Post-2015 Development Agenda

Martin Horwood Excerpts

Thursday 21st March 2013 Westminster Hall

[Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Brady, and to follow the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), who made some excellent points. In particular, he talked about the fact that support for sustainable development is not just a human imperative, but in our long-term economic interests. This has been a well-informed and wide-ranging debate, and it is a pleasure to take part in it.

This debate reminds me of one we held as recently as October in this same Chamber, when we also discussed the post-2015 agenda. Quite a lot has happened since then. Several Members have mentioned yesterday’s announcement by the Chancellor that we will hit our target of 0.7% of national wealth going to overseas development assistance during this coming year—that is what I think he said. The phraseology last year was “from 2013”—

[Mr Duncan]

This year.

[Martin Horwood]

The Minister confirms that it is the 2013 calendar year, which is very reassuring. Our original commitment in the coalition agreement was that we would introduce legislation in the first term of this Parliament. Although it is far more important to hit the target than to legislate for it, we should manage in what will now have to be the last two Sessions of this Parliament to put our commitment into legislation. It is a very proud thing to have hit the target. People have challenged me about why the figure is 0.7%, and the hon. Member for East Hampshire made similar points in his speech. It is to some extent an arbitrary figure—there is no denying that; but I think it was chosen because it was an achievable, and therefore realistic, goal for countries to share, but was also ambitious. It pushed the quantum of overseas development assistance beyond what was being achieved 30 or 40 years ago, when the target was set. Most importantly—the hon. Member for East Hampshire made this point too—it was a benchmark. It was something that enabled countries at whatever level to measure and compare each others’ performance. The hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) made the point that now that we are achieving the benchmark we are beginning to turn the pressure on to those countries that can afford to do it but have not yet.

The final meeting of the high-level panel, in Bali, is imminent and the Secretary of State for International Development will stand in for the Prime Minister. It is perhaps a little disappointing that the Prime Minister will not have made it to all the meetings, but the Secretary of State will do a fine job; she has been a strong supporter of the high-level panel process. The UN General Assembly’s open working group met recently for the first time, and I gather that a high-level event is planned for September. Apparently everything is still in train for a decision in 2015, which we all expect. In the meantime one more initiative requires comment, and although it is not the most significant it is a rather good one: the Secretary of State last month launched a competition in which UK schoolchildren are invited to submit ideas to the Prime Minister; 150 schools have already signed up. I am a little disappointed that I discovered that only while researching for the debate, so perhaps we need to publicise it more widely; but part of the way in which we shall garner support for the 0.7% figure and the development agenda generally is by engaging with young people. The initiative is a good way of going forward.

The original millennium development goals, as many hon. Members have said, have widely been regarded as successful and effective. That is not because every one has been achieved; rather it is because quite a lot of the targets within the MDGs have been achieved by some countries. Also they have helped to highlight some of the failings in development—particularly the way in which conflict has resulted in many fragile states achieving none of the goals. The MDGs have contributed to the amount of direct aid towards social spending, and to the significant rise in spending at national level by developing Governments. That, among other things, has meant that each day 10,000 fewer children under five die than in 1990; 33 million more children go to school than a decade ago; and more than 12 times more people are now getting AIDS treatment than in 2003.

It is true that those changes cannot all be attributed to the millennium development goals, nor, certainly, to aid and overseas development assistance—but then the MDGs were not just about those things. Perhaps I may gently rebuke the hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart), who is no longer in his place: I do not think that DFID, the United Nations or international agencies—including voluntary ones—that support development have ever really said that aid was all that people should rely on to make progress with development. That has always been about trade, tackling issues such as debt reduction, and encouraging private sector investment and activity and economic growth. A strength of the MDGs was the fact that they related to a wide range of topics.

The Secretary of State recently got a little bit of stick from Labour Members for referring to the importance of the private sector in development. I thought that was unfair, because she was not saying that overseas development assistance should be diverted to the private sector; she was simply underlining the importance of the sector. I come from a development agency background, where that has always been understood. The impact of aid is dwarfed by the impact, for good or ill, of the private sector and business decisions. For instance, mining companies’ ability to go into an area and act insensitively, or to wreck the environment and impoverish future generations by not behaving properly, is of massive significance. A good company that does the right thing—British extractive industries have a good record on that generally, although occasionally some companies, such as Vedanta Resources, have been picked up not doing the right thing—helps empowerment and wealth creation. That can be a very positive thing.

The hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) referred earlier to Green Fuels, and the hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) raised the question whether biofuels were always a good, sustainable thing to invest in. He was right: if business does the wrong thing in relation to biofuels, that can increase demand for land, leading to more incursions on rain forest, and can damage the environment. Green Fuels is a Gloucestershire company and I know it well; it uses surplus waste cooking oil. That is what it is encouraging in Indonesia. It takes surplus cooking oil from hotels, which would otherwise be poured into watercourses, polluting them, or go to waste; or, possibly worse still, be sold to street vendors to be put into their cooking oil and used for street food. If cooking oil is overused it can be carcinogenic, so Green Fuels is investing in a good, sustainable project in Indonesia. That shows how business, used in the right way, can support development goals.

The wider context includes organisations such as the International Finance Corporation, which has made an enormous contribution to development, leveraging and investing billions in developing countries and paying attention particularly to what it rather euphemistically calls frontier markets. I think that phrase is used in a bid to make them sound exciting and not just dangerous. The idea is to take investment and leverage business in places where at other times investors might fear, slightly, to tread. If there is a plea to be made to the high-level panel about the post-2015 millennium development goals agenda, I would ask that that agenda be inclusive, and spread beyond aid to include the private sector and international agencies such as the IFC.

Some weaknesses in the MDGs have been highlighted. Those include the way in which they hid inequality; the fact that they perhaps neglected issues such as joblessness, which is an acute contributor to poverty; and the fact that they may have missed the very poorest people in some countries. By using averages and country totals they perhaps did not spot some pockets of extreme poverty. That is among the things being discussed at the high-level panel. It has also been suggested that the goals did not, in addressing environmental sustainability, give it the centrality that they could have. When we debated that in October I made a plea for the importance, among all the various issues such as health, education, social justice and disability that might be included in any future set of sustainable development goals, of the central idea that growth and development should come within planetary boundaries. I reiterate that.

We also talked in October about whether the next set of goals should be global and include all countries, not just the poorest, so that some developing countries might have the toughest targets for jobs, agriculture and gender equality, whereas for countries such as ours there would be quite a lesson, and a set of targets to be met, on resource waste and unsustainable consumption. We talked about the ambitiousness of the goals and the idea that, as with the UN framework convention on climate change, they should impose common but differentiated responsibilities, and be sensitive to different countries’ circumstances. DFID’s latest report on the high-level panel’s progress says that it is considering a single post-2015 development agenda, which I assume means bringing together the continuing progress on the MDGs with the new sustainable development goals. If so, that is welcome. It is focused on poverty reduction and inclusive growth, “embedded” in the “principles of sustainable development”—I have never seen anything embedded in a principle before, but there is always a first time. I hope that sustainability will therefore be central to the development process.

DFID also reports a clear focus on eradicating extreme poverty, with a strong human development emphasis, which is obviously welcome. The new framework should also include income, poverty, health, education and equality for girls and women—all welcome as well—although I am again a little concerned that resources and the environment are not included in the list. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure me that sustainability in environmental terms will remain central to the process. DFID further reports that the high-level panel has talked about the building blocks being tackled, including strong institutions and the rule of law, and I am sure that is right.

The process, however, should not be simplistically about economic growth, so I will draw attention to three areas that I want the Minister to take on board and comment on, all of which were highlighted by an excellent organisation, Development Initiatives, which is one of the best sources of data and information about development that I have come across. First, responsibility: who is responsible for delivering the goals? That might seem rather obvious, but it has never been spelt out, and the debate about whether the private sector should play a role is relevant here. As I said, the private sector’s role in delivering development is crucial, and international actors such as the IFC and the World Bank should have specific responsibilities in the process, as should national Governments, not only the ones meeting the 0.7% target but the ones that are not yet meeting it; they should be given a responsibility to step up to the plate. People involved in remittances, who are acting privately, as individuals, also play a part, because “private” refers not only to big companies and investors but to private individuals. Some of them are very rich private individuals, the Warren Buffetts and Bill Gateses of this world, who are making a valuable contribution, but Development Initiatives spelt out to me that if we look at the overall resource flows into developing countries, overseas development assistance is only a small part of those flows. ODA is dwarfed by remittances and by foreign direct investment, as well as by debt, which the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) termed better as “finance”. A great deal of the resource going into developing countries is way beyond and above ODA.

My second point, therefore, is that it would be good if resource flows were brought into the framework. We should measure and look at resource flows into developing countries and perhaps consider setting specific development goal targets to do with reducing barriers to things such as foreign direct investment, or limiting or tackling outflows of illicit finance, which is a serious problem for some of the developing countries in the greatest poverty.

My third point is about reporting and measurement, which should be open, transparent and as complete as possible. The way in which data are being used in our information age is enormously advanced. I can look at an app on my iPhone and tell Members that 7% of our energy in this country comes from wind power—as of now, because I have a live app that tells me the exact amount of energy coming from that source. I could look at other sources and know that 2% is coming from the Dutch interconnector and so on. If I can have such information at my fingertips, we ought to be able to look at the development goals and see exactly the flows of resource into a particular developing country—how much from the private sector, how much from ODA—and any mismatches between the levels of poverty and of resource going in. Such imaginative but open and transparent information is important, and organisations such as Oxfam make the point that it increases the power of people on the ground to know how much money should be coming into their country and where it should be spent and to hold individuals accountable for the spending.

In summary, the new sustainable development goals should be global, including all countries. Sustainability is absolutely key, because climate change will ultimately impoverish us all, even in developing countries. The goals should be transparent, and measurement should be as complete and timely as possible. They should include some attention to overall resource flows, and not focus only on development assistance. Above all, who is responsible for delivering the goals should be clear, and we should welcome the private sector into the process while emphasising the specific responsibilities of international agencies, Governments and others, whom we can hold accountable.