Disability and Development

Fiona Bruce Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2014 Westminster Hall

[Sir Malcolm Bruce (Gordon) (LD)]

I will try to be brief and simply highlight the main points. We decided a couple of years ago to do a report on disability. Although it took us a while to get round to doing it, for various reasons, the fact that we were going to do it had a galvanising effect on the Department for International Development, which found itself in a better position to explain what it was doing than might otherwise have been the case. Our announcing the inquiry well in advance was therefore quite a good thing to do.

The first thing we wanted to identify was just how big an issue disability is. There are reckoned to be about 1 million people suffering disabilities in developing countries, and they are mostly very poor—they are the poorest of the poor. They are not often visible, and they are subject to a lot of prejudice and stigma. They are often hidden away, disadvantaged and kept poor.

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

I apologise for interrupting the right hon. Gentleman, but did I mishear him or did he say 1 million?

[Sir Malcolm Bruce]

The correct figure is 1 billion, and if I mis-said it, I am glad that my hon. Friend has given me the opportunity to put the record straight.

The challenge is huge, so we felt it was critical that the Department addressed it specifically and explicitly in a way that had not been done before. We issued a challenge, to which the Department has responded, which I think is a classic example of the galvanising and dynamic effect of the Committee’s relationship with the Department. We were disappointed when the Government rejected our recommendation for a disability strategy; however, we have been extremely pleased with the framework document that has emerged, so frankly I think we can park that disagreement. The framework document has been widely welcomed by organisations and others representing disabled people.

I would like to pay a personal tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone), a former Minister in the Department, for taking up the challenge. When she came into the Department, she basically said to me, “I’m a junior Minister. I can only do a limited amount, and the best way I can do it is to pick up two or three issues and make them my own,” and this issue was one of them—the others were women and girls and female genital mutilation. She is a great campaigner. My understanding—the Minister may correct me—is that direct responsibility has been transferred to my right hon. Friend’s successor, Baroness Northover, who has also given me an undertaking that she is determined to ensure that the commitments made by her predecessor are taken forward.

That is all very welcome. Hon. Members will know that I have an interest in disability, having a grown-up deaf daughter and being chair of the all-party group on deafness. I have always recognised the fact that if nobody rises up and challenges the problems that disabled people face, and if nobody works with disabled people, their problems will not be addressed.

Having welcomed the framework, I want to ask a few questions. We think that the process has been enormously positive and that the framework is ambitious. The Department is doubling the size of the disability team, making new commitments in humanitarian response—water, sanitation and hygiene—and advocating for a disability-inclusive post-2015 agenda. Put simply, if the aim is to eliminate absolute poverty by 2030 and leave no one behind, it is not possible to do that without specific policies to address disability and the needs of disabled people. What is being done for the first year of the framework to try to achieve measurable impacts? There are more staff and there is more awareness, but will the Department set some objectives that it hopes will be met by the end of the year?

Will the Minister consider committing the Department to an annual stocktake or progress report? The current Secretary of State for Health used to be a member of our Committee—many of the best people in the House of Commons, including the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Anas Sarwar), have been members of the Committee—he recognised that the international community had set a commitment to halve the number of people with HIV/AIDS who were not receiving treatment. That was a five-year programme, but he insisted, and secured agreement, that the target would be hit only if we had annual reviews and targets. I commend his initiative. The Committee and the Government accepted the proposal, which ensured that the target was hit. The logic is that annual targets require us to keep our eye on the ball, whereas a five-year target can be left until there is a push upwards at the end, like a hockey stick. I ask the Minister to consider that.

There have been criticisms from some organisations that represent disabled people. Some of those criticisms are a bit sharp, and I will not report them here, but they boil down to the Minister and the Department needing to understand that organisations representing disabled people are not the same as disabled people’s organisations. Disabled people should be a visible part of the process of addressing disability in development. Indeed, people within the Department who have a disability should be encouraged to take part in the process and be a role model—I am not talking about tokenism, nor should the Department specifically recruit such people. Again, I hope the Minister might consider that. What specific measures will the Department take to engage disabled people’s organisations? At the moment, such organisations still feel that they have not been properly engaged. Some of them have been sharply critical, but that is the nature of such organisations. I get a lot of that in my work with the deaf community. Let us just take it is a practical thing to be addressed.

DFID has acknowledged that we are a long way from being in the lead on disability. I understand that a member of DFID staff has been seconded to Australia to look at their examples, and I hope that in a relatively short period of time, as in so many areas, DFID will be a leading world role model. I am glad that the Department is looking to learn from international partners that may be ahead of the game. What more might the Department do to build on the experience of international organisations?

My right hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green recently held a seminar on collecting data, and part of the problem is that, precisely because they are hidden, we do not know the exact nature of the challenges. I was invited to the reception at the end of the day, and I got the impression that people were pleased that that was taking place. A progress report on how data collection will be taken forward would be helpful.

As with the problems faced by women and girls, in the humanitarian disaster agenda we have been shocked by the lack of awareness of the needs of disabled people. If there has been a disaster, by definition there will be newly disabled people who have suffered injury, been shot or wounded, or been affected by that catastrophe. The needs of disabled people, as well as the needs of women and girls, must be prioritised in the immediate aftermath of disasters because they tend to be forgotten at a critical and vulnerable time. The World Bank has an ongoing review. It would be good to know how DFID, as a very influential player in the World Bank, is trying to ensure that the bank also takes a strategic view of the needs of disabled people.

Finally, people need support when they are disabled, but quite often those disabilities are preventable, whether they be caused by illness or accident—road traffic accidents are devastating. What will DFID do to reduce the incidence of disability? Yes, we must provide for those who are disabled, but we must also help to reduce the incidence of disability. The consequences of female genital mutilation can be catastrophic, as can the consequences of disease. We have had that debate, but it is relevant in this context. I draw out mental illness and incapacity, on which we took specific evidence. Mental illness is a major problem. Frankly, poor people have a higher chance of suffering mental illness, yet that is almost unrecognised—it is stigmatised. I ask that mental illness and mental disability be included in the strategy.

I have some practical suggestions. I say that I speak on behalf of the deaf community, but there are others with specific disabilities. Surely we can provide cost-effective access to wheelchairs, hearing aids and hearing tests, simple interventions on sight, and so on. How will that be built into the strategy, so that we can create partnerships? I suggest cross-Government and cross-society partnerships, because it should not all be down to DFID, although DFID can provide the leadership.

In order to ensure that other colleagues have an opportunity to speak, I will finish by saying two things. I am glad that the Committee undertook this report. More evidence was submitted to this inquiry than to any other we have done. The engagement and participation of disabled people throughout the process has been very strong. They were passionate about the need for the strategy. Having had a slight stand-off with the Department, we can honestly say that the disability framework is more than we might have expected, provided it is delivered. I therefore commend the report, and the Government’s response, to the House. I hope the Minister will be able to answer some of my questions, because a wonderful declaration is meaningless without a series of measures and reports that enable us to make progress. I hope that in five years’ time disability will be mainstreamed and that the UK, once again, will have a leading role across the world in encouraging others to do the same.

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

This is not a minority issue. As the right hon. Member for Gordon (Sir Malcolm Bruce) has said, around 1 billion people, or 15% of the world’s population, are disabled. The vast majority of those people, 80%, live in developing countries, where one household in every four has a disabled member. The marginalisation of those families holds back entire communities. Disabled people, for example, are three times as likely to be denied health care and more than six times as likely to be out of school.

As we have heard, if we meet the poorest person in a community or village in a developing country, they will almost certainly be disabled, but it can be even worse than that, as I discovered when I was invited to meet a leper colony in Tanzania. Those people were not within their community; they were outside their community. They were living on the charity of some of the poorest people on Earth, and they were in the terrible situation of being ostracised, which is the opposite of the inclusivity we have almost come to take for granted in our own culture in this country. There is an awfully long way to go on this issue in many developing countries.

That is why the Committee is so welcoming of DFID’s new disability framework. The Government have accepted and endorsed many of the report’s key recommendations. I repeat the Chairman’s question to the Minister: what is DFID going to do to reduce the incidence of disability caused by, for example, disease? Leprosy is just one example. We hardly ever hear talk of leprosy. I am sure many people in our country think it is a disease that occurred only in biblical times, but it is very real for the people I met. They were crawling, walking on stumps and managing on crutches. Leprosy is a terrible disease that can be treated and, indeed, prevented. Will the Minister look at this issue and consider what can be done to reduce the incidence of disability resulting from leprosy?

We are talking about helping the poorest of the poor when we commit to helping the disabled in developing countries. I commend the new disability framework, and I commend DFID for setting far-reaching plans to make its programmes more accessible to disabled people, strengthening its disability teams, providing extra disability training and taking a strong stand with external partners. All of that is welcome.

Like the previous speaker, I will be brief, but I will touch on recommendation 13 in our report, which flows into recommendation 14. Recommendation 13 states:

“DFID has taken an important symbolic step with its new commitment”

in 2013

“to make all directly-funded school buildings accessible to disabled children.”

However, we said that we wanted DFID to show more ambition and recommended that it

“choose one or two substantial sectors (e.g. health or education), and a small number of countries, to focus on. Within these chosen areas, it should then pledge to give disabled people full access to all its programmes.”

In response, the Government said that they

“will make further specific sectoral commitments in 2014 as we did in 2013 when we committed to making all directly-funded school buildings accessible to disabled children.”

As we are just a few days away from the end of 2014, can the Minister update the House on DFID’s progress on those “specific sectoral commitments”?