Sustainable Development Goals

Grant Shapps Excerpts

Tuesday 16th June 2015 Westminster Hall

[The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Grant Shapps)]

It is fantastic to see you back in the Chair, Mr Turner, and a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I congratulate the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) on securing this debate, right up front at the beginning of this Parliament, on an issue about which I know he is passionate and has a great deal of knowledge and expertise through the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund and through the incredible Scotland-Malawi partnership, which runs incredibly deep. As the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) also mentioned, it is threaded through everything that goes on in international development in Scotland.

I was in East Kilbride only last week and, as the hon. Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen) will be pleased to hear, I will no doubt be going to the Welsh Assembly soon. One thing that I discovered there was that—I think I have these numbers right—some 157 primary schools in Scotland have direct links with Malawi, as do more than 900 different non-governmental and similar organisations and 47% of Scots. That is absolutely extraordinary, impressive and commendable, and we will seek to replicate it in other important areas of development during this Parliament.

This is a fantastic debate to have, and it has been good-natured, with some extremely important points raised. I will pick up on some of them. The hon. Member for Glasgow North mentioned the principle of dignity on behalf of some NGOs. The UK Government support the concept of dignity in development; it is absolutely right, and we welcome the Secretary-General’s report on dignity. He makes the intelligent point that prosperity and dignity, while allied, are not exactly the same thing.

As the new guy to this subject, I know this is the most fascinating topic that the Government have to deal with—perhaps only we in this Chamber know that. As the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) said, the number of people living on $1.25 a day, although falling, is not yet down where we need it. However, it is interesting that people are now living for a decade longer than they were in the 1960s, even though their income is not necessarily higher. Also, more children are going to school now. Whereas in the 1960s, only half the kids of primary age went to school, now 90% of children in the world go to school. The world is somehow getting better without prosperity necessarily rising, although we want to see that, too. However, dignity is absolutely key to this process and the hon. Member for Glasgow North is right to raise it as an issue.

The hon. Gentleman asked a direct question about the representation at the summit on sustainable development goals; the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire also referred to that. I assure both hon. Members that although the summit is in September—so still a little way away—and the exact composition of the delegations is still being worked through, I heard what they said and I will reflect on it.

There was a rather transient comment, which is none the less important to respond to, about what on earth having Trident does for supporting development goals. The answer is, quite simply, that it has prevented the world from getting into all sorts of trouble in the last 60 or so years. I will say no more about that now, but I believe that being on the Earth is an important objective in itself, rather than our being entirely wiped out.

The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby made some excellent points, including about the cross-governmental nature of the Department for International Development’s position. I can reassure him by saying that I absolutely know for certain that the Secretary of State for International Development regularly attends the National Security Council; I can put his mind at rest on that. Indeed, one or two people touched on cross-Government working. The level of cross-Government working at DFID is the most impressive of any Department that I have been involved or been a Minister in, or have seen operating.

I think the hon. Member for Ynys Môn asked about DFID working with the Department of Energy and Climate Change on the climate change agenda for international development. Again, the Secretaries of State for both those Departments, and the Ministers in them, including me, all work incredibly closely across government on that agenda.

DFID is different from other Departments. It does not have a role in writing to the Home Affairs Committee to seek collective agreement on policy in the same way that the Home Office, or another domestic Department, has. However, I assure the hon. Gentleman that that absolute tie-in with other Departments, many of which have a strong role in and relationship with international development—indeed, they spend some of their budget on international development—is not missing. They include DECC, the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and so on. There is a very close tie-in between Departments and international development.

My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Stephen Phillips) made an excellent speech, which included the absolutely correct observation about the extraordinary fact that there are 17 goals and 169 targets. Those numbers are rather unwieldy, but the zero base document starts to get to grips with them. I think the document comes up with nine principles, which will be easier for people to understand. However, we are where we are with this whole process, and I do not think that anyone believes that we should go back to square one and start again; it is important that we push forward. However, our goals need to have a sense of clarity, and some of the suggestions made in this debate can play an important role in achieving that.

My hon. and learned Friend was particularly exercised by the healthcare systems in countries such as Sierra Leone and by their inability to respond to the Ebola outbreak and its consequences. I want to reassure him by saying that the UK’s chief medical officer will now work with the World Health Organisation—as my hon. and learned Friend said, WHO’s difficulties, given the tools that it had available to it, were rightly pointed out by all who saw its performance—to develop a new and more advanced system to share data on disease spread on the ground. The CMO will also work with health agencies, doctors and nurses on the front line. We, as a Government, absolutely intend to make certain that the lessons are learned from what happened in Sierra Leone and elsewhere, so that we do not allow the shortcomings that existed to become problems in any future outbreak of a different disease.

My hon. and learned Friend also zeroed in on corruption and he was absolutely right to do so. Anyone who has listened to the Prime Minister talking passionately about what he calls the “golden threads” will know that having secure institutions that work on behalf of a population, rather than against it, is absolutely critical to any sense of international development. We will simply make no progress without those institutions. Anyone who has read the book, “Why Nations Fail”, will know that it is one of the inspirations for the golden threads. I think that those “golden threads” are absolutely embedded in target 3.8—no, sorry that is on universal health care, so I will have to find the exact target for my hon. and learned Friend. It is actually goal 16, which is to

“Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels”.

I hope that will reassure him.

[Stephen Phillips]

The Independent Commission for Aid Impact produced a report in November 2014 that stressed that this area of corruption was one that DFID was not concentrating on and needed to; the report raised a number of red flags. Will my right hon. Friend give an undertaking to the House that he will go and look at that report, to see whether those issues are now being dealt with?

[Grant Shapps]

Yes, I am pleased to give my hon. and learned Friend that undertaking.

I will quickly move on to the energy questions that were put by the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire. She made very sensible points. I am absolutely amazed that 1.2 billion people in the world do not have any energy in their own homes. In a world where the price of solar is tumbling, batteries are becoming more available and micropayments are available in developing countries— for example, through the British-inspired M-Pesa system— there is no reason to allow that situation to continue. I intend to spend my time in DFID particularly focusing on bringing energy to domestic housing situations, and I hope that hon. Members from all parties will join me in that work.

In Tanzania, I met a woman called Elizabeth who can now power three light-bulbs and charge her mobile phone from a tiny solar panel on her roof that is no bigger than a sheet of A4. That has changed her life; it saves her money on kerosene, and we should spread that practice to all the 1.2 billion people in the world who do not have such energy.

I disagreed with the hon. Lady when she said that somehow consumerism in the west is to blame for the situation. I do not think that is the case, but I fear that, because time is running out, I will not be able to have a longer and more interesting debate about that point.

The hon. Member for Ynys Môn talked about joined-up thinking, which I think I have covered, in addition to the visits that I have made to East Kilbride.

The hon. Gentleman and the hon. Members for Glasgow North and for Central Ayrshire will be interested to hear that I am going to Malawi next week, where I will do everything I can to push our relationship with Malawi and indeed learn from it.

Finally, I thank the hon. Member for Luton South (Mr Shuker) for welcoming me to my position. I can tell him that we have very strong plans. On inequality, for example, the UK is committed to an agenda that will end extreme poverty and build on prosperity for all. I can reassure him on that, as indeed I can on the language about climate change, where the goal is to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts, as a crucial part of our framework.

I would like to spend more time satisfying the hon. Gentleman about the issues he raised, but I know that there are only a couple of minutes left for the hon. Member for Glasgow North to respond to the debate.