Sustainable Development Goals

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Wednesday 28th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

I refer Members to my entries on international development in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

I am delighted that we have this opportunity to debate the sustainable development goals, which are incredibly important. Since 2000, the eight millennium development goals have achieved amazing results. My right hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Mr O’Brien) and my colleague on the International Development Committee, the hon. Member for East Lothian (Fiona O’Donnell), spoke about malaria. Since 2000, there has been a fall in the number of malaria deaths per year from over 1 million to about 600,000. That is still far, far too many. Nevertheless, several million people, mainly women and children, are still alive today because of the results of the work that has been done through the MDGs. I congratulate this Government on increasing the amount spent on combating malaria from £150 million a year to approximately £500 million this year, in fulfilment of a commitment made in the Conservative party manifesto. That was a direct result of the millennium development goal. If it had not been there, this would not have happened.

The twin goals of the World Bank are, by 2030, to eliminate absolute poverty and to promote shared prosperity and thereby reduce inequality. Those goals are absolutely vital. This afternoon, the International Development Committee had the honour of questioning the Secretary of State for our report on jobs and livelihoods. In evidence to the Committee, the Department has said that the world must create 600 million new jobs not by 2030, but by 2020, which is the end of the next Parliament should it run for a full five years. For me, that is the major challenge that the world faces, and so many of the sustainable development goals are pertinent to it, which is why I will concentrate on it today.

Without peace and governance—goal 16—there is no prospect of sustainable development or of creating those jobs. Let us remember that Somalia is improving at the moment thanks to the work of the peacekeepers from Uganda and Burundi, each of which has lost hundreds of its soldiers in that effort, and that some of those soldiers have been trained by the United Kingdom. Peace and governance are therefore absolutely critical.

Jobs and livelihoods are referred to in goals 1, 2 and 8, particularly in relation to agriculture, which sustains so many hundreds of millions of people. It is vital to give priority to the work on jobs and livelihoods. I congratulate the Secretary of State and her predecessor, the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), on doing so, and I also congratulate the previous Government, who set out on that course.

Following on from that work must come taxation, which is mentioned in goal 17.1, because only through fair taxation can we provide the revenues to bring about the public goods necessary for sustainable development.

Health systems have quite rightly been mentioned. We have recently published a report on them. It is vital to ensure that the direct work done on malaria, TB, HIV and neglected tropical diseases is reflected in horizontal work across health systems. We must not forget about strengthening health systems while we are tackling diseases.

[Kate Green]

Will the hon. Gentleman take the opportunity to note the importance of investing in and supporting mental health services in developing economies?

[Jeremy Lefroy]

That is absolutely critical, and I entirely agree that it must come out in the SDGs.

Goal 4 deals with education, without which people will not be in a position to fill the jobs and create the wealth needed. My constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash), has done sterling work in piloting through his Bill on gender equality. I was delighted to hear the Secretary of State say in Committee today that it looks as though we are spending roughly 50% of the international development budget on women and girls. It would be great to have that confirmed for the record.

Finally, as many Members have said—including the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley), whose work in this area I greatly respect—unless we tackle climate change, it will be impossible to live in a sustainable world and to create the jobs and livelihoods that everybody needs.

The motion calls on the Government

“to show global leadership on tackling the causes of poverty inequality and climate change.”

I am afraid that I cannot support the motion, because I believe that the Government are already showing such leadership under the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister, and with the support of the whole House.

Oral Answers to Questions

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Wednesday 17th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Swayne]

We have a deepening democracy fund through which we are providing support for those elections next year. With respect to the advance of Government forces, we are providing intelligence and direct tactical training to the Nigerian army. The elections themselves must be a matter for the Nigerians, but we are providing the funding and the technical support.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

We heard recently in the all-party group on malaria and neglected tropical diseases, which I chair, of a very important DFID programme to counter severe malaria in northern Nigeria. Can my right hon. Friend assure me that this programme will be continued and that efforts by Boko Haram to stop such development work will not be countenanced?

[Mr Swayne]

We are increasing our spend in northern Nigeria. Indeed, 60% of our spend in Nigeria is in the north-eastern areas, so I can give my hon. Friend that assurance.

Disability and Development

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2014 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell, and it is also a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green). I reiterate what she has just said, because we can learn from what we see of practice in developing countries.

I say that because one of the most memorable visits that I have ever made while I have been on the International Development Committee was to a hospital in Kabul that was run by the International Committee of the Red Cross. It was an outstanding place that cared for people with disabilities, substantially those who suffered from injuries caused by the conflict in Afghanistan. However, what was so remarkable about that hospital was that an extremely high percentage—the right hon. Member for Gordon (Sir Malcolm Bruce), the Chairman of the Committee, will correct me if I am wrong, but I think it was more than 90%—of the several hundred hospital staff, including the chief executive, themselves had disabilities. They were an outstanding group of people doing absolutely great work. Sometimes we in this country could learn from the way in which the ICRC had organised that hospital, so that people with disabilities were not just on the sidelines but were absolutely at the heart of providing services to other disabled people.

Disability is also a fairly personal issue for me, because my father was disabled. It was only after his death that I discovered that our family nearly emigrated to Australia because, as a disabled man, he could not find work in this country. Fortunately, at the last minute he became a clerk in holy orders; a church in London offered him the role and he served there for 25 years. However, it took him a long time to find that role, because in the 1960s disabled people were, to some extent, marginalised in this country. It is tremendous that we have moved on so far in this country, although we still have considerably more to do.

I will focus on two aspects of this debate. The first is jobs and livelihoods. I have already mentioned the hospital in Kabul. However, 1 billion jobs are required in the world in the next 10 years, so sometimes the temptation can be to think, “Well, it’s difficult enough to create jobs and livelihoods for people who are able-bodied. How on earth are we going to be able to do so for people who are disabled?” But that is absolutely not the point. The point is, as the DFID framework recognises, that the issue of disability must be integral to every programme; it must not be an add-on. If we just leave things as an add-on, they will be parked in the “too difficult” place; we will be so engaged with the sheer process of trying to create jobs and livelihoods that anything on top of that will be too difficult to deal with. That must absolutely not happen.

The second aspect I will focus on is prevention. I chair the all-party group on malaria and neglected tropical diseases. We referred to NTDs in the first debate today. They affect the poorest people on this planet—something like 1.4 billion people in the course of a year. By NTDs, I mean worms, the so-called soil-transmitted helminths, Guinea worm, lymphatic filariasis—sometimes known as elephantiasis—onchocerciasis and trachoma, leishmaniasis and indeed leprosy, which my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) referred to. In fact, NTDs not only affect the poorest people and cause morbidity and sometimes mortality, but they often cause disability. And they are eminently curable, or at least eminently preventable, often by very cheap interventions.

That is why I was thrilled that the last Government decided to make NTDs a priority, and this Government, through the London declaration on NTDs in January 2012, has continued that work, providing, I think, £240 million in total, including the money committed by the last Government, over a four-year period. I ask the Minister to ensure that that commitment to the prevention and treatment of NTDs is continued, because it has a huge impact on disability and the prevention of disability.

HIV/AIDS is another area where a lot of progress has been made, particularly in negotiations over the use of drugs, so that they are made available at a cheap price and so that countries’ health systems can afford to provide the antiretrovirals that were not available in the past. That must continue; there must be no let-up in the fight against HIV/AIDS or in providing support for sufferers in developing countries. There can be no two-tier world where we in the west have access to drugs that people in developing countries cannot access.

The Chairman of the Committee has talked about road safety. I am glad that in 2010-11 the Government had what I think was a change of heart on the provision of funding for road safety and decided to continue that funding. We were delighted about that, because the number of deaths on the roads in developing countries is enormous; it is in the millions. There are also tens of millions of disabilities caused by road accidents. I would like to hear from the Minister what progress is being made to ensure that all road programmes, whether we are talking about main trunk roads or rural roads, have a strong road safety component built into them.

When the hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) and I were in Dodoma a couple of weeks ago, we met the Tanzanian Minister responsible for rural roads and DFID staff who were implementing an excellent rural roads programme in Tanzania. The point we made was that when roads, even rural roads, are in a poor state, people can travel on them at perhaps 10, 15 or 20 kph. If someone causes an accident on those roads, they might cause some form of injury. However, if roads are upgraded so that people can travel at 60, 70 or 80 kph along them, and if children—indeed, everyone—along the route are not educated about what is happening and the danger that the road now poses to them if they treat it as they did when it was full of potholes and only traversable by vehicles at 10 kph, we will see a tragic rise in injury and death from something that at the same time is bringing development. I ask the Minister to comment on that.

Finally, there is the question of armed violence. I have already referred to the violence in Afghanistan, which has caused so much disability there and, of course, among members of our brave armed forces who have been injured there. However, there are many conflict states in which DFID is rightly engaged and spending up to 30% of its budget. I stress the importance of this issue, and ask what work is being done, or continuing to be done, to ensure that the kind of things that cause disability, such as improvised explosive devices, are dealt with, because conflict is probably one of the single biggest causes of disability. With that, I conclude my remarks.

Health Systems (Developing Countries)

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2014 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under you, Mrs Osborne, and to follow the hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley), who speaks with such knowledge and passion on these matters, and my two colleagues, my right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Sir Malcolm Bruce) and my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce).

I was delighted when the Committee agreed to do a report on strengthening health systems, because the subject is not one that commands a great deal of attention. The report does not look at a particular country or disease, but instead seems more to do with bureaucracy than anything else, although that is not at all the case. As our report states, health systems are fundamental to the improvement of outcomes and self-sufficiency in health services in developing countries.

I hope that one of the sustainable development goals next year will be universal health coverage, which is impossible without strong health systems. Strong health systems are in place not only to provide better outcomes for life or to prevent morbidity and mortality, however important those things are, but to alleviate poverty, which is a direct responsibility of DFID. Strong health systems are also in place to increase fairness: if everyone has access to a health system, life chances are immeasurably improved. People who go to school and have worms are much less likely to be able to concentrate. If people have blinding trachoma, the consequences are obvious for their life chances. In so many other cases, disease brings not only disability—which we will discuss in the next debate—but an inability for people to fulfil their human potential. That is why health systems are so important to international development. In the Ebola tragedy in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, we have of course seen the consequences of weak health systems, to which my colleagues have already referred.

In this country, we have a unique thing to offer in the strengthening of health systems, which is our national health service. For all the brickbats sometimes thrown at the NHS—in my constituency we have had our difficulties, but I am glad to say that we are working through and overcoming them with the tremendous support of local staff and of the NHS as a whole—it gives us a system that is efficient, and acknowledged as such, and effective. It has its faults and failings, but it is not only chance that caused the Commonwealth Fund to put the NHS at the top of the league in an august company of health systems.

We have heard a little about the so-called problem of vertical as against horizontal programming in systems. I want to dwell on that a little. One of the things that people in our inquiry referred to was the great emphasis over the past 14 or 15 years, since 2000, on vertical programming, or disease-specific programming. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Gavi and other programmes have all been successful, but there is always the risk that they will focus entirely or mainly on the disease without looking at how they can strengthen the health system within the country, which would bring far wider benefits than simply the elimination or reduction in prevalence of that disease.

I do not think this is an either/or question—that we need either vertical or horizontal programmes. Rather, it is a case of using both. I will give a couple of examples of interventions I have seen that were made through, and so reinforced, health systems. In June we visited Sierra Leone. I was privileged to go into a village on the peninsula near Freetown and see the results of the mass bed net distribution that was taking place—at a time, let us remember, when although Ebola had not reached a critical phase, it was beginning to become significant. That mass distribution of bed nets still went ahead, as far as possible, and did so through the existing health system, weak though it was. The distribution was effective: I went into homes where the new nets had been installed, and people clearly viewed them as being of great importance, particularly for their children and for pregnant women, who are the most liable to be affected by malaria.

Those mass bed net distributions, often through health systems, have resulted in the tremendous fall in the incidence of and mortality from malaria that we found out about this week from the World Health Organisation annual malaria report—I had the pleasure of chairing the launch of that report, in the company of His Royal Highness the Duke of York, in my role as chairman of the all-party group on malaria and neglected tropical diseases. Work by the global fund, DFID, and the US and many other Governments has probably saved around 4 million lives—mainly of young children and pregnant women—in the past 14 years. Even if we concentrate more on health systems and horizontal work, we should never let go of the gains that have been made. It is absolutely vital that we do not return to the situation we saw in the 1960s, and again in the 1980s, when, after a really strong effort on malaria, we let our grip on it go and saw a resurgence of malaria across the world. Vertical interventions are vital when they work through horizontal health systems as well.

My second example is from Tanzania, where I visited a programme run by the Tanzanian Government with the support of Imperial college, London, and various NGOs, such as Sightsavers. The programme tackles neglected tropical diseases. Instead of looking at only one—lymphatic filariasis, for instance, or worms—it is tackling four of those debilitating diseases alongside each other.

In other parts of the world we find the use of pooled funds—for example, pooled health funds in South Sudan and Mozambique, the development partners for health in Kenya and the health transition fund in Zimbabwe. All are excellent examples of people coming together to strengthen health systems locally, showing that it is not simply about one person making their one vertical intervention, but everyone working to bring the money together and make the best use of it.

The WHO identified six key building blocks in health systems: governance, finance, the work force, commodities —mainly drugs—services and information. In all those areas DFID plays a major role. I pay tribute to NICE International, an organisation already referred to by the hon. Member for York Central. I was impressed by the presentation it made to the Committee and its evidence to us, and I am impressed by its work. It is an example of something that most people will probably not have heard of, but which is helping health systems around the world to learn from our experience and that of others to bring better health care to their populations.

We have already heard about the financing challenges. It is vital that developing countries live up to their commitments—in the case of African Union countries, the Abuja commitment to spend 15% of their annual budgets on health. At the meeting I referred to earlier, the leader of the African Leaders Malaria Alliance—she is a former Member of Parliament and Minister from Botswana—made the same point, saying that countries with endemic malaria have to step up to the challenge and cannot simply rely on donors to fill the gap.

Indeed, let us take malaria as an example. It would take $5.1 billion of investment every year to see the elimination of malaria within our lifetimes. At the moment, something like $2.9 billion is being given. To put that into perspective, $2.9 billion would run our national health service for a week. Another $2.9 billion—another week’s worth of national health service funding—would see the elimination of malaria in our lifetimes. Surely that is not too much to ask from both the Governments of countries with endemic malaria and the international community to eliminate a disease that even less than 200 years ago was rife in this country and within the past 50 to 60 years was still present and killing people in countries in the south of Europe.

The hon. Member for York Central covered the ground on the issue of the health work force extremely well, so I will not repeat his remarks, save to say that by some estimates there will be a shortage of 13 million health workers around the world by 2035. The estimated shortage at the moment is somewhere between 4.2 million and 4.5 million, although I would say it is probably more—another estimate I have seen is 7 million. Here we have worthwhile jobs and livelihoods that could be created immediately if the training capacity was there. We know the work is there, because there is a shortfall, yet we are not training enough health workers, whether in this country or elsewhere around the world.

Those are great job opportunities for young people. As I said in our evidence session this morning, I urge the UK Government to look at providing more spaces for training doctors, nurses and other health care professionals, so that our young people can enter those professions. I was shocked to see in a newspaper this morning that half of the schools in this country do not have anyone going for training as a doctor. That figure astonishes me. There must be several pupils in every school who would both want to undertake that training and be capable of doing so, yet it is not happening. Let us put our own house in order, while helping others as they do the same to theirs.

I will not dwell extensively on the other three pillars the WHO mentions—commodities, services, which are absolutely key, but are far too big a subject for this debate, and information—except to say that the supply of pharmaceuticals to rural outposts has been a real problem for many years. I remember visiting a place in Uganda where even basic malaria drugs were not available, yet those drugs were in stock in the central store in Kampala. It is not beyond the wit of man to get drugs out from Kampala, or any other capital city, to where they are needed. It takes a bit of leadership and imagination and, possibly, some work with the private sector, which often has the logistics to get the drugs out even if the Government do not.

I have a couple of specific points to mention. In our report, the Committee referred to the work of the health partnership scheme run by DFID through the Tropical Health and Education Trust. That is a tremendous programme, and I am glad to say that DFID has continued it and added another £10 million to its funding. Partnerships have already been created voluntarily, such as the one between Northumbria health authority and Kilimanjaro Christian medical centre or the King’s Sierra Leone partnership—there are many others, and most Members will have them in their constituencies. Those partnerships can receive support for their work training professionals on the ground in their own countries.

Finally, I want to speak briefly about health education, which we did not cover substantially in our report, but is vital. Community health education programmes can provide enormous benefits, particularly when they are not thrust upon communities. My wife ran a community health education programme in Tanzania for 11 years through a training of trainers programme, training up local people who were not health professionals to work with their neighbours on improving health in their families. The success, for a small amount of money invested, was enormous. It could be seen in the health outcomes. People improved the hygiene in their households by constructing toilets and things such as dish drying racks at very little cost, with great benefits for their children in particular, who were often the victims of diarrhoeal diseases.

In conclusion, I reiterate the importance of this subject. I am delighted that DFID takes it so seriously, but it must continue to do so. Health systems and good health are at the heart of every nation’s attempt to counter poverty and raise the livelihoods and well-being of its citizens.

[Anas Sarwar (Glasgow Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Osborne. I congratulate the Select Committee on International Development on its two fantastic reports, the second of which we will debate in a moment.

I had the great pleasure of serving on the Committee at the start of this Parliament for almost a year and a half. Having worked with many of its current members, I can say that it is full of people who are dedicated to ensuring that we spread the values that we hold dearly in the UK around the world to maximise opportunity in the fight against poverty. Two of my former colleagues on the Committee—the right hon. Member for Gordon (Sir Malcolm Bruce) and my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley)—are retiring before the next Parliament. We all wish them both the very best for the future. The fact that both of them have used their last term in office to try to improve the life chances of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world speaks volumes. The right hon. Member for Gordon has been a member of the International Development Committee since 1997, for which he deserves a special prize. I pay special tribute to the Department for International Development staff and health workers who have gone from the UK and elsewhere to help in the fight against Ebola and have risked their lives to protect the lives of others.

I am particularly pleased to be able to make the case for universal health coverage, as the Committee has done, given that the UK is a global leader on that issue. We should be the strongest global advocate for universal health care because our NHS is the envy of the world. It supports people from the cradle to the grave, and it is based not on people’s ability to pay but on their need. We should spread that health care model around the world.

In the current crisis in Sierra Leone, more than 1,600 people have lost their lives, and every week 200 to 300 people are dying and 400 to 500 people are becoming infected. That is a real and sad example of why sound health care systems are crucial. It also demonstrates why the UK and the Department for International Development are right to emphasise promoting private sector growth. Sustained economic growth, higher employment, strong infrastructure and other good development work can be lost in an instant during such epidemics.

Sierra Leone’s GDP growth has sharply declined, despite its positive growth in recent years. All its post-war achievements in the health, education, justice and employment sectors are in jeopardy. The Committee will know from its visits and from the testimonies it has heard that all the schools in Sierra Leone have been permanently closed, and there is a real risk of losing a generation. A generation of young people in Sierra Leone will never get the education they need to improve their life chances, get into meaningful work, break the cycle of deprivation, create a better life for themselves, their families and their communities, and create a better Sierra Leone in the process.

Let me compare three African countries with varied health systems. Sierra Leone, as my hon. Friend the Member for York Central said, has about 136 doctors and just over 1,000 nurses for 6 million people. That is the equivalent of one doctor for almost every 50,000 members of the population. Sadly, since November, more than 100 health workers, including five doctors, have lost their lives to Ebola. It is even worse in Liberia, which has an estimated 60 doctors and 1,000 nurses for 4.3 million people.

In contrast, Rwanda has more than 55,000 health workers for its population. The president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, said:

“If this had happened in Rwanda we would have had it under control.”

That shows the difference that a meaningful health care system can have. It demonstrates that there is no substitute for adequate local health care cover. If there is no functioning health service, a single outbreak can turn into a global crisis.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

Will the hon. Gentleman also acknowledge Nigeria’s tremendous success in preventing the spread of Ebola? Some attribute that to the health systems built up through, for instance, the polio vaccination campaign.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Swayne]

As I said, there are 468 key isolation beds. We are supporting more than 100 burial teams—both the logistics and training, and their fleet. That has had a remarkable impact on the incidence of the disease. As I said in an earlier debate, people are almost most infective once they are dead. Removing bodies and dealing with local burial customs has been one of the main drivers of the disease. In the western part of Sierra Leone, in which a third of the population lives, we are achieving 100% burial within 24 hours, which will make a key difference.

Of course, the criticism will be made that we acted too late; that we should have spotted the problem earlier. Hindsight is the most exact of sciences, but when the Committee went to Sierra Leone in June, it was not obvious that the problem was going to be of the scale we have now discovered. Actually, in January DFID had already begun refocusing our effort in Sierra Leone to deal with the emerging problem. In July and August we started to pump in more money to deal with that. I was making telephone calls, I think in the latter part of July, to the chief officers of UNICEF, the Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the World Health Organisation to try to ginger up their response. Many of those organisations are in need of reform. I have some sympathy for the World Health Organisation, which does not have at its centre the levers of power to bring about immediate change in the regions and countries in which it operates.

Equally, we must remember what was happening in the humanitarian community at the time. First, we were distracted by the terrible events in Gaza. Then, we moved swiftly on to rescuing people from Mount Sinjar, and all the time we had the ongoing crisis in Sudan. It has been a busy playing field for humanitarian organisations and workers to deal with.

Starting from where we are now, we certainly have a proud record. Clearly, there are lessons to be learnt, but, having looked at both the reports we are considering, there is no doubt that both Sierra Leone and Liberia are among the poorest countries in the world and that they were so even before they were struck by this disaster. Our aid reflects that: Sierra Leone remains one of the largest per capita beneficiaries of UK aid. In 2010-11 it received £51 million in bilateral aid, and £68 million in 2013-14. Owing to Ebola, I anticipate that that figure will inevitably fall next year—I suspect by about 30%—as a consequence of being unable to spend on the programmes we had identified. Of course, that will be completely augmented by the £230 million we are spending on Ebola.

I hope that 90% of our programmed spend on health will continue, but there will be instances where we will be unable to distribute bed nets in the way my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) described. There will be an effect on our programmes, but we will seek to minimise that.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way and for his powerful remarks. The Committee concluded that, after a period of terrible civil war, Sierra Leone had made tremendous progress and was on the cusp of being able to go much further, when the Ebola tragedy struck. Will he commit the Government to being there for Sierra Leone as it emerges from the Ebola tragedy and seeks to build on its recovery from that terrible civil war? This is not the time to give up, but to reinforce our co-operation with and support for Sierra Leone.

[Mr Swayne]

Absolutely, I give my hon. Friend that reassurance. We have already established the post-Ebola team to take that work forward once we have got on top of Ebola. Of course, it will have to consider how we develop the programme on jobs and employment opportunities.

I was as surprised as the Committee, and indeed the former Under-Secretary, at the lack of a programme for female genital mutilation, as highlighted in the report. It is not within my bailiwick to commit to such a programme, but I accept that the Department has placed great importance on that issue, as our girls’ summit earlier this year demonstrates.

Ebola

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Wednesday 5th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Phillips]

Of course I agree with my hon. Friend. I shall be dealing with the question of diversion of resources shortly, but I can tell her now that one of one of the great concerns is that funds are now being directed towards Ebola that were formerly used to deal with other health problems in the affected countries.

Significant sums are undoubtedly being channelled through non-governmental organisations, as they have to be, for the simple reason that there is no infrastructure in the region that is sufficient to cope with the outbreak, or with the funds that are being channelled to deal with it. However, we need to know that our money is being well spent, and it is not always clear that that is the case. For example, the International Rescue Committee, an NGO that is laudably trying to help the fight in Sierra Leone, is apparently charging the King’s Sierra Leone Partnership, another NGO, $5,000 a month for the use of each of its vehicles. Why? How can that sum be justified? How can the administrative costs associated with the unnecessary transfer of those funds be justified? Where are the funds coming from in the first place? I do not expect the Minister to be able to answer any of those questions tonight, but they demonstrate that we need to get a grip on the ground, and to ensure that in Sierra Leone, where we are taking the lead, moneys are being properly directed.

Another example is the medical and laboratory facilities that we have constructed in Kerry Town, which opened this morning. I understand that all the out-of-country medical staff are staying at an hotel called The Place. It is one of the most expensive hotels in Sierra Leone, perhaps the most expensive. Save the Children told me today that it has have negotiated a special rate, that rooms are being shared, and that it is necessary for its staff to stay there for reasons of hygiene; but is that really the best use of funds, and what alternatives were considered? I do not know, and if the Minister is handing taxpayer money to Save the Children, he will no doubt want to find out.

Let me turn to the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response. It has, I am told, 65 staff in Freetown. What are they doing? I know not and, it seems, neither does anyone else in the country. Here is what someone on the ground said to me in an e-mail:

“Their role is unclear, so far they are just eating money and trying to raise more. Not helping fight Ebola.”

What is needed are health workers, an issue to which I shall shortly come, not administrators spending money on salaries, allowances, accommodation and drivers.

The health systems of all the principally affected countries have been overwhelmed. It is frankly amazing that so many health professionals from here and other countries are prepared to risk their lives to help. They are the real heroes, but there are problems in this area as well.

The first is the disincentive to volunteering that is caused by much of the media coverage surrounding the outbreak. For tabloids to question whether Ebola might become airborne when all the virologists tell us that is highly unlikely is hardly helpful. This is not a film with Dustin Hoffman; it is a real-life situation where responsible reporting is required, including reporting how difficult it is to become infected by the Ebola virus in the absence of contact with an individual displaying symptoms.

Politicians are scarcely blameless. What sort of message, for example, do the Governors of New York and New Jersey think they send out to those who might volunteer by imposing unjustified quarantine requirements on asymptomatic patients which have no basis in scientific fact? What sort of message do the Governments of Canada and Australia think they are sending when they impose travel restrictions on those coming from west Africa which again have absolutely no basis in scientific fact? Cheap scaremongering politics at the expense of lives is not only counter-productive; it is just plain wrong.

Politicians in this country are not immune in this regard. The Minister will know that after British Airways took the unilateral decision to pull its west African routes—another decision which had no basis in medical or scientific fact—the only airline still flying directly to the principally affected countries was Gambia Bird, yet I understand that in early October the Government either ordered or told Gambia Bird to stop its flights. The World Health Organisation has been clear that international air travel is a very low-risk vector for infection, so why did the Government give that direction? Perhaps the Minister can tell us, because a difficult journey involving a long layover in Casablanca or elsewhere en route to the region is scarcely a compelling incentive to dedicated medical staff to volunteer to assist.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

I am very glad my hon. and learned Friend has mentioned the question of Gambia Bird, which I have raised in this House before, and I press the Minister to say in his reply when we are going to start to see flights resume from the UK to Sierra Leone. It is surely much better to have people coming into the same place, rather than coming around from various transit points back to this country or out to Sierra Leone?

[Stephen Phillips]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The point I was making, too, is that it offers a massive disincentive to those who want to go and help in the region.

Oral Answers to Questions

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Wednesday 5th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

First, I agree with the hon. Gentleman that what has happened at Milford Haven is very disappointing. We will continue to work with the company concerned and try to find employment opportunities for all those who work there. With regard to Tata Steel, Clydebridge employs around 90 people and, as he knows, is an integral part of the Long Products division. We took action in the Budget to support heavy industry, and we are working with Klesch Group and with the Scottish Government. It says that it is taking this on as a going concern and that due diligence has started. I think that the right thing to do is to work with the Klesch Group to try to ensure that its plans are to maintain that company. What we need overall is a situation in this country in which the steel industry continues to grow, as it has been doing under this Government.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

Q14. On behalf of my constituents, may I offer my sympathy to the families of those killed and to those injured in the tragic factory fire in Stafford last week, and may I also praise the wonderful response of the emergency services? UK exports to countries outside the European Union have gone up by a remarkable 22% over the past three years, including transformers, generators and financial services IT systems from my constituency. Will the Prime Minister look at whether the support given by UK Export Finance could be increased, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises?

[The Prime Minister]

First, let me join my hon. Friend in offering condolences to the families of those killed in the fire in Stafford; we must get to the bottom of exactly how it started. In terms of supporting exporting companies, a very important part of our long-term economic plan is ensuring that we get more small and medium-sized companies exporting. As he will know, we have increased the budget for UK Export Finance and made available export contracts for small and medium-sized enterprises worth over £1 billion, and we will continue to work with those companies, including through the GREAT campaign, which is opening up new markets for British products to ensure that more of our companies choose to export.

International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Friday 12th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Doughty]

If the economy grows, it will do, of course. The crucial thing is that we are tying this to the state of our overall economy, but it is also setting a worldwide standard, and it is meeting a promise we made in the 1970s, and which, indeed, all parties in this House committed to.

We could give many examples. The right hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman) mentioned one from Malawi, and I have seen for myself the impact of effective aid led by the expertise in DFID, whether in Sierra Leone in tackling maternal mortality and the deaths of young children, and the impact we were able to make with a very small contribution and removing user fees for basic health care services; in our action to tackle malaria, on which the right hon. Member for Eddisbury (Mr O'Brien) did excellent work in his time as Minister in the Department; or through the education programmes we have funded, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, the former Prime Minister, spoke about. There is also our work on HIV and AIDS, which I know many Members are very passionate about, and, indeed, our humanitarian work.

It was also a privilege to be able to serve alongside people from DFID, the Ministry of Defence, the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Service and the Foreign Office, who worked on our response to the terrible Haiti earthquake many years ago. Disasters such as Haiti demonstrate exactly what is at stake. In addition to providing the immediate humanitarian response, we also need to address the underlying causes of vulnerability in those situations. That requires long-term, predictable and assured assistance from countries such as ours.

The argument about predictability has been put forward a number of times. Members have asked why we need the Bill, and why we need to firm up this commitment and put it into law. The reason is that the predictable assurance of effective aid in the long term creates an ability to move away from aid. If we can support countries in building up strong health and education systems and good governance, we will ultimately be able to move them away from needing development assistance.

This activity also helps to create a social contract in countries where people should be able to expect services such as health and education to be provided by their Government. Our assistance can get them over that hump. That is what happened in this country. Let us not forget that, many years ago, health care and education services were provided voluntarily, as charity, here before we moved to nationally funded systems. We can have a debate about how those systems should be handled in the future, but we have moved to those national systems with national standards and predictable, secure funding. That creates an expectation among the population and helps to further democracy and the overall quality of life in a country. We should never forget that. This is a fundamental point to be made to those who ask why we need this commitment.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that another important consequence of predictable funding is that, through DFID, we are able to support long-term programmes of research, particularly agricultural research and health research into much needed vaccines and medicines? Does he agree that those are global public goods?

[Stephen Doughty]

I thoroughly agree with the hon. Gentleman. I have seen many of those programmes at work, and we should pay tribute to those in DFID who work on them. DFID is a world leader in research on many of these issues, and we need to see long-term funding going into those programmes to enable us to come up with solutions for agriculture, for vaccinations and for other crucial areas. In the end, such solutions will remove the need for further support. We need the assurance for that funding, however, because if it is simply left to the whims and the day-to-day politics of this place and of other countries around the world, it could easily fall victim to the siren voices, which would ultimately do long-term damage as we would not be able to achieve the scale and effectiveness that we require.

Many right hon. and hon. Members have mentioned the importance of Scotland. It is exemplified by the fact that the Bill is being promoted by the right hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk and by the presence today of the Chairman of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Gordon. We must remember the impact that Scotland has had on these debates, not only here in the House but globally. I mentioned the impact of the Make Poverty History march in Scotland before the Gleneagles summit. That summit would not have taken place there if Scotland had not been part of the United Kingdom. The people of Scotland who feel passionately about these issues would not have been able to have that impact on cancelling debt, trebling aid and arguing for fairer trade rules had that summit not taken place in Scotland and had we not had leaders including our Prime Minister and Chancellor who were willing to stand up for those issues and respond to those campaigners.

Some of the most excellent DFID staff are to be found in Scotland, in East Kilbride. I have had the pleasure of visiting their offices. The right hon. Member for Gordon and my right hon. Friend the Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr Clarke) have rightly said that it would be a huge tragedy to lose them. In response to the hon. Member for Angus (Mr Weir), I would say that, yes, Scotland could have an aid programme—it already gives support to Malawi and other countries, and that is fantastic—but effective aid depends on scale. It depends on doing things together and working with institutions such as the European Union and the United Nations and with successful, long-established development agencies such as DFID. Breaking that up in order to set up a separate scheme and badge it in a different way would be foolish. It would be a sad ending for the hundreds of thousands of people who stood on the streets of Edinburgh in 2005.

The Bill is about investing in the future of some of the world’s poorest people. It is also about investing in our own common future. This is the right thing to do. It is about justice, not charity. It is about putting Britain on the world stage and doing the right thing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

No, I will not.

I can mention two organisations in my constituency in that regard: Mpika Relief Fund does a fantastic amount of work helping people in Africa, and there is one in Burley-in-Wharfedale that does a similar job. They raise money for very worthwhile causes. I very much support what they do; I have even made donations to them in the past. What they spend their money on is much more worthwhile than these grandiose schemes that the Government come up with, where Ministers like to go out and say how wonderful they are because they are indulging their largesse everywhere. I prefer the smaller schemes that are run bottom-up from organisations like the ones in my constituency.

It might even be a good idea for the Government to offer tax relief for people who want to go out to other countries to help with particular projects. I would welcome that.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

It might help my hon. Friend to know that, actually, the gift aid from those kinds of donations is included within the 0.7% we are talking about, so that is happening at the moment.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is missing my point. I am not talking about gift aid on donations. I am talking about tax relief to help assist people who want to go out and do something practical themselves—who want to give up their job for a while to do something worthwhile. That would be a much more valuable and worthwhile thing for the Government to do than simply flex their muscles on how much they spend.

Because I am feeling in a generous mood, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will give way to the hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern), seeing as she is so excitable about intervening.

Global Health (Research and Development)

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Tuesday 8th July 2014 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Streeter. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Andrew George) for securing this important debate.

It is extremely important for the UK, and indeed the whole world, to take seriously the question of research and development for global health. I want to outline why it is also important for it to play, as it does, a major role in the work of the Department for International Development. I believe that to be so for five reasons, the first of which is that the aims in question are global public goods. The right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) talked about institutions that grew out of a desire to give treatment, including the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which I believe was for seamen. The Seamen’s hospital was at the royal docks, and seamen from all over the world who had contracted diseases went there. The hospital that eventually became the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine was set up to help them. The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine was founded by a ship owner who saw that if he and his colleagues in Liverpool were to engage in trade around the world, there was a need for treatment for diseases that might prevent their trade from continuing. If half of a crew who had been sent overseas succumbed to deadly diseases, it would not be possible to continue to trade. Thus the school came from a compassionate interest in people’s lives, and a commercial interest linked to compassion.

Secondly, the work in question is a matter of global public goods; the diseases are not diseases of far away people in far away lands. My right hon. Friends the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) and for Eddisbury (Mr O'Brien) have already said that they are the diseases of the poorest people on earth. I declare an interest as chairman of the all-party group on malaria and neglected tropical diseases. Those diseases—some 17 of them—affect well over 1 billion people a year who are among the poorest on earth. Malaria is similar, although like TB it can affect anyone. Those of us who travel to countries where it is endemic catch it, as I have on several occasions. When we invest in global research and development for global health we invest in tackling poverty and helping economic growth and prosperity. When people are sick they cannot engage in economic activity.

Thirdly, there is a need for long-term funding. That is why the role of DFID, development organisations and private foundations is so important. We are not talking about a budget for one, two, three or four years, but about long-term commitment. That is why I applaud schemes set up with the influence of, or sometimes by, the previous Government, such as the International Finance Facility for Immunisation, which I believe committed UK funds for up to 20 years, to develop vaccines. It is not possible to develop them over the short term. The Government have committed up to £500 million a year to tackling malaria. That is not just for research. As my hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire (Heather Wheeler) mentioned, diagnostics are key. The money will go on diagnostics research and delivery, as well as bed nets and drugs, but a substantial part of that £500 million a year will go towards research. So will part of the £40 million a year that the Government have rightly committed to tackling neglected tropical diseases.

Fourthly, there is a question of partnership and leverage. We must work with others. As so many right hon. and hon. Members have said, the task is not one that can be carried out by the commercial sector alone, although it has an important role to play; by Government alone, because Governments do not really do research; or by the foundations and NGOs alone. I have found from my work on malaria and neglected tropical diseases, as I am sure colleagues have, that it produces some of the finest examples of people working together—the commercial and private sectors, NGOs and Government —to tackle a common global problem.

The final reason I want to outline is one that was eloquently pointed out by the right hon. Member for Neath (Mr Hain), and my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs: resistance. We sometimes think that the problems are solved. They are not. I know far less about TB than the right hon. Gentleman and my right hon. Friend, but they pointed out the problems of increasing resistance to TB drugs. The same is being experienced with malaria, although the problem is perhaps not so advanced. Already the artemisinin combination therapies that have been a life saver for malaria around the world are facing resistance in places such as Myanmar. That is of course where resistance to chloroquine started, before it spread across Africa, resulting in the drug’s becoming almost useless. We must take the situation seriously, and I welcome DFID’s work in Myanmar to help to counter the spread of artemisinin resistance there.

Resistance develops not only against drugs, but against the insecticides with which bed nets are treated. Increasingly the mosquito is becoming resistant to some of them. That is why we must begin to use combinations of insecticides, or develop new ones. There is no doubt that insecticide-treated bed nets in the past 10 to 15 years have dramatically reduced malaria incidence and the death rate.

The debate is incredibly important because investment in research and development for global health is not an option but a necessity. I am proud that the UK takes a lead in research and in development. As the right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras has said, there is much of that concentrated in the UK. Also, NGOs and foundations in this country take a lead, and a huge amount of work is done by DFID. I welcome what has been done, but the problem is a long-term one and we need long-term commitment. So far we have had that from DFID, and I urge the Minister to say that the issue remains at the heart of DFID’s work and will do for years to come.

Job Creation: Developing Countries

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Tuesday 24th June 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

Before we start, let me make it clear to all those assembled here that I am not late; I am the emergency replacement in the Chair. It is an honour to be here this afternoon for the debate in the name of Mr Jeremy Lefroy.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

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

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

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

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

[Jeremy Lefroy]

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

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

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on obtaining the debate. Does he agree that although it is vital that jobs are created—that is what this debate is all about—in order to achieve that for small and large businesses, it is important that the infrastructure of those countries needs to be improved dramatically? Would it be an idea for moneys donated from the United Kingdom to these countries to be focused on certain areas to help to create jobs for young people?

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his wise intervention. Later I shall come to the issue of infrastructure—he is absolutely right about that—and give one or two examples of where it has made a huge difference.

To return to the point about the word “jobs” including the informal sector and self-employment, we have to remember that if we define “jobs” too narrowly as those where people enter into paid employment, we will be missing the point. That is a fairly small percentage of the total amount of work available in the world at the moment.

[Alok Sharma (Reading West) (Con)]

I, too, commend my hon. Friend for the enormous amount of work he does, not only on the Select Committee but elsewhere. Of course, he has huge knowledge of this subject and many developing countries. He talks about jobs in a wider sense. Does he agree that another key issue for many of these economies is access to finance? Of course, access to finance for businesses is a big issue in this country, but it is a particular issue in this context, too. Perhaps he will talk later in his speech about some of the issues—or some of the solutions that have been found—with improving access to finance for individuals who want to start businesses.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

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

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

[Fiona Bruce]

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

[Jeremy Lefroy]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Fiona Bruce]

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

[Jeremy Lefroy]

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

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

[Alok Sharma]

My hon. Friend has a huge amount of experience of working in Africa, and in some ways the continent is an untapped resource for business links. I will be speaking at the Afro Business Expo, which is taking place in the Thames valley in a few weeks and which I believe UK Trade and Investment is supporting. Does he agree that, as individual Members of Parliament, one of the things we can do is to encourage such events that enable businesses from African countries to come and meet businesses here? Such events will provide an opportunity for creating jobs not only in the UK but in developing nations.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

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

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

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

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

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

[Fiona Bruce]

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

[Jeremy Lefroy]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

If the House was not aware previously of how much the hon. Gentleman knows about international aid, it will certainly be now.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development (Lynne Featherstone)]

What a pleasure it is to serve under your unexpected chairmanship this afternoon, Mr Hollobone. You are a very welcome replacement. Thank you for enabling us to continue with the debate.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) for securing such an important debate. In his opening remarks, he said he had just returned from Liberia and Sierra Leone, which listed unemployment as their biggest challenge, and DFID also believes that is the case. Jobs are at the core of international development, and I very much welcome the opportunity to discuss the issue. I am aware of my hon. Friend’s vast experience and great knowledge in this field—it is much greater than my own—which comes from his personal experience of living in Africa and being involved in business for many years.

I hope many of the points in my speech will address some of the issues that have been raised. If we have time, I will try to address some of the more specific points that have been raised. When we ask people in the UK or in a developing country what they want, the desire for a good job is normally one of the top things on their list—that is not rocket science. A job will allow them to work their way out of poverty, to provide opportunities for their families and to build for a better future. I always think that having something to do and somewhere to go every day is also good for keeping a person whole in mind and body.

Since I became a DFID Minister, there is something that has struck me about virtually all the African countries I have visited—and I have been to Africa perhaps 20 times now. Driving up the road—if there is one—at certain times of day, one can see that many young men are sitting at the roadside without anything to do. That is a reminder of something that has already been raised in the debate: how important and necessary work is and how much work is missing.

I want to highlight the scale of the challenge in developing countries. Most of the 600 million new jobs needed globally by 2020 for the growing working-age population are needed in developing countries, but at the moment only 15% of people in low-income countries in Africa have what we would call a proper job. There are 900 million people in developing countries who are working but who, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford said, are doing vulnerable self-employed work and living in poverty. They engage in subsistence farming and so on. Most people in developing countries have a job of some sort, but it is mostly in unproductive subsistence work that may even be unsafe.

To address those issues in the terms in which DFID thinks about jobs, we need modern, formal sectors to grow and to create better jobs. We need people who work in subsistence agriculture or unproductive household businesses to be able to earn a better living. I have visited some impressive projects to intensify and maximise the produce of small agricultural plots. Avoiding the loss of produce in getting it to market is one way to do that, but I also remember a market in Zambia where we had arranged for people selling seeds and market produce to meet small subsistence farmers to exchange knowledge of the best seeds and how to plant. There was a product to make cows grow, so that people could get them to market in two and a half years instead of seven. I did not ask what was in it; nevertheless, someone with one cow could triple their income with that product. Many of these people are in marginalised rural areas or cities, poorly connected to markets for their labour. They lack the right mix of skills, finance, land and information to enable them to find a job. My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford also talked about getting goods to market, the skills needed to get a job, access to finance, surety of land tenure and information about how to maximise produce.

We also need to address serious inequality in who gets job opportunities. Women are less likely to participate in the labour force and are more likely to be in unpaid or vulnerable work. Young people—and there are many in developing countries—also fare badly, which often poses a risk to social cohesion. That is not just unfair and dangerous; it is inefficient and represents a huge potential loss to developing economies. Changing this jobs picture requires economic development and transformation, much of which will be led by the private sector. People need the opportunity to earn more. For many, that will mean getting better incomes in agriculture, but over time—indeed, already and increasingly— the bulk of new jobs will come from higher-income opportunities in services and manufacturing, as has happened in every country that has successfully developed.

DFID’s work on economic development and jobs involves, first, getting the international system right; secondly, getting private sector growth going; and, thirdly—an absolute priority for me—ensuring that growth is broad-based and inclusive, in particular for girls and women. One example is the recent trade facilitation agreement reached in Bali, which will be instrumental in reducing the barriers to trade, helping to integrate developing countries into global trade flows and promoting jobs and investment. We are also pushing for productive jobs to feature prominently in the goals and targets of the post-2015 agenda, which is essential if we are to reach zero poverty by 2030. Our multilateral partners are also well placed to deliver on the jobs agenda and are upping their game. The UK-backed International Finance Corporation global SME finance initiative aims to provide at least 1 million new jobs and financing to 200,000 small and medium-sized enterprises. Access to finance is crucial, and I have just been in Mozambique, where I launched access to finance for women in SMEs. It is a crucial stage.

The World Bank Group has put job creation and economic development at the centre of its plans to achieve its goal of increasing shared prosperity and the income that accrues to the poorest 40% in each country. We are engaging closely with the bank on that. Across Government, the UK is also working to improve economic and trade relations. Our recently launched high-level partnerships for prosperity will improve trade between the UK and Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Mozambique and Tanzania—indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford mentioned the recent trip there by the Secretary of State.

Driving economic development and jobs is not only the most effective way to reduce poverty in developing countries; it is also in the interest of the UK. The hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) raised the question of tied aid, and I assure her that there is no question of that. It is against the law and not appropriate. However, when we let contracts in open competition, a UK business will often win. That, however, can only be a compliment to British business and its ability to make the successful bid. There is no favouritism: the process happens on the open market and such contracts are always let competitively.

It is in the interest of the UK to build our future trading partners. Africa has a growth rate that we in the UK can only envy and there is phenomenal wealth lying beneath its ground. The challenge with extractive industries is to spread the benefits widely, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford said. One reason for the work we do on value chains and supply chains in extractives, and in the surrounding geographical area, is to try to link the economic benefit to the country. We also give technical support and assistance with the original contract negotiations, so that the country benefits from its own wealth, rather than other countries or the elites of that country.

Improving job prospects in developing countries, particularly for young people, reduces the chance of conflict. The recent awful case of the abduction of girls in northern Nigeria seems to have gone from the media pages, but it has not stopped being on our mind at DFID or the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Part of the issue in the area where Boko Haram flourishes is that young men have nothing to do. I am looking at programmes to develop skills and jobs in that area, as possible diversionary tactics, which would also be very beneficial.

Many businesses in the UK are looking to Africa and Asia and seeing the markets of the future. Businesses see value in engaging with DFID and the rest of Government and they in turn have much to offer the countries that they choose to invest in. Interestingly enough, the business advisers to DFID’s advisory board have strongly called for exactly what my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford was talking about: the development of appropriate skills and education. There is a willingness to invest in countries and create jobs where the climate is stable enough, but there is also a need for skills, so that businesses do not have to import their own staff. A company that wants to open in many parts of a country needs to be able to use staff from the country in question to run branches, co-ordinate things and see to the logistics.

Our spending programmes create jobs in developing countries in a number of ways. The Commonwealth Development Corporation, the UK’s development finance institution, is having a huge impact on job creation in Africa and Asia. It is remarkable. In 2013, CDC’s 1,300 investee companies directly employed over 1 million people. That is a hugely successful rate.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

The Minister is absolutely right to point that out. I would further like to congratulate CDC; I understand that last year saw the highest level of investment by CDC in its history. That is a welcome sign of the success of the Government’s opening of CDC’s mandate, to include direct investment in businesses again, as well as investment in funds, and concentrating on low-income countries rather than spreading out through middle-income countries.

[Lynne Featherstone]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent intervention. CDC has gone from strength to strength. Not that long ago there were some question marks over it, but it has moved well away from that. As he says, because it works in the most fragile, conflict-affected and poorest of countries, its success is all the more remarkable. It has created more than 68,000 new jobs.

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[Lynne Featherstone]

The hon. Gentleman is obviously right. We work in that direction and we are working as fast as we can to enable job creation to happen. I have covered a number of things, but part of what DFID does is on the enabling environment for investment and therefore job creation, whether that means cutting the time it takes to get goods across a border from four weeks to one day, or help with filling in forms or how long it takes to start a business—all the things that are very off-putting to investors. We are working on all fronts.

I do not know whether those hon. Members present have ever eaten in Nando’s, for example, but I was in Mozambique, where Nando’s exclusively grows its peri-peri peppers. It is a labour-intensive process, with massive work for smallholdings, done to a very high standard—because the standards, both of the product and how people work, are very important to DFID and the British Government—which means huge job creation. It is a win-win for the country, the company and the individuals who are being taught and looked after while they grow peri-peri peppers—and I can highly recommend peri-peri chicken.

DFID currently supports more than 60 programmes with specific targets to provide economic assets to girls and women in developing countries. We have set ourselves a target of helping 18 million women to access financial services and 4.5 million women to strengthen their property rights by 2015. Both will have a fundamental impact on the job prospects of the women involved by improving their control over assets and finance.

For some women in work, the conditions remain unacceptable. The UK is supporting the International Trade Centre to work with Governments and customs authorities in east Africa to improve conditions for female informal traders, who face harassment and extortion at borders—the example often given is someone who starts with 12 eggs and, by the time they pay off all the people who have to be paid off, has about three eggs left to sell. That is a common, everyday kind of factor.

The Department is also scaling up its work on education and skills—an important point that my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford raised—to make sure that skills are relevant to people’s changing opportunities and that the private sector is involved in designing, delivering and financing them. We are also increasing our work on infrastructure—my hon. Friend talked about power and transport—and thinking afresh about urbanisation, in order to create more and more productive jobs.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

My hon. Friend is making some extremely important points. One issue that I did not refer to directly in my speech—but which relates specifically to skills—is the great need for additional skills in, for instance, the health and education sectors, which are themselves financed through the development of the economy, the payment of taxes and so on. The hon. Member for Wirral South, who speaks for the Opposition, and I were both keen to see the International Development Committee look into health system strengthening. I am glad to see that that inquiry has now taken place. One of the things that I think will emerge from it is the enormous number of job opportunities for people at all skill levels in the health and education sectors, but of course those sectors have to be financed and the finance comes from the growth of the private sector.

[Lynne Featherstone]

That is absolutely the case. There are some benign circles that we need to get going in, for example, higher education in developing countries, because skills in health and education need to be supplied locally. We need to up the quality of teaching and professionals in the health service. Indeed, that is how we are moving forward, and I believe I will be giving evidence to the IDC on health system strengthening. The need is great, because the numbers are enormous and those jobs must be filled by training individuals within countries and not “borrowing” them, as has happened in the past.

As for monitoring and evaluating DFID’s work, we are scaling up efforts to monitor and evaluate the impact of our work on economic development. Some areas of this agenda, such as job creation, investment and trade, are quite complex to measure. The International Finance Corporation’s “Let’s Work” initiative, which DFID, CDC and the Private Infrastructure Development Group engage with, is working to develop an agreed approach to estimating the impact of private sector infrastructure interventions on job creation. DFID funded the IFC’s study in 2013 of the private sector and jobs, and a whole chapter is devoted to the difficult issue of measuring net additional job creation. Measuring it exactly is one of the challenges, but it is our ambition both to measure it and to ensure that the jobs being created are additional and would not have been created in any case.

Under the economic development scale-up, we are looking to increase the relevance of education and skills for the changing job market, as I have said. That goes for foundational skills and technical skills, so that skills taught in school and technical training institutes have to be right and join up what is needed for industry in the country with the skills that are available. New interventions for marginalised groups in rural and urban areas provide combinations of interventions, such as entrepreneurship skills and finance and innovative business models—we are trying to create another benign circle. I have visited some of the larger pilot entrepreneur skills awareness training projects, where an inspirational speaker talks to 700 or 800 young people at a time, who all seem absolutely fired up and up for going out and becoming entrepreneurs in their own right. It is very exciting work.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford mentioned power. The Public-Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility is delivering technical assistance to unlock private investment in developing countries and the EU is investing in the EU-Africa Infrastructure Trust Fund.

As for ports, in Mombasa in Kenya we are helping to tackle problems with port management to improve trade and regional integration. Most importantly, of course, as Mozambique’s ports develop, the corridors that will open up to neighbouring landlocked countries will be incredibly valuable, both to those countries and the ports themselves.

As for work, I hear what the hon. Member for Wirral South, my opposite number, was saying. I can assure her that I go to the International Labour Organisation every three months and I work closely with the unions. They have raised the issue of our stopping their funding many times with me. However, as I have explained, we work in different ways. We are working with them on a project on trafficking in Asia and we have given £4.8 million to an ILO programme to improve working conditions in the readymade garment sector in Bangladesh. That was launched in October to help to conduct safety inspections of the 1,500 factories that are not covered by existing initiatives and to help the victims of the disaster.

In a similar field, the trade and global value chains initiative encourages buyers, factories and workers to work together to improve productivity and working conditions. Our overarching message and narrative on working conditions—in all businesses and in all ways, and with Governments—is that they should be good and professional. It is no good a Department such as DFID not caring about standards; we care very much about standards and responsible business. We encourage companies to respect voluntary global standards, which improve labour standards and reduce harmful working practices. We provide funding and support that strengthens mechanisms that ensure that companies comply with their commitments on labour standards and working practices, such as the ethical trading initiative. We have also funded and supported the extension to the global fair trade system and are building evidence about its impact on wages and working conditions.

As for ensuring that poor people are not being excluded from any newly developed markets, which obviously is important, we support inclusive growth, benefiting women and girls in particular. That is an essential pillar of DFID’s economic development strategic framework. Although occasionally one sees “economic development” written in a report, it is always meant to read “inclusive economic development”. There is no point developing a country if the process is not inclusive, because if it leaves people behind, it will simply repeat the worst mistakes that have been made in other parts of the world. I am pleased that the overarching principle of the high-level panel report on the post-2015 agenda is exactly that. “Leave no one behind” is the most important message.

In conclusion, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford, who covered the issues and subjects in better detail, perhaps, even than myself. I think all hon. Members would say that we are all committed to the creation of useful employment and work and the improvement of subsistence work and agriculture. That is important, right across the developing world, because if we do not do it right, we will be guilty of leaving many people behind. Ultimately, it is in our own interests—in the country’s and everyone’s interests—that we get this right and support the developing world in the creation of the right sort of jobs, the right environment and the right economy.

Afghanistan

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Wednesday 14th May 2014 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

That is an important question. We have seen in other countries how mineral extraction has filled the pockets of the few and how the opportunity for shared prosperity has been missed. We do not want to see that happen in Afghanistan. The value of minerals in Afghanistan is estimated to range from $2 trillion to $3 trillion. There is a huge opportunity there. DFID has worked with the Afghan Ministry of Mines on the minerals law, which has, I think, now passed through Parliament. That should provide a legal framework for responsible investment. We will be doing further work to ensure that those concessions that the Government give are ones that ensure not only that companies profit from extracting minerals but that Afghanistan itself starts to reap the rewards of having those resources.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

In a recent debate in the House, Members raised the important correlation between inclusive economic growth and respect for all human rights, including freedom of thought and belief. What discussions have my right hon. Friend and her colleagues had with the Afghan Government about that important relationship in respect of economic development?

[Justine Greening]

We talked more broadly about the economic and social progress that Afghanistan needs to continue to make, which includes people’s human rights. Obviously, a constitution is in place now. Part of the Tokyo mutual accountability framework was all about ensuring that that constitution gets implemented and holds for individuals in their daily lives on the ground. It is good that, two years on from that Tokyo meeting, we are having a ministerial meeting to look at development. We need to see not only that donors are living up to the commitments that they made—the UK is—but that the Afghan Government are getting on with the process of reform, economic development and security improvements, not least of which is the final signing of the bilateral security agreement.