Development: Post-2015 Agenda

Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd April 2014 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the case for the United Nations Open Working Group on the post-2015 development agenda recommending a stand-alone global goal on inequality when it reports to the United Nations General Assembly in September.

[Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead (Lab)]

My Lords, since 1990, the base date against which progress towards the MDGs is measured, hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty. The world is within reach of seeing every child enrolled in primary school and many fewer lives are being lost to hunger and disease. The global population as a whole is healthier, wealthier and better educated than ever before. In addition, the millennium development goals galvanised political commitment and challenged the complacency and apathy that stood in the way of progress.

All of that is encouraging. Regrettably, however, the promise offered by the millennium declaration in 2000 has not been met. It promised freedoms, solidarity and social justice, the right to development and human rights for all. That pledge was negated, though, when the eight richest country Governments drew up the MDG targets and indicators. They were top-down and decided behind closed doors. They therefore left unfinished business, such as the fact that the improvements in the past 20 years have still not reached significant minorities, who continue to be denied basic social, economic, civil and political rights. Then there is the unfinished business that arises from increasingly excessive concentrations of personal wealth when it is clear, as Oxfam says, that:

“We cannot afford to have a world of extreme wealth and extreme inequality”.

The logic of that is plain: when just 8% of the world’s population earns half of the world’s income and the remaining 92% shares the other half, power is abused, economic growth is stunted and social tensions are exacerbated. That is why it is now vital to achieve proper controls on tax-dodging and on the use of wealth to buy political favours. It is essential that the post-2015 agenda addresses the structural causes of poverty and injustice by tackling inequality, social exclusion, skewed financial systems and gender injustices.

Twenty years ago, more than 90% of the world’s population lived in low-income countries. Now 75% of the world’s poorest people live in middle-income countries. There is a new geography of poverty and it presents a main challenge for the post-2015 agenda. We can tick the boxes when we use the MDGs, which were set 14 years ago, as our benchmarks, but social exclusion and environmental sustainability are just not factored in. Now they must be, not least because the gaps in wealth obviously produce chasms in opportunity.

Children born to poor families are between five and 10 times more likely to die in their first year, and the gap is widening. Up to 70 million children are still not enrolled in school, and the most marginalised children—child labourers, poor rural girls, slum dwellers and ethnic minorities—are doomed to fall still further behind. Inequality, in short, makes poverty congenital.

Post-2015, the reduction of inequality must therefore be an explicit policy because chronic systemic inequity limits mobility, restricts the choices that people can make and cancels their potential. Inequalities inflicted upon the so-called hard-to-reach poor originate and endure because of their gender, ethnicity, religion, caste, disability, language, sexual orientation and geographical location. These people are born marginalised and socially excluded, and are pushed out even further. These are the most powerless of the poor and, across many of the MDGs, they are being left further behind. Nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of the global efforts needed to tackle the gross inequality that ODI director Kevin Watkins has called,

“one of the greatest development challenges of our age”.

With that in mind, the new goals should include targets to eliminate wealth and gender gaps and to secure improvements in child survival, antenatal care and school participation. Unlike the MDGs, the post-2015 agenda will be universal. That is a bold aim, and it needs to be; the true scale and nature of disadvantage is hidden in the MDG assessments by aggregate figures and averages. They distort the picture of results and, consequently, the policies based upon them.

The post-2015 framework must therefore include timely, disaggregated data so that vulnerable groups are clearly identified. To be focused and effective, action must be based on accurate and reliable information and rigorous monitoring. That necessity must be recognised in September when the UN General Assembly discusses the recommendations of the open working group on the post-2015 agenda. Those recommendations include a focus on inequality. I am persuaded by the arguments made by the Overseas Development Institute in favour of equality-related targets and indicators, which Kevin Watkins describes as stepping stones for reducing inequalities, with timelines for 2020 on the way to universal goals in 2030.

What goes into the post-2015 agenda and sustainable development goals really matters because those goals will set the global sustainable development agenda for the next 15 years. It is essential, therefore, that multilateral government action focuses on redistributing global wealth and opportunity as an explicit objective of all programmes to combat and overcome world poverty.

Whether we support a stand-alone goal or targets across a number of agreed goals depends on whether we believe, as I do, that arguing the case in all the relevant areas of policy can ensure that inequality issues get a comprehensive hearing and can be at the centre of any new framework. I welcome the fact that Save the Children is campaigning for a cross-cutting approach with disaggregated data, stepping-stone targets, targets on eradicating extreme poverty and the inclusion of an appropriate inequality dimension in each target or indicator across the board in the post-2015 framework. This will be needed to monitor progress in reducing inequality objectives identified, for instance, on child health and access to education. Indicators that have been identified can then be disaggregated and equity criteria applied to disability, ethnicity or location.

Frankly, I am somewhat sceptical about a general stand-alone inequality goal because I believe that it would risk losing the preferable option of inclusion across the entire post-2015 framework where disparities are growing. The co-chairs of the high-level panel, including the Prime Minister, have accepted the reality that, without explicit targets, poor people will be left behind. They wrote:

“We propose targets that deliberately build in efforts to tackle inequality and which can only be met with a specific focus on the most excluded”.

In agreeing with that, I ask the Minister: does she accept that, first, we need relevant data accurately to identify the most excluded; secondly, that we need explicit targets that capture inequality; and, thirdly, that we need targets that are incorporated into other goals, such as health and education, to focus attention on the specifics of existing disparities?

Inequality has been on the edges of development policy for far too long, generally because it has been considered too political. That must change. Inequity threatens efforts on poverty eradication, sustainable development, democratic processes and social cohesion, and it deprives people of their right to opportunity. World leaders can recognise and respond to the needs of the forgotten millions who are the most vulnerable and hardest to reach only if they make inequality a central focus of their objectives and their actions. Without that, they will continue to address symptoms instead of generating cures.