Post-2015 Development Agenda

Alan Duncan Excerpts

Thursday 21st March 2013 Westminster Hall

[Hugh Bayley (York Central) (Lab)]

That rather limits the time for me to say anything.

I start by thanking colleagues from many of the all-party groups that take an interest in international development for joining me, on behalf of the all-party group on Africa, in seeking the debate. I also thank the Backbench Business Committee for giving it to us, particularly in this important week. Next week the United Nations Secretary-General’s high-level panel, charged with producing a report recommending global development goals for the period after 2015—the end date of the millennium development goals—meets in Indonesia. That will be its last full meeting before it publishes its report.

I should also begin by paying tribute to the Government and what the Chancellor said in his Budget speech yesterday.

“We will also deliver in this coming year on this nation’s long-standing commitment to the world’s poorest to spend 0.7% of our national income on international development.”—[Official Report, 20 March 2013; Vol. 560, c. 935-6.]

That is a statement that I imagine everybody here will warmly endorse.

The Select Committee on International Development has made criticisms from time to time of the way in which the Department for International Development is moving towards that goal. We were concerned that instead of increasing the budget in three equal stages over three years from the 0.53% of gross national income inherited from the previous Government, the budget has flatlined for three years and will now rise steeply in this year from, I think, 0.52%, which is slightly below the level inherited from the previous Government as a proportion of GNI.

[The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Mr Alan Duncan)]

If I may assist the hon. Gentleman, last year’s figure was 0.56%, so it has been rising gently but then will be steeper.

[Hugh Bayley]

I stand corrected and congratulate the Government on moving in the right direction. The concern from the International Development Committee was that it will mean a substantial increase in spend in this year. We were concerned about the absorptive capacity, particularly in countries where we have bilateral programmes. That is something that the Minister might address later.

The International Development Committee has also voiced concerns about the squeeze imposed by the Treasury on DFID’s administrative costs. Like all Members I want to see every Government Department lean and mean, but as DFID is unusual in having a sharply rising budget, we are concerned that reducing the number of people DFID has on the ground runs a risk of our aid spend being supervised and scrutinised less closely, and possibly being less efficient as a result. That needs some creative thinking.

On my visits with the International Development Committee to DFID offices in the field, it has occurred to me that it is now harder for DFID staff to spend time away from the capital, looking at what is happening in health clinics or schools. Perhaps DFID could contract out to non-governmental organisations some of that work of checking what is happening on the ground and delivering reports on whether the training programmes for teachers in rural schools are delivering trained teachers. That is just a thought.

Having said that, I acknowledge that in the current economic climate it is not an easy political decision for the Government to stick to the commitment. Those of us who think it is the right thing to do have a responsibility to make the case for international development, in church halls and local newspapers up and down the country. Although there is a strong constituency of support, often church or faith based, for international development, and support from many diaspora communities in Britain, there are also many people who ask why we are increasing our charity abroad when we are not able to increase spending on some essential services at home.

--- Later in debate ---

[Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Brady, and to follow the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), who made some excellent points. In particular, he talked about the fact that support for sustainable development is not just a human imperative, but in our long-term economic interests. This has been a well-informed and wide-ranging debate, and it is a pleasure to take part in it.

This debate reminds me of one we held as recently as October in this same Chamber, when we also discussed the post-2015 agenda. Quite a lot has happened since then. Several Members have mentioned yesterday’s announcement by the Chancellor that we will hit our target of 0.7% of national wealth going to overseas development assistance during this coming year—that is what I think he said. The phraseology last year was “from 2013”—

[Mr Duncan]

This year.

[Martin Horwood]

The Minister confirms that it is the 2013 calendar year, which is very reassuring. Our original commitment in the coalition agreement was that we would introduce legislation in the first term of this Parliament. Although it is far more important to hit the target than to legislate for it, we should manage in what will now have to be the last two Sessions of this Parliament to put our commitment into legislation. It is a very proud thing to have hit the target. People have challenged me about why the figure is 0.7%, and the hon. Member for East Hampshire made similar points in his speech. It is to some extent an arbitrary figure—there is no denying that; but I think it was chosen because it was an achievable, and therefore realistic, goal for countries to share, but was also ambitious. It pushed the quantum of overseas development assistance beyond what was being achieved 30 or 40 years ago, when the target was set. Most importantly—the hon. Member for East Hampshire made this point too—it was a benchmark. It was something that enabled countries at whatever level to measure and compare each others’ performance. The hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) made the point that now that we are achieving the benchmark we are beginning to turn the pressure on to those countries that can afford to do it but have not yet.

The final meeting of the high-level panel, in Bali, is imminent and the Secretary of State for International Development will stand in for the Prime Minister. It is perhaps a little disappointing that the Prime Minister will not have made it to all the meetings, but the Secretary of State will do a fine job; she has been a strong supporter of the high-level panel process. The UN General Assembly’s open working group met recently for the first time, and I gather that a high-level event is planned for September. Apparently everything is still in train for a decision in 2015, which we all expect. In the meantime one more initiative requires comment, and although it is not the most significant it is a rather good one: the Secretary of State last month launched a competition in which UK schoolchildren are invited to submit ideas to the Prime Minister; 150 schools have already signed up. I am a little disappointed that I discovered that only while researching for the debate, so perhaps we need to publicise it more widely; but part of the way in which we shall garner support for the 0.7% figure and the development agenda generally is by engaging with young people. The initiative is a good way of going forward.

The original millennium development goals, as many hon. Members have said, have widely been regarded as successful and effective. That is not because every one has been achieved; rather it is because quite a lot of the targets within the MDGs have been achieved by some countries. Also they have helped to highlight some of the failings in development—particularly the way in which conflict has resulted in many fragile states achieving none of the goals. The MDGs have contributed to the amount of direct aid towards social spending, and to the significant rise in spending at national level by developing Governments. That, among other things, has meant that each day 10,000 fewer children under five die than in 1990; 33 million more children go to school than a decade ago; and more than 12 times more people are now getting AIDS treatment than in 2003.

It is true that those changes cannot all be attributed to the millennium development goals, nor, certainly, to aid and overseas development assistance—but then the MDGs were not just about those things. Perhaps I may gently rebuke the hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart), who is no longer in his place: I do not think that DFID, the United Nations or international agencies—including voluntary ones—that support development have ever really said that aid was all that people should rely on to make progress with development. That has always been about trade, tackling issues such as debt reduction, and encouraging private sector investment and activity and economic growth. A strength of the MDGs was the fact that they related to a wide range of topics.

The Secretary of State recently got a little bit of stick from Labour Members for referring to the importance of the private sector in development. I thought that was unfair, because she was not saying that overseas development assistance should be diverted to the private sector; she was simply underlining the importance of the sector. I come from a development agency background, where that has always been understood. The impact of aid is dwarfed by the impact, for good or ill, of the private sector and business decisions. For instance, mining companies’ ability to go into an area and act insensitively, or to wreck the environment and impoverish future generations by not behaving properly, is of massive significance. A good company that does the right thing—British extractive industries have a good record on that generally, although occasionally some companies, such as Vedanta Resources, have been picked up not doing the right thing—helps empowerment and wealth creation. That can be a very positive thing.

The hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) referred earlier to Green Fuels, and the hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) raised the question whether biofuels were always a good, sustainable thing to invest in. He was right: if business does the wrong thing in relation to biofuels, that can increase demand for land, leading to more incursions on rain forest, and can damage the environment. Green Fuels is a Gloucestershire company and I know it well; it uses surplus waste cooking oil. That is what it is encouraging in Indonesia. It takes surplus cooking oil from hotels, which would otherwise be poured into watercourses, polluting them, or go to waste; or, possibly worse still, be sold to street vendors to be put into their cooking oil and used for street food. If cooking oil is overused it can be carcinogenic, so Green Fuels is investing in a good, sustainable project in Indonesia. That shows how business, used in the right way, can support development goals.

The wider context includes organisations such as the International Finance Corporation, which has made an enormous contribution to development, leveraging and investing billions in developing countries and paying attention particularly to what it rather euphemistically calls frontier markets. I think that phrase is used in a bid to make them sound exciting and not just dangerous. The idea is to take investment and leverage business in places where at other times investors might fear, slightly, to tread. If there is a plea to be made to the high-level panel about the post-2015 millennium development goals agenda, I would ask that that agenda be inclusive, and spread beyond aid to include the private sector and international agencies such as the IFC.

Some weaknesses in the MDGs have been highlighted. Those include the way in which they hid inequality; the fact that they perhaps neglected issues such as joblessness, which is an acute contributor to poverty; and the fact that they may have missed the very poorest people in some countries. By using averages and country totals they perhaps did not spot some pockets of extreme poverty. That is among the things being discussed at the high-level panel. It has also been suggested that the goals did not, in addressing environmental sustainability, give it the centrality that they could have. When we debated that in October I made a plea for the importance, among all the various issues such as health, education, social justice and disability that might be included in any future set of sustainable development goals, of the central idea that growth and development should come within planetary boundaries. I reiterate that.

We also talked in October about whether the next set of goals should be global and include all countries, not just the poorest, so that some developing countries might have the toughest targets for jobs, agriculture and gender equality, whereas for countries such as ours there would be quite a lesson, and a set of targets to be met, on resource waste and unsustainable consumption. We talked about the ambitiousness of the goals and the idea that, as with the UN framework convention on climate change, they should impose common but differentiated responsibilities, and be sensitive to different countries’ circumstances. DFID’s latest report on the high-level panel’s progress says that it is considering a single post-2015 development agenda, which I assume means bringing together the continuing progress on the MDGs with the new sustainable development goals. If so, that is welcome. It is focused on poverty reduction and inclusive growth, “embedded” in the “principles of sustainable development”—I have never seen anything embedded in a principle before, but there is always a first time. I hope that sustainability will therefore be central to the development process.

DFID also reports a clear focus on eradicating extreme poverty, with a strong human development emphasis, which is obviously welcome. The new framework should also include income, poverty, health, education and equality for girls and women—all welcome as well—although I am again a little concerned that resources and the environment are not included in the list. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure me that sustainability in environmental terms will remain central to the process. DFID further reports that the high-level panel has talked about the building blocks being tackled, including strong institutions and the rule of law, and I am sure that is right.

The process, however, should not be simplistically about economic growth, so I will draw attention to three areas that I want the Minister to take on board and comment on, all of which were highlighted by an excellent organisation, Development Initiatives, which is one of the best sources of data and information about development that I have come across. First, responsibility: who is responsible for delivering the goals? That might seem rather obvious, but it has never been spelt out, and the debate about whether the private sector should play a role is relevant here. As I said, the private sector’s role in delivering development is crucial, and international actors such as the IFC and the World Bank should have specific responsibilities in the process, as should national Governments, not only the ones meeting the 0.7% target but the ones that are not yet meeting it; they should be given a responsibility to step up to the plate. People involved in remittances, who are acting privately, as individuals, also play a part, because “private” refers not only to big companies and investors but to private individuals. Some of them are very rich private individuals, the Warren Buffetts and Bill Gateses of this world, who are making a valuable contribution, but Development Initiatives spelt out to me that if we look at the overall resource flows into developing countries, overseas development assistance is only a small part of those flows. ODA is dwarfed by remittances and by foreign direct investment, as well as by debt, which the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) termed better as “finance”. A great deal of the resource going into developing countries is way beyond and above ODA.

My second point, therefore, is that it would be good if resource flows were brought into the framework. We should measure and look at resource flows into developing countries and perhaps consider setting specific development goal targets to do with reducing barriers to things such as foreign direct investment, or limiting or tackling outflows of illicit finance, which is a serious problem for some of the developing countries in the greatest poverty.

My third point is about reporting and measurement, which should be open, transparent and as complete as possible. The way in which data are being used in our information age is enormously advanced. I can look at an app on my iPhone and tell Members that 7% of our energy in this country comes from wind power—as of now, because I have a live app that tells me the exact amount of energy coming from that source. I could look at other sources and know that 2% is coming from the Dutch interconnector and so on. If I can have such information at my fingertips, we ought to be able to look at the development goals and see exactly the flows of resource into a particular developing country—how much from the private sector, how much from ODA—and any mismatches between the levels of poverty and of resource going in. Such imaginative but open and transparent information is important, and organisations such as Oxfam make the point that it increases the power of people on the ground to know how much money should be coming into their country and where it should be spent and to hold individuals accountable for the spending.

In summary, the new sustainable development goals should be global, including all countries. Sustainability is absolutely key, because climate change will ultimately impoverish us all, even in developing countries. The goals should be transparent, and measurement should be as complete and timely as possible. They should include some attention to overall resource flows, and not focus only on development assistance. Above all, who is responsible for delivering the goals should be clear, and we should welcome the private sector into the process while emphasising the specific responsibilities of international agencies, Governments and others, whom we can hold accountable.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Mr Alan Duncan)]

I thank the hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) for securing the debate. The post-2015 agenda is a priority for the whole of the Government. Ensuring that we have an ambitious, poverty-focused post-2015 agenda is a top priority for my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, for all of us in DFID, for much of the House of Commons, and for the development community as a whole. We all welcome parliamentary engagement on the issue.

I have spoken in previous Adjournment debates on this fast-moving agenda, but now is a good time to take up the topic again, because the high-level panel will meet once again next week in Bali. The debate is also timely given the recent inquiry into the post-2015 development agenda by the International Development Committee. The Government’s response to that was published yesterday, in which we welcomed the constructive contribution from the Committee and explained our thinking so far.

Let me start by saying that the post-2015 process should absolutely not be at the expense of continuing to work to deliver the existing MDGs between now and 2015. The UK will continue to lead the way on supporting developing countries to attain those goals. We have seen remarkable progress around the world since 2000. The proportion of people living on $1.25 a day since 1990 has been halved, as has the proportion of people without access to drinking water. Primary school enrolment has increased by 89%. Those are just a few of the successes, but there are many areas in which progress has been weak, such as on maternal mortality and the quality of children’s education. Additionally, more than 1 billion people are still living in extreme poverty. We still have a world in which people die unnecessarily every day. They go without education and go to bed hungry at night. That is why the Government are upholding their commitment to delivering 0.7% of our national income in aid, but that is only part of the answer, and it is in that context that we will look ahead to the period after 2015. We need the new development agenda to reflect the fact that the world has changed greatly since 2000. Indeed, in the period since I last spoke in an Adjournment debate on this subject, a lot has changed. The discussion has moved forward in leaps and bounds, but a lot remains to be agreed.

When we last discussed the post-2015 agenda in such a debate, the ambition for the new framework was not really clear. Would we, for instance, tweak the current MDGs to update and adjust them a bit, or would we revamp the whole framework and address completely new challenges and issues? Now, five months on, let me be clear about the ambition of the high-level panel, which my right hon. friend the Prime Minister co-chairs. The new framework should maintain a resolute focus on eradicating poverty, but to do that, it will not be enough to address human development issues such as health and education. Addressing the symptoms of poverty will also not be enough. We need to address the root causes of poverty, and that means going further than just a tweak to the old framework. Alongside dealing with issues such as education and health, we need to include the building blocks of sustainable prosperity, such as open, accountable governance, jobs—the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) referred to that in detail—and the sustainable use of natural resources, all of which were mentioned in this debate.

Those are all challenging issues, and the discussion about how the global community should work together to achieve the mammoth task of eradicating poverty for ever is full of intellectual and conceptual challenges. Various countries and organisations, such as businesses and civil society, have different views about what our priorities should be and how we should achieve our aims, so let me lay out a few of the core challenges that we will be working to resolve.

One lively topic of debate has been whether a focus on poverty eradication can be married with the need to promote global sustainable development in the post-2015 agenda that we are trying to design, or whether a wider view on sustainable development would dilute the focus on poverty? Should the post-2015 framework tackle issues such as climate change, or should they be separated into a distinct set of goals? In our view, the case for integration is clear. Integrating social, economic and environmental issues in a framework focused on poverty is the only way to make the ending of poverty irreversible. If we do not manage to do that, resource scarcity and environmental degradation have the potential to unpick years of economic progress, so the Prime Minister and the Government as a whole are committed to securing a single set of goals for the period after 2015.

Another conceptual challenge facing us as we look to 2015 is the role for the vital conditions for eradicating poverty and pursuing prosperity. Accountable institutions —we have heard about accountability today—transparent governance, the rule of law and the absence of conflict are just some of the building blocks of sustained prosperity that the Prime Minister calls the “golden thread” of development. Only when people can get a job and a voice can they take control of their own destiny and build a future for themselves that is free from poverty.

Not everyone agrees with the view that I have just outlined, however. Some believe that actively promoting good governance and the rule of law is going too far. They say that those things are sovereign—that no one is entitled to impose them on someone else—and anyway they do not believe that it is possible to quantify or measure something such as the rule of law or an effective judicial system. However, we believe that they can be measured. Indeed, we have done a lot of work on just that, and we are not alone in our belief.

Poor people themselves regularly identify honest and responsive governance as one of their top priorities for the new framework. That is what we seem to be hearing from the MY World global survey that we have been supporting. Fragile, conflict-stricken countries also agree. For instance, Emilia Pires, East Timor’s Minister of Finance, has been vocal on the panel about the need to establish robust institutions as part of tackling conflict and insecurity. Graça Machel, Nelson Mandela’s wife, has been another influential advocate. As the debate continues in the international community, we will be working with partners to make that a priority for the new framework.

Let me talk about “universality”. That is the current buzzword defining the debate, yet various people are giving very different meanings to that word. To some people, universality means that the new framework must reach people regardless of whether they have disabilities, whether they are male or female, whether they live in a city or a village and whether they are old or young, and whatever religion and ethnicity they are. In the MDGs, we said that we would halve poverty, so for some people, universality means that this time we must reach everyone and get to zero poverty—that we must reach the poorest and most marginalised, which is the approach urged on us by the hon. Members for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford) and for Hackney South and Shoreditch. It is, in essence, the issue of reach, in as much as the average is an inadequate measure of the depth of progress that we want to see.

However, some people mean that the framework should apply, as they put it, as much in East Anglia as in east Africa. They believe that all targets should apply to all countries, which is something that we have heard about in the debate. It is an interesting suggestion, but what would it mean in practice for the UK? Would targets on getting kids into schools or access to clean water have any meaning here? Perhaps not, although any targets relating to boosting the numbers of women CEOs or MPs might. We probably need to be cautious about losing the focus on eradicating poverty by casting our net too wide and rendering the sharp focus of intended action dangerously meaningless. The framework needs to deal with real fundamentals. Frankly, countries in which only half of all kids go to school, or in which corruption is rife and blocking growth and prosperity, need to be the priorities for a set of global development goals.

Some use the word “universality” to mean that we need firm commitments from donors. We agree with that, which is why the Prime Minister has been using the G8 to deliver a strong message on the obligations of richer countries. However, national Governments in developing countries will also have to act if we are to deliver real results.

Overall, the success of any post-2015 framework will rest on its simplicity. It should be short, compelling and easy to understand. That was the great strength of the millennium development goals. What we cannot have is a long shopping list of issues designed to satisfy everyone. A lot of development issues have been raised during today’s debate and I recognise the importance of many of them, but a new framework with hundreds of goals addressing every single point would be useless. The core challenge ahead of us is how to distil them into a few really fundamental issues. That will mean that not everyone is happy—some people will not see their favoured issues reflected—but we need to aim for our highest common ambition, not the lowest common denominator.

As we know, the Prime Minister, along with the Presidents of Indonesia and Liberia, is a co-chair of the high-level panel on what we will do after 2015. It has met three times and, at the fourth meeting next week, needs to continue to make progress. That meeting will focus on global partnerships, and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will be demonstrating the clear vision and leadership for which the UK has become known on the panel.

The panel is only the first stage, because UN negotiations will follow, but the panel has a fantastic opportunity to provide leadership at the start of the process and make ambitious proposals, setting a high standard for the UN negotiations that follow. The UK is a well-respected intellectual leader in the field of development, and we will be using our influence and expertise to lead the political and technical debate that is all part of the process.

Transparency is vital for the post-2015 agenda. That is one of the reasons why I welcome today’s discussion. I am glad that it has attracted such widespread interest—from Parliament, NGOs, businesses, local and national Governments and, we hope, through what we have arranged, from our schools as well. Only this morning, the Prime Minister’s special envoy for post-2015 development, Michael Anderson, a senior DFID official, updated the all-party group on the United Nations on the panel’s progress. At this very moment, a seminar is taking place in the House of Lords, bringing together NGOs, academics and parliamentarians to discuss the shape of the agenda that they want to see.

As I said, the voices of poor people themselves must be at the heart of any new framework. That will be crucial to developing a framework that ends poverty, for ever, in our generation. DFID has been supporting a number of initiatives to drive engagement with marginalised groups. One of those is MY World—an online, offline and SMS survey to ask people all over the world what they would like to see reflected in the framework. I expect that many of our constituents will be keen to get involved and will be filling that out online. Today, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State sent a letter to all MPs that outlines our thoughts and actions so far on the post-2015 agenda. A point it makes forcefully is that women and girls must be included in the framework, which must also include an aim to eliminate violence against women.

I sense that the hon. Member for York Central, who initiated the debate, might want five or 10 minutes to respond, so I hope that hon. Members will forgive me if I do not comment on everybody who has spoken, except to canter through some of the points made. We recognise the importance of jobs, but what gives us jobs? A vibrant private sector from the agricultural sector up. My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) was right to say that when Lord Howard was leader he committed the Conservative party to 0.7%; he might also wish to reflect on who was the shadow Secretary of State at the time who persuaded him to do that. I note that education is a high priority for the hon. Member for Ceredigion (Mr Williams).

On the question of population, I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) that prosperity is indeed the best contraceptive. Richer countries have lower population growth; it is the poor ones that have exploding populations. I note that my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) made a sensible defence of the development potency of the private sector. He is right about accountability and responsibility, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) has been for many years on the potency of trade. It is a pleasure to see such unity among parliamentarians on the issue. I hope that it can be converted to hard and productive work to ensure that Britain can be in the lead in seeking global agreement on how the post-2015 framework for poverty eradication should look.