Building Stability Overseas Strategy

Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale Excerpts

Tuesday 30th October 2012 Lords Chamber

Tabled by

[Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they will review the implementation and impact of the Building Stability Overseas Strategy.

[Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale]

My Lords, when I submitted the Question for debate in May, I had hoped that we might debate it near to the first anniversary of the Building Stability Overseas Strategy during the summer months. That was not to be, but in fact I am particularly pleased that we are debating the strategy and this Question this week, partly because this week, the Prime Minister will co-chair the high-level panel on the development framework that will replace the millennium development goals after 2015, but also because it gives an opportunity to the new ministerial team, following the changes in the Government in September, to respond, given the excellent work done by their predecessors. I hope that they continue the Government’s commitment to that agenda. I very much welcome this opportunity and look forward to hearing the Government’s response.

Since the creation of the Department for International Development in 1997, the issues of conflict and security in development have gradually moved up the agenda. For some time, there has been growing recognition of the importance of conflict and security to the international attempt to support developing countries and the people who live there. In the past, it has perhaps been too far down the list of international priorities; today, it must become centre stage.

For a decade or so now, we saw the previous Labour Government lead the international debate on this issue, taking a lead at home by starting important work to integrate defence, development and diplomacy and improve the way that the United Kingdom supported countries in post-conflict reconstruction and intervened in the international institutions to improve their effectiveness.

Then, with the election of a new Government in 2010, we had, first, a very firm commitment to 30% of our development aid going to support conflict-affected and fragile states and then the publication of the Building Stability Overseas Strategy in 2011. That strategy has been widely welcomed. I welcomed it at the time and still believe that it sets out an excellent strategy for the Government to follow. It sets out a clear purpose and also defines stabilisation in terms of the institutions and conditions required to manage tensions and take forward development in individual countries, recognising that each is different. I pay tribute to the work of the previous Secretary of State for International Development for his personal passion in support of that cause.

However, we are yet to achieve, here in the UK or anywhere else, the important integration of that work, bringing together development, diplomacy and defence, into the DNA of the departments, governments and institutions at home and abroad. There is much still to be done. That is important work. There may be concerns about the securitisation of aid in places such as Yemen, but I believe that there is a moral and pragmatic case to link the international aid and development that we support more closely to conflict-affected and fragile states. There are 1 billion people worldwide living in fragile states. Not one conflict-affected fragile state in the world is likely to meet even one of the millennium development goals by 2015. That speaks for itself. We are twice as likely to find undernourished children in conflict-affected and fragile states as we are elsewhere in the developing world. We are three times as likely to find families who cannot send their children to school; twice as likely to see children dying before the age of five; and twice as likely to see people living without clean water, in conflict-affected and fragile states.

This may be the most difficult development challenge of our age, but I believe that peace-building and post-conflict reconstruction is the greatest and most important development challenge of our time.

Those challenges have a wider impact, beyond the basic human needs. They have an impact on the economies of the countries affected and the wider region. It has been estimated that it takes 30 years to recover GDP growth from the cost of a civil war and 20 years to recover the trade position of the country where a major episode of violence has broken out. Not only the individual countries are affected; those countries in the neighbourhood are affected by such outbreaks of violence. Their trade and growth have been estimated to have been affected dramatically as well. So, for economic reasons, for important humanitarian and development reasons and for reasons of our own security, the priority that we give to stabilisation and to the Building Stability Overseas Strategy remains important for all parties—for the Government, for the Opposition and for our colleagues outside of Parliament.

Both the Building Stability Overseas strategy and the World Bank’s world development report, published in the same year, have laid out a firm road map for how to tackle stabilisation and help with conflict prevention and post-conflict reconstruction. We need to find ways to help to create the institutions that can underpin justice and stability. We need to help with the demobilisation and reintegration of those who have been involved in conflict. We need to help to find the jobs that give people an alternative to violence—an alternative way of life that is more positive and more of a contribution for their families and communities. We need to support regional solutions, which the Government have, in a very welcome way, been trying to secure, somewhat successfully, over the past two years in Somalia.

In all these, we need to listen to local voices and work with local organisations because their solutions will be more sustainable. We need to ensure that women are centre stage because in many cases women are the real peace-builders. We need to ensure that upstream prevention, real conflict prevention, is given a priority, not just because it saves money in the long term since it avoids the conflict that affects lives, kills many and leaves many homeless and destitute.

I want to ask the Government a number of questions about the strategy and its implementation. How is the early action facility progressing? Is the watch list of states that we worry about developing into conflict producing results? Have the Government been able to move forward on the independent assessment of their conflict-prevention programmes? Have the Government made progress on the prevention partnerships with the new emerging powers like Brazil, which I thought were a very good idea and were mentioned in the original strategy? Are the Government implementing the important recommendations from the Independent Commission for Aid Impact’s review of the Conflict Pool published earlier this year?

I want to finish on what is an important agenda for the United Kingdom—that is, not just to improve our own work at home or to ensure that we are more effective at our bilateral relationships, financial and otherwise, throughout the developing world, particularly in those states that are affected by conflict. The UK also has a key role to play internationally in leading this debate in the international institutions. We can use our role on the United Nations Security Council and in the World Bank, the European Union and the Commonwealth—a unique role that gives us a voice in all these major international institutions—to push this agenda forward.

In particular, we can use the role that the Prime Minister now has, as co-chair of the high-level panel set up by the United Nations, to look at the development framework that will exist following the deadline for the millennium development goals in 2015. That panel meets this week in London, and I believe that the Prime Minister should take the commitment of the UK into those discussions. While it may be understandable that the MDGs did not include any reference to justice, jobs, security or conflict because of the basic human needs that they addressed back when they were set just over a decade ago, in the post-2015 development framework we need to see justice in the institutions that will underpin justice and therefore peace not just referenced but agreed. We also need to see a commitment to economic development and jobs to give young people a different way of life from the conflict that perhaps they have experienced in the past. If the Prime Minister takes that agenda into those discussions in the high-level panel, he will be doing great service not just to the people of the UK but to those who suffer the most throughout the world, the most vulnerable and poorest people in our world—those who live in conflict-affected and fragile states.