Millennium Development Goals

Lord Bates Excerpts

Thursday 22nd November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson, and I pay tribute to way in which she has introduced the debate. I pay tribute to her work and understanding of these very important issues. She provided a comprehensive introduction. I support her call for greater time to be made available to debate these important issues. I hope that that message has been heard on the Front Bench and among the business managers. Perhaps there might even be a case for the Chairman of Committees looking at a special ad hoc Select Committee to look at the millennium development goals, supporting the work of the Prime Minister and the high-level panel, because of the wealth of expertise which exists in this House on this subject.

I will focus on one issue that the noble Baroness has already referred to: conflict and development. One of the elements that I have always found disappointing about the millennium development goals is that within the eight goals, within the 21 targets, within the 60 indicators, there is not one single mention of conflict prevention, or the essential condition of peace which precedes development in any country. Not a single low-income or fragile, conflict-affected country has yet achieved a single millennium development goal. Nine of the 10 poorest countries in the world are fragile states. It has been estimated that a civil war can cost 30 years of GDP growth in its impact on the economy. The noble Baroness mentioned Paul Collier who is highly esteemed in these areas and who said that war was “development in reverse”. One and a half billion people live in conflict-affected states: 60% of the refugee flows which are a prime cause of poverty are attributed to people fleeing violence. It is therefore essential that conflict prevention should be at the heart of the successor regime to the millennium development goals. I pay tribute to the Government for the way they are approaching this. They have led with documents such as the excellent Building Stability Overseas Strategy which shaped a cross-departmental approach to these issues and they have enhanced the Conflict Pool for conflict prevention. Prevention is always more cost-effective than intervention. If we have learnt anything over the past 10 years, we have surely learnt that by now. The expansion of the Conflict Pool up to £300 million in 2014 is very welcome indeed. Peace is the essential building block from which all else follows.

The millennium development goals were of their time. When they were conceived at the G7 conference—as it was then—in Cologne in 1999, the world was a very different place. It was a time of heady optimism between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the tragic terrorist attacks which occurred on 11 September and which slammed the door shut on a very optimistic view of how the world could develop going forward. I urge the Minister to feed back to the Prime Minister and to other departments that we do not just need to tweak the millennium development goals. They were of a time and of a place and we missed that opportunity because the successor to the Cologne agreement was the Monterrey development finance commitment where people said they would put up the money to make sure that the development goals were brought into reality. That has not happened and I am delighted that this Government, even in the toughest of economic times, are actually going to make good on that commitment by 2013. This gives tremendous credibility to the Prime Minister in advancing this case on the millennium development goals with colleagues at the G8.

Once we have peace and security and the aid and development are coming in, we must remember that the reason why most people have been lifted out of poverty over the past 10 years has not been as a result of any of that. It has been a result of the growth and dynamism of economies such as China and India. China has lifted more people out of poverty than any other nation in history. We need to remember the centrality of trade: trade liberalisation has been part of the drive for development. It is trade and it is aid, but it is all built on peace.