Global Poverty

Ann McKechin Excerpts

Thursday 1st July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mitchell]

I understand the hon. Gentleman’s interest in India; he was a distinguished member of the International Development Committee. I have seen that report, which makes a very valuable contribution and will be considered as part of the bilateral review of our India programme.

We are conducting a similar review of our multilateral aid budget. There are good reasons for working through international bodies, but I want to be certain that all our funding is being used to support programmes that align with our priorities, and that operational efficiency is as strong as it should be. In New York on Monday, in meetings with the heads of the United Nations Development Programme, UNICEF and the United Nations Population Fund, I had the opportunity to set out the reasons for this review. I have also spoken to the heads of other multilateral agencies, including the World Food Programme. At the Foreign Affairs Council in Luxembourg, I took the opportunity to discuss our plans with Commissioner Piebalgs of the European Union. Multilateral organisations that are performing well for the world’s poorest people stand to gain from this review, but if such agencies are not performing we will scale down funding, or even stop it altogether. Our duty to the world’s poorest people, as well as to the British taxpayer, demands nothing less.

[Ann McKechin (Glasgow North) (Lab)]

I welcome the Secretary of State and his team to their posts. I notice that one issue of which he has made no mention so far is gender. Can he confirm that gender equality and the role of women and children will receive equal, if not greater, priority under his guidance in the Department?

Given that the Secretary of State has a particular interest in Afghanistan, may I bring to his attention this week’s excellent BBC television report by Lyse Doucet about the status of women in prisons in Afghanistan, the vast majority of whom are in prison for no crime whatsoever, in breach of the international conventions that Afghanistan has signed up to? Can he give an assurance to the House that he will call on the Afghan Government to comply with their international requirements and to ensure that the position of women in Afghanistan receives the proper status that it deserves?

[Mr Mitchell]

I thank the hon. Lady for her comments. I will have a look at that report. On her first point about the role of women, I am coming to that directly in my remarks.

Doing the right thing with British aid is not just about saving money: it is about being honest and open about where our funding is going. Knowledge gives people the power to hold others—be they individuals, organisations or Governments—to account. That is why I have launched a new UK aid transparency guarantee that will help to make aid transparent not only to people in the UK but to those in recipient countries.

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[Ann McKechin (Glasgow North) (Lab)]

May I begin by welcoming to the House the hon. Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey)? She gave a very confident and lucid speech, and raised the very pertinent issue of how the vision of children can often inspire us to consider some of the greater global problems that we face.

As the right hon. Member for Gordon (Malcolm Bruce) correctly said earlier, the environment for a debate on development is very different from what it was five years ago, when we had the Make Poverty History protest in Edinburgh. Obviously, we are facing much greater economic pressures domestically, but the two problems are not separate. Increasingly, our future is bound to that of the developing south, in an age of growing volatility.

The millennium development goals must remain at the heart of our policy direction and development. I welcome the new Government’s commitment to the MDG process and the 0.7% target, but many of us would be much more comforted if we had a more settled timetable for passing binding legislation to achieve that. In increasingly difficult times, the issue of ring-fencing will be coming under pressure, and it is important that all sides retain support.

However, I also think that this is a time to look back and reflect on how we can sustain and improve performance in respect of the MDG targets. I believe that we need to move away from a narrow focus on technical intervention and move to a focus on supporting citizens’ ability to exercise their rights. Our overarching philosophy should be that poverty is not inevitable. We should not believe that aid in its current form should be a permanent fixture in world affairs; rather, we should believe that it is the means to help countries out of dependency and to empower them to tackle their national problems by their own means.

As I have argued before in this House, I believe that one area of poverty that does not receive sufficient priority is employment. Globally, more than 1 billion people are currently unemployed, under-employed or working poor. As populations in the developing world continue to escalate, global official unemployment has now reached a record high of over 185 million.

Nearly half that total are people under 24 years of age, yet younger people represent only a quarter of the working-age population. That problem may well get worse in the coming decade, when young people will make up the highest ever proportion of the world’s population. Currently, there are 1.5 billion people aged between 12 and 24, of whom 1.3 billion live in the south. It is estimated that, due to the global recession of the last few years, 64 million more people worldwide will fall into extreme poverty this year alone. If we do not wish the progress on the MDGs to recede, we need to give employment a much greater priority at every level.

Increasing urbanisation in poor nations is exacerbating the problem, as more and more people are concentrated in shanty towns, often without access to basic utilities and at increased risk of disease, abuse and marginalisation. Obviously, that can lead to increasing domestic political instability, with little enforceable domestic security. It also provides the perfect environment for human trafficking and other forms of criminal activity, such as drugs and arms trading, the consequences of which we can see in every town and city in Europe. We face not only global bank and debt crises, but a global unemployment crisis, both at home and abroad, but too often in their language and responses, our world leaders fail to place employment at the core of their priorities.

Now is exactly the right time to revive world trade talks, and I welcome the Secretary of State’s comments on the Doha round. We must not bury trade talks or pander to protectionist instincts. This time, we need to ensure that the talks focus on creating jobs rather than on increasing corporate profits. The UK is one of the leading international donors, and should use its influence at both bilateral and multilateral levels to promote investment in job-rich industries and services, and to make a decent work agenda a core factor in its support for private sector development. Trade agreements must not signal a race to the bottom in terms of income, and they need to be accompanied by firmer agreement on minimum labour standards.

However, another reason why getting greater numbers into the formal economy is important is that we want to create a permanent, stable tax base, which is a key element in reducing dependency on aid. In a world that is changing rapidly—politically, economically and environmentally—we can anticipate greater periods of turbulence, higher food and energy prices, water depletion, fish depletion, and deforestation. Demand growth is accelerating, and the World Bank estimates that food production will need to increase by close to 50% between 2000 to 2030. Increasingly, a nation’s resilience in the face of disruption will mark its ability to survive successfully. Those of us who live in richer nations have distinct advantages: strong states, an ability to harness sophisticated technology and highly skilled citizens. To differing degrees, developing countries lack many such advantages, and accordingly have much higher levels of vulnerability.

If the ambitions of the MDGs are to bear fruit, it is important to protect the advances that have already been made before we seek further progress on the targets. Despite the fact that we have made considerable progress since 2000, those who have been taken above absolute poverty remain very close to the threshold. They live in emerging economies, so they are subject to much more pressure and are more vulnerable, and there is a very high risk that they will go back into absolute poverty.

Increasingly, we need to consider innovative ways in which to improve resilience and sustain the improvements that have been made. Rather than focusing only on developing basic public services, we need to consider how wealth can be redistributed within societies to achieve social progress, how the voice of the poor can be properly recognised, and how democracy, and thus the accountability of Governments to their citizens, can increase. All three elements are vital to progress on the MDGs.

Christian Aid recently made two specific calls in respect of taxation to aid a fairer distribution. I hope that when he responds, the Minister can provide an assurance that the Government support multilateral, automatic exchange of tax information between tax jurisdictions, so that we can better tackle the pernicious impact of tax havens, and a new international accounting standard that requires corporations to report on profits that they have made in every country where they operate. Those two measures will not cost the UK taxpayer a penny, but they could make a real and substantial difference to millions of the world’s poorest. I am sure that they would pass the Secretary of State’s value-for-money test.

I should like briefly to address gender. Sadly, it is no surprise that MDG 5, on maternal mortality, is the most off track. Women account for 70% of the world’s poor, and because they face systematic discrimination, their opportunities to escape poverty are correspondingly fewer. The interlinked problems of high fertility rates and maternal mortality continue to impede economic and social development. The underlying causes of high fertility, morbidity and mortality are not lack of contraception, blood loss and infection, but rather, as the right hon. Member for Gordon correctly said, apathy and a lack of respect for women and their fundamental rights. One symptom of that is that the data on women and girls are patchy. Key statistics, for example, are available only in about one quarter of developing nations. That in turn leads to women’s concerns being given low political priority and to a lack of impetus to change.

I believe that the UK should continue to be at the forefront of working with others to press for voluntary family planning that is universally accessible, and I welcome the Secretary of State’s comments this afternoon, but we also need to prioritise support for social and legal measures that stem the widespread practice of early marriage of young girls in many parts of the developing world. For a number of reasons, we in the west have shied away from this issue, but it is fundamental. It goes without saying that getting girls into school is important, but if we simply rely on primary education for success rather than the full range of secondary and tertiary education, we will not make much change.

Sixty per cent. of the world’s out-of-school children are girls, and they are less likely to progress to secondary and tertiary education as a result. Children of mothers who can read themselves are likely to achieve significantly higher results and accordingly continue their education longer. Tackling illiteracy, particularly among girls and women needs to have priority if we are going to give women better opportunities. We also need to give greater support to initiatives to encourage girls to continue their education and address the cultural barriers to female employment. Currently, 82 million girls in developing nations who are now aged 10 to 17 will be married before their 18th birthday. Where the birth rate in countries has fallen, between 25% and 40% of economic growth is attributable to demographic changes. Tackling those issues would bring fundamental and permanent improvement to the rights of women and tackle the millennium development goals on which we are most lagging behind.

What we need most in the year to follow is political will of the type that saw the birth of the MDGs and was prepared to look not just at the latest emergency but at how we want the world to be in the next 10 to 15 years. The outcome of the G20 summit last week was disappointing for development; there is no doubt about that. We need the UK Government to provide continued leadership in the tough times as well as the good. September’s summit gives us an opportunity, and I hope that it will be grasped.

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[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

I begin, like others, by paying tribute to three excellent maiden speeches. It was delightful to hear those speeches and I am sorry that the Members who delivered them are no longer in the Chamber to hear my speech. They are probably celebrating in the Tea Room, having got through the first milestone here in Parliament. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk), who spoke passionately and with great knowledge about his constituency; to my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland), who is clearly going to be a great contributor to the field of defence and, indeed, international development; and, last but not least, to my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey). Those of us slightly older in the tooth on the Government side—and that might include yourself, Mr Deputy Speaker—might recall her giving a passionate speech at the annual conference in Blackpool on the theme of “What is a girl like me doing in the Tory party?” That was a fantastic speech, and from her performance here again today, we can see why a girl like her is in this place. I am sure that she will represent her constituents well.

Before moving on to my main theme, I would like to respond to the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Ann McKechin), who made a passionate plea to keep funding based in the UK, which has been stopped by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. [Interruption.] Let me quote to that hon. Member—

[Ann McKechin]

rose—

[Mr Ellwood]

Let me finish the point.

[Ann McKechin]

It was my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central (Anas Sarwar) who said this, not me.

[Mr Ellwood]

I stand corrected; I mean the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Anas Sarwar). What it says on the tin—I presume that this was true from when the Department for International Development was created—is that DFID is

“the part of the UK Government that manages Britain’s aid to poor countries and works to get rid of extreme poverty.”

That is not in line with what the hon. Gentleman was pleading for—for funding to remain in his constituency—so perhaps he wants to see the definition of DFID change. I will come back to the definition and its importance later in my speech.

What do we mean by poverty? It is not just about an individual, a community or a country being poor; it is about being economically challenged. Poverty is multidimensional. It is lack of food and water, yes, and it is a lack of shelter; it is also the lack of health and access to medical support. Poverty is also about the lack of education and the inability to read, not having a job, and fearing for the future, living one day at a time. In essence, poverty is about powerlessness, lack of representation and lack of freedom.

I am pleased that we are having this debate so early in this Parliament in order to discuss the issues and the role Britain can play in the future. It is an important debate. I—like many other Members, I am sure—was challenged during the election about why we were ring-fencing funding for international development when there was so much economic pressure on all the other Departments. I am glad that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State spelled out the importance of keeping aid working and of making sure that we are able to support the countries that need it so that they can help themselves. Otherwise, immigration issues and environmental issues will grow, and the problem will become much bigger in the long term.

The causes of poverty can be broken down, crudely, into two areas—the natural and the man-made. On the natural side, there is the swell of population in places like India, or crop failure in places like Sudan or indeed disease and epidemics such as HIV/AIDS in places like South Africa and southern Africa. On the man-made front, equally affecting, we have things like corrupt leadership as we see in Somalia, or civil war as we see right across Africa and particularly in places like Angola. Then there is economic failure or even the deliberate denial of funding to poor communities for necessary projects.

Climate change can also be seen to be man-made as well. If sea levels continue to rise, places like Bangladesh would be hugely threatened. What is called water stress would be the result, and the lack of drinking water is estimated to affect 1 billion to 3 billion people. These are issues that we in the developed world need to debate, even though they may affect more people in the developing world.

The yardstick for our debates is now the millennium development goals, put forward in September 2000 by the United Nations with eight clear aims. The first is the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger. Unfortunately, we are a long way from achieving our 2015 target in that respect. The second is the achievement of universal primary education. The number of children receiving primary education has risen to 89% in the developing world, but we are still short of our millennium goal target. The third is the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women. That remains out of reach, as, indeed, do the reduction of child mortality and improvement in maternal health, which are the fourth and fifth goals.

The sixth goal is the combating of HIV and AIDS; the situation seems to have stabilised in many regions. The seventh is the ensuring of environmental stability, and the eighth is the development of a global partnership for development, which involves developing open trading and financial systems. My hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) spoke passionately about his attempts to establish and promote such systems in Rwanda.

Those are the eight themes that we will use as our benchmarks. When the countries meet for the summit in New York in September there will be much to discuss and much food for thought, given the huge shortfall between where we are now and where we would like to be by 2015.

What is our role in all this? What can the United Kingdom do to tackle the problems, either individually or with other countries, and how should we contribute? I believe that there are many ways in which the UK can make its mark. We often put our hand up when other countries do not, and it is fantastic that we continue to be willing to step forward and encourage other developed countries that may be reticent.

As I said in an intervention on the shadow Secretary of State, the G8 and the G20 are new organisations that have been able to bring in many voices that may have been excluded in the past. They make decisions and agreements, and issue challenges. Older organisations such as the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which were created when life was very different during or just after the war, have to pick up the pieces and deal with the details of those challenges.

The older organisations are out of date, and are in dire need of modernisation. While we have renewed and are reinvigorating the methods with which we distribute aid to ensure that we receive value for money, I do not believe that the same can be said for those major organisations. That is why I am pleased that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has been hesitant about handing over money before he has guaranteed to ensure that it will be well spent.

[Ann McKechin]

Let me gently suggest to the hon. Gentleman that confusing Glasgow and Edinburgh is not a practice that he should try to repeat. However, he has made an interesting point about the current management of the World Bank and the IMF. Does he agree that we should try to ensure that donee nations have a much bigger say in management and decision making than they do at present?

[Mr Ellwood]

The purpose of the debate is to enable ideas such as that to be put into the pot. In this instance, we are not taking about minutiae, but about the need for a root-and-branch change in the way in which organisations both operate individually and interconnect. Afghanistan is a good example of the failure of huge organisations to co-ordinate their activities sensibly in order to assist with post-conflict reconstruction.

As long as conflict continues in developing areas, poverty will thrive. Only when it ends can peace flourish, which will allow support and investment to move in, and business and trade to flourish as well. That is our role. It is dual-faced. We can use what Joe Nye used to call soft and hard power, or soft and hard influence. On the soft side there are, for instance, the Fairtrade initiatives, and ensuring that we support businesses in developing countries in the knowledge that buying a product in the supermarket will genuinely help people in need rather than corrupt organisations. The setting of tariffs can also help, as can targeted investment and funding—which has already been mentioned—and choosing support responsibly.

Any of us who have travelled to African countries will have observed that China is taking full advantage of those countries’ desire for hard currency, but I am afraid that it is doing so in an irresponsible way. The Chinese are not allowing local skills to be developed. They bus in their own people, rob the country of its minerals, drain it dry and then go home or move on to another area. That is happening on a huge scale, and no one seems to want to challenge it.

I will finish my contribution by discussing conflict and the relationship between DFID and other organisations. For 10 years, DFID has been waking up to the fact that it has had to do something very different from what it was set up to do. It does tackle poverty well, and it has been congratulated on that, but it has had to develop a new role in working in insecure and dangerous environments. I am pleased to say that the stabilisation unit and the other work being done are working well, but we took an awful long time to get there. For the first year in Afghanistan the budget was £47 million but the current budget is £5 billion a year. Had we bothered to get the reconstruction and development right when there was a small window of opportunity to win over the hearts and minds of the locals, we would have been out of Afghanistan by then. I am pleased that DFID has moved forward, I am glad that the new management have pledged to ensure that there is better scrutiny, and I wish the new team well.