International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill
Gordon Brown Excerpts(10 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Gordon Brown (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (Lab)
Let me first thank the former Minister, the right hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Michael Moore), for introducing this important Bill. Let me say, too, that all Members deserve thanks for the way this country has met the target of contributing 0.7% of our national income in aid over these last few years. I hope the background to this debate is that we wish to keep the promises we have made for the future.
Anyone who goes to the children’s museum in Rwanda will see a photograph of a young boy called David. Below that photograph, people will see a number of words that summarise the problem that we have and are dealing with. It says only a few things about the life of this young boy: “David, age 10; favourite sport, football; favourite hobby, making people laugh; ambition, to be a doctor.” Then it says: “Death by mutilation; last words, ‘the United Nations are coming to help us’”. That young boy in his innocence and his idealism believed that the international community was coming to his aid. He believed that what we had said about what we would do in a genocide would lead to action. He believed that when we made promises, we in the international community would keep them. It is to our shame that that young boy died, believing that help would come when it never did.
Now it is too late to keep our promises to that young boy David, but what we are talking about today is how we keep the promises we have made as a country and as an international community. What we are talking about is whether the parties that signed pledges during the last few years—the coalition agreement contained those pledges—are prepared to uphold these pledges, which said specifically that the 0.7% target would be legislated for and put on the statute book by this House and by the House of Lords.
We have not even recently kept the promises that we made in another area. “Why have you abandoned us?”—the five words that a young girl from Syria said to me when she was pleading for help for her country and her family, now that she was exiled in Lebanon. That young girl had been forced out of her home in Homs, her family had been forced into exile and her disabled sister had been forced out on to the streets. She was now in a shack in Lebanon. Yes, she wanted food; yes, she wanted shelter; and yes, she wanted medicine for her sister, but she said to me that she also wanted to go to school. She thought she might be able to go to the schools in Lebanon, and she asked us whether we could make international aid available so that she and other exiled refugees could do that.
The Lebanon Government—I appreciate that the Minister of State, the right hon. Member for New Forest West (Mr Swayne) has just been there—offered to help. They said they would do a double-shift system in the schools by opening up the schools in the evenings so that young people from Syria would have the chance of being educated after the Lebanese children had had their own education earlier in the day. We devised a plan that would cost $200 million and would enable nearly 500,000 children to go to school. That is $4 a week per child—a cost-effective way of getting children back into school.
The British Government have put up money—I thank the Secretary of State for International Development, who is in her place today, for that—as have other Governments, but the brute fact is that 300,000 of these 500,000 children who could go to school are not able to do so because the international aid community has refused to put up enough money to make it possible. While we have achieved $100 million of the $200 million target, we have not been able realise the simple matter of providing $4 a week to get a child into education in Lebanon. It is not because there are no schools for them to go; it is not because we are ignorant of the plight; it is not because there are not enough people willing to help and make it possible: it is because there is a need for international aid, and that aid has not yet been met.
Sir Edward Leigh
The right hon. Gentleman makes a very powerful emotional argument, which we can all understand and support. He will be aware, however, that serious academic studies, not least by the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee and the Centre for Global Development, question the effectiveness of this target. For instance, they say that
“the speed of the planned increase risks reducing the quality, value for money and accountability of the aid programme”,
and
“the right amount of aid for poor countries should not be based on the size of rich economies but on the needs of a particular poor country itself.”
Will the right hon. Gentleman reply to those serious academic arguments?
Mr Brown
First of all, I have to say to the hon. Gentleman that his party made a promise, and it is a duty of a party that makes a promise to try to keep it, to do what the party said and to legislate in law. The problem we face with the general public is that we make promises, but the public still do not trust us to keep them. That is why it is important that this debate leads to action and results. As for the cost-effectiveness of aid, let me provide the hon. Gentleman with another example, and then others might like to enter the debate.
I have recently been to Juba, the capital of South Sudan, the newest country in the world, which is trying to move forward. I went to a village school just outside Juba and I asked the women there—young mothers, many of whom had been child brides at the age of 12 or 13—what they wanted most. Of course, as I said about those in Syria and Lebanon, they needed food, protection, shelter and security, as they were in the midst of the threats and violence that come whenever there is a civil war, but they also said that what they wanted was education for their children.
I went to a small village hut school just outside Juba that was serving that village. There were 20 young children in that very small, one-hut school. What I remember seeing was 100 children outside the school looking in through a portal—one small window in this hut of a school—at something that they could not have because there were only 20 places for a village of hundreds of people.
The plan was drawn up for $200 million to be spent on educating the children of South Sudan. Only a third of children are at school and there are only about 60 girls in the final year of secondary education. The plan cost $4 a week—$200 a year—for these children to get education. The problem was not the willingness of the Government to do it or that there were no plans to do it; the problem was that nobody in the international community was able to come up with the extra $100 million—for a cost-effective project that, at $4 a week, nobody could doubt would be worth the money—despite efforts by this Government and others. Nobody in the international community was able to bring together the $200 million that might have brought children to school.
If anybody is in any doubt about other services, let me say this about education. Education unlocks the future. Education unlocks opportunity. The reason why we can cut child mortality and maternal mortality is that the death rate for educated people and educated mothers is half that of others. If anybody is in any doubt about what education has been able to do, there are 400,000 children who have been brought into school as a result of the aid budget of this Government and the previous Governments, in a way that did not happen before 2000.
Mr Gray
We are, as the right hon. Gentleman correctly says, spending 0.7% now and not achieving the various things that he has listed. We all support international aid—of course we do; there is no question about that at all. The question is simply whether there is any advantage in writing the figure of 0.7% into the law of the land. If so, why should we do that for children around the world when we do not do it for British children with cancer, for example?
Mr Brown
We can talk about other areas of policy, but let me remind the House that every party made a promise. Every party debated and discussed this, and every party decided that they would legislate so that aid was a requirement at 0.7% and that the Government would honour that, so the hon. Gentleman is saying to his own party that it made a mistake in doing so. If that is his view, let him have the debate with his own party.
Let me respond to the point about cost-effective aid. I do not think the hon. Gentleman knows this figure, but the average amount of aid for education—I will come to health in a minute—for a sub-Saharan African child, in all the poorest countries of Africa, from the international aid agencies, Britain and America, put together is $13 a year per child. We spend £5,000 a year on the education of a child in Britain. The average amount of aid for a child in Africa, at $13, is barely enough to pay for a second-hand textbook, and he is somehow suggesting that this is not cost-effective and is too much.
Nadhim Zahawi
If we take a leadership position on this and enshrine it in law and then other countries follow suit, would that not also give the NGOs working on the ground much more clarity and predictability on spending and planning for smart aid for all the good causes that the right hon. Gentleman talks about?
Mr Brown
The hon. Gentleman puts absolutely the right argument, which I will now come to. By legislating in this House, we could be a catalyst for other countries to do more. We would be in a position for the long term to say to countries and Governments who are not spending enough domestically on education, health and anti-poverty programmes that we will match whatever extra money they give over a longer period of time. We would be giving certainty to our aid budget for many years ahead. It seems to me that those who are protesting today also ignore the fact that on average we spend only about £1.50 per child—all aid agencies put together—on the vaccination programme in Africa.
Philip Davies
I am grateful; it is good to hear the right hon. Gentleman being so shameless about promises when he broke one on the Lisbon treaty.
On the point that if we spent 0.7% of our GNI on aid, every other country would follow us, how is it that as we have increased our aid budget, other countries have reduced the proportion they spend on aid? Is it not the case that they are using our increased spending as an excuse to reduce theirs? The right hon. Gentleman is giving the CND argument of the 1980s that if we were to get rid of our nuclear weapons, every other country would follow.
Mr Brown
We know we are on a filibuster when a Conservative Member starts mentioning the Lisbon treaty and then mentions CND in the 1980s.
Why does the hon. Gentleman not get to the heart of the issue? Let us take one country—Sierra Leone: one health worker for every 5,000 people; the UK: one to 77. Sierra Leone has 100 doctors for a population that is bigger than Scotland’s, and 200 nurses and 100 midwives. Do we say as a result of that that the small amount of aid we give—the $12 per person for education and the $50 per person for health in sub-Saharan Africa—is too much? Do we say that it is too generous or too wasteful?
Let us project into the future. We know that this has been a summer of conflict—six wars around the world—and a summer of carnage for children. When we have 1.5 million child refugees displaced from Syria, with refugees in Iraq, Gaza, the Central African Republic and also South Sudan, how can we possibly justify not making a law that suggests that the small amounts of money that are given by the international community, which can make an absolutely huge difference, should continue? My claim is based not just on the success of what we have done and the enormity of what we still have to do, but on the cost-effectiveness of most of the aid that I see delivered by DFID and many other aid Departments round the world.
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)
The right hon. Gentleman is speaking with great authority. Having been in Jordan just last month and seen the schools operating there, partly funded by us, I do not think anybody can doubt the necessity of what continuity and sustainability of funding brings to education for those displaced people. On health, Ethiopia was the first place I ever visited as a Member of Parliament, where I learnt the shocking statistic that there were more Ethiopian doctors in New York than in the whole of Ethiopia. Do we not need to ensure the continuity and sustainability of aid, so that we build up a force of professionals who can stay in those countries to bring the health, education and business development that they so desperately need and with which this Bill can help?
Mr Brown
The hon. Gentleman makes the argument for a long-term commitment to aid—for building up the capacity of health care systems in those countries; for encouraging them to invest for the long term; and for paying the doctors sufficient salaries in those countries so that they stay in them. Does he not also make a point that Government Members who oppose what we are doing should listen to—that if we can be a catalyst for other countries, if we can make a long-term commitment to aid and if we can honour our promises, we have a chance, as a large country, of influencing the rest of the international community?
Mr Brown
I am going to move on and finish so that other people can speak.
Is this Parliament really prepared to send the message to the rest of the world that, after 40 years of fighting to reach the 0.7% target—it was 0.27% in 1997; we moved it to 0.3% by 2000, then to 0.4%, to 0.5% by 2006, and to 0.6% by 2010, and then, to the credit of the coalition Government, to 0.7% by 2013—and all this time spent climbing to the top of the mountain and reaching this elevated view, we are going to slide down again by making no commitment in law that in future we will meet the targets we have set?
Mr O'Brien
I just want to reinforce the point about the predictability of funding. In support of the right hon. Gentleman’s argument, we are privileged that we can now see the impact of this policy, which proves that this is worthwhile spending and very efficient, not least when we look at malaria, in which I know he has been seriously engaged, and it goes above all politics and across this House. We have managed to reduce the number of deaths in sub-Saharan Africa from malaria over the last 18 months from 2 million down to 672,000. What more proof do we need about the predictability of funding?
Mr Brown
I apologise; I should have allowed the former Minister to intervene earlier, and I congratulate him on the work he did. He makes a very big point, which in my view is also an answer to the point made by the Scottish National party. Without bringing politics into this, it is absolutely clear that the only reason we were able to secure debt relief of $200 billion, which meant that about 20 to 30 countries were able to spend money on health, education and anti-poverty programmes, where they were previously spending it on interest, is because we had the power of the large countries coming together in the G7 which were forced to make a decision that other countries were prepared to follow. If Britain had not proposed that at the G7—Scotland could not, as an independent country, have been at the G7—and if the big countries had not got together, we would never have achieved the $200 billion reduction in debt as a result. We have said that aid is cost-effective. I am suggesting that aid can also be thought of as long-term by building the capacity for the future.
I am saying that we can be a catalyst for other countries, but I also want to say one thing in conclusion. It is said that we can survive for 40 days without food, for eight days without water and for eight minutes without air, but we cannot survive for a minute without hope, and this debate is also about hope.
A friend of mine was at an international conference in Africa and she was making the point, which perhaps we would all have been tempted to make, that aid is not about pity; it is about empathy. It is not just about having sympathy for people; it is about helping people, because we think the same way as they do about their responsibilities to each other. She said that people would do everything for their children. But after her talk someone quietly took her aside and said one of the most devastating things I think I have ever heard. He said, “I can’t love my children as much as you love yours in the west. I can’t allow myself to, because then it would destroy me when I lose them.”
How can we continue to live in a world where in a country such as Ethiopia families did not register the births of their children for months because of the fear that they were going to die in their infancy—where a father or a mother can say that they cannot love their child too much because of the fear that they are going to lose them? How can we live, therefore, in a world where there is not hope and expectation that things could get better?
Let our debate today be a message that there can be hope for the future, enshrined in law. Let us ensure that we can say that to millions of people who thought things were hopeless and that we not only kept our promises, but we kept hope alive.
Syrian Refugees (Schooling)
Gordon Brown Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Gordon Brown (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (Lab)
If any one of us were to visit the children’s section of the museum commemorating the genocide that happened in Rwanda, we would immediately be drawn to a picture of a young boy called David. The words that describe what happened to that boy are very brief indeed, and the biographical details are sparse, but they say, “David, aged 10; favourite sport, football; pastime, making people laugh; ambition, to be a doctor; death, by torture; last words, ‘The United Nations are coming to help us.’” That young boy, in his idealism and innocence, believed that the world would honour the promise that it had made to help people such as him in times of need and desperate difficulty. His story, and the words that he said to his mother before he tragically died, have influenced me a great deal over the years.
As I look at the situation that is emerging in Syria, those words come back to me, and they did so particularly when I heard a young teenage girl in Syria issuing a plea to the world with the words, “Why have you abandoned us?” That young girl had been made homeless in her city of Homs. Her father, mother and sister—her disabled sister was in a wheelchair—were pushed out on to the streets, and her school had been bombed. She was without shelter, without accommodation, without food and, of course, without a return to schooling. That young girl issued a plea in a letter to me in which she said that she had been a champion at chess, she had been a leader of her youth group, and she had sung with her church choir. Now, she said, she had lost not only her school and her home, but she had lost hope. She said:
“Everything is lost. I feel like I should show you so you will believe me.”
That young girl dreamed of continuing her education despite the chaos, and by good fortune linking her up to a great charity in Britain, she is now studying in a college in the United Kingdom. She dreams that one day she will go back to Syria and use the skills that she is learning in service of her country.
But there are today 3 million girls and boys like her who are now the victims of the civil war in Syria, displaced from their homes in what is now a disaster of biblical proportions. It is officially, as you know, Madam Deputy Speaker, already the biggest humanitarian tragedy since the second world war. Some years from now the world will look back on what happened and wonder why we did so little, faced with a catastrophe that has made more people permanently homeless than the world’s most recent natural disasters, from the Asian tsunami of 2004 to the Haiti earthquake of 2010.
We know that, historically, children are the innocent but often forgotten victims of conflict, and that children need to be able think of a future ahead of them. They need to be able to dream. They need to have hope, and the best way to deliver that hope and to give them the future that is essential for them, is somehow to enable them to return to school: children, like the seven and eight-year-olds whom I have read about and heard of who have never been at school; children who are now in their teens and will never finish their education; young girls who are now being trafficked in Lebanon and in other parts of the region, who dream of a future that is violence free.
In this debate—I am grateful that the Minister is here to reply to it and that he had a meeting with me yesterday about these issues—I do not want to focus on the diplomatic complexities of the region, nor do I want to speculate on the foreign policy considerations that I know are involved. I am not here to do anything other than to acknowledge the Government’s £1 billion contribution to Syrian aid; to appreciate their recent announcement of £100 million of extra aid at the Kuwait pledging conference; to thank the Secretary of State in her absence for the £6 million that has been given to Lebanon for books for Syrian and Lebanese children. But I am here to join 50 international development agencies and departments from around the world, all known for their humanitarian work, which have today made an urgent appeal to Governments about an emergency that can be addressed by a very specific plan that they are asking this Government and other Governments now to support.
Tomorrow, the Minister—to whom we should be grateful —will be able to meet the Prime Minister of Lebanon. He is the Prime Minister of a troubled, divided country, bleeding from the biggest inflow of refugees, who now form one quarter of the population of his country. His plea is not only for more food, more shelter, more medical care for girls and boys and for adults, but, because he knows too that these young children need more than food, more than shelter, more than health care, his is an appeal that their right as children to have an education, even in these troubled times, be upheld, and be upheld during the crisis as long as it lasts.
I want to ask the Government today to accept and to contribute to what I believe is the most innovative plan that has so far been developed, by UNICEF and UNHCR, to provide education, not for a few hundred or a few thousand, but for 435,000 Syrian refugee children who are now located in Lebanon but who now are not at school, and without this plan may never be at school. The plan that I want to address today is one that will support the biggest number of pupils ever helped in an education conflict zone. I believe it could be up and running within weeks and months, not years. I believe I can show that it is cost-effective and affordable, and I believe that it establishes a principle that just as the Red Cross established a right to health care 150 years ago when it moved into war zones and said that health should be a right of people even in these troubled areas, so too the right to education can exist across borders and even when children are located and caught and sometimes trapped in areas of conflict.
Let us look at the figures we are dealing with. Today, of the 3 million children who have been displaced in and from Syria, 1 million have had to flee their country, and almost half of them are in beleaguered Lebanon. Those children are the subject of the call today by the 50 anti-poverty advocacy groups that—this is the slogan—“education cannot wait.” On best estimates, those child refugees are likely to spend at least 10 years away from their homes, in camps, temporary shelters or elsewhere.
However, if we adopted the plan submitted to the Government several weeks ago, which has been compiled by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and UNICEF, as many as 435,000 of those children could get to school, and it could happen quickly, as I have said, because the plan is beautiful in its simplicity. It would put existing Lebanese schools on double shifts, offering one set of classes by day and one set in the evenings. Thus, all the 435,000 refugee children, who are spread across the country in about 1,500 locations, rather than concentrated in one place, could be offered the chance of schooling. Because we would be using existing classrooms and would thus be spared the expense of building new schools, the annual cost would be an astonishing £5 a week per pupil, or $8, which is $400 a year.
The money, as I think the Minister knows, would go to five separate projects that are part of the Education without Borders initiative: 80,000 children would be in the schools; 100,000 would be catered for by non-governmental organisations and the Government in joint projects; 175,000 would be catered for in NGO-led projects—many of the NGOs that have signed the missive to the Government and other Governments are part of that—and at the same time 40,000 children would be in nursery schools, so that they could start school at age three; and 35,000 15 to 18-year-olds, many of whom may have missed out on education over the past three years because of the conflict, would be given skills and the chance to get jobs. It is a figure that offers almost every refugee child in Lebanon the chance to enrol in schooling and the hope of the better future that goes with it.
Proof that the double shift system is working, albeit on a smaller scale, can be found in a north Lebanese village called Akroum. In a unique effort, we have volunteer Syrian teachers, local Lebanese school heads and a small Scottish charity called Edinburgh Direct Aid operating the local school there, in what they call a timeshare, outside normal school hours to give those refugees the chance to be taught, this time in Arabic. Almost immediately, boys and girls who had fled from burnt-down and bombed schools, and who only a few weeks ago had been, in some cases, child labourers and even beggars, have started to recover their lost childhood and now have hope that there is something to live for. What has been achieved on that small scale in that village on the border with Syria can now be achieved at speed for 435,000 Syrian refugees, if we urgently adopt this plan.
My frustration, and the reason I called this debate, with the permission of Mr Speaker, is that that idea was conceived nine months ago. It was negotiated with the Lebanese Prime Minister six months ago—we have met, had talks and agreed the plan. It has been subject to two in-depth reports: one by the respected Overseas Development Institute, a British charity working in that area; and the other by UNICEF, with the UNHCR. It is now sitting on a table awaiting implementation while the problem has worsened and while all this winter children, with few exceptions, are walking the streets, some tragically trafficked into prostitution and some even forced into early marriage as child brides. That is why, for three reasons, I urge the Minister to be positive in his response today and to tell me not only that he supports in principle the plan being put forward by all the different agencies and led by UNICEF, but that the Government will contribute to it in the way that others have done.
First, since we started on this exercise, 300,000 more people have moved into Lebanon. In the past nine months, 150,000 children have been added to the list of those in need, and that number is growing at about 5,000 a week. If we do not act now, the problem will simply get worse. I think the Minister is aware of the politics of Lebanon, where in a divided country there is a huge dispute as to whether—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
That was a mere procedural necessity. I call Mr Gordon Brown; the right hon. Gentleman has the Floor.
Mr Brown
After 30 years in this House, Madam Deputy Speaker, there are still procedures that I did not know. It is also very good to speak to a relatively empty House because there is not much opposition to what I say.
I was saying that, first, this is urgent and the Government should act because the problem is getting worse. Secondly, the Lebanese Prime Minister, as the Minister will particularly recognise after he meets him tomorrow, has sold this plan to a divided population, some of whom would want to throw out the Syrian refugees and some of whom would want to deny them any help. The Prime Minister is now asking why so much of the world has yet to support this humanitarian plan. One of the reasons why action is urgent is that his Ministers are risking their lives every day while his Government struggle to hold together around a plan that he has personally championed—and that I believe the Minister will wish to support.
The third reason why I think the Minister will want to respond positively, as I hope he does, is that other countries want to be part of this initiative and want to help. The United States of America, Norway, Denmark, the European Union, the United Arab Emirates and other countries, one or two of which will announce tomorrow that they are giving money, are committed to providing finance for this plan, and a consensus is growing in favour of it. It is money that will not be wasted and, as I can tell the Daily Mail, it is money that will be well spent. Given the International Development Secretary’s own personal commitment to the “no lost generation” plan, which is about helping children in all the different areas of the region, I want her to put her weight behind this plan as part of her own initiative.
I know from my own experience as a father that every single child is precious, every single child is unique, and every single child is special. That means that, if we can do something about it, every single child deserves the chance to fulfil their talents, to make the most of their potential, and to bridge the gap between what they are and what they have it in themselves to become. We have the chance to make that opportunity possible for not just a few but several hundred thousand children in this troubled region.
Given that the Minister and I agree that the Government have made a general commitment to this region and that we both appreciate that the sums announced at Kuwait include money that could be devoted this project, I hope that he will be able specifically to address the UNHCR-UNICEF plan. I think it is common ground that the Government have done a huge amount in this region and that they wish to do more on education for children, particularly for girls. However, what we need to agree on today—I hope the Minister will play his part in contributing to this—is that when we have an innovative plan, when we have the support of the Lebanese Government, who would find it difficult in normal circumstances to finance anything that is now happening with Syrian refugees, and when we have international aid agencies in support of this plan and prepared to unite around it, it would be a mistake for us to delay any longer in providing this urgent support that is needed in an emergency. It is needed for children like the girl I mentioned who are losing hope because, despite all our efforts, they do not feel that we are reaching their needs and those of their fellow children—boys and girls like them. I hope the Minister can respond positively to the desire not just that this plan be supported but that it be properly financed.