UN: Sustainable Development Goals

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Tuesday 16th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, on securing the debate and express my admiration for him and my noble friend Lady Jenkin for their living below the line. I remind them—perhaps naughtily—that there are free cheese biscuits in the Bishops’ bar. I welcome my noble friend the Minister to her role and have promised her that I will not be tiresome today.

I do not have an interest to declare in this debate although I have an investment in a DNA diagnostic company which might, at some stage in the distant future, prove to be useful in helping to fight infectious diseases in the developing world.

My main reason for speaking on this issue—I do not claim anything like the expertise of others in the debate—is that I was commissioned by the Wall Street Journal to write about the process of producing these sustainable development goals last year and I got interested in it. I am particularly interested in the question of priority setting and I will focus my remarks today on that issue. It is crucial that these SDGs are seen as an opportunity to set priorities within the development goals.

We need to have, I am afraid, a ruthless focus on value for money in what we direct our efforts towards because it is not a matter of identifying the biggest problems facing the world but of identifying the ones where we can get most results for the money that we are likely to spend. There is no question that money for foreign aid is limited The very brevity of the list of the eight millennium development goals and the deadline attached to them meant that they caught the world’s imagination, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans referred to the need for the SDGs to do so as well.

As my noble friend Lady Jenkin said, since 2000 the number of people living in extreme poverty and hunger around the world will have been cut roughly in half by 2015—a truly astonishing achievement. However, as the noble Lord McConnell, said, there is much further to go.

I worry that the list of SDGs may be too long because if you were to ask people to name the eight millennium development goals, most would not be able to do so. Even that list of eight was, perhaps, a little too long. All the pressure during the process of arriving at the SDGs has been to make the list even longer. NGOs and others have been bombarding those involved in the process with their own pet projects and the result is 17 goals divided into 169 targets. It needs leadership from the Secretary-General, Mr Ban, and politicians to bring focus to the process when the meeting takes place in September.

As Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, put it, you should “never ask a committee to write poetry”. One person who could bring poetry to this process is the UN Secretary-General, but he needs to edit with an axe, not a scalpel. Perhaps that is too violent a metaphor for the subject.

The worry is that the open working group’s proposals which have come to the zero draft are trying to be too comprehensive rather than forensic and targeted in order to arrive at an imaginative list that will enable us to measure progress by 2030. Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus Center has been working with his expert analysts on trying to help this process by focusing on cost-benefit analysis. His 120 experts went through all of the 169 targets to try to put a number for cost benefit on them. This exercise was well received in many areas, particularly in the developing world, where it got more attention than it did in the West.

The numbers produced by this exercise were startling. Every dollar spent to alleviate malnutrition can do $59-worth of good; on malaria, $35; on HIV, $11. By contrast, on setting a millennium development goal of limiting global temperatures to two degrees above pre-industrial levels, his 120 experts, who included Nobel Prize winners, calculated that would do just two cents of good for every dollar spent. On the other hand, phasing out fossil fuel subsidies would achieve more than $15 of benefit per dollar spent.

Surprising as it may seem, the global aid industry very rarely carries out these kinds of cost-benefit analyses. People in this line of work generally recoil from rankings because they feel like a heartless exercise in discrimination against other goals that are still worthy. The aid industry often seems implicitly to take the view that funds are unlimited and that spending on one priority does not crowd out spending on another but that is patently not the case.

Trying to solve the world’s problems with poverty and other development challenges is not like solving a mathematical problem—there is no right or wrong answer. However, there are better or worse answers. It is vital, to the extent that we can, that we set priorities—setting aside sentimental commitments—and do the hard work of assessing costs and benefits.