Disability and Development

Kate Green Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2014 Westminster Hall

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I will not speak for long, partly because, unlike every other hon. Member here in the Chamber, I am a complete international development novice, and partly because I am somewhat lacking in voice. However, I am not a novice with respect to disability policy, given that I am shadow Minister with responsibility for domestic disability policy. I particularly wanted to ensure that links between domestic and international policy are firmly on the table, as they are much alike in terms of the issues and challenges we face.

I am a bit less of a novice than I would have been if this debate had taken place six weeks ago, because I have just had the great privilege of visiting Rwanda as a parliamentary intern, under the auspices of Voluntary Service Overseas. I acknowledge the tremendous experience that VSO gave me—I am sure other hon. Members in this Chamber have had similar opportunities—and I place on record my interest, which is recorded in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

I, too, thought that the disability framework produced by DFID in response to the excellent Select Committee report was an impressive piece of work, and I know it has been widely welcomed among disability organisations. It identifies all the right challenges that both international and domestic social policy must get to grips with. Other hon. Members have discussed the link between disability and poverty, which is often driven by worklessness, children missing education as a result of their condition, and thereby being prevented from achieving their full economic potential. Disabled people also experience poorer health outcomes and health service. As other hon. Members have mentioned, disabled people also face stigma, exclusion and isolation.

In addressing these issues, I want to highlight a few of the similarities—the read-across—between domestic and international policy, which I hope the Minister will find of interest. The UK, like many of our international development partner countries, is signed up to the UN convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. That rights-based framework—that lens—for how we develop our policy is important, and I hope he will say a little about how DFID perceives it and what he and his Department mean by giving reality to disabled people’s rights.

For me, an important example of that rights-based approach is people’s right to live independently and to live the life they choose. I am interested to hear how DFID is applying in different cultural contexts what might be perceived as a western cultural norm of independence and living one’s own life. I have come back from that visit understanding the clear importance of the family and family life in all international and domestic settings. It is also pretty clear to me that institutional life is rarely good for people in any international or domestic setting. I would be particularly interested to hear what the Minister has to say about DFID’s attitude to that.

I echo what the Chair of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Gordon (Sir Malcolm Bruce), said about the importance of disaggregated data. He said that there are 1 billion disabled people in the world, which highlights how important it is to improve data collection. When I was in Rwanda, I was told that people with disabilities accounted for some 6% of the population. I am surprised that that number is so low. In this country, where one would expect the incidence to be lower, it is actually higher, some 10% to 12%. Frankly, I suspect that there is massive under-recording, even in respect of the worrying figure given by the right hon. Gentleman. I cannot highlight enough the importance of DFID’s role in supporting effective data gathering, monitoring and validating mechanisms. Without those, we are developing policy and programmes somewhat in the dark.

I am pleased to see in the framework a reference to co-production, an ugly word for an important concept. Can the Minister confirm that co-production will not relate just to programmes specifically dealing with impairment and for persons with disabilities? Bringing disabled people into the development and preparation of every programme funded by DFID would ensure that they have their say in how all DFID programmes develop, so that in every case, every bit of DFID spending reaches everybody, including those with disabilities, even if the programmes are not designed specifically for them.

The other issue in which I take great interest, particularly informed by my history before coming to this House and my few days in Rwanda, is the relationship and engagement with non-governmental organisations and civil society. While I was in Rwanda, I had the privilege of spending most of my time working with civil society organisations through their umbrella organisation, the National Union of Disability Organisations of Rwanda. My experience was that there is quite a lot of work to do to support local civil society organisations.

The Chair of the Select Committee is absolutely right to distinguish between disability organisations, which are often big national and international names, and genuinely grassroots, disabled people-led organisations, which are less random in their approach than simply consulting a few disabled people. They involve an element of representation and organisation, but they offer a much more lived and real experience. That is not to decry the importance of the analytical approach taken by some of the bigger organisations, which is also valid; but we must hear the voices of those with lived experience.

Civil society bodies certainly exist in Rwanda that could provide help, but disabled people’s understanding of the mechanisms by which they could participate in and influence policy and the political process was underdeveloped. I invite DFID to consider how, in supporting building the capacity of NGOs and civil society, it could build effective advocacy capacity that is plugged into the political decision-making process in each of the countries and settings in which DFID delivers programmes.

Like other hon. Members present, I think the 2015 sustainable development goals offer a tremendous opportunity that we missed when preparing the millennium development goals. That opportunity is observably on offer now, as a number of the draft goals being discussed refer to disability. It is important that we ask Ministers to be utterly vigilant in protecting all the references to disability within whatever SDG framework eventually emerges.

We know how effective internationally agreed ambitions can be from the progress made following the millennium development goals on gender issues, and from the progress made on women and girls. I say to the Minister that this is an important line of argument that needs to be sustained on the SDGs, and I hope the Government will take a strong line on ensuring that the emerging framework reflects that.

I welcome the fact that the issue of disability and development has come into the spotlight, and I want to convey, through the Minister, to his Department and its staff that in Rwanda the work of DFID is very well regarded, and we as a country ought to be proud of that. I therefore hope that we will want to build on that strong reputation, and that the UK will continue to be a staunch and vocal champion of the rights of disabled people in developing economies.

I also ask the Minister to tell his ministerial colleagues in other Departments that what we are doing in developing countries is not just something we offer, but something from which we ourselves can learn and develop back here at home. Development is not a one-way trade, and nor is aid. We can learn much from our partner countries as they develop their own domestic strategies, sometimes with the aid of DFID’s support. But believe me, I saw in Rwanda a scale of ambition, commitment and willingness to vocalise and mainstream policy, in order to address the disadvantage and exclusion that disabled people face, that it would be really nice to see in our own country. I hope the Minister will consider how he can learn from other countries to inform our own domestic policies.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Mr Desmond Swayne)]

I begin by dealing with the points raised about prevention. I agree entirely that it is highly appropriate. One principal area not touched on in the debate is the fact that for every birth that results in the death of either the mother or the child, 20 result in disability, so our emphasis on maternal health, and the health of women and girls, is fundamental to this. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) about the importance of dealing with disease. We continue our commitment to eradication of disease, including polio, and our work with Sightsavers. On roads, in Nepal we are putting barriers on to roads to reduce the number of accidents; that is an issue that we are alive to. With regard to conflict—my hon. Friend mentioned Afghanistan—we are putting significant funds into the International Rescue Committee to deal with rehabilitation and prostheses. This is an important part of the agenda.

I join the Committee Chairman, the right hon. Member for Gordon (Sir Malcolm Bruce), in paying tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone). This was a brief that she felt passionately about, and she made a singular contribution to it. She drove forward the issue of data and the ability to disaggregate. Just in October, she chaired a conference jointly with the United Nations on how we drive forward that agenda. My hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) asked about the progress we are making on data; I largely put down the progress we have made to the impetus that my right hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green gave to that.

We are prioritising national data systems. We have just managed to get the Washington Group questions on disability incorporated into our programmes in Burma and Yemen. We are developing new guidance on disaggregating data at programme level, and we have an important new commitment to disaggregating data on humanitarian support and disability. It is true that if disabled people cannot be counted, the temptation is to think that they do not count. We have to be able to count them and disaggregate.

On the issue raised by the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) about the post-2015 millennium development goals, she is absolutely right: we should not lose the gains in the language from the output of the open working group and the debates that surrounded that. I am not convinced that we need a specific goal on disability, although I understand that I may have implied that in an answer to a recent parliamentary question. The reason why we do not necessarily need that specific goal relates to the difference between what constitutes a strategy and what constitutes a framework. The strategy is that no one should be left behind. It is about inclusivity, an end to stigma and all moving forward to the same place. The framework is about how we deliver that. Of course we will have to paddle under the water a lot faster for our disabled people to get them moving forward at the same rate.

The Chair of the Select Committee is absolutely right: it is fundamental that we cannot tackle poverty, including extreme poverty, unless we tackle poverty among disabled people. “No one left behind” is the key strategy behind what we are attempting to do. We have made considerable progress on inclusivity. We have a number of separate programmes that deal specifically with the disabled, but equally we have programmes where we are having to incorporate the needs of disabled people. In 2013, we announced that any schools that we fund have to be accessible. This year, we have new sectoral commitments on water supply and humanitarian programming, but there is no doubt that the International Development Committee set us some challenging goals. We have doubled the number of people working on the team and appointed a new champion, but in my estimation, overwhelmingly the most important thing we have done is produce the framework document.

I am surprised by the criticism levelled at the discussion with and involvement of disabled groups. We work very closely with disabled groups. The Department works with some 400 disability groups. In drawing up the disability framework, discussing it and getting it to the state it is in, we worked with disabled people’s organisations, including organisations of disabled people—not people representing the disabled—in Rwanda and Mozambique. In this country, we worked with disabled people’s organisations, but also—this, I suspect, is where the tension comes in—with the Bond Disability and Development Group. We included both.

[Kate Green]

I want to clarify exactly what I was suggesting. Based on what I was told in Rwanda, I absolutely recognise what the Minister said. Rwanda was one of the consultee countries in preparing the framework, and civil society organisations were able to have input. My point was that that needs to be replicated in how those organisations are facilitated and enabled to work with their national Government. From my observation, that is not happening in Rwanda. DFID has a role in thinking about how it uses the framework to replicate what he says was done in its preparation here.

[Mr Swayne]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. The framework is not only to inform us, but to inform how we work with our partners, be they Governments or multilateral organisations. It is our key response. It was published on 3 December and will be published every year. The Chair of the Committee asked for an annual stocktake. The framework is a living document, and we will change and update it all the time to ensure that it works, but clearly we need an annual review as well. I would have thought that the ideal way to deal with that would be to have an annual session with the Select Committee, in which it interrogates the performance and the progress made.

There are not any targets in the document, as the Chair said, but that is because it is the first one and we are feeling our way, to an extent. It would be wrong to put targets in until we have bedded the thing down and seen the progress that we have made. We will use the document to build understanding of disability into every single member of staff, so that every single member of staff can take responsibility for ensuring that the principle of “No one left behind” is built into every one of our programmes. We will work with our multilateral partners to ensure that, and to make sure that they are taking account of disability. As part of that, we will develop the disaggregation of data.

There will be special provision for the agenda for women and girls who are in double jeopardy as a result of disability and being female, and the stigma that attaches to that. We will continue to prioritise research and evidence on what works in low-resource economies. The Chair of the Select Committee drew specific attention to mental health, and that is an area where we have to raise our game with the agenda. To that end, we have launched a study called the Programme for Improving Mental Health Care, in which we work specifically to see what we can do on mental health issues in low-resource economies.

I believe fundamentally that the framework is one of the most important things on our agenda, and it is vital to drive it forward. I recall having a conversation with a constituent who was disabled. She was giving advice on what was needed for a particular project. She said to me bluntly that people did not want our pity; they wanted our help, not only so that they could be self-sufficient and do what other people do, but so that they could be contributors to their community. The ambition of “No one left behind” has to be that disabled people become an asset to their communities and not a burden on them.