Queen’s Speech

Earl of Sandwich Excerpts

Wednesday 11th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Sandwich (CB)]

My Lords, in a defence debate it is a tradition to start with a tribute to those who have fallen in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and I open my remarks today with a tribute to aid workers, who have also died on active service, working on the front line in Africa, Syria, Afghanistan and many other areas of conflict. Aid workers in Africa and Asia are now targeted as if they were a fighting force. They will not, generally, be remembered, except of course by their families and colleagues.

I would like briefly to mention my concerns about Ukraine. The noble Lord, Lord Jopling, has already mentioned EU Sub-Committee C’s timely inquiry, and I know many Peers today share his concerns and those of the noble Lord, Lord King. My own suspicion, already much better expressed by my noble friend Lord Cromwell, is that the EU has overreached itself and has not taken sufficient account of the historical ties between Russia and some of its neighbours, notably Georgia and Ukraine.

Conflict seems to be on the increase, especially in Africa and the Middle East, partly because the media, notably Al-Jazeera, have brought conflict much closer to us. Victims of conflict are added to the high toll of poverty, which is the biggest killer of all. Countries such as Somalia and South Sudan have already low levels of literacy and health, which keep them on the lowest rungs of the ladder; civil war has almost thrown them off the ladder altogether. It seems to outsiders that whole swathes of Africa are now out of bounds to aid workers, yet the staff of the ICRC or United Nations agencies such as the UNHCR risk their lives in regions like Upper Nile and Darfur, and in many areas there is no authority except for local militias which often aggravate the conflict. But there are many areas where peaceful development is a real possibility. Even South Sudan has vast stretches of fertile land; minerals are another source of wealth. Investors and agencies have a common purpose in bringing prosperity to the poorest developing countries, but their frustration often stems from the lack of information, which means knowing the level and scale of poverty.

It is difficult to count the numbers in need. Because of the variations between and within countries, it is nearly impossible to set standards or calculate how many people live in extreme poverty. It is no wonder that the World Bank has had trouble with its poverty statistics. The $1 a day calculation was a handy way of describing the millennium development goals. It enabled the UN to proclaim that the number of extreme poor in the world, which had long remained at around 800 million, had been halved—and so it had, until the $1 a day was updated to $1.25, when the numbers accordingly went back up by 400 million. With the help of the Overseas Development Institute, I have been trying to learn how economists reach these calculations. They do it on the basis of household surveys that take account of purchasing power parity through something called the International Comparison Programme, which is carried out every six years. The latest survey showed that consumption in China and parts of Asia was growing much faster than previously thought. For some economists, this meant that poverty again fell dramatically, from 20% to about 9% of the world population. Meanwhile, the Brookings Institution did a different calculation, raising the poverty level to $1.55 and basing its results on the 15 poorest countries. Again it came up with an extreme poverty figure of 870 million. The end result is that the poor, in the biblical sense, remain with us just as before; and the UN says that a billion people could still be extremely poor by 2030.

The one thing that has been agreed is that we can no longer base our statistics crudely on GNP per capita, which has been so convenient in the past. We must now take account of social factors such as employment, access to education and so on, and these are extremely difficult to assess and compare. Can the Minister say what our Government’s policy is on data collection for the new millennium goals? Is this a priority for DfID? Can he confirm that the High-level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda recommended that the new targets be tailored to different income and social groups? This will surely mean that a concerted effort must be made to assess the numbers in each group. This is a herculean task in about 40 of the poorest countries that still lack the necessary data and means of collecting the information. Nevertheless, the work has to be done if we are going to have confidence in achieving these goals in years to come.