UN Sustainable Development Goal 3

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Thursday 19th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con)]

My Lords, I will declare my voluntary interests before beginning my remarks. I had the honour of serving as the Prime Minister’s trade envoy for Turkmenistan and Iraq, both of which I will mention in my remarks. I also chair the AMAR international charitable foundation, whose example I will reference.

The noble Lord, Lord Robertson, requested this debate. We honour him for that request despite the fact that he is not in his normal seat, and we thank the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for putting it in front of your Lordships’ House. I wonder whether the experiences of the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, as Secretary-General of NATO might have heightened his awareness of road safety issues in both military and civilian contexts. Nine years after his retirement, he clearly celebrates the 2015 sustainable development goals, including the one for road safety, the one that we are debating today, which is identified as number 3.6.

My own concern for road safety came from my experiences with the military, in Iraq, in this case, accepting the kind hospitality at Camp Victory offered by US General Chiarelli and subsequently by General Joe Anderson and General Odierno over a five-year period. When going out in on patrol in Baghdad with their soldiers, I consistently read the notice in the military vehicles stating, “Wear your seat belts. We have more deaths from traffic accidents than we do from enemy action”. I found that very hard to believe and I questioned it, but of course they were absolutely right.

Five years in Baghdad and other missions with the US military elsewhere taught me a lesson that road safety is not an add-on to personal and family health; it is an integral component of human health, life and safety. I welcome the adoption by the United Nations of the SDGs, including target 3.6 regarding road traffic accidents. For some years earlier, in my capacity as chairman of the AMAR international charitable foundation, I partnered with Shell to tackle road safety issues and the injuries and deaths of mothers and children in Maysan province in Iraq. The province is in the south of the country and has a huge oil field called al-Majnoon, meaning, “My God, what have we got here?” It is one of the biggest oil reserves in the world, and when they discovered it, that is what they named it. It has a wide population of marsh people around it.

Shell entered into a partnership with the AMAR Foundation in order to have a look at these issues. I will say that the local population were very unbriefed indeed, and it was a pleasure to be able to work with them. We did a pilot in 2013 with 1,654 pupils. We expanded it to 72 schools and 136 teachers in the autumn of 2014. From May to December 2013 we extended it to April 2014, at no cost to Shell. The total value of the Shell project was $179,000. Within that, the core part was $42,000 plus $40,000 to produce the teaching materials for the local people and the training of trainers, with a field budget of $106,000.

What did we do with that money, and why was it effective? At the heart of it lay the use of women. In that sense, that is a very successful way of working in any case. We trained volunteer women to assist on the Iraqi family road safety education project. During one quarter alone, the 24 women safety volunteers in al-Nashwa and the 40 in al-Dair made a total of, and I quote correctly, 9,315 education visits to families in the community, reaching an average of 8,482 beneficiaries educated every month. Quarterly refresher training was provided both in al-Nashwa to the WSVs on 8 June that year and in al-Dair. The 40 women safety volunteers and four supervisors were divided into two groups, owing to their large size.

Part of my comments today will refer to modelling and looking at the ways in which achievements can happen. In this project, participant understanding of the training was evaluated through pre and post testing. Health staff from the AMAR clinics locally, also funded by Shell, provided road safety education to a total of 3,831 patients during that quarter, an average of 1,271 people a month.

During the quarter, a total of 226 road traffic accidents were recorded by health staff, representing a decrease from the 424 incidents and accidents reported in the previous quarter. Quarterly refresher training was provided; road safety education was delivered by the staff in the primary health centres; and the targeting of children in the schools was another outreach programme. For example, with children, a team worked hard to compose with the relevant local education department a teacher-training booklet, cards with photographs, messages and the children’s stories and songs, and this was piloted in a dozen or more schools.

I raise these details because, as the noble Lord stated, the Department for International Development has spent a very large sum of money indeed over that same period of time—£9.8 million—and now there is another surge of funding to support more research programmes.

Shell has high sensitivity to the health of populations local to the oil and gas fields where it works. Indeed, it is the principal extractor in large parts of the globe. Given the experience I have had with Shell, I very much welcome its approach to local populations. It is, as far as I am aware, the only major oil and gas institution with its own medical personnel in headquarters as permanent staff. I cannot help but compare that with the use of the funding that DfID has put into the global budget of the Global Road Safety Facility, all of which appears to have gone on research. So I seek to persuade the Minister to continue to think globally—that is essential—but also perhaps to consider acting locally. It is the people themselves who are suffering the road incidents and if they have no knowledge they will not be able to benefit from their Governments’ efforts.

Indeed, the development goals certainly highlight the need for road safety development in developing nations. There this will mean new roads and new vehicles of all types and kinds. These will be novel to the local population. They will offer huge risks to life and limb: incoming foreigners, poor road behaviour by everyone, unnecessary permanent injuries, and a lack of education on these issues.

I wonder, therefore, whether, looking at lessons learned, as we do, we should be discussing size. I suggest that given today’s more difficult environment the days of big—indeed, vast—unmonitored grants are and should be past. The trusted organisations have let us down: Oxfam and prostitution; Save the Children, where I used to be a director, employing known sexual offenders; and UNICEF claims of expenditure contradicted by knowledge on the ground—information I have already given to DfID. The evidence is contradicting the reality. Perhaps we should start to remember that small is beautiful, and although small needs monitoring, is it not better to have definitive outcomes for a number of people than global goals which, wonderful though they are, do not seem to give us the outcomes that the people themselves will achieve? It does not happen, of course, with UN grants either.

The population and local governments of the north of Iraq—I am moving my geography—have to cope with 3.8 million refugees and IDPs who have been hastily sheltered since 2013. There are Yazidis, Christians, Syrians and Muslims, none of whom believe that the UK Government have given them anything at all. Yet both I and the Minister know that we have provided one of the largest sets of grants ever known to the north of Iraq in order to assist the KRG and the Iraqi Government in Baghdad to look after that enormous influx of refugees.

However, because the funds are spent by the UN, they are not noted as being funds coming from any individual Government. The reasons are understandable, but it means that the local people of the north of Iraq believe that Britain has betrayed and deserted them by giving them nothing at all, even though that is the exact opposite of what we have done. However often I explain that to the local population and to the governments in question, both regional and national, when I visit them, the message does not get through. As I say, that is understandable, because the money is invisible to the local population and their governments. This is not necessary, because the German Government, who I am sure are just as stringent or more about their expenditure as we are, are well known for the funding they provide. Perhaps we should think about how UK taxpayers’ money needs not only more careful husbandry through monitoring—which the large grants do not get, of course—but a change of values. Perhaps we should change them from high expenditure on unmonitored international NGO projects to having our normal British respect for low-cost, high-value, well-monitored development expenditure where the overriding goal is the people’s development—the development not of the spender but of the recipients. By realigning our development expenditure with UK foreign policy and human rights, we could again offer expenditure with a British face.

Our large grants have been absolutely wonderful, but is now not the moment to rethink the way we spend our money? I have no doubt at all that the world needs Britain. We are the most successful, multiracial, best co-ordinated and outward-looking nation in the world and our charitableness is immense. The examples I have just given are offered as a model that might be capable of being copied a million times over for a minuscule amount of money. Engaging with Shell and other major global businesses in Britain is another way of doing this. I would be happy to discuss new ways of using our funding with the Minister whenever that will be possible.

Perhaps I may say again what a pleasure it is to contribute to this debate and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, and his alter ego, the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for this opportunity.