Disability and Development

Desmond Swayne Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2014 Westminster Hall

[The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Mr Desmond Swayne)]

I begin by dealing with the points raised about prevention. I agree entirely that it is highly appropriate. One principal area not touched on in the debate is the fact that for every birth that results in the death of either the mother or the child, 20 result in disability, so our emphasis on maternal health, and the health of women and girls, is fundamental to this. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) about the importance of dealing with disease. We continue our commitment to eradication of disease, including polio, and our work with Sightsavers. On roads, in Nepal we are putting barriers on to roads to reduce the number of accidents; that is an issue that we are alive to. With regard to conflict—my hon. Friend mentioned Afghanistan—we are putting significant funds into the International Rescue Committee to deal with rehabilitation and prostheses. This is an important part of the agenda.

I join the Committee Chairman, the right hon. Member for Gordon (Sir Malcolm Bruce), in paying tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone). This was a brief that she felt passionately about, and she made a singular contribution to it. She drove forward the issue of data and the ability to disaggregate. Just in October, she chaired a conference jointly with the United Nations on how we drive forward that agenda. My hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) asked about the progress we are making on data; I largely put down the progress we have made to the impetus that my right hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green gave to that.

We are prioritising national data systems. We have just managed to get the Washington Group questions on disability incorporated into our programmes in Burma and Yemen. We are developing new guidance on disaggregating data at programme level, and we have an important new commitment to disaggregating data on humanitarian support and disability. It is true that if disabled people cannot be counted, the temptation is to think that they do not count. We have to be able to count them and disaggregate.

On the issue raised by the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) about the post-2015 millennium development goals, she is absolutely right: we should not lose the gains in the language from the output of the open working group and the debates that surrounded that. I am not convinced that we need a specific goal on disability, although I understand that I may have implied that in an answer to a recent parliamentary question. The reason why we do not necessarily need that specific goal relates to the difference between what constitutes a strategy and what constitutes a framework. The strategy is that no one should be left behind. It is about inclusivity, an end to stigma and all moving forward to the same place. The framework is about how we deliver that. Of course we will have to paddle under the water a lot faster for our disabled people to get them moving forward at the same rate.

The Chair of the Select Committee is absolutely right: it is fundamental that we cannot tackle poverty, including extreme poverty, unless we tackle poverty among disabled people. “No one left behind” is the key strategy behind what we are attempting to do. We have made considerable progress on inclusivity. We have a number of separate programmes that deal specifically with the disabled, but equally we have programmes where we are having to incorporate the needs of disabled people. In 2013, we announced that any schools that we fund have to be accessible. This year, we have new sectoral commitments on water supply and humanitarian programming, but there is no doubt that the International Development Committee set us some challenging goals. We have doubled the number of people working on the team and appointed a new champion, but in my estimation, overwhelmingly the most important thing we have done is produce the framework document.

I am surprised by the criticism levelled at the discussion with and involvement of disabled groups. We work very closely with disabled groups. The Department works with some 400 disability groups. In drawing up the disability framework, discussing it and getting it to the state it is in, we worked with disabled people’s organisations, including organisations of disabled people—not people representing the disabled—in Rwanda and Mozambique. In this country, we worked with disabled people’s organisations, but also—this, I suspect, is where the tension comes in—with the Bond Disability and Development Group. We included both.

[Kate Green]

I want to clarify exactly what I was suggesting. Based on what I was told in Rwanda, I absolutely recognise what the Minister said. Rwanda was one of the consultee countries in preparing the framework, and civil society organisations were able to have input. My point was that that needs to be replicated in how those organisations are facilitated and enabled to work with their national Government. From my observation, that is not happening in Rwanda. DFID has a role in thinking about how it uses the framework to replicate what he says was done in its preparation here.

[Mr Swayne]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. The framework is not only to inform us, but to inform how we work with our partners, be they Governments or multilateral organisations. It is our key response. It was published on 3 December and will be published every year. The Chair of the Committee asked for an annual stocktake. The framework is a living document, and we will change and update it all the time to ensure that it works, but clearly we need an annual review as well. I would have thought that the ideal way to deal with that would be to have an annual session with the Select Committee, in which it interrogates the performance and the progress made.

There are not any targets in the document, as the Chair said, but that is because it is the first one and we are feeling our way, to an extent. It would be wrong to put targets in until we have bedded the thing down and seen the progress that we have made. We will use the document to build understanding of disability into every single member of staff, so that every single member of staff can take responsibility for ensuring that the principle of “No one left behind” is built into every one of our programmes. We will work with our multilateral partners to ensure that, and to make sure that they are taking account of disability. As part of that, we will develop the disaggregation of data.

There will be special provision for the agenda for women and girls who are in double jeopardy as a result of disability and being female, and the stigma that attaches to that. We will continue to prioritise research and evidence on what works in low-resource economies. The Chair of the Select Committee drew specific attention to mental health, and that is an area where we have to raise our game with the agenda. To that end, we have launched a study called the Programme for Improving Mental Health Care, in which we work specifically to see what we can do on mental health issues in low-resource economies.

I believe fundamentally that the framework is one of the most important things on our agenda, and it is vital to drive it forward. I recall having a conversation with a constituent who was disabled. She was giving advice on what was needed for a particular project. She said to me bluntly that people did not want our pity; they wanted our help, not only so that they could be self-sufficient and do what other people do, but so that they could be contributors to their community. The ambition of “No one left behind” has to be that disabled people become an asset to their communities and not a burden on them.