Kurdish Political Representation and Equality in Turkey

Debate between Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Alex Sobel

Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Westminster Hall

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

I totally agree. NATO and the Council of Europe, both of which we and Turkey are members of, need to be holding Turkey to greater account. I also totally agree with my right hon. Friend that we should have no truck with terrorism. But an expansive approach including anyone who just shares the ideals of self-determination is not helpful in the fight against terrorism, because it makes a mockery of the whole system. I will come on to that in the final part of my speech.

In December 2020, the European Court of Human Rights ordered the immediate release of the chairs and other Members of Parliament and a suspension of their trials, saying that they was politically motivated. That ruling is now wilfully ignored by Turkey. In addition, the European Parliament passed, by 590 votes to 16, a motion saying that they should be released.

The testimony is supported by the “World Report 2020”, published by Human Rights Watch, which states:

“Cases against HDP politicians provide the starkest evidence that authorities bring criminal prosecution and use detention in bad faith and for political purposes.”

The 2020 Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe resolution dealt with the political crackdown on political opposition, highlighting how immunity for politicians had been stripped away from 2016 onwards.

We have debated this issue previously in this place, and I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Feryal Clark) for securing a previous debate about political representation in Turkey and the fate of some of the HDP politicians. It is clear that this is an organised targeting of opposition MPs just for calling for autonomy or self-determination for majority Kurdish areas. Previously it had been an attack on HDP MPs, but recently and worryingly it has been extended to CHP Members of Parliament. The CHP is no Kurdish-flag-waving party. Many Kurds will say that the CHP is part of a state that helped to lay some of the foundations of difficulties. But many CHP members now choose to speak out on the moral and correct thing, which is the ability of people to partake in democratic life. And the idea of supporting Kurdish autonomy and self-determination seems to be all that is now required to trigger an accusation of terrorism or subversion. That is a dangerous precedent.

We not only heard from MPs in Turkey; we also took evidence from municipal leaders, one of whom was elected a mayor but is now in exile in Greece. The APPG heard that since the last local elections in 2019, 59 of the 65 elected municipal leaders have been replaced by Government-appointed trustees. A human rights report quoted in our report says:

“Regardless of which party or candidate they voted for, the will of…more than 4 million…voters living within the boundaries of 48 municipalities”

has been

“seized through the appointment of trustees.”

Our inquiry also took evidence on the closure of the Democratic Society Congress—the DTK—an organisation bringing together politicians and civil society that advocates not separation but confederalisation in Turkey, and that is its crime. Actions taken have included the arrest of its leaders, as well as the targeting of the Kurdish political youth organisations. One refugee is in my constituency because of the persecution he faced.

On Kurdish political representation, the APPG made nine findings. I will not read them all out, but I will mention a few. We found that trials have been increasingly conducted in closed central courts in Ankara and not the open divisional courts in the home provinces, making a defence harder for a Member of Parliament. The APPG also found that there have been routine cases against 154 MPs—154 MPs have received indictments; this is not just a few people who have done objectionable things —and that the legal proceedings are being used to tackle political disagreements, which in turn disproportionately affects Members of Parliament from Kurdish backgrounds. We also found that the human rights of municipal leaders are violated routinely by detaining them pending trial or sentencing them to prison on trumped-up charges.

Our report was 56 pages in total, with 32 recommendations for the UK Government. We received comments based on the first-hand experience of MPs, mayors, civil society and women’s organisations, and I sent the report to the Minister in July. I received a one-and-a-quarter-page reply, the substantive part of which said:

“We were concerned by recent reports of increased violence in the region and the Minister for the Middle East and North Africa tweeted on 1 September calling for de-escalation.”

Is a tweet really the maximum amount of our diplomatic effort? It would be nice to know more about what the Government have been doing. Over hundreds of hours, we collected work on the report and made concrete recommendations. I would like the Government to give some concrete responses.

Will the Minister and the Government demand the release of the HDP co-leaders, in accordance with the decision by the European Court of Human Rights in December 2020? Will she condemn the closure of the DTK and remind the Turkish Government of their previous commitment to find a peaceful solution to the ongoing conflict? Will the Government push the Turkish Government to accept the revised European charter on the participation of young people in local and regional life, which is a Council of Europe charter for young people, so that it applies to young people in Turkey? Finally, what will the Government do to press the Turkish Government to uphold the rule of law and democratic principles in Turkey?

I now turn to the issue of discrimination through language and culture. Having gone through the first section of my speech, I will now try to rattle through the other sections. The inquiry received evidence from the Education and Science Workers’ Union in Turkey, which had conducted its own report. It stated that 200,000 children in Diyarbakır alone and 6 million children in south-east Turkey were being denied an education entirely or being forced to learn exclusively in Turkish and not their mother language. This is, of course, a denial of human rights, and it also makes it impossible for children to be helped in their studies by their parents or caregivers, which puts them at an immediate disadvantage as they grow up.

The inquiry also received a report from the Kurdish Language and Culture Network, which suggests that there had been enforced and targeted discrimination against the Kurdish community, particularly where they had expressed their culture in language and other traditional practices. We found that in the last five years 57 Kurdish cultural institutions and organisations had been closed down, including theatres, just for staging plays in the Kurdish language.

Will the Government condemn the Turkish Government’s decision to close multiple institutions that uphold Kurdish cultural life? Furthermore, what steps will the Minister take to raise this issue with her Turkish counterparts? Will she discuss the support that the British Council could offer in Kurdish-English work and co-operation?

I turn now to gender-based oppression in Turkey. Historically, Turkey has retained a low representation of women in its Parliament. In 2020 the World Bank calculated that 17% of seats were held by women, which is below the global average of 25%. The HDP operates a co-chair system, whereby a man and a woman co-chair the party and many municipalities. The HDP maintains a quota of 50% female candidates and, I think almost uniquely for any political party in the world, 10% of Members must come from the LGBT+ community. That means that repression of Kurdish and Kurdish-supporting MPs has ended up disproportionately affecting women and LGBT+ people, because they are disproportionately represented—not disproportionately according to the population, but in the Turkish Parliament.

The practice of having co-chairs has even been cited by the Turkish Government as evidence of links to the PKK, which was the first to use the co-chair system. That is further evidence that the expansive practice of just sharing any similar idea or practice with the PKK will mean that an organisation is branded as terrorists. It is clearly ridiculous.

It is not just the HDP that has been targeted in a gendered way. The Free Women’s Congress and 49 other women’s organisations were closed down in the state of emergency that was declared in 2016. As a result of that declaration, the bank accounts of many of these women’s organisations were closed, making it impossible for them to continue to operate.

In the evidence submitted by the TJA—the Free Women’s Movement—the Kurdish women’s organisation, it stated that in 2020, 2,520 women reported to non-governmental organisations cases of physical and gendered violence, 775 women applied for shelter, and 113 women reported cases of sexual assault. In the 18 years that the AKP has been in power, femicide in Turkey overall has increased by 1,400%. That is a shocking amount.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this debate and making an excellent speech. The issues he is raising are really important, and are ones that the Prime Minister has spoken about in a UK context. However, there is no evidence that the Prime Minister, when he met the President of Turkey at the NATO summit or, more recently, the G20—I do not know whether he had a bilateral at this weekend’s G20—discussed any of these issues. The main issues on the agenda seemed to be tourism and vaccines, but nothing about Kurdish rights or the rights of women in Turkey.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

It is very worrying. During our report, the Turkish Government withdrew from the Istanbul convention—it is slightly ironically named now—which is about the prevention and combating of violence against women and domestic violence. The convention had only come into force in Turkey in 2014, and we are yet to see any strong diplomatic effort from the British Government to really condemn that.

The evidence that the APPG took shows that the situation is becoming dire for women, so may I ask the Minister what support the Government will give to international organisations aiding women in vulnerable situations in Turkey? What steps is she taking to ensure that the UK Government aid is directed to women-led organisations in Turkey, and that that aid reaches majority Kurdish areas? Will her Government call in the strongest terms for Turkey to rejoin the Istanbul convention and fully implement it?

Turning to freedom of the press, the APPG heard from a journalists association, and those who gave evidence said that it becomes harder to work every day with the intimidation that they face. In October 2020, five journalists were arrested for publishing a news article about two tortured civilians from the city of Van. They were flown in a helicopter and then thrown out—one of them to their death, the other very seriously injured. The governor of Van said that the people who threw them out were acting for the PKK. That is disputed, but either way, the reporting of the action should not see a journalist arrested. Some of these journalists have now been released, but still have international travel bans imposed against them, and others remain in jail awaiting trial.

There are attacks not just on individual journalists, but on publications and radio stations in Turkey. The APPG received evidence that “following the state of emergency” 62 newspapers, 24 radio stations, 19 magazines and 29 publishing houses had been shut down. In total, 177 media organisations were shut down, and 2,500 journalists were repressed, restricted or out of a job.

According to Amnesty International, one third of all the world’s jailed journalists are imprisoned in Turkey. That is a disgraceful statistic, so may I ask the Minister: will the Government condemn the measures to restrict freedom of speech implemented in Turkey and remind the Turkish Government that criticism of the Government —criticism of any Government—is a fundamental aspect of the public’s right to participation? What will the Government give to support journalists so that they are able to uphold their freedom of speech?

Finally, I will turn to the PKK, but before I do, please may I ask this? I know that in much of the correspondence Ministers are focused on the PKK element, but the other elements are really important for me and I really want a strong focus on them. That was one of the reasons why I was initially nervous about raising the PKK issue at all. I thought that maybe we should just ignore it. The problem is that, as we heard evidence, it became clearer and clearer that we cannot delink these issues, because of the Turkish Government’s expansive view of what supporting the PKK is. As I have mentioned, journalists, politicians and other civil society actors are routinely accused of terrorism if they support the wider beliefs of the PKK.

Without getting into a debate on the nature of terrorism, it is clear that terrorism that has the aim of national sovereignty is a slightly different beast from terrorism that aims to impose fundamentalist ideology on a reluctant people, but the age-old debate about whether someone is a terrorist or a freedom fighter has been debated over decades in this place. However, there is a set of international definitions of what it means to be a terrorist and the legal consequences of acting in a terrorist manner. Those that do so should be prosecuted and proscribed, but the UK Government already make a distinction for Turkey. They recognise that the YPJ and YPG—the Kurdish units in the Syrian defence forces—are not terrorists but are anti-terrorist in their nature. Although the Government call on them to distance themselves from the PKK, they recognise that, in reality, many of their views, and some of their activities and training, are shared. That has been recognised in the British courts, and the Government have rightly diverged from the Turkish Government, who still regard the YPG and YPJ as terrorist organisations. The Turkish Government are so obsessed with the YPG and YPJ but they have supported jihadis who are often proscribed in the UK.

I have mentioned the Turkish Government’s expansive definition of terrorism: anyone who supports Kurdish political leaders or even just gender equality. It becomes an extremely slippery slope. Therefore, will the Minister make it clear that supporting Kurdish aspirations for some form of autonomy, supporting Kurdish political leaders, or even supporting those who have renounced violence and who call for dialogue should never be a reason for someone to be fearful of an accusation of terrorism? I do not ask the Minister that for an academic purpose; I do it because recent cases in Belgium, and potential cases in other European countries, show that the Turkish Government are increasingly and proactively trying to persuade their so-called NATO allies to prosecute those who support the Kurds. That is producing a chilling effect in Kurdish communities in this country and around Europe. Any listing must be based on evidence of indiscriminate violence, a determination to undermine and destroy democracy, and an intolerance of other people’s views.

The second line of defence in the Belgian court case, where the Supreme Court failed to convict the defendants for running a Kurdish newspaper and radio station, was that they were simply not terrorist acts, and that the listing of the PKK was based on information that had been discredited. I have a list here but will not go through it, because I know my time should have been up already. Here is the list of the pieces of evidence that were given to the European Union in the listing of the PKK. One can go through each one of them and show that they are not acts of the PKK. A number of them have been acts of the Turkish police force or Turkish army, and Turkish courts have prosecuted Turkish authorities for such acts, but they are still listed as PKK acts, even though Turkey and its courts recognise that they are not. There needs to be a review of this situation, as the Turkish courts have shown.

More interestingly, the Belgian court case and the APPG heard from the lead defence lawyer. The court upheld their defence on the first point: that the PKK are a national movement of self-determination in a legal civil war. The treaties on definitions of terrorism that Belgium has signed up to are the same treaties as Britain has signed up to. All bar one explicitly say that if civil war actors are covered by the laws of war, they cannot be regarded as terrorists, and the one that does not mention that is just silent about all definitions. That is of course quite right; it is to stop anyone just labelling their opponents as terrorists when there is a legitimate internal conflict taking place. Under the Geneva and Hague conventions, the laws of war outline the requirements to be classed as an actor. One of the things is a command structure, and another might be an identifiable uniform. Suffice it to say that the Belgian Supreme Court found on all counts that the PKK fulfilled those requirements. Therefore, it could not be classed as a terrorist organisation. In finding that the PKK was involved in a belligerent and internal conflict, the court struck down the terrorist listing.

The same process also happened in the European Court of Justice, where a Europe-wide listing was struck down, and the justices found that the PKK had not met the European or international listing definitions. Although we are not a member of the European Union, the laws of war that interpret treaties are now directly part of our domestic laws and we are signatories to the international treaties that they interpret.

A quirk of terrorism law is that organisations are proscribed at the European and international level annually, so although they have been struck down from previous listings they are currently listed, and the courts are now going through a process of striking down their current listings, adding them again after the case, but of course no new evidence has been provided as to why they should be re-listed. That makes a mockery of the proscribing process, with people being arrested and prosecuted for being part of a proscribed organisation, only to find midway through their trial that the organisation is no longer proscribed.

The British Government need to re-look at the case for the proscription of the PKK and take into account the latest evidence from the Turkish courts and the terrorist acts that were not committed by the PKK but by others. The Belgian and European courts have said that they should be classed as internal belligerents, not terrorists.

A strong fight against terrorism can be achieved only if the listings that the Government maintain are accurate and not liable to change. Will the Minister commit to conduct an immediate review with her Home Office counterparts and report back to this House? To those who say that designating the PKK as a belligerent might give credence to those that target civilians, I say that the crime of targeting civilians in war under the Geneva and Hague conventions is a more serious crime with a higher prosecutable level in international courts and a higher punishment than the crime of terrorism, so de-listing and classing them as belligerents provides less incentive for civilian attacks.

If we are to seek peace in Turkey, we must see how organisations can go from being classed as terrorist to seeking political solutions through political aims. The UK’s role in Colombia, although not perfect, and incomplete, shows how the FARC could be brought into a mainstream political discussion. If we look at our history in Northern Ireland and the African National Congress in South Africa, each is different and unique, but each had a process that has ended politically and not violently, and that is what we all want to see in Turkey.

Finally, what serious discussions have the Government had with Turkey about restarting the peace negotiations? What practical support have the Government given for domestic and international channels for the discussions? What role do the Government see in third pillar negotiations between civil society actors, trade unions and women’s organisations to ensure a peaceful settlement of the conflict? Although the death toll might not be large, the APPG found that political representation was high and increasing. It found that the basic principles of democratic freedom were being undermined, and terrorism laws were being misused to shut democratic spaces rather than keep them open. The APPG and I are sure that Members here today would like to work co-operatively with the Government. I hope that we might be able to get fuller responses to the APPG in time.

Equality of Funding: Post-16 Education

Debate between Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Alex Sobel

Tuesday 25th February 2020 Westminster Hall

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Yes, it does. I hope the Minister will address that point.

I pay tribute to the work of the Sixth Form Colleges Association in co-ordinating the Raise the Rate campaign, which has been highly effective. As has been mentioned, the Government have responded by pledging an increase of £188 this coming September. That is still far below the £4,700 per student that Raise the Rate is asking for, and it is £822 below the £5,000 that schools receive for each pupil.

That brings me to the second key issue: equality. Young people are now required to participate in education and training until the age of 18, but education funding is reduced for students who have reached 16. This inequality is impossible to defend. It is worth noting that, in the independent sector, fees usually increase at the age of 16 to reflect the additional cost needed to train and educate 16 to 18-year-olds.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

The Yorkshire College of Beauty Therapy is in my constituency. It is suffering from the fact that the new T-levels in the relevant subjects are being introduced but are not yet ready. The whole area of vocational education is suffering from the same lack of sufficiency that my hon. Friend describes for academic subjects.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

My hon. Friend is quite right. We have debated T-levels previously, and there is the difficulty of transition as we go forward. I hope that we will eventually get to a situation where we have A-levels; good general vocational training, with BTECs continuing as a strong component of that; and T-levels. They all offer something different and important.

Until 2011, the funding for a student at a sixth form in a school continued at the school rate, not at the college rate. Given the concerns about the inequality that that caused, there was quite rightly a campaign. Organisations such as the Institute for Public Policy Research said that we needed to equalise the funding. The Government did that but they equalised it down, meaning that we took away about £800 per pupil in today’s terms from the budget, rather than adding to the college budget. That hurts sixth-form colleges even more, as they generally pay teachers’ terms and conditions and do not get additional remuneration for it. For many years, general FE colleges have got away with underpaying their staff, or rather, the Government have got away without giving them additional resources.

Erasmus Plus Programme: Youth and Sport

Debate between Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Alex Sobel

Tuesday 30th January 2018 Westminster Hall

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered youth activities and sport within the Erasmus Plus programme.

I applied for the debate, as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on youth affairs and former vice-president of the European youth forum, for two main reasons. The first is the big issue hanging over us in almost every decision we make in this place at the moment: Brexit. How will we continue to co-operate with EU programmes after departure day? The Minister for Universities has stated that the Government intend to negotiate some sort of continued access with Erasmus Plus and its successor. However, the Government’s intentions remain unclear on the youth elements of the programme that are part of Erasmus now but may be separated post-2020 in the next EU multiannual financial framework, which is being negotiated.

I note that it will be much easier to continue co-operation in higher education—most exchanges there are bilateral in nature—than it will be in youth and sport, where exchange and co-operation are primarily based on multilateral partnerships, making the arrangements all the more complicated. I remain concerned that when people talk about Erasmus, they are generally speaking about the university sector. When I tried to secure this debate, I was asked multiple times whether the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport was the correct Department to respond. The Universities Minister has given assurances about the Erasmus programme but not wider assurances about its youth and sport sections, and particularly how our policy on youth and sport will feed into an Erasmus successor programme. That is why I am here.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

As my hon. Friend said, the Erasmus sport programme is not just for universities. One of the Barking Abbey sports academy programmes is a basketball programme. As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on basketball, I am proud that 35 basketball apprentices undertook an exchange with the Basketball Federation of Madrid. Sixty-five per cent of Barking Abbey students are from black and minority ethnic communities. Does he agree that the loss of such a programme would be detrimental not just to sport, but to BME communities in the UK?

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Totally. I will talk later about how the youth and sport programmes are far more diverse than some of the university parts of the Erasmus Plus programme. The continued participation of black, Asian and minority ethnic communities and other harder-to-reach or economically deprived communities in parts of those programmes is really important. We need to think about not just our continued participation in the Erasmus programme but, generally, how we will continue to co-operate with our European partners on youth policy and sport policy.

Erasmus has secured a place in people’s minds as a university programme—600,000 people from the UK have gone abroad to study in the past 30 years—but there are similar numbers in the youth programme. It is vital to highlight the importance of youth and sport in Erasmus Plus. What are the policy views of DCMS about how that programme should look? Additionally, how will our current domestic programmes intertwine and co-operate with a future Erasmus programme? How will the International Citizen Service and National Citizen Service work in harmony with any future European programmes? How will UK Sport’s international development through excellence and leadership in sport programme continue to work with the sport section of Erasmus Plus?

The sport part of the programme is a good example. More than 10,000 people have taken part in the youth and sport section alone in the past year, while the IDEALS programme has an average uptake of 46 young people. Those are different programmes, but the scale of Erasmus’s youth and sport section outweighs any of our domestic programmes. That is why it is so important that our involvement continues. The current programme runs from 2014 to 2020, so it is in its final half. We await the independent mid-term evaluation report, which was completed in August 2017 and is sitting on desks in the Commission in Brussels. We all want to see what the official report—rather than the drafts—will say.

I have spoken at length to several national agencies and to the evaluation team who wrote the report on EU youth and sport policy. What role is the UK playing to ensure that we lead those discussions? If we are to buy into Erasmus Plus and its successor programmes, we want to ensure that they meet our needs, so we need to roll our sleeves up and get involved in the nitty-gritty of the debate and discussions. If we are to remain in Erasmus, we must ensure that it is in line with our youth policy. That would be much easier to do if we had had the youth strategy that the Government promised before the election. I understand that there will now be a youth chapter in the civil society policy. It is important that we are clear about our policies so that we can influence our European colleagues.

From conversations with colleagues in Ukraine last night, I understand that the Ukrainian authorities tried to opt into only part of the Erasmus programme—interestingly, the youth and sport part, not the university part—but they were rebuffed by the Commission, who said that it is all or nothing; they could not start to take programmes apart. That makes it clear that if we took part, we would be in not just the university section, but the youth and sport section. It is, therefore, even more important that we inform the design of the youth section based on our policies.

What vision do the Minister and the Government have for the content? Erasmus Plus has policy themes based particularly around economic policy, because the current programme was designed in the wake of the economic crash to get young people back into economic activity. Issues of social inclusion and radicalisation have now come to the fore. How will those issues, which I assume the Government will want to tackle, be reflected in a new programme? What are the Government’s priorities?

Additionally, in the latest Commission proposal, it looks as though the European Voluntary Service for Europe and neighbouring countries—in a crude way, I guess it is our equivalent of ICS—will be taken out of Erasmus. The EVS has existed for 20 years, so it is not a new programme, and we have participated in it for all that time. It will be merged into a new European solidarity corps—or, as most of my European colleagues rather unfortunately pronounce it, “corpse”—and how that corps complements NCS and ICS will be really important. Do the Government intend to opt into the new European solidary corps? We have had reassurances about opting into the Erasmus programme, and the European solidarity corps will be a successor, but it will not be part of Erasmus. Do the Government intend to commit to continuing in all successor components of Erasmus Plus, or will we continue only with the core of Erasmus, with everything else still up for question?

Erasmus is the name of the programme we have at the moment, but it was not always thus. Before 2014, there was a separate youth programme, Youth in Action, and before that the EU Youth Programme. There were Comenius, Grundtvig and Leonardo—I could go on with the other European philosophers. Erasmus was chosen in conversations we had with the Commission. I was not in favour of it at the time; in fact, I argued heavily against it when I was in Brussels.

The idea was that everyone knew Erasmus, so we might as well try to make everything Erasmus. In my view, doing so just waters down the other bits of the programme that are not really known about, but that is the direction that the Commission went in. Now it looks as though the Commission is moving towards separating parts of those programmes back out into a solidarity corps, and it would be interesting to know the position of the UK Government and the Minister. Are we supportive of those plans to split out again? How are we having those discussions in Europe?

The higher education sector has a high success rate in achieving Erasmus funding; 90% plus of Erasmus funding is successful in that sector. In the youth sector, it is around the 30%-plus mark. I sat on the European programming committee in a previous life, and the evaluators often state that the youth programmes are just as well written, but they are written by volunteers. It is the same with the sports programme; we are often talking about voluntary sports clubs rather than big, professional HE institutions. How will our influence be brought to bear on the Commission and the discussions in the Council to ensure that the future programmes, and particularly the solidarity corps, are flexible, light-touch programmes to which voluntary groups and small organisations can apply?

One of the outcomes, as I understand it, of the mid-term evaluation is that smaller organisations have been pushed out by the bigger merger. There are other advantages to merging everything into one, and I do not particularly want to get into them all, but it is important to recognise that smaller organisations, which we want to encourage and foster, are at a disadvantage in an integrated programme. I hope that we will welcome the European Commission’s direction.

The only reasons we managed to secure a separate section for youth in the Erasmus programme were the heavy lobbying work from youth organisations, which I helped to co-ordinate, and detailed discussions with Commissioner Vassiliou, who was the commissioner at the time. I wonder whether the Minister has considered, in her discussions with youth organisations, the importance of including the voices of youth and youth organisations in the programme.

Equally, it would be interesting to include the voices of stakeholders such as Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland colleagues. The matter is generally devolved, but we represent the whole UK in the discussions. I am aware that the Belgian authorities take their counterparts with them to Council meetings. The Belgian authorities have no problem with having all their regional Ministers sitting behind them. Are we considering something similar, particularly on these important devolved matters—on sports and youth—to ensure that those voices are included?

I will give some numbers quickly before I finish. I have asked several questions that I hope to hear back on. Erasmus, of course, is a good programme. Some 16,000 higher education students took part last year, and 10,000 youth and sports groups, but only 11% of the money is distributed to youth and sport programmes—1% for sport and 10% for youth. That surely shows the efficiency of the youth and sports programme. The cost per head of a participant in the youth part of the Erasmus programme is €900 or thereabouts. The cost of participating in the Erasmus higher education programme is €2,500 within Europe; if participants take the Erasmus option of going to a neighbouring non-EU country such as Norway or the Russian Federation, it is €5,000 per participant.

There is nothing wrong with investing in students who go into higher education, but the majority of students who take part in the Erasmus higher education programme are from more privileged backgrounds, by the nature of the fact that they have gone to university and then chosen to opt out. As I have mentioned, more than 50% of those on the youth programme come from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. It is important that we continue to opt in and have a voice. A stack of case studies is available on the websites of the British Council and the UK national agency about how the programme—particularly EVS—has turned young people’s lives around, and I implore hon. Members to look at them.

When I was chair of Woodcraft Folk, a national voluntary youth organisation, I applied for those grants and saw this at first hand. I remember a young person from County Durham who came to the programme with very anti-immigrant views. By the end of it, after doing exchanges and working with other young people from across Europe, his views were totally transformed because he was able to see the value of humanity in all of us. That is what I hope this Government will do, by continuing to engage in the programme and by giving a strong commitment that we will continue not only in Erasmus, but in the solidarity corps and the European Voluntary Service substitute.