Oral Answers to Questions

Fiona Bruce Excerpts

Wednesday 16th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

The hon. Gentleman is right to mention the barriers that keep children out of school. DFID is working on many of them, not least female genital mutilation and child marriage. Many of the children he talks about are girls who often do unpaid work at home and on family farms.

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

T5. Bangladesh is a significant recipient of UK aid, yet last week the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission heard grave concerns about the shrinking civil society space there. What can Ministers do to help address this?

[Justine Greening]

I can assure my hon. Friend that DFID and Foreign Office officials, together with other donors, raise concerns about the space for civil society with Governments, including the Government of Bangladesh. This is an incredibly important area. Non-governmental organisations funded by UK aid are active in negotiating with Governments to protect the space for civil society to operate.

Ebola: Sierra Leone

Fiona Bruce Excerpts

Tuesday 19th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

The International Development Committee report, which was issued today, commends the strong leadership of DFID and the UK Government in co-ordinating the response to Ebola in Sierra Leone, but is very critical of the WHO’s delay in designating the outbreak as a public health emergency of international concern. Will the Secretary of State give us more of an insight into her discussions with Margaret Chan and confirm that the Department is ensuring that the WHO treats this matter as a priority among its radical reform needs?

[Justine Greening]

There are various aspects, but one that is particularly key is the regional response of the WHO. It is important to ensure, at that level, that emerging outbreaks be clearly identified in a depoliticised way. They must be identified as outbreaks simply from the facts on the ground, as Governments are sometimes understandably reticent about declaring a health emergency. Those are the key changes that we will steadily see in the WHO over time.

Critically, we need to be able to mobilise people. One aspect of the WHO reform is the setting up of an international register of healthcare responders, much like the one the UK has, which we were able to draw on to tackle Ebola. That will enable us to ensure that we rapidly have the right people in the right places the next time that a crisis hits. Having said all that, this was an unprecedented outbreak. It was the first time that an Ebola outbreak spread across borders. Nevertheless, we clearly need the WHO to reform and to respond far more quickly and effectively in future.

Oral Answers to Questions

Fiona Bruce Excerpts

Wednesday 16th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hurd]

What is important to us is the creation of jobs. Those jobs will be created by a range of companies, and we will work with them to create a better economic environment in the countries in which we work. However, we know that 90% of the jobs will come from the private sector, and we know that most of the sustainable jobs will come from small and medium-sized organisations. We therefore give those organisations priority in respect of a number of the programmes that we are developing.

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

How will DFID’s work with women and girls drive economic development in poorer countries?

[Mr Hurd]

As my hon. Friend will know, that issue is enormously important to the Department and the Secretary of State. Inclusive growth and support for women and girls as part of economic development is a central pillar of our strategic framework for the future. We expect our support over the next seven years to help to mobilise finance for more than 200,000 SMEs, at least a quarter of which will be headed by women.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Prime Minister]

Let me join the right hon. Lady in paying tribute not only to the British Museum, which is an absolute jewel in the British cultural crown, but to Neil MacGregor, who gave it such extraordinary leadership. Given her heritage, perhaps she will be amused by the fact that I took Chancellor Merkel to the museum to show her the brilliant exhibition about Germany—it was fantastic—but the next thing I knew, the Germans had poached Neil MacGregor to run their cultural institute in Germany. None the less, in the spirit of European co-operation, which is going to be vital this week, I am happy to see that happen. I want to see the British Museum complete all its partnerships, not just across the United Kingdom but internationally. The right hon. Lady will have seen in the autumn statement that the British Museum got a funding settlement with which it was, rightly, very pleased.

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

Q13. According to Oxfam, the UK has donated a generous 229% of its fair share of aid in support of Syrian refugees —the highest percentage of the G8—yet worldwide only 44% of what is needed by those refugees has been donated. Does the Prime Minister agree that it is critical that other countries step up to the plate, as the UK has more than done, and will he update the House on progress in support of Syrian refugees?

[The Prime Minister]

I very much agree with my hon. Friend. Britain is doing its moral duty in terms of funding the refugees and the refugee camps. We are going to hold a conference in February, bringing the world together to make sure there is more funding in future. That is going to be absolutely vital. In terms of the number of refugees that we have resettled, I made a promise that we would resettle 1,000 by Christmas and I can confirm today that we have met that commitment. The charter flights that arrived yesterday at Stansted and Belfast mean that over 1,000 have been settled. Another charter flight is coming today. The Government have provided funding so that all those refugees get housing, healthcare and education.

I thank all the local authorities and all those who have worked so hard, including the Under-Secretary of State for Refugees, my hon. Friend the Member for Watford (Richard Harrington), who has led the process so ably. I said that Britain would do its duty, and with those 1,000 we have made a very good start.

Tropical Diseases

Fiona Bruce Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2015 Westminster Hall

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) on an excellent speech, not least because of his impressive articulation of so many technical terms, which left many of us in awe. I also acknowledge his equally effective leadership of the all-party parliamentary group on malaria and neglected tropical diseases, which over the previous Parliament and continuing into this one has gathered together many of those involved in research and its practical application, seeking to resolve the challenges that he spoke of and to find solutions to the still deeply concerning impact of malaria and other neglected tropical diseases across the world.

I acknowledge the Department for International Development’s considerable contribution over the past several years and the achievements secured thus far, not least because the constructive partnership working that my hon. Friend mentioned is being so effective in contributing to the improvements that have been made. There is still a long way to go, however. My hon. Friend spoke of the importance of increasing funding for drug discovery, and I want in particular to speak about early-stage drug development funding.

As I said, the all-party parliamentary group has gathered together a number of thinkers at the forefront of this issue, one of whom is Professor Alister Craig from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, who visited us last week. He is a lifelong researcher into the biology of diseases and has several suggestions that could make the funding that goes into this area even more effective. I hope the Minister will take those suggestions away. Professor Craig speaks of the weighting system of the research excellence framework, which is a method of addressing the research of British higher education institutions that can impact on the grant funding received. Professor Craig says that the current UK system is well suited to recognising the researching and developing of drugs that have an ultimate commercial home in western markets—that is to say that the cost of their development will be recouped by pharmaceutical companies. In practice, that can mean that the research excellence framework prioritises pure academic and perhaps more theoretical research over more iterative drug development processes. Drug development, particularly at an early stage, can be under-recognised as a result. Framework points can be accrued through the demonstration of excellence in academia more than through a demonstration of excellence in drug development. That is particularly concerning for the development of drugs for NTDs, because it can be seven to 10 years before apparent progress is made, but unless that work is done, no progress will ever be made.

While the system makes sense for the majority of the UK market, where a commercial operator will put in money to turn academic research into a product that ends up on the market, it can be difficult for grant money to get to development stage research into tropical diseases. Such research is often left under-resourced without a commercial developer to inject cash. In the next review of the research excellent framework, is the Minister prepared to consider measures that would allow drug developers to demonstrate the excellence of their research? We could perhaps consider the matter at a future meeting of the APPG, to which Ministers were generous in giving their time in the previous Parliament, so that the issue can be discussed with the experts in this field.

There is a clear disparity in the funding here. Successful research is rightly rewarded with drug development, but the drugs being developed only have a 0.3% chance of turning out to be an effective and available product. Much development work gets us closer to a final answer while not producing a solution or product. That valuable work—we could perhaps call them useful failures—could be better understood by review panels to give it more recognition.

For example, a number of malaria vaccines did not result in in a marketable vaccine, but each new research stage and trial contributed to the accumulation of knowledge and is valuable in the chain of research that will eventually lead to an effective malaria vaccine. If useful failures could be better understood and identified, that would be helpful. However, funding agencies and review panels are often heavily represented by individuals from the academic sphere of pharmaceuticals and less so by those from the development field. The Government have the power to set expectations about the mix of backgrounds on such panels, but will the Minister consider the balance between those from academia and those from product development?

DFID’s funding has been enormously effective over the past few years, but will DFID look particularly at targeting at early-stage NTD drug development? The purpose would be to support long-term development work from groups that have a deep understanding of NTD challenges. Money is put into development, but it is often directed, even by DFID, towards picking up drugs that are already at an advanced stage of development, leaving early-stage drugs desperately under-resourced. It is particularly important that Government consider that because private foundations and NGOs often want to invest where they can get the biggest bang for their buck and where they can see an early-course impact.

Research in the UK into tropical diseases has been effective, and research into river blindness, as mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford, is a good example. For Members’ information, river blindness is a parasitic infection that is spread through the bites of black flies. It often leads to permanent blindness, and millions of people in central Africa and Latin America are at risk of infection. In some west African communities, 50% of the men over 40 had been blinded by the disease. UK research discovered that the parasitic worms could be stopped by attacking bacteria inside the worm as it was much easier to kill the bacteria than the worm. Millions of people are still benefiting from that discovery, which is a great example of UK research benefiting the lives of many. Such strides take time, however, which is why it is important for us to invest in early-stage drug development to make progress as quickly as possible.

I thank Professor Craig for his engagement with the APPG and for his particularly constructive comments. He says that it is not that the UK is not doing this work, but rather that more could be done. We could do more and could do it even more effectively.

Sustainable Development Goals

Fiona Bruce Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

I welcome the SDGs. They take a more holistic approach to development, addressing the root causes of poverty and inequality to bring transformative change that will leave no one behind. Significant achievements have been made on many of the MDG targets, but progress has been uneven. As the UN Millennium Development Goals report of 2015 states:

“Although significant achievements have been made on many of the MDG targets worldwide, progress has been uneven across regions and countries, leaving significant gaps. Millions of people are being left behind, especially the poorest and those disadvantaged because of their sex, age, disability, ethnicity or geographic location.”

It is really important that we concentrate on the poorest of the poor wherever they live in the world. I am thinking here of the Dalits, who are below caste level. One of the many jobs that they undertake is to go out at night—they are not even allowed to go out during the day—and clean up human excreta with their hands. I am talking about those kinds of people who are the poorest of the poor. We must not leave behind those in middle-income countries—the minorities and the ethnic groups.

Before I turn to the specific points that I want to draw to the Minister’s attention, I want to comment on how encouraged I was this week during a meeting of the International Development Committee where witnesses from international non-governmental organisations and civil society and campaigning representatives voiced such strong support and enthusiasm for the SDGs and for the process by which they have been developed. The wide consultation seems to have brought about a real buy-in for the approach that the SDGs encourage. I am talking about joint working between donor and donee countries, NGOs and civil society, and the real focus on addressing the underlying causes of poverty. That focus is both people and planet-centred and promotes economic growth while ensuring that development is sustainable for the earth’s resources. It is about how the world can work together and it is really exciting. I pay tribute to all those in our Government who are involved in those negotiations.

I wish to raise two specific points that I mentioned earlier—I am sure the Minister did not leave the Chamber just because of that. DFID is undergoing a review of how it structures grants and its relationship with civil society. I wish to highlight the advantage of rebalancing more funding away from large international, institutional NGOs towards those that operate at local partnering level. The power of local groups to mobilise communities, shape people’s values and build a sense of identity is immense, and there is growing understanding that in certain communities, granting aid to large organisations can sometimes—not always—harm rather than help.

A study of one community in Pakistan by Masooda Bano points to the fact that large grants to non-native organisations can, on occasion, disincentivise a community from using resources that it already has, and effectively weaken the latent energy and initiative that can be a community’s greatest weapon. The way that funding is structured can make a significant difference to its effectiveness. There are areas where small grants over a long period of time could be preferred over up-front large grants. Creating more flexibility for how aid is structured can bring better returns for fewer resources invested.

For example, Tearfund has told me about a community in Okulonyo in northern Uganda where a local faith-based charity launched a project of advocacy training and community mobilisation in 2011. The community has been transformed and empowered. It has mobilised and lobbied its Government for much needed aid and infrastructure projects including health services, water pumps and roads. For an investment of $330,000 it has been calculated that a benefit of almost $10 million has been received by that community. That is a return of $30 dollars for every $1 put in—even Warren Buffett would be pleased at that.

I have already spoken to DFID Ministers about how much value for money small grants to small organisations can provide, and I urge Ministers to look again at that. I hope the Minister will confirm that small organisations are being engaged in DFID’s civil society review, just as larger ones are. In the past DFID has perhaps not worked as much with local, embedded partners as I would like it to do in the future, and that is important. Yes, oversight is harder and the risks might be greater, but the gains can be disproportionately beneficial. I urge DFID to be entrepreneurial about that.

Let me turn to the importance of leaving no one behind. Earlier, I read out a list of causes for which people can be left behind, whether due to gender, geography or those in ethnic minority groups such as the Dalits. This is a paradigm shift: leave no one behind regardless of their ethnicity, gender, geography, disability, race or other status. That is admirable.

However, I believe that one word and cause of inequality is missing from that group: belief. No one should be left behind because of what they believe, whether they have any faith or none. Ministers know that I have raised on a number of occasions my concern that an underlying cause of poverty is a lack of freedom of belief, freedom of thought or the freedom of speech that can follow, resulting in conflict, violence, loss of opportunities, homelessness, displacement and more. If we are determined to tackle the underlying causes of poverty, we cannot leave that behind. Fostering religious freedom should be seen as a priority not only for tackling conflict once it has happened, but to prevent it before it takes place and to promote stability.

As Brian Grim argues in his book, “The Price of Freedom Denied”, religious freedom fosters respect towards others with a different belief in the same society, therefore reducing tensions. I would go further than that, because I think it will contribute to the achievement of our SDGs. For example, goal 5 promotes the rights of girls and women. So much harassment of women is linked to religious discrimination against women—the respected report by the Pew Research Centre states that such discrimination takes place in 32% of countries. Goal 8 is about economic welfare, and employment discrimination as a result of someone being involved in a faith group is rife, as we see in countries such as Iran.

Let me give another example—sustainable development goal 16, the promotion of peace, as well as sustainable development goal 8, economic growth. In countries where freedom of belief is not respected, conflict disrupts economic activity. Foreign and local investors become reluctant to invest, jeopardising sustainable development and economic growth. As businesses corroborate, an opportunity to invest, conduct normal business practice and prevent industries from struggling is weakened. Egypt’s tourism industry, for example, has faced such challenges. By promoting and practising freedom of belief, a path to security and economic well-being can be laid.

I urge Ministers to consider this and to engage faith groups in their civil society review. Is it not time to review the Department’s faith partnership principles? Finally, would DFID consider engaging in the joint learning initiatives on faith and development instituted by some of the major international NGOs working on poverty relief, such as Tearfund, CAFOD and World Vision?

Health Systems (Developing Countries)

Fiona Bruce Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2014 Westminster Hall

[Sir Malcolm Bruce (Gordon) (LD)]

I am pleased to have the opportunity to debate these three reports, which as it happens are timelier in their outcomes than we realised when we started them. The Select Committee on International Development decided that we should visit Sierra Leone and Liberia to see how the Department for International Development was working in post-conflict situations and how it was working with development partners, particularly the Americans, in Liberia. That was an interesting and informative inquiry. When we visited the two countries in June, Ebola was present, but at the time, it was apparently not imminently as out of control as it has become. At the same time, we had also been doing an inquiry into DFID’s role in helping to strengthen health systems. One can see a certain irony in how those things came together at the time we were conducting our inquiry.

I will take things in that order, concentrating on health and then adding a couple of points about the development programmes. In those countries where we have a bilateral partnership and health is a significant part of the engagement, DFID has a good record, supported by all the evidence, of using the funding to help build stronger and more effective and coherent health systems.

About half of DFID’s health money goes in that direction, but the other half goes to the vertical and multilateral funds, where we found much less concentration on building health systems, perhaps for the understandable reason that targets were being set to deliver reductions in malaria and HIV/AIDS and everything was set in those terms. However, to achieve those targets, an infrastructure for delivering them is ultimately needed. We were anxious to ensure that the money going into vertical funds left a legacy of stronger health systems. What has happened with Ebola vindicates the argument that we made.

In Sierra Leone and Liberia, we saw health systems that were beginning to show some signs of effectiveness, but as we now know, they were totally overwhelmed by the Ebola crisis, which they are incapable of handling. The Liberian system was probably in slightly better shape than Sierra Leone’s, but then it was ahead on the curve. Nevertheless, both of them were overwhelmed.

One thing we are clear about is that if the international effort now going into bringing Ebola under control is to have a lasting legacy, it should also go into ensuring that when the immediate emergency is ended, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, on which there is more of a French lead, have health systems in place that will be resilient and robust enough to withstand any further similar outbreak. The situation also makes it clear that strong health systems are an essential component of development and in the global national interest, because such diseases, whether resistant, endemic or epidemic, can spread everywhere if not contained in their own territory. Strong health systems are in everybody’s interest.

One disappointing thing is that although the African Union countries made a declaration at Abuja that they should spend 15% of their Governments’ budgets on health, of the 50 members, only six have actually done so. Although I commend DFID—I am looking at the Minister here—we must urge the development partners to share the commitment. Without their commitment, they will never achieve effective health systems, which requires both political will and commitment. Therefore, we conclude that we need to put even more resource into completing the job that had only just started in Sierra Leone, and ensure that the legacy of tackling Ebola is not just that we get it under control but that we leave behind something much more substantial for the future of those countries. That is essentially the major point we must make.

Interestingly, the evidence told us that the UK national health service has a significant contribution to make in this area, in a number of ways. First, contrary to some popular opinion, in a Commonwealth evaluation of health services across the developed countries, the NHS ranked top, as the best health service in the world. We know that it is not perfect, but we should not sell short what it can do. We are seconding people right now from our own health service to work in Sierra Leone; perhaps not quickly enough, but we are doing so.

However, several issues came to light. One is that there ought to be a permanent partnership across Government to use DFID and NHS capacity and expertise to help build those health systems. That was and is being done in Sierra Leone, but our inquiry revealed—my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) raised this issue with the health adviser this morning—that we are not training enough health service staff for our own needs. I argue, and to some extent the Committee’s recommendations suggest, that we should be training more than enough staff for our own needs, on the grounds that we could then second people abroad without leaving our own health service understaffed.

Although we have a policy of not recruiting directly into the NHS from a long list of developing countries in a worthy attempt to avoid brain-draining qualified health professionals from poorer countries, the fact remains that they are not prevented from coming here or applying, and there are doctors and nurses from Sierra Leone working in our health service when one would like to think they would be working in their own health service alongside our volunteers and secondees to tackle the problem. This needs a cross-Government approach and it is not the responsibility of the Minister’s Department, but I ask him to take it on board that discussions with the Department of Health should address those issues, which are in the national and international interest.

I will touch on the reason why we went to Sierra Leone and Liberia before the crisis engulfed them. Those countries had been riven by civil war. The UK effectively intervened in Sierra Leone and ended the civil war, for which I can testify the people of Sierra Leone are extraordinarily grateful. It might amuse the House to observe that one sees more Union Jacks driving through Freetown than in Ayr. It is a declaration of appreciation. The partnership is constructive and is valued by both parties.

Sierra Leone is a bit of a forgotten country. The UK is the lead donor, and there are few others. It is literally a far-away country of which many people know very little, yet it and Liberia have an interesting history that is different from anywhere else in Africa. Liberia was settled by freed slaves from America in the early part of the 19th century. Interestingly, the country that first recognised Liberia as an independent state was not the United States of America but the United Kingdom, a fact that Liberians are anxious we should know.

I will say in passing, however, that some of us were a little shocked or bemused—I do not know which—by Liberia’s national flag and symbol. I think it has a ship with a pennant saying, “We came here in search of freedom.” The vast majority of Liberians never left, and there is a dichotomy between the freed slaves and their descendants, who are the elite, and the majority of the people, who have not had good governance over a very long period of time.

The current president is to be commended, in that the situation is changing and there is a much greater will to govern for the whole country. We made only a short visit; we were only able to go to Monrovia. However, people told us that while Monrovia looked a reasonable city, the rest of the country had virtually no roads, no infrastructure and no support. Again, that is a development challenge that needs to be addressed.

Sierra Leone was founded on a similar basis, by freed slaves from the Caribbean, and it has a definite Caribbean feel to it. Obviously, it enjoyed—I think “enjoyed” is the right word to use—administration by the British for many years, before it gained full independence. There is a legacy of roads and infrastructure that, again, the people value. However, it is still at a very low base; Sierra Leone is still a very poor, deprived country.

Our Committee recommends that, first, regardless of the Ebola crisis, we continue the current level of support. However, now we are where we are and both countries have been knocked back, the Department, although it has immediately given extra resources, needs to reassess its long-term programme, especially for Sierra Leone, which will need more resources than have so far been committed. That is not a criticism but a recognition of reality. We hope the Department will be able to provide those extra resources.

We made some criticism of the centrally managed programmes—we have engaged with the Department since on this issue—because, to say the least, we were a bit disappointed to find that we were not getting all the information on what the British Government are doing in Sierra Leone. We got it in bits and pieces from different sources. When the Committee visits a country where the UK has a bilateral aid programme, we almost expect—we have asked for this for many years—to get a full breakdown, or at least an assessment, of the bilateral programme, the multilateral programmes and engagement with the international agencies such as the World Bank and the African Development Bank; of course, it may not be an absolutely precise figure. However, we found that substantial programmes were being delivered in Sierra Leone that local DFID staff had no engagement with at all, and knew very little of. There may be good reasons for that, and we have asked DFID to give them if there are, but we still think that openness and transparency and an understanding of those programmes’ interaction would be helpful.

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman is making an extremely good point. He will recall that exactly the same issue arose when the Committee visited Brazil: it was only almost as we were leaving that we were provided with a comprehensive plan.

[Sir Malcolm Bruce]

My hon. Friend is right; in fact, it was actually after we had left. We have now learned—I am smiling at the Minister—how to ask the questions. We asked in general terms what our official development assistance was, and DFID said, “We don’t have an ODA programme in Brazil, but HM Government do.” On returning from Brazil, we found that the Foreign Office had a £40 million ODA programme there. We do not object to that; we just think we should know about it, and the reason for it.

We had a similar concern regarding Sierra Leone. It is a question of transparency and understanding. Such knowledge helps us to make a good case: we are doing much more in Sierra Leone than is apparent, so why not say so? Ironically, when we went to Liberia, where our programme is a lot smaller, everything had been thrown into the pot to make the budget look bigger. So, the exact opposite approach to that taken in Sierra Leone was being adopted in Liberia.

I get the impression that the Department has learned something from this dialogue, and that the situation will change. We have asked the Independent Commission for Aid Impact to look at the centrally managed programmes, simply because the Department has not given us a clear explanation of strategy, listing exactly what should be done through centrally managed programmes, what should be done locally, and why. What is the rationale for choosing one method rather than the other? We are not saying that those ways are wrong and do not deliver, but it is not clear what they deliver and why, and we would like some clarity.

As the reports state, it is absolutely right for the UK to be the lead donor in Sierra Leone. We have a degree of responsibility, and the partnership works and is appreciated by both sides. Playing a supportive role in Liberia, with the US, benefits Liberia and the UK’s interaction with the US, because the UK and the US have a strong connection. We urge the Government, perhaps once they have gone a little further in dealing with the Ebola crisis, to tell us how they propose to set out a reconstruction programme for Sierra Leone in the coming years, because that is what is required. We urge DFID to take on board our recommendations on strengthening health systems. In particular, DFID should use its influence with the multilateral agencies to ensure that, where they put aid money into health—whether through vertical funds or other health programmes—they build in the objective of leaving a legacy of stand-alone functioning systems.

We should also open a dialogue with partner countries to get them to make health a greater priority on behalf of their citizens, not least because the aid community’s prioritising of health is almost giving some countries an excuse not to do so. The scale of the challenge is such that the aid community will never deliver a sufficiently strong health system on its own, and nor should it. Unless there is a partnership and a willingness on the part of Governments to contribute, we will not get the result we seek.

Notwithstanding the Government’s formal response, I hope the Minister will pick up on the points I have made. We are very appreciative of what DFID is doing. The circumstances have changed. There were a number of criticisms, which I hope the Department will address. Our engagement in these two countries is extremely important, but it needs to be ramped up if we are to get them back on their feet after the crisis that has engulfed them in the last few months.

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

I begin by thanking the Minister for the Government’s detailed response to the Committee’s report, “Strengthening Health Systems in Developing Countries”, which I will speak to. I also wish to put on the record—and not just because we are approaching the season of good will—our appreciation of the International Development Committee’s Clerks and assistants for their expert help and invaluable contribution to our reports, and indeed to all the Committee’s work.

Strengthening health systems gets to the heart of much of what the Department for International Development must now be about, as we move from the millennium development goals to the sustainable development goals. Aid must be proactive as well as reactive, seeking prevention as well as cure. Clearly there will continue to be epidemics and tragic random events of nature or war, such as the Ebola outbreak or the current crises in Syria or Iraq. That is precisely when a robust in-country health system becomes so important. A mature and progressive approach must focus on the long-term goals of building the organisations, in-country institutions and the attitudes that will enable developing nations to become truly independent and truly developed.

One of the ways that is done is through building the networks by which health care resources can be spread, establishing training institutions that can make health care systems sustainable and bringing Governments to account, so that they realise the realistic and significant benefits of prioritising health care. If the latter in particular is not done, much of the health care action that this country’s aid workers overseas seek to undertake will be only half done.

I am reminded of the time that the Committee visited Ethiopia. We saw some dedicated community health workers, who were funded by DFID. They were young women who were going out into remote rural communities and talking to women in their homes about how to improve their health and hygiene with 10-step plans. Those women were visited and revisited until the good practices had been embedded. However, we visited the clinic in the same region, to which these women would go to give birth to their children and have treatment if they were ill, and quite frankly it was filthy. What was of even more concern was that when we challenged the Government Minister on this issue, he responded, if I recall correctly, “Yes, hygiene is a problem in Ethiopia.” Unless we have more joined-up thinking on the part of the Governments and institutions of the countries in which we are seeking to support the health systems, we will, as I say, find our work only half done. That is why this has to be a priority.

It is good that DFID takes this matter seriously and that the Government have responded positively to almost all the recommendations in our report. It is also good that much of our report recognises the excellent work that DFID does. DFID is an acknowledged leader in this field, particularly in transparency and sharing information. Our Committee is always reminded, wherever we go, of its significance in the field of development around the world.

[Sir Malcolm Bruce]

I agree, but does my hon. Friend acknowledge that we heard some evidence that, good as DFID was, it was rather hiding its light under a bushel, and that people felt that it should be doing much more to provide leadership and that it had slightly lost its edge in that area—not what it is doing, but in inspiring and encouraging others?

[Fiona Bruce]

The right hon. Gentleman pre-empts me, so I thank him for that pertinent comment. One of the thrusts of the report is that although DFID is in a prominent and influential position, it does not take advantage of that. Many of the Committee’s recommendations ask not for a change of policy, but for DFID to use its expertise and good practice to improve the practice and governance of the organisations, institutions and partners with which it works. It is good that the Government largely agree with that aspect of the report.

Let me turn to specific recommendations in the report. First, in response to recommendation 14, the Government state that they have shown leadership on working with women and girls,

“nutrition, female genital mutilation and early and forced child marriage, all of which require dismantling cultural barriers.”

I commend the Government’s work in this area, which gets to the heart of effective aid. It is not just about money pumped in or relief parachuted to problem spots; it is about dedicated work over time with locals on the ground to address fundamental barriers to health provision.

I cite, for example, the work done by aid workers in rural villages and rural communities in Ethiopia, where early child marriage involves children as young as six being married off and where children are even pledged to one another at birth. We heard a moving story of a young girl in her early teens who benefited from the teaching of some of the health workers in rural communities, who encourage young women not to allow themselves to be married early, but to stay in education and preserve their health and well-being, so that they do not end up with early sex and early childbirth. Instead, they can give themselves hope and a future and can contribute more fully to their communities than they would do were they married off early, which, in the misguided view on the part of their community, is somehow regarded as strengthening the community’s future.

It was really moving to learn that that young girl was only a few years younger than her older sister in her late teens, who had been married off early. She described how her older sister was already damaged and isolated, living almost alone, having been abandoned by her so-called husband, her education wrecked and her future looking very bleak. That is just one example of where the work of our DFID representatives, in strengthening health systems in a proactive, long-term way, is so effective.

Transparency is another area where DFID’s performance is exceptional in the field—if I remember rightly, it has been ranked second out of 68 countries. I commend this work. Will the Minister elaborate on the Government’s response to recommendation 6 in our report? The Committee recommended

“that DFID work harder to encourage its partners to make more data on their health systems strengthening work freely available.”

The right hon. Member for Gordon also mentioned that.

In their answer, the Government emphasised DFID’s good record, but regarding other organisations and partners they merely said:

“DFID will continue to set a good example to its partners on transparency and to encourage them to follow this example.”

Perhaps that could be more strongly stated. Perhaps the Minister will put some flesh on the bones of that statement. How will DFID seek to do that and what are its realistic aims and hopes in this area? The Committee’s inquiry showed that although DFID is world leading in this area, perhaps it is not leading the world as much as it could. I encourage the Minister to make use of DFID’s position, its reputation and its relationship with the various multinational organisations to have a greater impact in this area.

I now turn to recommendations that the Government partially accepted. I am pleased that the Government seem to be in general agreement with the Committee on how DFID needs to move forward to apply aid more effectively. Recommendation 4, for example, examines the need for an internationally agreed measure of

“system strengthening expenditure and efficacy as part of discussions about the post-2015 development goals.”

This is clearly an essential task over the next year.

The Government response states that such measures are not part of the post-2015 process. However, they also state:

“Some early thinking has been done about what would be required to develop a common framework for tracking health systems strengthening expenditure.”

Perhaps the Minister could expand on where that thinking is taking DFID and whether the Department has any time line on drafting such a framework.

Recommendations 15 and 16 relate to volunteering, which the Committee Chairman mentioned. I thank the Minister for his Department’s commitment to develop better frameworks and practices for volunteering in response to those recommendations. I should like to reflect with him, and with hon. Members in the Chamber, on the impact that nurses, doctors and even finance and management specialists—which the Committee made recommendations on—can have on health work in developing countries.

Let me mention the work of some volunteers with medical expertise in the Conservative party’s Project Umubano, of which the Minister—whom I am delighted to see here—is an august member, having been a part of that volunteer project virtually every year since its inception. Volunteers in the project go out for one or two weeks a year to Africa: Rwanda, Burundi and Sierra Leone. They are self-funded—so they are really on a minuscule funding basis—and go out there to make a difference in those countries. I remind the Committee of the difference that can be made, even in such a short time, and why it is therefore so important that we look at supporting volunteering from people with NHS expertise.

I should like to quote from an account from this year’s Umubano from Dr Sharon Bennett—who is, if hon. Members are not aware, apart from being a qualified and practising doctor, the wife of my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), the former Secretary of State.

“This was my 8th year in Rwanda, and it was wonderful to return to this special place, where I have made so many friends and treated so many patients over the last decade.”

She speaks of spending time at the Umubano health outpost, a clinic in a fairly remote area founded by Umubano volunteers, who raised funds to build it, and opened in 2011:

“I am happy to report that it is thriving, and we are now putting together a proposal not only to do preventative clinics—HIV, immunisation, ante-natal—but to have a daily minor ailments clinic there. This will bring healthcare closer to this extremely vulnerable group of people.

Every year I see the Health Centre grow, in all ways. The dedication of the staff at the centre is truly humbling.”

She is speaking about the staff that the volunteers have gone out to help train as they set up systems in the health outpost. She said:

“My most happy story this year, and possibly from all my visits, was reviewing a young woman with her happy and healthy seven month old baby. The outlook for mother and child was very different a year ago. In 2013”—

Dr Bennett went out in the summer of 2013—

“she came to see me late on in her pregnancy, when she was very short of breath. She had been treated for a chest infection. However, when I examined her it became clear that she was in heart failure, caused by a valve problem in her heart. If this had gone undiagnosed, she and the baby would almost certainly have died in labour from the huge amount of strain that is placed on the heart during child birth. She was transferred to Butare Hospital and put on medical treatment to take the pressure off her heart. The baby was delivered safely. In February next year, surgeons will be visiting from the United Kingdom to give her a new heart valve.”

Is that not a wonderful story and a microcosm of what can be done if we encourage volunteering from this country to such countries?

I want also to touch on the wonderful structural work being done by Mr Sheo Tibrewal, a consultant orthopaedic surgeon who has helped to set up a postgraduate orthopaedic course in a university in Rwanda. That is a wonderful piece of work he has done over many years. He has strengthened the structure of the university departments and ensured that medicine and dentistry are better able to implement a strategic plan, in conjunction with the Government’s work out in Rwanda. Those are just two examples of where volunteering can make a difference, and I am sure that, with greater support from DFID in conjunction with the NHS, we could see many more. Will the Minister update us on how deliberations on that are progressing? How can support be given to those NHS workers who would like to volunteer abroad, whether in the short or longer term?

That leads me neatly to recommendations 5 and 8, which touch on the difficult topic of how we can encourage other organisations or partners in other countries to take health system strengthening seriously. The Committee recommended:

“If DFID is not satisfied that system strengthening is being given sufficient priority by an organisation, and that organisation does not change, DFID should be prepared to withhold funds.”

That is strong—it may be a nuclear option—but as the Committee’s discussions with the Minister in Ethiopia showed, we have opportunities to challenge thinking at the highest level in those countries, and we should take them. I know how much those countries value the financial support and expertise that come from the UK and DFID, and we should not hold back from challenging Governments at the highest level on such issues.

The Government response rightly states:

“A decision to withhold funding to Gavi or the Global Fund would have a significant impact in developing countries”.

Although I am sympathetic to the Government’s caution, can the Minister satisfy the Committee that he intends to make progress in this area? Progress is vital and should not be seen as an optional extra. We should ensure that we take a tough line with Governments who are unwilling to take responsibility for the long-term health of their populations.

We also have a duty to take a tough line not only in-country, but in our country. That is critical. The Chair of the Committee touched on this, but we need to ensure that our people are made aware of the remarkable work done by DFID and representatives across the world, so that there is a greater degree of support than at present. The debate on the 0.7% Bill showed that there is a strong and vocal, but perhaps small group of people who are critical of what DFID is doing. One only has to look at the amount of private donations made to appeals to see how much the people of this country support what DFID is doing on international development. However, we need to spend some time focusing on that work to ensure not only that we challenge other Governments to take up the responsibility of communicating the importance of that work to their inhabitants and residents, but that we do the same here at home.

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”?

International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Fiona Bruce Excerpts

Friday 12th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

Britain should rightly be proud of being the first G8 country to reach the internationally agreed target of 0.7% of GNI expenditure on development support for the poorest countries on earth. In one respect—perhaps only one, in this debate—my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) and I are not that far apart. It is not reaching the target that counts, nor even legislating for it, although I am proud to be a sponsor of this Bill, supported across the parties as it is. What is achieved with UK taxpayers’ money to transform the lives of the poorest people on earth is what really counts.

The point on which I would take issue with my hon. Friend concerns the transformation that our DFID programme is making. It is securing schooling for 11 million children, more than we educate in this country, at 2.5% of the cost. It is providing 43 million with safe drinking water and improved sanitation and vaccinating more children against preventable diseases than there are people in the whole of the UK. Every one of the people helped is an individual: a mother, a father or a child with loved ones and with hopes and dreams just like ours. That was brought home to me many years ago in Tanzania, as was how comparatively rich we are in one of the richest countries on earth. In this country, we spend more on uneaten food that we throw away than our entire aid budget: does that not put into context the words of this debate’s detractors?

On that trip to Tanzania many years ago it was brought home to me that these people are not just statistics but individuals. I was invited to the home of the headmaster of the school that British people are supporting and I was shocked that he, his wife and his five children did not live in a house. They lived in a container, their meagre belongings hung up in plastic bags from hooks on the ceiling. Their furniture was merely a few mattresses, stacked up against the wall during the day to make space, and one chair. They had no bathroom or kitchen; their toilet was a communal latrine and their kitchen a charcoal fire on the edge of the road. He was the headmaster of a school.

I will never forget the lovely smiling face of their 15-year-old son, Sam. My son Sam—my oldest son, as this was their oldest boy—was with me, and he was not quite 15. The difference between that 15-year-old boy and my son is that a short time later that boy was dead. He had died of malaria. There was no treatment available. Addressing such needs—need is the basis of UK aid provision—is, quite simply, morally and compassionately the right thing to do. In an era of huge inequalities across the world and global communication, we cannot say that we do not know of the acute deprivation other people suffer. We cannot pass by on the other side and that is why legislating in this regard is so important.

I believe that as we promote the Bill the majority of UK taxpayers are with us. Younger people certainly are. We need only to consider how generously they respond to disaster relief requests. A child is vaccinated every two seconds through the work of this nation and a child’s life saved every—[Interruption.]

Job Creation: Developing Countries

Fiona Bruce Excerpts

Tuesday 24th June 2014 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Hollobone. It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship. I would like to draw attention to my various entries in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. The debate is about supporting job creation in developing countries and much of my working life has been spent in that area, so it is inevitable that I have some interests to declare.

Last week, the Select Committee on International Development visited Sierra Leone and Liberia. In both countries, we had the honour of meeting the President. Both, without prompting, listed unemployment, particularly among young people, as something they needed to tackle, and tackle quickly. They see the need particularly clearly because of their recent experience of terrible civil wars that were fuelled by the resentment of people who had no real income, felt divorced from any development taking place in the country and saw an elite disconnected from the needs of the population. As a result, they are both determined to do whatever they can to avoid that situation arising again. As the UN says in another context: create more jobs or risk unrest.

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

I commend my hon. Friend and colleague on the International Development Committee for his dedication to this subject and for bringing forward this debate. Does he agree that in Rwanda we now see a genuine example of job creation, growth and stability, which has come out of a very traumatic period for that country, proving that that can indeed happen?

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. She is absolutely right. Of course, in Rwanda people would say that they have much further to go. They want to concentrate on developing the skills of their population, and in particular young people. They are looking at, for instance, the IT sector, because Rwanda is a landlocked country without large natural resources, apart from its own people and the beauty of its landscape. As I said, my hon. Friend is absolutely right.

High levels of unemployment or underemployment, especially among young people, are a problem in most countries in the world. When we ourselves have a youth unemployment rate approaching 20%, we recognise that this is a shared problem and there may well be—in fact, there should be—shared solutions. It is estimated that 1 billion additional jobs will be needed in the next decade for those who are currently out of work and those who will be coming into work over that time. Throughout my remarks, I shall use the word “job” to include self-employment and work in the informal sector, particularly in agriculture.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Lefroy]

My hon. Friend and the hon. Member for Upper Bann (David Simpson) have obviously read my notes in advance—either that or they are most prophetic—because I will come on to that subject in a moment.

Jobs, in the widest possible sense, will need to bring in more than merely an income on which people can barely survive. The World Bank has set two goals for 2030: to eliminate absolute poverty, which is vital, and to promote inclusive growth by concentrating on the lowest-income 40% in each country. I commend the World Bank president, Dr Jim Yong Kim, on his relentless focus on that. He sees that we must not only eliminate absolute poverty, vital though that is, but raise the living standards of everybody, particularly those at the lowest end of the income scale.

[Fiona Bruce]

My hon. Friend is being generous in giving way so much. Does he agree that one way to raise the living standards of the poorest is to ensure that women in some of the poorest communities in Africa have the opportunity to develop businesses and access finance, even if only small amounts of finance? All the evidence shows that when women are given such an opportunity, the benefits of their businesses are returned to their local communities and are exponential.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I will say a little more about that. It is vital that those benefits are spread throughout the community. Let us not forget that since the International Development (Gender Equality) Bill, which was introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash), received Royal Assent a couple of months ago, Britain’s international development work must now show equality towards men and women, boys and girls.

Work at subsistence level may take someone out of destitution, but it will not bring inclusive growth. That is not to say that subsistence work is pointless, but we must aim higher. As the head of the International Monetary Fund, Madame Christine Lagarde, has said, in far too many countries the benefits of growth are being enjoyed by far too few people. There are ways in which we can help to counteract that, and the Department for International Development does so. One way is to promote fair trade, which began in agriculture but has spread through a number of industries, most recently the garment industry. DFID has done some excellent work in Bangladesh on labour standards among garment workers, together with the British companies that those companies supply. As my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) has said, it is vital that such work extends throughout the community, particularly to women. As she rightly says, they will probably reinvest the most back into their communities, because they see that as the best safeguard for their children and families.

Let me set out briefly how I believe we can support developing countries to create the jobs that they and we need—our economies are increasingly interrelated. The UK continues to run a large trade deficit, and one of our best hopes for dealing with that lies in trading with developing countries as they grow. I will start by setting out something that I take for granted: a stable and secure state and an economy that is relatively open to the private sector are essential, given that 90% of jobs in the developing world are created in the private sector. Work to improve security and economic governance helps to develop an environment in which jobs can be created. DFID is doing a tremendous amount of work in that area, and I commend it on that. However, I will not dwell on that, because it is the subject of another debate.

A large number of the 1 billion jobs that are needed will, at least initially, be in the informal and agricultural sectors. In 2018, 63% of jobs in developing countries are forecast to be in agriculture still, which will represent a fall of only 8% since 2000. Industry will account for 10% and services for 27%. That is why I believe that one of the most important ways of supporting job creation in developing countries is to teach business skills at school. If most students will be earning their living in some form of self-employment, whether in agriculture or informal sector services, it makes sense to give them the right tools.

Last week in Liberia I met graduates and teachers of the Be the Change academy from Paynesville. Along with David Woollcombe, one of the founders of the organisation, I met Zuo Taylor, who runs the academy’s operation in Liberia, and some young British volunteers who were there as mentors and supporters on the programme, which was exclusively for young business women. I met two young women who had just finished the course, Manjee Williams and Mattee Freeman, who both had businesses already, one as a hairdresser and the other as a caterer. Both said not only that the training and support they had received would help them to organise and run their businesses in a more professional way, but that it had enabled them to consider giving work to others. The caterer already employed several other people—six, I believe—and planned to employ many more.

I believe it is vital to teach self-employment skills not only in schools in the developing world, but right here in the UK. That is done, and it is often done well, but it is supplementary to the curriculum rather than an integral part of it.

[Fiona Bruce]

My hon. Friend and I have experience of teaching business skills, in Rwanda and Burundi. Does he agree that there is an enormous hunger on the part of those who are in business or starting up a business in Africa to learn such skills? Does he also agree that there is a real opportunity, which we need to highlight, for those who have been in business in this country to help to mentor and support growing businesses in Africa, whether by travelling there or by using electronic communication? We must focus on that and encourage it much more.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and it has been a great privilege and pleasure to share that work with her over the past few years. I reiterate that I believe such work to be essential for the UK as well. It is not simply a matter for developing countries. As I have said, we must learn from some of the work going on elsewhere in the world, and I believe we must integrate that sort of business education into our schools. We are not talking about sophisticated business education; we are talking about basic skills that are relevant to the self-employed or those in the informal sector. Many of our young people who are at school will end up being self-employed or working in the informal sector; that is true more than ever in the modern economy. We need to give them those skills, not just through excellent programmes such as Young Enterprise—I am proud to support that programme in my constituency, and I have no doubt that several colleagues do likewise—but as a core part of our curriculum.

One might argue that such training has little relevance to someone involved in small-scale agriculture, but I absolutely disagree. I have seen many examples of how farmers who have just a small amount of land can, using business acumen, create vibrant businesses that are based on agriculture, but go beyond it into activities such as food processing, retail and feed manufacture.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. Such events are vital. The more connection we have with markets in the developing world, the more we can trade and invest—both ways, these days—and the closer our relationship, the better. That is why I welcome DFID’s focus on livelihoods and on bringing in British business. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State took British businesses to Tanzania to help with development work in that country through enterprise. That is absolutely vital.

My hon. Friend the Member for Reading West (Alok Sharma) has already mentioned finance. Once someone wishes to start a business, or take a business on to the next stage, they soon find that the next obstacle is finance. Banks provide very little credit to businesses other than those that are well established and fairly large. One might think that that is a familiar refrain even in this country, but what is true of this country is far truer of developing countries, where it is almost impossible for anyone other than a fairly well established, medium to large-sized business to obtain much credit from banks. There are various reasons for that. Bank overheads are high, which means that minimum loans are often far greater than the loan required by a business because the banks need to generate enough income from the loan to sustain their overheads. Bank salaries in some developing countries are not far short of bank salaries in this country, certainly at branch level.

In my experience, banks are also reluctant to lend without substantial security, which is often worth far more than the value of the loan—perhaps 200% of its value. Indeed, central bank rules in some countries may make that compulsory, so any business that does not have a lot of additional security to offer against a particular loan is almost shut out of the market.

Additionally, in countries where the Government run a substantial deficit and dominate bank borrowing, it is often safest and simplest for banks to buy Government bonds. As we learned last week, until recently that was the case in Sierra Leone, where Government bonds were offering something like 30%, well above the rate of depreciation, so it was easiest and simplest for the banks to sit back, buy Government bonds and watch the money come in. There was no need to take the risk of lending to small or even medium-sized businesses.

Of course, there are many good initiatives that assist the provision of finance to businesses in developing countries, although at the moment those initiatives provide just a fraction of what is necessary. Microfinance has been around for some time; although people tend to think of it as more about lending for consumption, microfinance has increasingly been involved in lending to micro and small enterprises—MSEs—as well as for personal consumption, which I am glad to see. This morning I was speaking to the chief executive of a microfinance bank based in Botswana that has operations all over sub-Saharan Africa and is now entering the MSE market.

[Fiona Bruce]

My hon. Friend may remember that we visited the Women’s Initiative for Self Empowerment, the establishment for microfinance in Bujumbura. The initiative informed us that, because of the personal relationship between the women who borrow small amounts of money and the administrators of the lending, the default rate is very low. Should that not encourage us to look further at such microfinance organisations, and perhaps to encourage them through DFID?

[Jeremy Lefroy]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The default rate is often lower in such organisations, which rely on a substantial element of trust, as well as on prudent lending and investigation of borrowers. We have seen that default rates of less than 5%, considerably lower than some banks take, are common. Default rates are sometimes as low as 2% in such organisations.

There is also internet-based lending, which is increasing substantially. We see that in this country with peer-to-peer lending, but there are also organisations such as Kiva and Lend with Care, which is run by the charity CARE International. Such lenders typically provide very small loans in which donors from across the world can invest as little as £20 or £30 in loans to MSEs. Such is the power of technology these days that they are able to run such schemes without extremely large overheads.

Furthermore, there are initiatives such as DFID’s programme in Pakistan in which local banks, as we saw, were given a guarantee by DFID so that they could lend to businesses. That means that DFID does not have to do the lending itself, but, as the risk is taken out of the lending, a local bank is able to lend to businesses to which it would not otherwise have lent.

In this case, I believe the guarantee of some £10 million, if I remember rightly, was not drawn on at all, which shows it was an excellent example of lending at no cost to the British taxpayer, with the British taxpayer giving a guarantee. Banks will still carry out the same degree of due diligence, but the guarantee gives them a bit of extra confidence to go and lend to businesses to which they would not otherwise have lent. The key in all those areas is to find cost-effective ways of reducing risk so that financial institutions are prepared to lend, or investors are prepared to commit equity, to a project.

I will mention one particular fund because I have personal experience of being an investor in a company that took advantage of it some years ago. The Africa Enterprise Challenge Fund was set up under the previous Government, with substantial funding from DFID—I believe that DFID currently funds more than 50% of the entire fund. The fund focuses on investments of which the primary beneficiaries are people earning less than $2 a day. Those people may be suppliers to a business or consumers who now have access to a reliable source of seeds or fertiliser, for instance. The fund matches the entrepreneur’s investment up to a certain amount. In Sierra Leone, we visited a chicken farm that is expanding production through support from the AECF. One of the new investments was a modern feed mill that will not only improve the quality of feed, and hence chickens, which have hitherto been imported, but provide a regular customer for many small farmers from whom maize and other crops are purchased.

The AECF effectively acts as a catalyst, and its various funds now total more than $200 million. I have said in the past in the House that I believe that the AECF should provide less in the form of outright grants and more as returnable capital, loans or equity, which can be reused to help other businesses. I am glad to see in the latest figures that just over half the funds advanced by the AECF have been loans, and I encourage it further to increase that proportion because the more it does, the more that can be recycled in to other businesses. If a business is successful, it is right that those who have helped it—in this case, the British taxpayer and taxpayers from other countries that contribute to the fund—should share in that success.

I now come to the point well made by the hon. Member for Upper Bann. Without adequate infrastructure, it is almost impossible for businesses to grow and reach their potential. I recall visiting a road project in the Democratic Republic of Congo near Bukavu with the International Development Committee. The project was substantially funded by DFID, and the road was connecting Bukavu with a town several hundred kilometres away that had been cut off from the rest of the world for some 20 years. That town is not small, and people travelled from there to Bukavu, one of the major population centres of the Democratic Republic of Congo, with great difficulty.

We travelled on the first 60 km to be completed, and people told us that it now takes just two hours for people, generally women, to bring their produce to market in Bukavu, whereas previously it had been a five-day walk carrying produce, in which time a lot of the produce probably would have gone off and become unsalable. The road project is a clear example of rural infrastructure that directly benefits farmers and the rural poor and creates jobs in the widest possible sense. There are many other examples, but that is the clearest example I have seen in which so much difference has been made in such a short space of time.

We heard that Sierra Leone and Liberia have some of the highest electricity prices in the world. That is extraordinary in countries where income is so low. Capacity is another issue. There are many countries in which the entire generating capacity is a fraction of the 900 MW output of Rugeley power station in my county of Staffordshire. As far as I know, Rwanda has less than 500 MW of output, and we were told that Sierra Leone has less than 100 MW of output, although it is currently building more capacity. Those substantial countries have electricity supplies on which a medium-sized town in the UK would not be able to survive. Without electricity, business clearly cannot flourish, and jobs cannot be created. Of course people can buy generators, but as anyone who has ever run a generator will know, the cost is prohibitive and adds enormously to the cost of doing business.

One final infrastructure issue is ports, which are a hindrance in many countries instead of an asset. We can see how, for countries that have invested in ports and run excellent ones, they become an entire competitive advantage in themselves; I think of Singapore, which has become a hub of trade in the far east and globally. Almost anything going in that direction transits through Singapore. I think of one or two ports in the middle east that have been developed into enormous entrepôts. Earlier still, the classic example in Europe is Rotterdam, through which effectively everything transited. We lost a lot of trade to Rotterdam because we were not fast enough in developing our own ports here in the UK, although that has been reversed to some extent since.

There are a number of problems with ports, not least corruption. I have personally experienced the problems with theft and corruption in ports, but it is clear that many ports are simply too small: they need more quays and they need dredging. The difference that better ports can make to job creation and business is enormous, particularly for landlocked countries. Many countries in sub-Saharan Africa are landlocked. In order to give them access to markets, the countries that house ports have a business opportunity, but also a responsibility, to make those ports as efficient as possible. It is estimated that sub-Saharan Africa needs a minimum of $100 billion a year for its infrastructure, and that the whole of Asia needs perhaps $1 trillion. Given that total overseas development assistance is less than $150 billion a year, it is clear that such investment can be done only through Government and private financing.

That is where initiatives such as the Private Infrastructure Development Group come in. Today I checked the results of that initiative, which was set up by the previous Government and continues under this one. The 2012 report stated that 39 projects were operational at the time, employing about 200,000 men and women in their construction and operation and providing services to 97.6 million people. Every $1 contributed by members through the PIDG facility—I am proud to say that the UK is by far the biggest donor—mobilises $39 in finance from other sources for projects. That is a tremendously effective use of money. Even if we take some of the figures with a little scepticism, as I always do, we would have to be extremely sceptical not to acknowledge that that is good value for taxpayers’ money in terms of the return created and the jobs generated.

I will come to the end of my remarks fairly shortly, but I will touch on a few areas that I believe are extremely important to supporting job creation in developing countries. The first is agriculture. We have already heard how many people are employed in agriculture in developing countries, but what must we do to make it work for them so that it is much more than just a subsistence livelihood? We need to help them invest in productivity. I have spoken about productivity before, as have others in other debates, so I will not go into it in great detail, but the issue is about processing, both on-farm—much is lost through poor processing—and post-farm, when raw food is made into finished products that can be sold. Post-farm processing creates a tremendous number of jobs. When we were in Afghanistan, we noted that many raw products from Afghanistan were going to Pakistan for processing and then coming back to Afghanistan in processed form, so we encouraged Afghanistan to invest in its food processing facilities.

Marketing is also important, as are land rights, which come up time and again. Land rights are essential to developing an economy. We have mentioned on a number of occasions the excellent DFID programme in Rwanda in which some 10 million plots of land were given titles, meaning that people have security over their land and can invest in it. They are therefore able not only to borrow against it but to gain additional productivity from it.

Green jobs are also relevant, and not only to the UK and developed countries; they are important in developing countries, because they link sustainability and growth. I was pleased to see that one of the more recent infrastructure projects funded through PIDG was a solar farm in Rwanda. Sometimes one wonders whether solar farms built in the UK are of much use, although I am glad to say that, over the weekend, I was able to have a couple of baths from the hot water solar panel on the roof of my house, even in Staffordshire. However, in countries such as Rwanda that have the benefit of the sun, it is great to see projects such as solar farms being developed to provide low-cost electricity for tens of thousands of homes.

Another way of encouraging job creation that might seem slightly difficult, particularly to those of us on this side of the House, is tax creation. You might share with me, Mr Hollobone, a scepticism about whether collecting taxes can create jobs, but I believe that it does, as long as it is done fairly and rationally. There are a number of reasons why. First, it creates a level playing field. Many countries that I have seen have an arbitrary way of collecting taxes. For various reasons that I will not discuss, some businesses are let off paying the whole amount and others are penalised, perhaps because they are more honest. A proper tax collection system should be neutral. It should enable everybody to flourish in the right way, paying what one would hope is a fairly low rate of tax while contributing to the benefit of everybody.

Secondly, taxes fund security and good governance. As we said at the beginning of this debate, without good governance and good security, business cannot be conducted. Finally, taxes fund public services. To refer again to the remarks made at the beginning, education is absolutely critical to the success of business, as is a health system in which people are looked after so they do not get sick with malaria every other week and go missing from work or, if they are self-employed, end up destitute because they simply cannot get out into the fields.

I have not attempted to do more than provide a brief overview of what I see as the most important areas in which job creation in developing countries can be supported. I have spent most of my working life trying to support it; I remember that when I first went to Tanzania, the business that employed me had about 20 employees. My ambition was that it should have 100 employees after four years, and we succeeded. We had some ups and downs afterwards, but by and large, that was my biggest source of satisfaction: not necessarily the bottom line, but the fact that more and more people—hundreds and hundreds—could get a livelihood from the kind of work in which we were involved.

The stakes could not be higher. If we solve this, we will solve so much else in terms of peace, security, development, the elimination of poverty, and shared prosperity for both developing countries and, as I have said, for ourselves. It is not beyond us, with committed and visionary leadership.

Violence Against Women and Girls

Fiona Bruce Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

Like most hon. Members, I want to focus on one aspect of violence against women and girls: female genital mutilation. I believe that our concern reflects that of the public, and that was brought home to me when I was asked to do several media interviews following the publication of our Committee’s report, because every one of them focused on concern about FGM in this country. I believe that once people become aware of the issue, they want resources allocated to address it. I welcome the prioritisation that DFID is giving FGM by providing £35 million towards the ambitious aspiration of ending it in a generation. I want to touch on the practice here and abroad, and to update Members on one or two statistics that have been published since the Committee published its report. I will finish by asking the Minister some questions.

As we have heard, a terrifying number of girls are affected—140 million. According to UNICEF, 98% of women and girls in Somalia are affected. In Guinea, 96% are affected; in Egypt, 91%; in Eritrea, 89%; in Sierra Leone, 88%; in Ethiopia, 74%; in Sudan, 88%; in Gambia, 76%; and in Burkina Faso, 76%. The practice also occurs in many countries outside Africa, so it is a truly global problem. In recent decades, the practice has grown significantly among the migrant communities of north America, Scandinavia, Europe and the UK.

Our Committee was shocked to receive statistics for this country from the Department of Health. A 2007 report indicated that about 66,000 women and girls in the UK had undergone FGM and that more than 20,000 girls aged under 15 were at risk. However, those figures may well have been a gross underestimate. I had the privilege of sponsoring the launch in the House this week of a report from the New Culture Forum. That report extrapolated figures from the 2011 census data, whereas the figures that I cited were from the 2001 census. The number of women and girls living with FGM from migrant communities is highly likely to have increased over those years. It is now estimated that the figures could be about three times those that the Committee received, meaning that about 170,000 could have undergone FGM, and about 65,000 girls aged 13 and under could be at risk of mutilation.

The New Culture Forum report also includes thought-provoking comments, one of which is the frequently made statement that it is now almost 30 years since legislation was enacted to outlaw the practice—the Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act 1985—yet

“not a single successful prosecution has been brought against FGM practitioners.”

It is interesting to note that we are behind Kenya in that respect, as it has brought at least three successful prosecutions. As has been mentioned, France has brought many more. However, it is not only 30 years since legislation prohibiting the practice was enacted, because legislation relevant to it actually goes back as far as 1861, as what is happening is grievous bodily harm. It is child sexual abuse of the worst possible nature, so we really must do all that we can to break down what the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has called a “wall of silence” that is inhibiting prosecutions in this country.

We need to ensure that professionals in the field, including criminal prosecutors and health care practitioners, receive adequate training, and that there is engagement and education within FGM-practising communities. As many Members have said, FGM is a cultural practice that has to be changed.

There is a difficultly with compiling evidence. Only this week, we heard that hospitals are failing to report FGM as they should, because

“161 hospitals that responded to a Freedom of Information request, 83 said that they did not formally record FGM cases.”

That has to change. This week we heard that the chief inspector of constabulary, Tom Winsor, was reported as saying:

“Police are never called by certain minority communities because they administer their own justice even in cases as serious as…sexual assaults on children.”

That also has to change.

The most important factor in inhibiting action is excessive cultural sensitivity, which is simply a reluctance to combat the practice of FGM for fear of appearing reactionary or prejudiced. The profound irony is that that perspective generates a discrimination of its own as the victims remain unprotected precisely because of their race. It is interesting that the Council of Europe has clearly dismissed arguments of political correctness, stating:

“It is a matter of urgency to make a distinction between the need to tolerate and protect minority cultures and turning a blind eye to customs that amount to torture and inhuman or barbaric treatment”

of this type.

As a French lawyer said at the event that I was privileged to sponsor this week, “You cannot use the excuse, ‘It’s their culture.’ Torture is not culture.”

In most cases, parents and/or grandparents—the very people a child would expect to provide them with protection—are present at the act, and it is often conducted at their instigation. It is heart-rending to hear some of the recordings of a child crying out, “Mummy, Mummy” during the act. This is not only about all the physical damage that we have heard of today, as the psychological and mental damage that the children—they are often aged between six and 12—suffer cannot be calculated.

I turn to several questions to which I would like the Minister to respond. First, although our Committee welcomes DFID’s announcement of £35 million for a programme to end FGM in a generation, if that aspiration is to be met, the funding needs to be invested sensitively and carefully. I remind the Minister of the Committee’s recommendation of adopting a “phased and flexible” approach to ensure that evidence-based programming is conducted. Will she update us on progress with regard to the use of that £35 million to tackle FGM worldwide?

Secondly, will the Minister confirm reports of how the Metropolitan police are approaching the issue? I understand that they have reopened some FGM cases. How confident is the Minister that that will lead to a prosecution in this country? It is clear that we need to put aside political correctness and adopt a far more robust, cross-agency approach in which the police proactively track girls at risk. Our Committee has recommended the publication of an up-to-date, binding document requiring all health service providers, the Department of Health, the Department for Education, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Home Office, the Government Equalities Office, the police, the Ministry of Justice and the Crown Prosecution Service to play their part. Will she look again at that? Is it not the case that unless we have joined-up working, we will not be able to tackle FGM in this country? Even more so, unless we have international joined-up working, and learn from good practice and success in other countries, we will not achieve our global aspiration. This massive challenge requires joint working by as many agencies as possible.

The Committee noted that the Government disagreed with our report’s recommendation that a cross-Whitehall strategy for tackling FGM should be published, as they said that they already had an action plan in place. Why, as the Prime Minister himself admitted earlier this month, do we therefore still lack results on stamping out this practice in the UK? During our inquiry, we discovered that there was no consistent data collection on FGM in the NHS. Will the Minister assure us that the Government will start collecting information routinely about at-risk babies and girls, and that that information will be used to take action?

We welcome the action already taken by DFID and its financial commitment. However, we highlight in particular that although robust action must be taken, it needs to be culturally applicable and there has to be joint working, both within and outside the UK.