Ebola Outbreak: DRC

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Monday 20th May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

That, of course, is the central question. Our colleagues in public health conduct an analysis on a real-time basis and publish every two weeks their view of the risk to the United Kingdom. They publish the risk of vectors of transmission that they are aware of. They look at the fact that eastern DRC is a relatively remote area, with no direct flights to the United Kingdom, and there is a very limited number of people from the diaspora community of eastern DRC in Britain. However, if Ebola continues to spread, that fortnightly update will change. The current negligible risk could move up, which is why we need to watch this very closely. If it were to move to Uganda, two factors would come into play. Uganda has a better public health system, so it should be able to trace contact to contact and contain Ebola more rapidly, but there is the risk of the direct flights to the United Kingdom, so we need to keep the House updated very closely on that. At the moment, I think their assessment is correct. However, should the situation change, our assessment will need to change.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden), for their very measured and detailed statements and replies. May I ask the Secretary of State about the situation in Goma? As far as we know, there are no cases in Goma at the moment, but it is a very large population centre. It seems, from the information I have, that it is not well prepared. Should the disease reach Goma, that could have extremely dangerous consequences. Goma is home to large numbers of refugees, as my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell) pointed out.

[Rory Stewart]

In terms of the worst-case scenarios we are looking at, Goma is a very serious situation. Butembo, as I explained to the House, has a population of 1 million. Goma is far larger. It is a considerable urban settlement and a major trading port right across to Rwanda. It would not be possible to vaccinate everybody in Goma. There are simply more millions of people than we have vaccines to insert. It is therefore very, very important that we contain the outbreak by ring-vaccination around the area of Butembo. If it moves to Goma, we will have to move to a totally different stage of response, so we must do all we can to prevent that happening.

World Immunisation Week

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Thursday 2nd May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Dan Carden]

I agree with my hon. Friend. This is absolutely critical, and our discussion shows the importance of raising awareness in such debates.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is making some extremely good points. Does he agree that it is also important to be positive and show the huge impact of past vaccination programmes? In the 1940s, diphtheria killed 3,500 children a year in the UK, but it now kills approximately zero. Showing what has happened in the past and how beneficial it has been for our children will, combined obviously with other measures that the hon. Gentleman has referred to, give us the confidence that vaccination is indeed the way forward to protect our children.

[Dan Carden]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, and the figures in graphs and elsewhere in documentation show the remarkable impact that vaccinations have had. We must carry that story forward.

We know from this experience how vital universal public services are for ensuring that everyone in society, regardless of their income, can realise their right to a healthy life. The Labour party founded our national health service. We are today, like then, committed to a health service that is that publicly owned and publicly run and with universal access. Universal health systems are the building block for everything else: without them we cannot reach full immunisation coverage; without them we cannot protect all the population against the national security threat of disease; without them we cannot reach the poorest and most marginalised in society with the care they need; and without them we cannot invest properly in the health of everyone equally, or deliver the fullest benefit for our society or our economy. And crucially, without universal public health systems, countries cannot fight the soaring inequality that now exists the world over.

There is no greater public asset here in the UK than the NHS, and so too around the world people value and look to the founding principle of the UK’s NHS: health care available to all, regardless of wealth. And so I want to briefly mention two important commitments that the Opposition have made to how we would deliver aid and development differently.

Aid is, or at least should be, delivered on the basis of poverty reduction. The Labour party has committed to a second, dual goal—to use aid to tackle inequality, too—and we know there is no better way of bringing about greater equality than universal public services in health, education and other key services. It is a tragedy that while we have our national health service—our own best-loved institution—created by the post-war Labour Government, this Government sometimes use UK aid to export to developing countries the kind of botched privatisation models that have done so much damage in the UK in recent years, instead of helping those countries to secure their own universal public health services.

I have a simple message: as DFID Secretary I would use UK aid to work alongside communities and civil society groups across the global south who are fighting for their own universal public services, and I would use DFID’s resources to work in partnership with their Governments to build and strengthen them.

World Immunisation Week is a chance to celebrate the work being done to protect people from vaccine-preventable diseases and to highlight the challenges ahead and the collective action needed. This international awareness week promotes the core message that the immunisation of every child is vital to prevent diseases and protect life. Immunisations are one of the most successful and cost-effective global health interventions of our time. Delivering immunisations gives all of us in this House, as custodians of the UK’s important position as a leader in global health, the simple, remarkable ability to save countless lives.

[Alistair Burt (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to welcome my very good friend the Secretary of State for International Development to his new role. We all know what a tremendous background he brings to this role, with vast international experience beyond the majority of us, and we all know the dedication he has put into his previous ministerial roles, and we are certain that we will see this reflected in what he does with international development. I am delighted to see him in his place. I am also delighted by the further progress of his predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt), who is now Secretary of State for Defence. She did a terrific job at DFID, and I am really pleased to see her in a post for which I think she has always been destined, bearing in mind her background. She will do a great job there. It was a great pleasure to work with her.

Not unusually for me, I find myself largely in agreement with the speeches that have been made from both sides of the House. I should like to say little bit about a topic for which I had responsibility in the Department until relatively recently and to offer thanks to colleagues who have been so effective on this and who will give great support to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for International Development.

First, a personal word: as some hon. Members know, I have a very personal connection with vaccination, which I never fail to bring out. My dad, who is watching this debate courtesy of the great medium of television, is a doctor. When I was a small boy, it was his responsibility as my doctor to provide me with polio jabs. In the old days in the United Kingdom, we provided jabs for polio, not sugar lumps. Yes, I am that old. As my dad knows, we are talking serious needles; not the sort of thing that children get these days. These were really serious needles that bubbled away in the steriliser in the corner of the surgery, and they absolutely terrified this small boy. My dad had to chase me round his room. I would hide under the desk, eventually I would be brought out to see all the things that were meant to entertain me as he put the needle in. Then he did it. The lesson I learned from that was that if my dad, who loves me very much, could inflict a degree of pain on his crying little boy, there had to be a really, really good reason for it. And of course there was. Like the grandfather of the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden), I was spared polio, as were the vast majority of my generation and subsequent generations, because of that vaccination. That first early introduction to vaccination and needles, and the visits with my dad to hospitals that I thoroughly resented for many years—until I did a stint at the Department of Health—have stayed with me, so vaccination matters to me. It is an important thing.

My father subsequently got involved with Rotary International, and any discussion of vaccination and global health has to include a mention of the contribution that Rotary has made to the near-eradication of polio. The United Kingdom remains absolutely supportive of that policy, and we must not get so close to the line but then fail to drive it over. The contribution of Rotary International and its members in this country must always be recognised, and we should thank them most sincerely.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I would like to pay tribute to Rotary as well. I remember when my family was living in Tanzania and my daughter was born there, she was vaccinated against polio through a programme sponsored and funded by Rotary International, as were millions of other children in that part of the world. Rotary deserves huge credit for what it has done, and I thank the Rotary clubs across the United Kingdom for the money they have raised for that programme.

[Alistair Burt]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who speaks for all of us in the House in thanking Rotary.

I also want to thank one or two more people while I am on my feet. The first is the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford), the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on vaccinations for all, who will no doubt speak later in the debate. She makes a tremendous contribution on these matters in the House on all available occasions. I also want to thank Danny Graymore, who heads up the global funds team and is our senior DFID rep in Geneva, for all the work that he puts into this, as well as the team of colleagues in DFID who work so hard on this. I offer my deep appreciation to them for all that they have provided for me in the last couple of years.

I also want to thank Gavi’s chief executive, Seth Berkley, who does a remarkable job, and Henrietta Fore at UNICEF and her team in the UK. They do a tremendous job in vaccinating and in providing the vaccines and the basis for what both Front-Bench speakers have talked about. UNICEF vaccinates half the world’s children and saves 3 million lives a year. Since Gavi came into existence, it has vaccinated some 700 million children and 10 million lives have been saved, for the reasons that have been set out. We could not do without them.

Nor could we do without the health workers who are out there doing their job but, as those on both Front Benches have mentioned, they are under increasing threat. A specific example is Pakistan, where work is being done on polio. There has been a string of attacks in recent years, with seven policemen being killed in Karachi recently while trying to protect polio workers. In February 2015, four kidnapped polio workers were found dead near Qetta. In June 2015, 15 were killed by a suicide bomb outside a polio vaccination centre. Four were killed in 2014 in Qetta, and in 2012, five were killed in Karachi and Peshawar. This is not just about the threat of intimidation to health workers in different parts of the world; it does actually result in their injury and death. We in this country should always remember what it is like in some of those places. We should remember how important those people consider their work to be and why they consider it to be of such benefit to their communities that they would take such extraordinary risks.

I am proud of the part that the United Kingdom plays in Gavi, the global vaccine alliance. It brings together the private and public sectors in a shared goal of creating equal access to new and underused vaccines for children in the world’s poorest areas. It has strategic goals, which are all of importance to the United Kingdom and illustrate why we support it. The first is to ensure equitable uptake and coverage of vaccination. The second is to ensure effectiveness and efficiency as part of a strengthened health system. The third is to be part of the sustainability of a national vaccine programme.

At this point, I want to comment on what the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton said about DFID’s role in health systems abroad. This cannot all be done purely through the support of public sector health systems. The combination of private and public in health is absolutely vital, but he can be reassured that the determination of the UK Government and DFID is to strengthen universal healthcare systems. Money and support for healthcare must go into that, but there is a combination of public and private, as was made clear at a meeting with UNICEF in New York in September. It is a partnership, but this does not contradict the fundamental principle on which I am sure the hon. Gentleman and I are united.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that state co-ordination is sometimes needed, but that there are different systems? If we look at Zambia, we see that the Churches provide tremendous health coverage throughout the country, but they do so in co-ordination with the state so that everybody knows, as far as is possible, that they have coverage locally. Clearly, they have a long way to go, but they do a tremendous job in co-operation with the Government there.

[Alistair Burt]

Absolutely, and I think that that is the model to take forward for the development of healthcare systems. We need to bear in mind the nature of that relationship, because it will be absolutely key.

I am proud of the United Kingdom’s support for Gavi. We are its largest donor, and we are

“currently responsible for 25% of its budget. The UK has committed £1.44 billion to Gavi from 2016 to 2020, including funding to its innovative finance mechanisms. This investment fully delivers on the UK commitment to immunise 76 million children and save 1.4 million lives by 2020.”

I am grateful to the team for the briefing it gave me for the meeting with the all-party group, which I have kept. Credit where it is due: that was a quote from the Department’s own briefing. The replenishment conference is coming up. There was very little I could say about that when I was a Minister, but speaking from the Back Benches, I can say to the Secretary of State that I am sure we will sort it out and I hope he will be really, really generous. He can be absolutely sure that I will be on his tail if we do not make a serious commitment to Gavi, because it really delivers. Seth Berkley delivers for us, and the visit to Bognor Regis in the past few months when he saw the work being done here was really important. I hope the Secretary of State will bear that in mind.

Vaccination does more than the obvious function of preventing diseases in children. Its background, not only in the health system but in the development of countries, is fundamental. A healthy child goes to school, is able to learn, and grows into a productive adult. Unless that basis for immunisation is clear, so much development work is stymied right at the beginning. Immunisation is part of a sustainable, integrated health system. The reckoning is that the overall impact is that every £1 spent on immunisation leads to a £16 saving in terms of subsequent health care bills and people’s inability to interact effectively in the community.

Before I deal with the threats, I want to remind the House of what this is all about, and I will talk briefly about measles, because measles outbreaks have suddenly returned in recent times. The tendency in the United Kingdom is to accept measles as a rudimentary childhood suffering that is easy to go through, so the misery of measles is forgotten. A recent piece in Forbes Magazine talked about the problems of anti-vaccination and included a quote from Roald Dahl. His oldest daughter, Olivia, died of measles in 1962 at the age of seven, and the article quotes his words:

“one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything. ‘Are you feeling all right?’ I asked her. ‘I feel all sleepy,’ she said. In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead. The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her.”

That is how real it is. When we talk about vaccination and take on those who are concerned about it, that is the reason.

Measles has largely died out in the United Kingdom, but it is coming back in different places, and it will come back here unless we challenge it. The United States declared measles eliminated in 2000, but there have been 695 cases this year, mostly concentrated in three outbreaks and mostly concentrated in small tightly knit communities. The rise in measles cases in both the developing world and the developed world is really frightening, and it must be challenged.

When I was first made aware of the rising figures, I had a discussion with my ministerial team about how to deal with it. I have to say that I was pretty gung-ho and thought, “We’ve really got to take this on aggressively.” The team, to their credit, tried to scale me down from that, saying, “There are different reasons for the threat to vaccination, and you need to handle them differently.” That was good advice, and my sense is that the challenges are as follows. The first is the straightforward matter of incomplete coverage—the millions of children who do not currently get vaccinated. Gavi needs to look at where it is developing its resources, but it is committed to go to the poorest areas, and we need to keep that up. We need to deal with the areas where coverage is not great, but there are other threats, too.

We can divide anti-vaccination into several categories. First, there are religious reasons. I am unaware of any tenet in any major religion that suggests that vaccination is inherently wrong. It is quite the reverse. As a practising Christian, I believe that one of the revelations of God has been to give us the skills to discern what harms us and what helps us. That is where science and medicine come in, and vaccination is part of that. We have been given the skills to be able to help our God-given children and keep them healthy.

No major religion contradicts that, but sects in various religious denominations are against it. When we do get an outbreak, such as in an Orthodox Jewish community in New York, it runs around quickly. The United States has seen recent outbreaks in the Orthodox Jewish community, among Slavic migrants, in the Amish community in Ohio and the Somali community in Minnesota, because measles spreads quickly in a small, closed group and then it affects anyone else they come into contact with outside who has not been immunised. The United Kingdom should urgently work with religious leaders worldwide and say, “Please make a declaration to ensure that none of your leaders—none of those who promote a faith under your auspices—are in any way in any doubt about the value and importance of vaccination and say that there is no religious tenet against it.”

Oral Answers to Questions

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Wednesday 12th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green]

The right hon. Lady is right to identify the issue of energy prices, and I am sure she will welcome the announcement in the Queen’s Speech that the Government will

“ensure fairer markets for consumers”

and that

“this will include bringing forward measures to help tackle unfair practices in the energy market to help reduce energy bills.”

I am sure this is an issue on which we can work across the House together.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

Q2. Mr Speaker, yesterday you kindly hosted two important talks on the future of health and social care, and their funding, including one by my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston). My right hon. Friend the First Secretary knows that the NHS in Staffordshire and Stoke is delivering fine care, but under great financial pressure, in common with other parts of the country. May I encourage the Government to bring together people from across this House to make this Parliament the one that puts the NHS and social care on a firm and sustainable foundation?

[Damian Green]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that. I know he has been campaigning vigorously on behalf of health services in his constituency, including his local hospital, and he is absolutely right to do so. I am sure we both welcome the fact that the Government have committed an extra £8 billion over this Parliament to the NHS, and we are also committed to having a full debate, across the House, and much more widely with people, about how we can improve our social care system, because this is indeed one of the big issues facing this country.

Humanitarian Situation in Mosul

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Wednesday 12th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy); he can be the author of the brevity textbook.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

I pay tribute to the Iraqi security forces and the British armed forces for their work. Will the Secretary of State update us on another humanitarian threat to the people of Mosul, namely the Mosul dam, which is in an incredibly dangerous condition and, being upstream of Mosul, threatens the city?

[Priti Patel]

That is a very serious situation and, again, we are working on stabilisation and are making every effort to provide the support required in that area. We will continue to do that; this is an ongoing situation. We are not only monitoring it but are being very active in the support that we can give.

Tackling Infectious Diseases

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Thursday 20th April 2017 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

I congratulate my colleague from the International Development Committee, the hon. Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma), on his comprehensive speech, which covered a huge amount of ground. I also declare my interest as a member of the boards of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and the Innovative Vector Control Consortium, which develops new insecticides to put on bed nets to counter mosquitos, and as chair of the all-party group on malaria and neglected tropical diseases.

I had the honour on Monday this week to chair a meeting in Washington, as chair of the Parliamentary Network on the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, with Madame Christine Lagarde of the IMF and Dr Jim Kim, president of the World Bank. Dr Kim spoke about infectious diseases and the threat posed by them. He pointed out that we had come together as a world with three countries in west Africa—Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone—to tackle Ebola. There was a huge cost of life there, particularly among medical workers, but the co-ordinated action enabled that epidemic to be curtailed; it could have been much worse. He talked also about Zika and the work done on it. He pointed out, too, that a major epidemic of an infectious disease, possibly a flu, which could affect as many as 30 million people resulting in a scale of deaths that we have not seen since Spanish flu in 1919, was perfectly possible and very much on the radar. That illustrates why this debate is so important.

The UK Government have been at the forefront in providing resources for research and development as to tackling infectious diseases and the deployment of those tools in the countries where they are needed, not only in the cases of Ebola and Zika, but, as the hon. Gentleman mentioned, in terms of the rise in the resistance to drugs, particularly for tuberculosis, but also for malaria. Resistance has been growing to the artemisinin-based combination therapy drugs, or ACTs, in south-east Asia, and, as we know, it is always from south-east Asia that resistance grows to malaria drugs; it did for chloroquine and it did for sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, or SP, and now it is for the ACTs. That is where the real threat from malaria lies: if resistance grows there and then crosses to sub-Saharan Africa, we face the prospect of yet another drug becoming less effective. ACTs have played a huge role in cutting the number of deaths from over 1 million in 2000 to less than half a million last year.

The UK Government have played a major role through the funding of, for instance, the Medicines for Malaria Venture and the Innovative Vector Control Consortium, which I mentioned earlier, and I welcome the announcements this week by the Secretary of State on additional funding to combat neglected tropical diseases. I hope some of that funding will go into developing new drugs in the area, because we have shortfalls in the pipeline for tackling some of those diseases; some have very effective existing drugs, but others do not. We must also not forget the role that vaccines play, as the hon. Gentleman also mentioned, in respect of TB.

As the hon. Gentleman made clear, these are not commercial propositions in most cases. They are not drugs that companies can afford to develop on their own; they need the support of Governments and foundations. It is tremendous how Governments and foundations such as Wellcome and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have stepped up, and indeed drugs companies in the case of neglected tropical diseases, where they have provided billions of doses free across the globe in the past 15 to 20 years.

I want to conclude by giving three reasons why we should be concerned about this matter and taking this action. First, that is absolutely the right thing to do: dealing with diseases that affect people across the globe, and not just the poorest people—the 1.5 billion who suffer from neglected tropical diseases and those who suffer from malaria, TB and HIV—but the people in our own countries who suffer from these diseases. Let us not forget that those people are right on our doorstep and in our midst.

Secondly, this is highly cost-effective. A ratio of about 40:1 has been mentioned, and I have seen that in many places. What we spend on international development has to be extremely effective. In many cases, what we spend on research and development and on treating these diseases is pretty much the best buy in international development, which is why I welcome the fact that the UK Government have concentrated more resources on these areas.

Thirdly, the UK is a world leader. That is even more important now that we are coming out of the European Union. We have institutions such as the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Imperial College London, the University of York, the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, the University of Dundee and the University of Aberdeen. Many of our universities across the United Kingdom are world leaders in this area, and it is vital that, as we look to create a more global Britain, we do not neglect those areas in which we are already world leaders. That involves a number of things, such as investment in the form of Government support, primarily through DFID and in cash, but also ensuring that the best scientists such as the young researchers who want to come to this country because of our excellence can continue to do so and will not be blocked.

Let us not forget that researchers are often not well paid. If we set salary-based caps for immigration, we will automatically disqualify some of the brightest minds on the planet from coming here, so let us ensure that that does not happen. If we are to have immigration rules, they should be based on the task and not on the salary. Setting a cap of £30,000, for example, would probably exclude half the PhD and other doctoral posts in this country. This is absolutely critical. We also need to encourage our own researchers to go and work across the globe in collaboration with others. This kind of research is not national; it is international, and it requires the widest possible collaboration.

I want to conclude by thanking my hon. Friend the Minister, who is absolutely committed and who I know will have played a major role in the decision on neglected tropical diseases in the past week. This is something we have been waiting and calling for, and the Government’s announcement has exceeded our expectations. That is tremendous. It is great for the United Kingdom and, above all, for the people who are suffering from neglected tropical diseases.

That comes on top of a range of announcements on malaria, TB and HIV. As we come to the end of this Parliament, I hope that all the manifestos—particularly the Conservative manifesto—will contain a commitment to continue to spend 0.7% of our GDP on international development and a repeat of the commitment to make research and development on infectious diseases and the deployment of those resources a key priority for the new Government.

DFID’s Programme in Nigeria

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Thursday 23rd March 2017 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

I apologise for not being here at the beginning, Sir David. I was participating in the debate in the main Chamber. I am glad to follow the hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Dr Cameron). She has highlighted a lot of the very important issues. I would differ slightly with her on education, but I will come to that.

One thing that struck me more than anything in our visit to Nigeria, which was my first visit to that country, was when we were in Abuja and we visited a refugee camp where the refugees were cared for not by an outside agency or the United Nations, but by Nigerians themselves and by Christian organisations and mosques. The teachers gave up their time, often voluntarily, in a school that was almost in the open. I felt that Nigeria was a hugely self-reliant country, but, as the hon. Lady has said, perhaps the people are sometimes not supported sufficiently by their own Government. Nigerians are hugely entrepreneurial and dynamic people, but I believe they are sometimes a little held back. However, I felt that their caring for their own in the refugee camp in the middle of Abuja, where there were refugees from the north and particularly from Borno state, was a microcosm of what so many Nigerians do for each other across the country.

Education is clearly something for which the Chair of the Committee has a huge passion—as do we all—and he has made it a hallmark of its work. I welcome that. I agree that perhaps aspects of the schools that we visited in Kano surprised us, but other aspects encouraged me. For instance, in the Koranic schools we saw that, almost for the first time, many of the children were learning subjects to which they had not had access before. The curriculums that they were using—which have been largely supported through DFID—were encouraging; they were not, perhaps, the finished article, but they were probably a step forward from what there was before. Clearly, we want much more of an advance. We want girls’ education to be absolutely right; we want them to get the same education as boys. However, it was a step forward.

The other school had something like 13,000 children. It is one of the biggest primary schools in sub-Saharan Africa, if not the biggest, and, again, I felt that progress was being made. We visited a class with disabled children, where an effort was being made on their behalf. Clearly, in comparison with our education system or those of other middle-income countries—Nigeria is, of course, such a country—there are great shortfalls. Nevertheless, improvements are being made, particularly by one of the two education programmes that DFID is running in the north. Progress is being made, and much more could be done, but clearly that is fundamentally an issue for the Nigerian Government. In a country as large as Nigeria, DFID can only really supply technical advice and a little support here and there.

That brings me on to corruption, tax collection and so on. I share the views of the hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow about the anti-corruption building. I was more interested in finding out about the anti-corruption work than I was in seeing a half-finished building in which that work might take place in future. There is little more to be said other than that I hope the building will be finished and that the work that is done in it will have a huge impact. I am not sure that the UK Government should finance the building. We should support the work that goes on there but not the infrastructure.

I was encouraged by the work on health that we heard about through some of our meetings in Abuja. I am the chair of the all-party group on malaria and neglected tropical diseases and I have a particular interest in the area, as does pretty much every Member attending the debate. We heard of the great progress that has been made in reducing the incidence of malaria across Nigeria, which, along with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, still has the largest burden of malaria in the world. We heard particularly of progress in the northern regions—the Sahel region of Nigeria, where there can be intermittent malaria, particularly in the rainy season.

We visited a midwife training school based at the hospital, and the pharmacy there. I was extremely impressed with the pharmacist, who was clearly dedicated to her work to prevent malaria. She contacted me and the all-party group after the visit and said, “I want to do something on World Malaria Day”—which was a month after our visit; “can you help us?” The all-party group agreed to send an amount of money—I think it was about $1,000; and with it the pharmacist co-ordinated a magnificent World Malaria Day event. She invited local people, local government leaders and health leaders, and also managed a mass distribution of bed nets. It was all done voluntarily and it showed the spirit of individual Nigerians—how they really want to work on behalf of their country and people. I very much hope that the same thing will happen again this year, and that our group will support it if it does. For $1,000 I think the impact was substantial, based on the report we received.

It is not only on malaria but on neglected tropical diseases that the work supported by DFID in the north has had a great impact. I believe that that programme is just coming to an end, and I urge DFID to look at supporting a continuation of the work. We know that, if work in areas such as neglected tropical diseases and, indeed, malaria is halted for a while, those diseases can come back. Clearly, we want the Nigerian Government to take up the work on NTDs. In the meantime I should like the Minister’s reassurance that DFID is considering supporting a continuation—perhaps in a different way—of the programme on NTDs in the north of Nigeria. I should declare an interest, in that I am a member of the board of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. I want to make that clear as I know that the school has great engagement in Nigeria and with DFID programmes, although I am not sure in what respects.

The economy in Nigeria has been far too dependent, clearly, on oil in the past decades, but a real effort is being made to expand and diversify it. That has been made necessary by the fall in the price of oil. The hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow rightly mentioned the lack of women in senior positions, and particularly the lack of women Members of Parliament. However, the Finance Minister of Nigeria is a woman, whom we had the pleasure of meeting in Abuja, and who was committed to reform of the Nigerian economy. I should hope that she—and, indeed, her reform-minded, progressive colleagues—would get the fullest possible support from the British Government, whether through DFID or the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, in their efforts to ensure that the economy of Nigeria works for everyone.

I want to touch on the issue of food, food security and famine. We have heard from the Government and from colleagues across the House of the issues in Nigeria and east and central Africa. I welcome the generosity of the British public in supporting the Disasters Emergency Committee appeal for east and central Africa. Perhaps the Minister will outline for us the current situation in Nigeria, as it is a year since we were there. Nigeria has a proud reputation of wanting to help itself to deal with such issues, but I want to find out what the current food security situation is. Our efforts are concentrated on east and central Africa, but we would not want countries in the Sahel—not just Nigeria but Chad, Mali, Niger and others—to miss out on the efforts that are being made. Whether we like it or not, the UK is a leader in the area; particularly given concern about the potential withdrawal of United States funding it would be a problem if areas where the UK is not so prominent fell behind because they are not on our radar. I should appreciate an update from the Minister about that.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development (James Wharton)]

I thank hon. Members for their contributions and the very broad range of issues that they raised. In particular, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham), whose tour de force opening comments covered a broad range of subjects—I hope I have been able to note them down sufficiently to answer her questions. In line with her gentle suggestion, if I fail to address any of her questions, I would of course be delighted to enter into further correspondence or discussion with her, as indeed I always am.

I am going to do my very best to go through the broad range of issues that hon. Members have raised, but I am going to base my comments, in the first instance, on my hon. Friend’s excellent contribution. She asked some specific questions at the end, but also talked in informative and in-depth terms about the Committee’s report and the Government’s response. The hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) spoke in his typically witty and engaging way, and said, in a politically carefully worded phrase, that the Government were partially in agreement. I think that is probably fair. To be partially in agreement is often that for which we should strive in this place. Were he and I to find ourselves completely in agreement, I suspect that either I would be wrong or he would be right—I am not sure which it would be.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire talked about power. I will start there, as the shadow Minister chose to end there. Power sector reform is crucial for Nigeria. I do not need to remind hon. Members that power supply can be a key perquisite for sustainable growth. I am sure they are aware that in early 2016 Nigeria’s power sector supplied an all-time record amount of power, but that since then disruption, and even terrorist activity in some cases, has impacted on its capacity. However, I am pleased to inform the House that supply levels are approaching those of early 2016.

We are clear that reform is needed. It is clear that significant investment is needed in Nigeria’s power system. Over 60% of Nigerians do not have grid connection, which holds back economic growth. Intermittent supply presents real challenges for those who wish for certainty and investment. Reform was necessary. The shadow Minister alluded to the involvement of the occasionally controversial Adam Smith International, which has had its fair share of coverage. We are reviewing some of our relationships with it.

It is important to recognise that there are pluses and minuses to all change. Along with the price increases that have come from privatisation and the removal of some of the artificial subsidy within the power system, fixed charges for those who do not use power have been removed, and the lowest volume users have been protected through reforms that have taken place. Much more needs to be done for the power sector in Nigeria. We need to build on the reforms we have seen and continue to review and improve on changes that have been made. The interest that hon. Members take is welcome.

We have had a wide-ranging discussion about the importance of education. The Girls’ Education Project, which is in phase 3 in Nigeria, is one of the programmes that DFID in the UK supports. As my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire recognised, it has seen reform and improvement and is now an A-graded programme, having had some issues in the past. We are helping more than 23,000 girls to stay in education through small cash transfers, which we discussed in the previous debate and which was raised in particular by the shadow Minister. There is no doubt that a significant amount needs to be done and that education is important in driving change and ensuring that a country such as Nigeria can develop its way out of some of the challenges it faces.

The sixth question asked by my hon. Friend was about sustainable development goal 4, which was also raised by the hon. Members for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Dr Cameron) and for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) and my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy). There is no doubt that there has been insufficient progress to date in Nigeria on education. Access increased by only 4% between 2003 and 2013, and the poorest are even less likely to complete schooling. That is why education is a real focus for DFID in Nigeria and why we have the programmes we have. However, it would be unrealistic not to recognise the scale of the challenge and the fact that more needs to be done and constant scrutiny is required. I welcome the work of the International Development Committee in that space.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

The Minister will know that African countries committed quite a long time ago—I think it was in the early 2000s—in the so-called Abuja declaration to spend 15% of their budgets on health. Indeed, some of them, including Rwanda, have reached that target or are not far short of it. That commitment was made in Nigeria. Does he agree that it would be very welcome if a similar commitment were made by sub-Saharan African countries and other developing countries around the world to spend a specific amount of their budgets on education, which we have seen far less commitment on than health?

[James Wharton]

My hon. Friend makes a relevant and important observation. The long-term sustainability of education in countries such as Nigeria must be founded on Government support and investment. We want to see and encourage more of that. We can offer direct support, as we do now, for those who need to benefit from it. We can offer technical assistance and support in training teachers and establishing curricula. However, for long-term sustainability, domestic Government support is required. My hon. Friend’s suggestion deserves a good airing and consideration, and I suspect we have not heard the last of it.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire mentioned the Chibok girls. That issue caught the attention and imagination, in the most dire of circumstances, of much of the broader global community. It has drawn attention to the terrible conflict in north-east Nigeria and the effect of Boko Haram not only there but in neighbouring countries. I will go on to talk about some of the challenges with the humanitarian response that is required, but specific questions have been asked about the girls by hon. Members, including the hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow. One hundred and ninety-five of them remain to be released, which is a significant number. There are significant challenges in addressing that. Much of north-east Nigeria remains a challenging area in which to operate. Boko Haram is not yet defeated, although there are some signs of progress. The UK provides significant support in that work, including a recent commitment of a further £5 million in funding. We offer and indeed give training to the Nigerian armed forces; more than 20,000 personnel of the armed forces have now received training supported by the UK Government. We must continue to fight radical terrorism in all its guises. Today of all days, I do not need to remind right hon. and hon. Members of that or of the scale of the threat faced by so many people throughout the world. The Chibok girls are a stark and poignant reminder of the scale of the challenge that many countries face.

Many others are of course affected by the conflict in the north-east, Boko Haram and the other challenges there, but I am pleased that we are playing the role we are playing, even though I am not pleased that it has not been possible to make more progress. However, we will continue to focus our efforts in that area and to provide appropriate support that can make a difference in the medium and longer terms.

The humanitarian crisis is a significant one. About 5.1 million people face a severely difficult environment; they face food insecurity. If we take no action, we estimate that somewhere in the region of 90,000 children could die. That is a stark and worrying figure, and one with which the world and the global community must engage. Indeed, I am pleased to recognise that the global community did engage at the recent conference in Oslo and has committed a significant contribution to the amount of funding that is needed: more than $400 million has been committed. More is needed, and we expect more to be committed in due course, but the $1 billion target has none the less not yet been reached.

The Government of Nigeria, however, have made their own commitment to spend $1 billion in the north-east. We recognise that that is a welcome announcement and that it gives the Government of Nigeria an opportunity to present themselves as a true world leader in this space, and Nigeria as a country that is serious about humanitarian issues and about tackling the problems it finds within its own borders. We must encourage them to do so, so their announcement is welcome. We look forward to working with them to ensure that the money materialises and is spent in the right way, so as to have the maximum beneficial impact that it can. I expect we will see further announcements on this over the weeks and months to come.

I thank those right hon. and hon. Members who have taken the time to meet me, whether one to one in recent weeks or at the drop-in session that I held with officials to brief interested Members of this House and the other place on the work of this Government, on the broader situation in north-east Nigeria and on the other famines throughout the globe, in particular in Africa, in what is set to be a very challenging year indeed.

The fifth question of my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire was on strengthening joined-up working across UK Government Departments. In my eight or nine months at the Department for International Development, I have been pleasantly surprised by the extent to which that already takes place. I am keen to drive it further and I have regular discussions with my counterparts in the Department for International Trade and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and have had meetings with Ministers and officials at the Ministry of Defence, to discuss a broad range of issues across the portfolio that I oversee. That has included discussions about the situation in Nigeria. We need to continue to drive cross-Government collaboration, to break down silos and to make a reality of one HMG.

The truth is that, when people look at UK Government engagement, they do not see the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Department for International Development, the Ministry of Defence or whatever it might be; they see the UK Government, the role they play in the world and the contribution that they can make. Together we can make a greater contribution than in our individual departmental parts. I recognise that. It is a message that I reinforce continually to the teams for which I am responsible in DFID. It is an area in which we are making significant progress but, following this debate, I will take the opportunity to continue to push it, because it is one in which we can always do more. The more we can do, the greater the net achievement will be.

Many hon. Members have spoken about health and health systems. I particularly recognise the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford on the importance of tackling malaria. I commend him for the work he does; he supports this area of debate and activity and the work of Government in this area in particular. He is aware of the Support to National Malaria Programme—SuNMaP—in which the UK Government are engaged in Nigeria. That £50 million contribution—the figures underline the importance of our work to tackle malaria on a global scale—aims to reduce the number of children who will die before their fifth birthday from 128 in every 1,000 to 80 in every 1,000 by 2022. Eighty is still far too high, but it underlines the significant threat that malaria in particular poses to so many of the world’s poorest children and to developing nations. It is a disease that we can beat and are committed to beating. I am pleased that this is an area in which, along with the UK’s part in the Global Fund, programmes such as SuNMaP are making such a significant contribution.

My hon. Friend also mentioned neglected tropical diseases—another very important point and one that is not lost on the Secretary of State, who is very keen to pursue further work in the area.

Our programme in Nigeria being our second largest bilateral programme in Africa, it is one in which I take a very keen interest as the responsible Minister. In recent weeks, I have had significant and in-depth discussions with our teams, including in Nigeria, going line by line and component by component through the programmes that DFID supports there and talking about our strategy for the future and where we need to go to have the maximum impact with the money that we spend.

The hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow, in particular, talked about the need for a strategy—the need to see where we can make a long-term difference. I can assure her that that message is not lost on me as the responsible Minister or on our team in country, with whom I have been having those discussions. We expect to see changes as a result of those discussions, but it would perhaps be premature for me to pre-empt now what they might be. However, she is absolutely right to say that we need a ruthless focus on value for money, on where we can make a difference and on the impact that we can have. We need to ensure that we identify those programmes that are working and those that could work better, either change or close programmes and then reinvest to ensure that we get the maximum impact we can.

We need to recognise that there are big challenges in countries such as Nigeria. Corruption, which was mentioned by several hon. Members, is a key cause of poverty and a key factor that can hold back development. It is not like me to disagree with the former Prime Minister about much—actually, in effect, I do not disagree with him about this—but corruption cannot, in any context, be fantastic. To be fantastically corrupt is to be terribly so. That, of course, is what he really meant, and the attention that he drew to the issue was welcome. We have significant programmes, including Anti-corruption in Nigeria—ACORN—and PERL, the Partnership to Engage, Reform and Learn, both of which engage with government structures and civil society groups, through which we are working both to empower people to tackle corruption when they see it, and to ensure that institutions have the tools to address it.

Several references were made to particular individuals and individual cases. With hon. Members’ permission, I will not talk about those cases, because many are live, but they make clear the point that we need to pursue corruption wherever it might hide, from the lowest to the highest levels, without fear or favour. We must always be alert to the risk that anti-corruption work will be focused on the political enemies of the people who control the direction of that work, and we are. We should be proud of what we do in this area. The work that we do to tackle corruption is an absolutely necessary and vital prerequisite for securing the long-term sustainable growth that we all want to see delivered and we all recognise Nigeria has the potential to secure.

Nigeria is a relatively affluent country in its region. It is blessed—or perhaps cursed—with significant natural resources. It accounts for about a quarter of the population of sub-Saharan Africa. It presents one of the greatest opportunities for growth and one of the greatest dangers of instability on that continent. We are right to be engaged there, we are right to play a key role given our historical ties and the country’s importance for the future, but we are also right to scrutinise what we do and to hold to account those who are responsible for it.

I therefore welcome the Committee’s work and thank hon. Members for their contributions and questions. I hope that I have addressed most of the points that my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire raised, but I know that she will take me up on any that I omitted to comment on. I look forward to continuing our work and the positive and constructive dialogue that we have had today as we all strive to improve life and realise the opportunities that exist for the people of Nigeria. Nigeria is a friendly and important nation that I hope we will continue to trade with, and I am confident that its economy will become further entwined with that of the UK as both nations develop and march forward into the world in a way that will deliver benefits for both our peoples.

Commonwealth Development Corporation Bill

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Programme motion: House of Commons & 3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 10th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Kate Osamor]

The hon. Gentleman makes a valuable point, but the Bill still needs scrutiny. That is what I am laying out.

We all know that transparency is something that DFID does very well indeed. Its performance in the aid transparency index demonstrates an international gold standard in that regard. Historically, however, the same cannot be said for CDC. It is of the utmost importance that the proportion of the ODA budget that is channelled through CDC be subject to the same checks on outcomes and value for money to which DFID holds itself. New clause 4 lays down conditions that would guarantee transparent governance through an agreed framework reached with the Independent Commission for Aid Impact and CDC. Proper annual measurements of outcome would be a welcome addition to the Bill.

In relation to new clauses 1 and 8 and the issue of CDC use of separate financial centres where countries do not have sufficiently robust regulatory environments, now is the time to put on record the Government’s commitment to strengthening financial service centres in developing countries. The Opposition know that the importance of addressing and tackling CDC’s use of tax havens cannot be overstated. Although we heard assurances in Committee from Diana Noble, the chief executive of CDC, that using offshore financial centres ensures legal certainty and lessens risk for investors, far more than reassurance is needed to ensure transparency on that point. We need clear legislative safeguards, which is why the Front-Bench team will press new clause 1 to a vote. New clause 1 requires any proposal to increase the limit by secondary legislation to be accompanied by a thorough analysis of CDCs use of such centres. Where the countries in question do not have sufficiently robust regulatory environments, it is the UK’s job to ensure that those centres are made more robust.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

The hon. Lady makes some important points. Does she agree that the changes made to CDC five years ago, under which CDC was encouraged to make direct investments in developing countries—contrary to the preceding situation, in which it made investments in funds situated offshore—were a major step forward?

[Kate Osamor]

The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point, and I will touch on that in my speech. Regardless of any development, we must always be robust and we must be able to show taxpayers that we have a transparent and accountable system. That is at the forefront of our objections to the Bill.

I seek assurances from the Minister of State, the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), that he will consider supporting the implementation of such safeguards. It is of course to be applauded that the whole ethos of CDC has been transformed since it was the subject of widespread controversy some years ago. It is testimony to the organisation’s willingness to change that it reacted to that criticism by becoming a more positive institution and implementing an overhaul of the systems that were in place. These efforts were praised in the most recent report by the National Audit Office, which assessed CDC’s progress in implementing the recommendations that the NAO made in a report in 2008. It was heartening to read in the follow-up report that CDC has proved successful in adapting its strategy in accordance with NAO’s earlier recommendations, including instituting frameworks to limit excessive pay and to refocus CDC’s priorities on the world’s very poorest nations, rather than investing in markets that already attract foreign investors.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Kate Osamor]

No, I need to make some headway.

It was also encouraging to learn that CDC has not only met but exceeded the targets agreed with DFID relating to its financial performance and development impact, and has improved its procedures for documenting fraud and corruption. Although we on the Front Bench praise CDC for making those changes, we must not forget that the recent NAO report was by no means unequivocally positive, and that it highlighted significant areas for improvement. Allow me to quote directly from a passage in the report examining the efficiency of CDC’s methods of capturing its development impact:

“It remains a significant challenge for CDC to demonstrate its ultimate objective of creating jobs and making a lasting difference to people’s lives in some of the world’s poorest places. Given the Department’s plans to invest further in CDC, a clearer picture of actual development impact would help to demonstrate the value for money of the Department’s investment.”

That is quite some statement. According to the NAO, it is “a significant challenge” for CDC to demonstrate how effectively it does the very thing it was set up to do.

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[Mrs Drummond]

No, because we are investing in very difficult areas where robust systems may not already be in place, plus the CDC has very clear guidelines about where the money is going, so we can track it much more easily than we can with other aid agencies.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the issue is not so much about offshore centres being invested in by funds from a variety of jurisdictions, but about the tax paid in-country for activities undertaken in that country? In that respect, the investments made by the CDC are excellent and provide major tax revenues of billions of dollars a year for those country’s Treasuries.

[Mrs Drummond]

I thank my hon. Friend for his very clear explanation, which beefs up what I have said.

On the case for raising investment limits, amendments l, 3 and 6 and new clauses 2, 5 and 10 would hamper the CDC in the same way. We have already extensively debated the need to increase the limit, and we have had assurances from the Minister and the CDC that business cases for further capital will be clearly made. We will have the full strategy document this year, backed by an analysis from the CDC of the development impact. We will have both before any additional money goes through the CDC.

On the focus of spending, I agree with my hon. Friend the Minister that the question of which specific investments are made must be delegated to DFID and the CDC. That would give the Government oversight and ensure that sustainable development goals are at the heart of the investment. Putting countries or, indeed, limiting sectors in legislation would make delivering the development process cumbersome, and I believe that it would hobble the CDC.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Lefroy]

Whether people live in the United Kingdom, Tanzania or Colombia, the most important route out of poverty is a good job or a good livelihood, and that is why I fundamentally support the work of the CDC. It has done excellent work throughout the world for nearly 70 years, and in recent years it has concentrated on the most needy countries, where there is the highest level of unemployment or the highest level of poverty. I welcome the fact that the Government are to invest more through the CDC in the coming years.

However, I think that today’s debate, and our debates in Committee and on other occasions, have made it clear that the CDC must be careful. It must invest in areas in which commercial investors would not normally invest; otherwise, it should be the commercial sector that invests in them. The CDC must invest in the areas that create the greatest number of jobs in return for the investment made. That will often involve agriculture, and it will often involve difficult investments, because it is not easy to invest in agriculture in remote areas. However, that is what the CDC is there for: it is not there for an easy life. I know that—given the management that it has had recently, and given the calibre of its staff—it is up to those challenges, and I welcome the Bill.

Commonwealth Development Corporation Bill (Second sitting)

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Stephen Doughty]

The Minister suggests we should not be sceptical of the Government and their intents. It is the role of this House to be sceptical of the Government and their intents. To suggest that Ministers are going to take powers but might not use them is a slightly curious argument: I have not seen many cases of that in the past. The timing of this is very odd, given some of the other circumstances, which I will come on to.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Stephen Doughty]

I will give way in a moment, but I just want to make one point. We have seen a very important change in the definition of the ODA, which occurred only last year. Previously, as I said on Second Reading, it was the issue of the CDC net disbursements that contributed to our ODA figures. Normally we looked at the money that the CDC was investing, returns from that investment, the function of the two and ended up, usually, with a positive number. Over the past five years it had been a £100 million or £200 million positive contribution to our aid effort. In fact, last year it would actually have been a negative contribution of minus £9 million. However, the Government changed the rules. They decided to count the capital inflow into the CDC—all of it, in its entirety—as ODA, as aid, rather than the function of what is actually, potentially, being achieved.

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What is to prevent the Government in the future from putting pressure on the CDC, regardless of whether it wants the money, to spend, use or request, through the process that the Minister has described, large sums to bump up the figures to show that the Government are, for example, meeting the 0.7% aid target? Before the Minister jumps to his feet to say, “Oh no, that would never happen,” let me say that he knows full well that it has been the habit of all Governments, of all colours, to look at how figures are presented, move things around and reclassify things in an attempt to meet wider targets and wider agendas. Obviously, a certain amount of that goes on all the time, but it does look very odd that we are seeing this huge rise, this huge potential new power being given, at the same time as the definition of how that is counted is changed. That is where my scepticism and that of many others comes from.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ryan. The hon. Gentleman raises a very important point about the capacity of DFID and, indeed, the capacity of the two continents—Africa and part of the continent of Asia, south Asia—to absorb this kind of money, but does he not agree that one major challenge facing the world at the moment is the need to create in the next 15 years 1 billion jobs, most of which will be in those countries, and that the amount of money that we are talking about is tiny in comparison with the amount that would be required to create those jobs and thereby to alleviate poverty?

[Stephen Doughty]

I agree that the challenge of creating jobs is huge and one in which we and others should be playing a role, but it is not solely our role. Again, I hope that one question that we will get on to discussing is whether we should be providing what is in effect private capital in some of these locations or whether the capital should be coming from other sources: other Governments, institutions or DFIs. Indeed, should that be the responsibility of the Governments themselves? We will undoubtedly come on to that in discussion of some of the new clauses, but one of my fundamental questions is about the focus of this money: where is it going currently, and is it doing all that it could do? Professor Collier himself said this morning, in relation to the current bias of funding towards south Asia and India in particular, that he thought that there should be more focus on Africa. I agree.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I agree, too, on that point. Will the hon. Gentleman also accept this point about the other DFIs? The Dutch DFI has invested far more money than we have, and the Netherlands has a population one quarter the size of the UK’s. The French Proparco is in a similar position to the UK, but the Germans have invested three times as much. We are laggards in this respect.

[Stephen Doughty]

We are not here to discuss the Dutch DFI, but I do know a reasonable amount about it. It provides only marginally more than us. It does do interesting work; it does not do exactly the same work as us. I do not know its history of recapitalisations and how much additional ODA money it has received recently. It would be interesting to look at that. However, the question here is this. What is the best use of our money? Are we not investing or have we reduced investment in other sectors where we could be using our aid in order to do this, and is that the right choice? That is the question before us, and when we look at, for example, DFID’s closures of bilateral programmes in places such as Burundi, we do not have clarity from the bilateral aid review on whether there will be further closures or changes.

We have heard worrying things about cuts in bilateral funding for HIV/AIDS programmes, despite the good money that is going into the global fund. We have seen a shift away from certain sectors and from budget support. We have seen a shift away from investing in free healthcare and education, and in teacher salaries, and with removing user fees for healthcare, for example. When the CDC invests in private healthcare and private school systems, we might have a debate about the role that voluntary and private play in healthcare and schools, but again it is an opportunity cost—it is a choice about where we invest these things.

I accept the hon. Gentleman’s wider point about the importance of jobs, investing and crowding in capital into some of these sectors, but we have to question what we should be doing with our money and whether that is right versus other potential sources. I contend that the Government simply have not come forward with a case that justifies this level of cap. Some increase in the CDC’s budget might be justified, but certainly not at this level.

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[Patrick Grady]

I thank my hon. Friend for that point. The point of equity and proportionality is what I am trying to test. As I have said, under my formula, the figures would come out not that much lower than the caps proposed in the Bill. Let us accept, in good faith, that we will hear some rationale for those caps. My formula would take us not a million miles away from those numbers. The point is that under my formula, the caps would vary over time, depending on what the total ODA spend was likely to be.

Even if the Minister objects to the particular formula, I will be keen to hear why some kind of proportionate formula is not preferable to the hard numbers in the Bill. We have heard about other amendments that probe those numbers. A formula that linked the caps to the total ODA spend over a period of time surely would help to clarify the link with the overall amount of ODA and the balance of the Government’s development priorities, which we will discuss when we debate the new clauses.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I will make four brief points. First, there are several reasons for bringing forward the Bill, but one of the major reasons is that reducing the expected rate of return of the CDC’s investments, which I absolutely agree with, creates a need for more capital.

Under the last Labour Government, the CDC grew substantially, was well managed, invested in funds and made a lot of money out of significant investments, such as that in Celtel. All of that was good and I welcomed it, but it perhaps was not in accordance with the CDC’s original mission, although I would argue that it helped to reduce poverty. Capital was generated internally to quite a considerable extent. The required rate of return was relatively high, those returns came in and that money was reinvested.

Now that CDC is quite rightly supposed to focus on harder investments with lower rates of return and higher risk, there inevitably will not be as much free cash flow or free capital available for investment, so the shareholder —the UK Government, DFID and the taxpayer—needs to be prepared to put in more capital if we are to meet those objectives.

The second point is about middle-income countries. I fully accept the Minister’s point about the importance of targeting lower-income countries wherever possible, but let us not forget that the range for middle-income countries is, frankly, ridiculous. It goes from just over £1,000 to £13,000 per year. At the lower end are countries that are basically low-income countries and at the higher end are relatively wealthy countries. If we categorise all middle-income countries as somehow moderately wealthy, that is simply not the case. There was a point—not now, sadly, because of what is happening there—when South Sudan was briefly a middle-income country; look at where it is now. We have to be very careful when we talk about middle-income countries as though they are a homogenous group; they are not.

[Stephen Doughty]

The hon. Gentleman is making an important point and I have no doubt we will discuss this further. Is he not concerned, though, when he looks at the amount that is going into India, for example, and at individual states within India, where the majority of even the CDC’s new disbursements are still going to the richest states rather than the poorest? The top disbursement was to Maharashtra, where Mumbai is.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

Absolutely, we should look at that. However, there are more of the poorest people in India than in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. If you take the view that a company in India in which you invest is likely to have national ambitions and wants to work across India, you would hope that it would therefore target the poorest as well as those who are perhaps better off. I agree, though, that the CDC needs to look at this and ensure that it does not stray back into the realms of investing only in fairly soft, nice, high rate of return investments.

My third point is about employment. I have already mentioned the figure of 1 billion jobs. The World Bank says that 600 million jobs are required across the world in the next decade; others have put it as high as 1 billion. There will be more of those 1 billion jobs in the middle-income countries than in the low-income countries, so we need to invest across the two if we are to tackle this enormous threat.

I was in Tunisia last week at the launch of the Parliamentary Network’s middle east and north Africa chapter—I chair the global network. The problems that a country such as Tunisia faces, with a population of 10 million and unemployment among graduates of 60%, are enormous. We know the social consequences of that. Tunisia has a very high rate of young people who have gone to Syria and Iraq to fight for Daesh. That is one consequence of the very high rates of unemployment and the lack of hope in those countries.

Finally, this is about investment. We talk about money being spent, but it is actually investment. Once it goes in, provided it is well-managed, it is recycled. As I have said, the money that made about £500 million of profit from Celtel under the last Labour Government was recycled into investment and is still there. Some of it may have been invested twice since then. This is not a one-off hit where we make a grant to an organisation and it does excellent work, but is then gone. It is money that goes round and round, that is recycled and that creates jobs.

[Stephen Doughty]

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point and I agree that it is investment and it is recycled—the CDC has shown that. However, does he not agree that that applies to our whole aid budget? If we invest in the education of a girl through a bilateral programme, with the opportunities that provides in her life and the opportunity it gives her to contribute to the economy, that is, similarly, an investment.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

Yes; I do not disagree with that.

[James Duddridge]

The hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth is wrong. It is not an investment in the same way, in that it is not so easily controlled. An investment in a girl’s education is, indeed, an investment, but we are discussing an investment that has an actual return, which we can reinvest and have some degree of control over, as the aid budget is targeted in different ways. It is a different type of investment. As I said on Second Reading, it is a gift that keeps giving.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I will conclude by saying that I feel a little like I am in the middle of a great argument, but I probably agree in some way with both Members.

[Kate Osamor (Edmonton) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ryan. This is the first time for me, but I am sure there will be many more.

I want to speak about investment. That word has been used many times and in the absence of an investment strategy from the CDC, we feel very sceptical about why we should use taxpayers’ money in this way. It is only fair to ask the Minister to present that to us, so that we can have a debate in which we feel we have all the information. That is my brief contribution on this group of amendments.

--- Later in debate ---

Those are my main points. Is the capacity there and does the Minister see indirect investment as having a significant role in the future? Does he share the view that identifying first-time funds in developing countries is an important part of our agenda and will he recommit himself to the issue of equivalence of respect through this amendment?

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I accept that the potential increase from £6 billion to £12 billion is very substantial. I note that subsection (3) talks about regulations. Does the Minister envisage gradual increases, perhaps of a billion at a time, through regulations under secondary legislation? I believe that secondary legislation is a very adequate way in which to do this and that hon. Members need to take it very seriously, as the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth has mentioned. However, it might reassure Members if somewhere in the Bill or in an amendment it was stated that the increases would be no more than, say, £2 billion at a time. After all, we are now considering raising the amount by £4.5 billion in the Bill, yet, as I understand it, we are looking to put it up by £6 billion through secondary legislation. It might therefore be proportionate to indicate that we would expect the Government to come back to the House on more than one occasion if the sum were to go from £6 billion to £12 billion.

[Imran Hussain]

For the sake of avoiding repetition, I will cite the case I previously outlined, because I think the arguments are exactly the same. The only additional point is that I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth, who makes the point that using a statutory instrument to double the increase, if not more, is something that MPs will be uncomfortable with, for obvious reasons.

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[Jeremy Lefroy]

I have to say that I agree with a considerable number of the hon. Gentleman’s points, although I see some problems with the way in which the new clauses address them. For instance, if we restricted new capital to a certain list of countries, where would that leave the self-generated capital, both from existing investments and from these investments once they are sold? That does not seem to be clear, so in effect we would have to segregate capital raised through the profits or the free cash flow of the sale of existing investments, and capital raised through the sale of new investments that had been restricted to certain countries.

[Stephen Doughty]

The hon. Gentleman will correct me if I am wrong, but has that not already happened with regard to legacy investments in Latin America, for example, as a result of the changes in the strategy for CDC in 2012?

[Jeremy Lefroy]

Yes, it has, absolutely, but what I am saying is that the new clauses are not specific enough to achieve what the hon. Gentleman wants.

I must also repeat my earlier point that middle-income countries are a very broad church. I think I mentioned that they cover gross national incomes between £1,000 and £13,000; forgive me, but I meant between just over $1,000 and just over $13,000—dollars, not pounds, although that is less of a difference than it was a year ago. I believe firmly that a country with a gross national income of $2,000 or $3,000 per head per year is absolutely the kind of country that we should be investing in to create the jobs I referred to earlier, but it would be counted as a middle income country.

My final point is that when we invest in multilateral institutions such as the World Bank through IDA, we are investing in low income countries; but when we invest through the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which is the major part of the World Bank, we are investing indirectly in middle income countries, including India, China, Brazil and all the other countries that the hon. Gentleman mentioned. I would not like us to treat the CDC differently from our investments in the World Bank or in other multilateral institutions such as the Global Fund.

[Imran Hussain]

Again, I associate myself with the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth. I have two additional general points. We have to look at the 2011 review. There were clear purposes behind it, one of which was that the CDC had lost its focus. As a result of the review, we saw the new universe of countries and, as I said earlier, have ended up in a better place today than we were in four or five years ago.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that we must not lose our focus on development impact and where it can be greatest, and nor must CDC. We must continue to focus on the poorest countries, where the impact will be felt the most and where it is most needed. The CDC’s ultimate goal must be to alleviate poverty, and that goal is not best achieved in some of the countries that have been used as examples.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kate Osamor]

I have not spoken a lot today. That is not because I have not been in support of my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth, which I believe is the right way of saying it—I have heard many versions today. I want to speak on this clause, because my issue relates to tax havens and the way the CDC is using them. In the evidence session earlier today, Diana Noble of the CDC admitted that at times it has to use tax havens, but I feel that DFID should be looking at transparency. We should be working more closely with CDC because we are setting up a system that could be exploited, and I am concerned that we could be sitting back and not using the power that I believe DFID could be using.

This is the time to look at how the relationship was initially set up and at how we might reform that relationship, not because we should be micromanaging but because we should be taking some responsibility for taxpayers’ money. I say that because, while there is cross-party support for DFID in this House, there is a lot of tension outside among people who do not agree with the way we are spending money. If this was highlighted and got into the wrong hands—the Daily Mail—it could turn into a situation in which the Government would have to fight back. I ask that we look at that relationship, make it a lot more transparent and also look at what will happen when Diana Noble moves on, because a new CEO may not able to turn things around the way she has. She has made great changes, but she is moving on, so we need to look at how that new relationship with DFID will be, and this is the time to change that situation.

I support the clause and I hope that the Minister can reassure us that we will not be in a situation going forward whereby the CDC, or similar organisations, have to use tax havens because the country they are functioning in does not have systems to take the tax.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I have a lot of sympathy with the points made. I cannot support this new clause because I do not think that the international situation lends itself to being practical for the CDC at the moment. Regrettably, there is not the range of options for CDC to make its investments at the moment alongside other partners. When it is direct investments, which I am very glad to see the CDC has started to do again since the new arrangements in 2011-12, there is absolutely no reason why the investment cannot be made directly into the share capital of the company in which the investment is being made. However, when you are trying to leverage other investments, as the CDC often does, alongside other DFIs or other private sector entities, you have to arrive at a mutual agreement as to what jurisdiction is most suitable, both from the point of view of the ability of the legal system to uphold agreements and in terms of when dividends are paid, and whether double tax arrangements and so on are in place.

These are all practical matters, but I very much agree with the hon. Member for Edmonton and the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth that there is an opportunity here for the CDC to set the pace—for instance, here in the United Kingdom, where we have such a fine legal system, as is being displayed right at this very moment across the road.

[Hon. Members]

Hear, hear.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

That is true from whatever point of view we approach the matter. Why can we not set up the kind of structure, based in the UK, that would be perfectly reasonable for funds to see as an acceptable basis for making their investment alongside the CDC?

[Rory Stewart]

I shall try, for the sake of right hon. and hon. Members who are under time pressure, to be quite short in answering. Of course, I agree strongly with points made about the absolute importance of this. The CDC never invests in any of these locations in order to save tax or to avoid scrutiny. There are only two reasons why we would do it, and those are the reasons that were raised by the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth; which is to say either because the regulatory environment in the country in which we are investing is not sufficiently robust for us to be able to trust UK taxpayers’ money to that location, or because we are attempting to accumulate a larger fund where we are trying to get co-investors. We are very proud of that. We have brought in, at times, £1 billion of investment and have managed to bring in £30 billion behind it, so that is a multiplier effect of 30 which might not have been possible had we not been able to ensure that we were able to go through certain offshore centres.

However, we are very focused on this issue. The Labour Government made great progress in focusing on the white list. The hon. Gentleman mentioned Anguilla and the British Virgin Islands. To be absolutely clear, as I think he is aware, we do not, nor would ever, invest in those locations, nor would we invest in Panama. We only invest in the places that have been put through the OECD’s Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes as compliant locations.

Nevertheless, I agree that in the long run we need to develop financial sectors within Africa to ensure we can make secure investments through African locations, rather than having to go through offshore centres. DFID is now running a big programme on that, which is something the CDC can learn from. To respond to my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford, we absolutely should be taking the lead on this. On that basis, I ask that the motion be withdrawn.

Commonwealth Development Corporation Bill (First sitting)

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

Q I would like to ask Diana about job creation. You say that one of CDC’s key strategic aims is to achieve development impact focused on job creation. How do you measure jobs that are created directly and indirectly? Last week, the National Audit Office said in its report that progress on measuring job quality has been slow. How are you working on that? How are you measuring productivity, quality of jobs and income levels?

Diana Noble: As you rightly point out, we focus on jobs because we believe a job is the first and the best step out of poverty. I think everyone on the Committee understands the difference that a job makes to someone in a poor country: to them and to their family. When we talk to workers it is clear that they also use the income particularly to educate their children, so it has a benefit for future generations. How do we measure job creation? This is something that we take very seriously. Two years ago, in partnership with some academics, we put in place a way to measure job creation across the whole of the Africa and south Asia portfolio.

We are the first DFI to collect data from all our portfolio companies. We do not just collect headcount data; we also collect revenues, supply chain, purchases, work and wages as well. The academic uses that to calculate not just the direct job creation but the indirect job creation. As you can imagine, some of our priority sectors, such as financial inclusion and particularly infrastructure and power, have a far greater job impact beyond the direct jobs. So we have now published the methodology on our website. We are going to go through a peer review process because we want it to become one of the industry standards. We have shown the data from that for two years now. We can start to compare and contrast it. It shows that the portfolio has created over 1 million jobs in the past two years. That is a number we take immense pride in.

You also rightly talked about job quality, because it is not just about volume. Quality has lots of different elements to it. What all of us sitting in this room might consider a good job is not necessarily so with the lens that you should use in the countries where we invest.

On job quality, before we make an investment, our fantastic environmental and social team go and sit down with the company and do due diligence on them. They say, “Are you up to standard, particularly in the areas of health and safety?” If they are not at the right standard, an action plan is agreed with management and put in place.

The second thing we do is collect data across the portfolio on fatalities and serious accidents. We have been doing that since 2008. We have very rich data now and have been able to combine that and give training back to portfolio companies and fund managers about the areas that lead to fatalities and serious accidents. We think that gives huge added value to our portfolio.

We are going further than that. We are collecting information on lost time injury frequency, particularly for manufacturing and construction—places where workers are potentially put at harm. We are looking at staff retention for some of our larger investments, because we are advised that it has a big correlation with job quality. We are doing an evaluation in Bangladesh at the moment—everyone on the Committee will be aware of the issues in garment factories there—to try to understand what workers really want out of their jobs, so that we can build that in. There is a big element of learning. We are on a journey, and there is still a long way to go.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

The question I wanted to ask has been asked, Mr Streeter.

[The Chair]

So we move on to Patrick Grady.

Sustainable Development Goals

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2016 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer, and to follow the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick). I was interested that he mentioned Staffordshire fire and rescue service. I shall contact it and ask it about the work it has been doing. It is also a great pleasure to follow the Chairman of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) and my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), who made very important speeches.

The UK has a great opportunity to show leadership in implementing the sustainable development goals. In our report, we have given four or five out of 10 for what has happened so far, but I want to let bygones be bygones and look ahead to the future. We have got a new Minister and a new team, and this is a great opportunity for them and the United Kingdom to show leadership, as the former Prime Minister, David Cameron, showed in developing the SDGs with the two other leaders and the United Nations more generally.

As the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby said, the millennium development goals were, on the whole, a success. They were fairly narrowly focused, but they were all the better for that because we could see that great progress was being made. As the chairman of the all-party group on malaria and neglected tropical diseases, I saw how much the emphasis on malaria in the MDGs meant for countries in which the disease is endemic. Malaria deaths have been reduced by more than half over the past 15 years, with a huge reduction in the number of cases. The SDGs are much broader, but that does not mean that they should not equally be a success. All of us have to work to achieve that.

We must start at home. These are global goals, and they are meant to apply to the United Kingdom. I welcome the Secretary of State’s letter, because it gives a lot more clarity. I have a suggestion for the Minister on something that other countries have not yet done, so perhaps we can take the initiative. Why do we not ask to be marked by other countries—particularly those to which we give bilateral aid—so they can look at what we are doing? We should open the books in the great spirit of partnership and equality so they can see whether we are matching up to the goals. International development should be something we do together with each other, not to other people.

I have five levers—I tried to think of a better word, but I could not—that the Department for International Development can use to achieve the 17 SDGs and the 169 targets to be achieved, and five means by which those levers can be supported. The levers are ways into not just one goal but lots of goals.

The first is jobs and livelihoods, which help to reduce poverty. If someone has a job or a livelihood, they are likely to have access to better health, better education and many other things. It is not just about economic development. Many areas in which jobs and livelihoods are created are beyond economic development. For instance, they will be created in the health and education sectors as countries employ more health workers and teachers.

The second is education, about which the Chairman of the Select Committee spoke at length. Without education, we will not get anywhere. As he said, DFID is already spending more than 7% of its budget on education, but I think we need to up the amount going into all forms of education, because it is one of the great levers for tackling almost all of the 17 goals.

The third is gender equality. If we do not aim for gender equality, we will not reduce poverty as we should, and we will not achieve the health outcomes, education outcomes and all the other outcomes that we want from the SDGs.

The fourth lever is water and sanitation. Earlier this year colleagues on the International Development Committee and I had the honour of going to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to see an excellent project that DFID had funded, providing water to villages for the very first time. We were humbled by people’s reaction. The project was low-cost, only a few dollars per head to provide clean water, but it meant that children and women in particular had to spend far less of their day getting the water that they and their families needed. That brought home to me how cheap it really is to make such life-changing interventions for so many people.

Over the past five years DFID has reached more than 60 million people with better water and sanitation. What has happened is absolutely wonderful, but a lot more can be done—so many more hundreds of millions of people are still without. Over the past two or three years that was brought home to me while most of Stafford was dug up in order to replace the water and sewerage systems. Of course I had plenty of moans about the effect on traffic congestion but, ultimately, my constituents said, “Yes, we know that this has to be done. We know that we have a system that is decades old and needs to be replaced. And we know how vital water and sanitation are to our everyday lives.” If that is the case for us, it is the case for every person on the planet.

The final lever I suggest is that of global public goods in health, climate change and, following on from what my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton said, peace building. Global public goods are, by definition, goods for the benefit of everyone, such as the development of drugs against tuberculosis—we know how far we are falling behind on drugs against TB—or research into antimicrobial resistance, which I raised in the main Chamber earlier today. The Government have taken the lead after an excellent report from Lord O’Neill earlier this year but they need to pursue it relentlessly because, as he said, by 2050, if we take no action, 10 million lives will be lost every year—that is more than die from cancer —to diseases that cannot be cured because of resistance, and that will cost the global economy trillions of dollars.

Global public goods are not only in the area of health, but in climate change. Many communities around the world face the prospect of being submerged, or flooded regularly, and others face regular droughts, even though there are practical, if not simple, actions that we could take on behalf of those communities and of the world as a whole.

Peace building is another area. As my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton said, we need to invest in peace building at an early stage—in inter-faith relationships and dialogue, for example—and, as the Committee has said on many occasions, in training peace negotiators, women in particular. There are almost no women peace negotiators whom I am aware of in the United Nations. Let us invest in that: prevention is so much better than cure or, as Churchill said:

“To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”

Those are the five levers that I humbly suggest the Department looks at. It is doing many of those things already, but I wanted to put them in one place. If we concentrate on those levers, we will succeed in addressing the SDGs in the best possible way.

Finally, I will talk about the five means. The first, as our report suggested, is the collection of data, and the UK has a comparative advantage in data accumulation. Earlier this week at our all-party group on malaria and neglected tropical diseases, we heard how an Oxford centre for collecting data has been hugely helpful in identifying which areas have problems with malaria or particular neglected tropical diseases and how to address them. With good data we will make much more progress, and I know that DFID has that as a priority.

The second means we refer to as scale. We hear a lot about pilot projects, some of which go to scale, but many stay as pilot projects and get nowhere. Right from the beginning of a pilot, we have to think how it will be scaled up. The project might of course not work, in which case it can be cut after the two or three years of the pilot, but so often we hear about a successful pilot project only for a hiatus to occur as people think how to get it to hundreds of thousands, or millions of people, as opposed to the hundreds or thousands whom the pilot helped.

Third is the issue of partnership, which has also been mentioned. It is absolutely vital that we work in partnership with NGOs and other Governments. We need to see the SDGs as an enterprise on which we are all engaged together. I come back to the point made by the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse about small grants. The idea that DFID will not get out of bed for less than £1 million—I am sure that is not the case—is how things seem to many of us who have met several such excellent charities in our constituencies or are aware of them through previous or current work. They simply cannot get access to funding, even when they have raised a lot themselves. The Department is looking at that carefully, and the Minister has expressed a desire to do more, so it will be good to hear his suggestions when he replies to the debate.

The fourth means is parliamentary scrutiny, and I mean not the scrutiny of this Parliament alone, but that of parliaments in the places where we work. Frankly, if Members of Parliament in a country where we operate are not interested in the work being done for the development of their own constituents, why should we be? I agree that we have a moral imperative to do such work—I am sure all Members present feel that—but if a Parliament does not look at the kind of things that our own DFID officials look at, we should begin to question whether we are in the right place, because there might not be the right commitment. I urge DFID to help and work with parliaments in the countries in which we are active—through multilateral organisations in those with whom we do not have bilateral relations—to scrutinise the work of their own Governments and of the development agencies there.

Finally, long-term engagement is another point made by the Committee on a number of occasions. DFID has been involved in some excellent long-term programmes. The one I always come back to is the reforestation programme in Nepal, on which we have worked together with the Nepali Government over more than two decades. It has resulted in a tremendous increase in reforestation in that country, which is vital in tackling climate change in Asia and globally. We need to do more, however. Too often, I fear, people involved in a country and doing great work are not aware of what DFID did 20 or even 10 years ago in the same country. It was good to hear the permanent secretary take up that challenge at a recent evidence session the Committee had and suggest the possibility of looking at one or two countries to map what DFID has done, together with the NGOs and the Government of the country, over the past 20 years, so that we have much better understanding of how long-term partnership can or perhaps, in some cases, cannot help us.

It is an honour to take part in the debate. I welcome the Minister’s presence, because I know how seriously he takes his portfolio, and I look forward to hearing his reply.