Oral Answers to Questions

Alison McGovern Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

Yes, I do. It is projected that Lebanon, a country with a population of 4 million, will have 1 million refugees by the end of the year. If the same proportion of refugees were to arrive in the UK, the figure would be upwards of 15 million. We need to do everything we can to support not only the refugees but the host communities that they are going into.

[Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)]

The UNICEF ambassador Eddie Izzard recently returned from Syria. He said that

“missing from these discussions are the Syrian children, who are not made of steel, and who are facing desperate and harrowing conditions.”

He specifically drew attention to the lack of education for children there. What conversations has DFID had about providing schooling for children in Syria?

[Justine Greening]

This is something that DFID has particularly focused on. We have given funding directly to UNICEF to support educational facilities—when I was in the Zaatari camp in Jordan, I saw school facilities that had recently been built—and to support counselling. I would like to look more carefully with the United Nations agencies at what we can do to provide trauma counselling for children and their parents, because many of them have gone through awful experiences before ending up in the refugee camps.