an expectation of support when they bravely come forward. That is what we as a society and we as a Parliament are going to have to give them. That is why this debate is not only timely, but critical. We need action within months, not years.

Political and Human Rights (African Great Lakes)

Debate between Lord Mann and Jim Shannon

Tuesday 13th May 2014 Westminster Hall

[John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)]

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for the debate. I want to make four points. First, briefly, the Prime Minister in government has been keen to emphasise the Christian nature of the country and the Government. I had the opportunity, with the Bishop of Durham, other Church leaders and some parliamentarians, with the assistance of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, to visit the great lakes last summer. We were hosted by local Church leaders in Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi.

The role of the Church, post-conflict—and, more critically, post-border—in reconstruction is one that the Government, in their international development and foreign affairs work, must build on. I will come on to Burundi in my fourth point, but there and in Rwanda we see Church leaders, from different ethnic minorities in each country, working alongside communities that have been in conflict in different and tragic ways more or less ever since independence. Whether we wish it or not, a critical element of our role is to assist in bringing together the Churches to work on the problems in the region. There are a variety of Churches; the Catholic Church is hosting a meeting today, and the Church of England has got a particular role in relation to the problems we are discussing, which I hope that the Government will capitalise on. The Church of England—not least in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire—has done an immense amount of work over many years to build links across the great lakes, not least in Burundi.

Secondly, I want to talk about the group that nobody seems to be dealing with, namely the Twa community. The Department for International Development, wrongly, does nothing about them; it has done nothing about them for many years, so that is a criticism not merely of any changes made by this Government, but of the continuing lack of priority given to the group. That community of former forest dwellers across the great lakes is small in number now. It was once great in number, but its members were murdered in greater numbers than anyone else under Belgian colonial rule; vast numbers of the Twa were murdered over the past century. Those who remain in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi are the most impoverished of the poor. They are the most disfranchised and the least represented. Having been removed from the forest for the benefits of nature conservation and western tourists—

[Jim Shannon]

And business.

[John Mann]

—and business, they have incredible levels of inter-communal violence, particularly sexual violence and rape, and they are struggling to cope with life outside the forest.

It is not for me to come up with or even to suggest solutions, other than to say that without question, DFID ought to give proper priority to projects working with the Twa, not least those that develop youth leadership and potential community leadership. There is some exciting church-led work in that area, which is creating new leaders for the future. That is vital if the Twa are to continue to exist and not disappear in what I would describe, I think accurately, as an assisted genocide—a genocide assisted by the inaction of everyone, both inside and outside the country. We share some responsibility for that. With our proud history of international development, such projects ought to be the kind of thing we are good at. It is rather shameful that over the past decade we have done nothing about the Twa in those countries.

Thirdly, other Members have already raised the attempts by SOCO, a UK-based oil exploration company, to plunder the reserves in the Virunga national park. I would make two points. I do not wish to be trite, but it is a fact that there are more parliamentarians in Britain than mountain gorillas in the wild. If we balloted our constituents on which they would like to preserve for the future, I suspect that parliamentarians would lose out, and lose out heavily. We have a responsibility to future generations. It must be cost-effective to preserve wildlife. There may well be roles for the Twa to play in that, for their economic livelihoods. After all, they are removed from the forest to allow tourists to visit the mountain gorillas and bring in hard currency.

The point is more fundamental than that for human beings. The national parks in the great lakes region are the natural borders and boundaries that, more than anything else, will preserve nation states and restrict cross-border conflicts. The Akagera national park between Rwanda and Tanzania is being rebuilt. It has an horrendous history from the genocide, but, as well as having income-generating potential for the country, it serves as a natural brake on cross-border issues. The Volcans national park in the north-west corner of Rwanda, the Virunga and others serve a similar purpose. The preservation of such natural borders and the wildlife they contain is therefore ethically right and economically sensible for the long term—for tourism and livelihoods in 50, 100 or 150 years, not just the profits for SOCO or whatever in the next 10 or 20 years. Such preservation is critical to these countries’ competitive advantage, but also to minimising conflict now and in future. That should be seen as part of our foreign policy and international development work, and be given much higher strategic priority.

Fourthly and finally, I want to make a slightly longer point about Burundi, which is 178th out of the 187 countries assessed by the UN for poverty; it is not the poorest, but it is virtually the poorest country in the world. The UN says that Burundi is likely to achieve one out of the 18 millennium development goals. That is beyond the scale of most countries. For a post-conflict country with such a level of poverty to go without support from this country—here I will criticise this Government—is, whatever the reason, a mistake that must be reversed by whoever is in power after 2015. We must stop our lack of engagement with Burundi on international development.

I know that the Minister is a good man and a good Minister, in my experience. I do not normally give even the most modest praise to Tories, but he is a good man and has been, in my view, a good Minister. As he has been to Burundi, I would like to hear about his experience; perhaps he might like to give us his recommendations about how the Government should relate to that country, because it is applying for Commonwealth status. I hope that the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association will engage with Burundi on not just a parliamentary but an official level, and on a more intense basis. We should be in there, assisting a country that is increasingly looking to the English language, to the Commonwealth—not least because of the trade links with east Africa—and to us. There is a lot that we can offer.

Many criticisms can rightly be levelled at Burundi. It is not exactly a pluralistic democracy of the highest calibre. Currently, there is not the freedom of media and non-governmental organisations that we would want and expect. However, Burundi has had the most successful repatriation of displaced people in recorded history. More than 1 million refugees have returned, without civil war breaking out, and reintegrated into one of the world’s poorest economies. Although there have been, and remain, issues of land disputes and so on, on balance the process has been incredibly successful compared with any other such mass movement of people back into a country after they had been driven out by civil war. Many second-generation Burundians were born in Tanzania but have returned to their historic roots, sometimes with elderly family, sometimes without. That has been handled extraordinarily well. We should praise them for that, but we should also be in there with them.

The people of Burundi have recovered from what was an almost hidden war, certainly in the western media, in which as many people were killed as in Rwanda, over a longer period and with some of the same ethnic conflict bases. If any of that had ever been reported by the western media, people in this country would have been jumping up and down. But it was a secret civil war in a country that no one had ever heard of and that very few people across the world and in Britain have heard of. Yet Burundi has come out of that conflict, so we should be there using our great expertise in pluralist democracy and in building up civil society and its institutions. We have expertise in how the Churches can contribute to that process, because they—not least the Church of England—already play a significant part in what is happening in Burundi, and I would say a positive one.

There are many reasons why modest investment by DFID and better engagement—including by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office—would pay great dividends for us, for Burundi and for the great lakes region. I hope that the Minister will give some encouraging signs that this country will re-engage. If this Government do not, I want to put on the record for whoever is in power after 2015 the fact that this demand will not go away. We should re-engage, DFID should re-engage, and our diplomatic staff should be in Burundi, representing us and assisting the country.