Sustainable Development Goals

Patrick Grady Excerpts

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Westminster Hall

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr McCabe. I congratulate the hon. Member for Bath (Ben Howlett) on securing this debate. This is first debate on various aspects of the SDGs since the goals were agreed but—I have used the shiny new Hansard search facility—about the fourth since the start of the Session. There was, not least, my own debate in Westminster Hall on 16 June last year. There was a debate on the educational aspects led by the hon. Member for Ceredigion (Mr Williams) a few weeks later in July, and a very useful Back-Bench business debate on 10 September led by the hon. and learned Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Stephen Phillips). Just yesterday, the hon. Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer) led a debate on tackling HIV and AIDS in women and girls, in which a number of the issues that we have heard about today were touched on. I suspect that we will continue to revisit these issues throughout this Parliament and the lifetime of the SDGs. That is appropriate, because the effective implementation of the sustainable development goals will require considerable and ongoing scrutiny and monitoring from Parliaments around the world.

I should declare an interest: until the election last year, I was an employee of the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund, the chair of the Network of International Development Organisations in Scotland and a member of the Scottish Government’s working group on the implementation of the sustainable development goals. I will perhaps touch on some of those things if time allows.

I want to look briefly at how the structure was arrived at and the opportunities that it presents, at the approaches that have been taken in Scotland—because there are lessons that DFID can learn—and, more generally, at the options for prioritisation and implementation of the goals by DFID. The process by which the goals were arrived at was incredibly inclusive and consultative. The SDGs are not simply the millennium development goals mark 2; they are a complete refresh. They represent a global consensus on the kind of world that we know is possible and that we have the resources, the knowledge and the technical ability to achieve. The most important thing that is needed is the political will to get there.

The universal, comprehensive nature of the goals is significant. The hon. Members for Strangford (Jim Shannon) and for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma) talked about goal 3; the hon. Member for Bath and for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton) talked about gender equality; and the hon. Member for Ceredigion talked about goal 4, on education. In the context of this debate, perhaps the most important goal is No. 17, on strengthening the means of implementation and revitalising the global partnership for sustainable development, because it will encourage all the Governments of the world to work together to implement the goals in their own countries and internationally. As we have heard, no goal is met unless it is met everywhere and in full. That is the important universal nature of the goals.

The Scottish First Minister committed Scotland to the SDGs last July while they were still in draft format. She committed to the principle of achieving them at home and abroad and of using the Scottish Government’s powers to meet them in Scotland to eradicate poverty and achieve gender equality, which is very close to her heart. A great deal of work is going on at civil society and civil service level to see how the goals can be integrated into the national performance framework and the Scottish national action plan for human rights. Incredibly encouraging progress is being made. It would be interesting to hear how DFID plans to take forward a similar approach and, more broadly, the attempt at policy coherence for development.

This issue also came up yesterday in the HIV debate. A number of us were disappointed at the Command Paper published by DFID. The Government had showed commendable leadership in the development of the goals, in the negotiation process. Then last November they published a Command Paper that mentions the global goals only four times in its 28 pages. It would therefore be useful to hear from the Minister when a clear strategy for implementation of the SDGs will be published and whether that will happen before the high-level political forum in New York in July—the first key milestone—what the cross-Government role will be and whether they see a role for the Cabinet Office in co-ordinating across Government how domestic policy has an effect overseas, but also how the goals can be met at home, as well as how this will complement other commitments that have been signed up to, not least the Paris commitments on climate change.

Hon. Members have raised a number of operational points, in particular about data collection and disaggregation of data. There are questions about the funding cycles that DFID introduces, given that these are 15-year horizons and many projects perhaps receive only two or three-year funding. I am conscious of the time, so I will conclude simply by reiterating what I said earlier. We have the knowledge, the ability and the technical know-how to reach these goals. What is needed is the political will.