International Development (Gender Equality) Bill

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Friday 7th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord McColl, and add my voice to the tributes paid to him. He and I have been involved many times in debates about health, women’s health and Third World health over many years, and I was not surprised to see that he was sponsoring this Bill today in your Lordships’ House. As usual, we have had an informed and passionate debate because there is such expertise, experience and commitment in the House to these issues. I also pay tribute to William Cash MP for introducing the Bill in the Commons. It is a testament to his reputation that he managed to bring this Private Member’s Bill so far up the list. I also thank NGOs such as the GREAT Initiative, Plan and WaterAid for their briefings.

The aim of the Bill, as noble Lords have said, is to embed gender considerations into every aspect of the UK’s aid spending and to ensure consistent and long-term monitoring of how UK aid impacts gender inequality. I cannot resist a small and gentle aside to the Minister, in that I wish that some of this was embedded into the monitoring of our domestic policies and their gender impact. However, I leave that debate for another day. The Bill places a duty on the Secretary of State for International Development to consider gender in the disbursement of any development and humanitarian assistance and introduces an additional duty to report annually on the activities undertaken to tackle gender inequality. From the briefing that I have read, I understand that the Bill may be one of the first of its kind anywhere to enshrine a commitment to reducing gender inequality in development. I commend the Government on their support for that.

Importantly, the debate has shown that gender inequality holds back development. It is not enough to address democratic reform if the political representation of women is not also addressed—or, for example, to fund family planning initiatives that fail also to address men’s roles and responsibilities. That was mentioned by noble Baronesses earlier in the debate. As has also been mentioned, women around the world continue to face serious levels of violence, limited control over assets and property and unequal participation in private and public decision-making. All those issues are important and they all provide us with the backdrop and the reason why the Bill is important.

The previous Government and this Government have put improving the lives of women and girls as a policy priority for the work of the UK Department for International Development. They have seen it as,

“stopping poverty before it starts”.

I was very struck by the remarks made by my honourable friend Meg Hillier in Committee in the Commons. She said that she had visited Nigeria several times, and one of her points was that,

“we went to look at human rights”,

but,

“we quickly concluded that women’s rights, if tackled, would solve many of the wider problems, particularly with children’s rights. That underlines the importance of the first part of new clause 1”—

as it then was—

“which deals with development assistance. If people are aware of their rights, that can make a big difference”.—[Official Report, Commons, Gender Equality (International Development) Bill Committee, 11/12/13; col. 9.]

My honourable friend Gavin Shuker, who has responsibility for this issue on the Front Bench in the Commons, said:

“One of the challenges of gender equality is that all too often it is treated as a women’s issue, but in an international development context, holding back women in a society does not just hold back women; it holds back societies”.—[Official Report, Commons, Gender Equality (International Development) Bill Committee, 11/12/13; col. 6.]

That is absolutely right, so from these Benches we are very happy to give wholehearted support to the Bill. We will certainly do everything we can to make sure that it reaches the statute book.