UN Sustainable Development Goals

Debate between Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale and Lord Kennedy of Southwark

Thursday 17th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale]

That this House takes note of the impact of conflict, extreme poverty and climate-related emergencies globally; and of the progress towards achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, before we start, I point out to noble Lords that the advisory speaking time is nine minutes. That means that at eight minutes, they should make their concluding remarks, and at nine minutes their time is up. I urge all noble Lords to adhere to this advisory speaking time; it helps the House to function well.

[Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale (Lab)]

My Lords, I start by drawing attention to my entries in the register of interests. I thank all those Members of your Lordships’ House who have agreed to speak in the debate; I am very grateful to everyone. Looking at the range of speakers, I can see that we are going to raise a variety of topics. That is useful because it gives me the chance to open with an overview. I am also very grateful to the electorate, because this is the first time I have had the opportunity, in the 14 years I have been in the House, to speak from the Government Benches; I thank them for that opportunity. I also thank those who provided my hearing aids over the summer because, for the first time in a long time, I will actually hear the full debate and the Minister’s reply. I welcome the Minister: we have worked hard on these issues for many years, and I have been delighted to see his work at the United Nations and in many bilateral visits over recent months. I wish him well in his role.

There have been 280 Members of your Lordships’ House appointed since the sustainable development goals were agreed in September 2015. It is quite a remarkable figure, and it shows that there may be many who have not taken part in a debate on the SDGs before, so I will briefly introduce the topic by saying that the millennium development goals agreed in 2000 came at the end of the decade of upheaval and change across the world in the 1990s. They were agreed at the start of the new millennium to give some direction to the support that was required to deal with extreme poverty in the global South.

Here in the UK at the Gleneagles summit in 2005, the UK Government turbo-charged their work on the millennium development goals, because they were already falling behind. The millennium development goals made a difference, but they only really dealt with a small number of very specific issues: primary education, the supply of clean water, maternity provisions and so on. They never really dealt with the underlying causes of extreme poverty and the difficulties faced by so many people across our world.

Instead of taking four hours to agree the millennium development goals, we took four years to consult on, debate and agree the sustainable development goals in 2015. They attack the causes of extreme poverty and vulnerability around the world—climate, conflict, inequality and the lack of strong national economies—to ensure that all the other work on education, health, clean water and public services is underpinned by stronger sustainable economies at the national level and the peaceful environment that is required to allow them to succeed.

The SDGs had core themes. Leave no one behind was the driving force, as was prioritising the most vulnerable in our societies to ensure that they are not left behind. They were universal, applying to every country in the world to ensure that people were not left behind anywhere. They were for everybody, everywhere. They had a structure: a system of voluntary national reviews which allowed national plans to be developed to prioritise the right goals in the right countries and ensure that they were reporting against their targets to their peers.

Unfortunately, although a number of countries in the global South took that structure seriously, far too many in the developed world did not. Perhaps only Japan, under Prime Minister Abe, really took seriously the need to create a framework in government that drove support for the SDGs at home and abroad. Perhaps also remarkably, businesses across the world, large and small, took this seriously. Many now embed the SDG framework in their long-term planning to preserve their supply chains and ensure that they are treating their workforces well, and to ensure that they are making a contribution to society.

However, by 2020 and the pandemic, progress against the goals was far too slow, and we were way off track already. Of course, the pandemic had a terrible impact, on everything from girls’ education to vaccinations and health system structures in different parts of the world. It also provided an opportunity for those who perhaps had less inclination to support the most vulnerable in our world to cut overseas aid, primarily here in the UK with then Chancellor Sunak’s decision to dramatically cut our aid budget in the middle of a global pandemic—a decision I still find utterly remarkable, but one that was also mirrored in some other countries as well.

Today we see the impact not just of that pandemic but of the rising tide of conflict around the world, creating a situation in which only 17% of the SDGs are even remotely on target to be achieved by 2030. We have the highest level of conflict around the world since the 1940s, over 700 million people are living in extreme poverty and the graph is going up, rather than down, for the first time in 30 years. We have had the hottest year on record—we can see the impact of climate change—and over 100 million people have been displaced, including nearly 50 million children displaced from their homes in our world today. All over the world, there are children who are out of school, who are not being vaccinated who would have been just a few years ago, who are hungry and would have been fed just a few years ago, and we have children in danger from conflict and violence. This is a global emergency, and the SDGs provide the framework for us to deal with it nationally and internationally.

As I said, I have found the support of businesses for the SDGs over this time to be particularly interesting. Businesses that have a long-term plan for success take into account the many factors that affect their success, whether that is their workforce, their supply chain, their impact on society or other factors. It is astonishing that over the course of the last nine years, Governments have let down populations so much when businesses have actually risen to the challenge.

Fast-forwarding to September 2024—I say this carefully—we saw at the United Nations more warm words of the sort we have seen again and again from countries around the world that actually do not mean it, and I want to start at that point. The pact for the future, which we of course signed up to at the UN General Assembly in September, has 56 individual actions to try to get the SDGs back on track in order to achieve as much as possible by 2030. It has the addition of a—very welcome—global digital compact, and a further declaration on future generations that expresses all sorts of wonderful motherhood and apple pie about where we should be in our world today.

The pact itself talks about a

“profound global transformation … human beings … enduring terrible suffering”.

It also talks about

“a moment of hope and opportunity”

and expresses a wish to see

“a world that is safe, peaceful, just, equal, inclusive, sustainable and prosperous”.

If we look around our world today, we are further from that than we have been for a very long time.

I say first of all to our new Government that it is vital that we engage in as many international fora as possible to ensure that we step up and push our peers around the world to be more committed to acting and not just talking. This includes the many countries that have stepped up at the United Nations and supported adopting these kinds of statements every September since 2015 and have either violated the commitments they made or ignored them.

Our new Government have a firm commitment to a world free from poverty on a liveable planet. Both the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary referred to the SDGs in their speeches at the United Nations in September, and I certainly welcome that. Leaving no one behind is a driving principle that should underpin the review of our development activity that is under way in the FCDO.

I would also like to see a cross-government approach to this in the UK. We have waited nine long years for this, and almost secured it when Prime Minister Theresa May managed to get her Cabinet to have their pictures taken with placards on each SDG in February 2019. At that time, Secretary of State Penny Mordaunt was ready to make a number of commitments, before she was moved to become Defence Secretary. We need cross-government co-operation. This is not just about our global commitments in the FCDO and the climate department; it also cuts across other government departments. As we review our ODA and development activity, the SDG strategy should be centre stage, and we should commit as soon as possible to a second voluntary national review, as 2019 was the last time we reported on our progress against these commitments.

Of the three topics mentioned in my Motion today, I do not want to spend a lot of time on climate, because we discuss it on many occasions here in your Lordships’ Chamber. I just express the hope that what was being said and supported by the UK at the UN General Assembly in September is coherent with what we then say and do at the COP in Baku in November. One of the great benefits of the SDGs was to pull together financing for development, the development targets for the world and our climate targets in Addis, New York and Paris in 2015. We can play a role on these international stages to ensure consistency and co-ordination between what is being said and done in the different summits. I do not see action on climate and on development as an either/or; they have to go absolutely hand in hand.

I mentioned earlier that we have such a horrific and high level of conflict in our world today that it almost seems impossible to tackle. But we need a commitment in this country not just to our defence but to our interventions around the world that help prevent conflict and build peace. I would be interested to know more about whether the Government will continue with the integrated security fund, run from the Cabinet Office rather than from the FCDO. I would be interested to know more about how that fund will direct resources towards peacebuilding and conflict prevention, and not just perhaps more traditional forms of security. I would also be interested to know whether the remit for my noble friend Lord Robertson’s defence review will include a commitment to a greater UK intervention on conflict prevention and peacebuilding.

We can make a significant impact around the world on conflict prevention. At times over the last 20 years—with the Conflict Pool; the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund that was built up by the Conservative Government; and now, again, with this Government’s strong commitment—we have made a real difference on conflict prevention over the years, and I hope that will continue and expand with the new Ministers in place. I would us to have a particular impact on children affected by conflict. Organisations such as Education Cannot Wait, which supports education for children displaced from their homes due to conflict, are definitely worthy of the UK’s support as we review our development budgets.

Finally, on extreme poverty it is stunning that, having set out a commitment to leave no one behind, we are leaving more people behind in 2024. That cannot continue. There is a whole range of financial issues that we could spend a whole day debating, but I will highlight just a few. The first is our own official development assistance. This country has been spending a third of its official development assistance in the UK—not abroad but in the UK; not with the poorest people in the world but here in the United Kingdom—for the past couple of years. That is totally unjustified, unfair and wrong. I hope that the Government will do something to start to change that. We need to be consistent in our approach to ODA and, as I said, we should ensure that “leave no one behind” is a theme that runs through all our bilateral and multilateral interventions.

We also need to ensure that other forms of finance, which are in reality far more important than ODA, make their difference too. The UK and the City of London can make a real difference, whether in dealing with debt or getting private creditors to the table to deal with the terrible burden of debt; through tax transparency and making sure that climate finance is additional to development finance; or by ensuring that businesses step up to the plate in all these areas.

I will finish on this point: I am always reminded that this is, ultimately, about human beings; it is not about formulas, summits or even debates here in your Lordships’ House. In February this year, I met a young girl in Malawi, Alinafe, who walks seven kilometres to and from school every day. She is the youngest of seven in her family. She is the first to get past the first year in the local high school. She does not know anything about the SDGs—she has never heard of them—but what we do with them matters to her and to her opportunities and start in life. We should always remember that these human beings are at the centre of this agenda. If we do that, we are more likely to succeed.