Syria

Kate Osamor Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2018 Commons Chamber

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

I welcome the Secretary of State’s statement, and I thank her for giving me advance sight of it. Let me join her in expressing my anger at the attacks on aid workers in South Sudan. Let me also congratulate her on her appointment today as Minister for Women and Equalities.

The war in Syria has gone on for more than eight years, and 100,000 civilians have died, 1 million have been injured and 12 million displaced. For all our differences, I believe that we in this House are united in our desire to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Syrian people and, as fellow humans, to help to bring an end to their suffering.

Turning first to money, I welcome the fact that last week the UK pledged £250 million more in new funding to help Syria. That can sound like a lot, but the truth is that last week’s pledging conference in Brussels raised less than half the $9 billion needed. It also raised less than was raised at a similar conference this time last year. Indeed, Mark Lowcock, the UN’s emergency relief co-ordinator, has warned that we have a $5 billion shortfall and that the UN will now have to make hard choices. The Prime Minister of Lebanon, where 25% of the population are refugees, has warned that his country remains “a big refugee camp”. Without enough funding, tensions are rising in Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Jordan, so will the Secretary of State say more about how the UK intends to help to fill that remaining shortfall and about what plans exist to increase our own contribution? Given that delays have been reported in the United States’ pledge and that pledges from the Gulf states have so far been less than was hoped, what assurances can she give the House that she is putting extra pressure on those others also to come to the table?

It is not all about the money, however—it is not enough just to get the chequebook out. Without a political solution, our aid budget will only ever have a limited impact, so what are the Government doing to show political leadership in securing a ceasefire? After they ignored the UN and joined US airstrikes, will the Government now recommit to a joint multilateral solution to peace through the UN, even if that seems difficult? Let us remember that, a fortnight ago, this House debated the decision by the Prime Minister to bomb Syria without even coming to this House for a vote. We were told then that the action was intended to alleviate human suffering. Will the Secretary of State tell us whether her Department ever carried out an assessment of the likely humanitarian impact of the airstrikes before they were authorised by the Prime Minister?

Opening the chequebook overseas counts for nothing unless we also live up to our responsibilities to Syrian refugees here in the UK. The Government promised to take 20,000 Syrian refugees by 2020, yet the UK is taking just 4% of the number of refugees received by Germany, and the numbers across European countries are dwarfed by those in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq. We are not even able to hit the Dubs amendment target of 3,000 children, and that is pitiful.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) also reported recently that his constituents were unable to host and help Syrian refugees because of the logistical and bureaucratic hurdles set up by the Home Office. That pattern is being replicated up and down the country. If the Government can prioritise targets to remove people from this country, why are we not able to hit a simple target to let in a handful of refugee children from countries such as Syria? Will the Secretary of State please sit down with the new Home Secretary and urge him to remove these barriers straight away so that we can, at the very least, hit the UK’s very modest targets for resettling Syrian refugees and children?

[Penny Mordaunt]

I thank the hon. Lady for her warm words at the start of her response. We are doing many things to ensure that we and the international community have the funding we need to alleviate the immense suffering being endured by the Syrian people. The first part of our contribution is obviously asking others to lean in, so my right hon. Friend the Minister for the Middle East and I have been asking other nations to do that. We obviously heavily co-ordinate our efforts with UN agencies and with their asks. We are also leading the charge on reforming the humanitarian system. We lose about $1 billion a year globally because the system does not work efficiently, so if we can get it to work better, we will have more money to deploy where we need it.

We are also helping in other areas. To give one example, I was recently in Jordan looking at the costs of healthcare; particular prices must be paid for vaccines for refugees. We are looking at the specific cost issues for the countries that are shouldering an immense burden and at what we can do to try to alleviate those costs or to get more sensible pricing systems in place.

We are also working with the multilateral system; as the hon. Lady will know, the capital replenishment of the World Bank was a huge success for the UK’s development goals. That formed part of our desire to ensure that the countries that are shouldering burdens, specifically Jordan and Lebanon, have their contributions taken into account when decisions are being made. I am pleased to be working with the president of the World Bank and Bill Gates on being human capital champions and on ensuring that all multilaterals are making decisions about which nations are stepping up and not only funding their own people, but supporting refugees from other nations.

The hon. Lady mentioned the UN, and we all know about the problems we have with the Security Council and Russia’s veto. We must find other ways of working and to encourage people to come to the table, and we have to put pressure on Russia and Iran to play their parts in getting the situation resolved.

As for the air strikes, their purpose was to degrade and deter the use of chemical weapons, as the hon. Lady knows. The vast majority of Members across the House recognise why they were a good thing for the people of Syria, for our own safety and for trying to ensure international norms. One reason why we are not able to share information with the House in advance of such strikes is that we can only make the judgment to which she referred when we know what the targets are. We can only make a judgment about whether a strike will be legal, effective in its objective and compliant with our targeting policies if we know what the targets are, and we cannot share that information with the House for understandable reasons.

We have chosen to support millions in the region. We are taking a number of refugees into the UK, but we are supporting millions of individuals not just with the basics of life, but by trying to ensure that they have some kind of future, particularly with our investment in education. Since I became Secretary of State, I have set up several new groups with the Home Office, both recently and last year, to consider issues in which there is Home Office interest, including the administration of the situation of refugees. For example, if people caught up in the Rohingya crisis have relatives here, we are trying to be proactive and to ensure that we are doing everything we can to get sensible things to happen.