Queen’s Speech

Baroness Tonge Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tonge]

My Lords, it is no secret to Members of this House that I have been in disagreement with many of the policies of the coalition Government over the past two years. I have moved temporarily from my party’s naughty step to access the microphones—there is no more significance to it than that.

One shining beacon, however, has been the actions of the Secretary of State for International Development and his department. The commitment to enshrine in law 0.7% of GDP to overseas aid, with an additional £740 million to be spent on maternal and child health and an emphasis on family planning, was very welcome. However, although the commitment was in the Queen's Speech, there is no legislation yet to make it law. I suppose that there was some nervousness about doing this in the current economic climate, and I know there has been opposition from some newspapers and members of the public, but I live in hope.

I would suggest that the Opposition would understand the arguments that we have made for aid to the poorest countries of the world if we ensured that it was spent even more wisely. For example, although more than 50% of global overseas aid comes from the European Union, much of it goes to near neighbours of the EU such as Turkey and Morocco, which are hardly the poorest of the world. EU aid also goes to Palestine to rebuild its infrastructure, destroyed by Israel, only for that infrastructure to be destroyed again. Taxpayers all over Europe might think well about our overseas aid if it were not being used to subsidise the illegal occupation of the Palestinian Territories. Why does the European Union not have a poverty focus for all its aid, as we do, and as has recently been recommended by the Select Committee for International Development in its recent report on EU assistance? The poor should be our focus.

There is also still widespread concern that overseas aid does not reach the people and projects for which it is intended but ends up in the back pockets of politicians in those countries. I was privileged yesterday to meet a group of women Members of Parliament from Afghanistan, brought here by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, to which I pay tribute. These brave women told me that they had huge concern about the disappearance of aid in their country but as women MPs had no means of tracking where it had gone. Their message, which I promised to relay, was that the projects that had survived had made a difference to women’s lives in Afghanistan, but that they feared they would have to “disappear back into the shadows or be killed” once ISAF had left. It is a chilling thought.

Much more needs to be invested in the women of Afghanistan if the Department for International Development’s aim of peace, stability and prosperity is to be brought to that country—yet there is no budget line for maternal health and family planning in that country’s operational plan for the next four years. The maternal death rate in Afghanistan is among the highest in the world: 1,600 deaths per 100,000 live births. Many more women suffer chronic illness following unassisted childbirth. The contraception rate is 2% among women of childbearing age, and family size averages 6.9 children per woman. How can women contribute to their country’s “peace, stability and prosperity” if we do not help them? Perhaps if the Minister cannot answer these points he will write to us after the debate. DfID, after all, will have its Golden Moment in July to ensure that the poorest and most marginalised women in the world are given sexual and reproductive health services and family planning. The all-party group that I chair supports this initiative and is delighted with it. I hope that it will be extended to Afghanistan.

I emphasise the importance of ensuring that the 215 million women in the world who would use family planning if it were available to them get what they need. If we can meet this need, as DfID wants us to, it will reduce the growth in world population—and it will do so voluntarily, without the type of coercion mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, that occurred some years ago in China. The reduction in the growth of world population is crucial if Africa, for example, is to feed itself—and it must happen if we are not to be engulfed by climate change and global warming. The issues are interlinked: population growth, consumption in the developed world and the environment.

Finally, I will put in a plug for our own royal society. It produced a magnificent report recently, People and the Planet, which dealt with all these issues. I hope that the Deputy Prime Minister will read it before he attends the Rio+20 conference on our behalf in the near future.