Oral Answers to Questions
Preet Kaur Gill Excerpts(2 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Mr Mitchell
The reason the Government were able to reduce the size of electricity bills for hard-working families was precisely because we are meeting our targets and will meet our international commitments. Britain’s international targets and commitments are enshrined in law as a result of the activities of this House. Internationally we are committed, as the right hon. Gentleman knows and as was set out to the House towards the end of last year, to spending £11.6 billion on ensuring that we meet our climate targets and produce climate finance. I would argue that that figure will be nearer £16 billion by 2026.
Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab/Co-op)
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Mr Andrew Mitchell)
The Government recently set out our commitments on developing country debt in our international development White Paper.
Preet Kaur Gill
The main mechanism to tackle the debt crisis, the common framework for debt treatment, is failing due to the low level of participation by private creditors who own around 40% of low-income country debt. Does the Minister agree that there is strategic need for the United Kingdom to take debt reduction seriously and change its approach, given the crisis in Africa and the growing role of China and Russia in the developing world?
Mr Mitchell
The hon. Lady is right to point to the considerable difficulties that countries are finding. Some 15% of low-income countries are in debt distress, and 45% are at higher risk of that. The African Development Bank says that debt repayments in 2024 are likely to be six times the level of 2021. That is why Britain is working with other creditors to secure debt restructurings, most often through the G20 common framework, but also through the Paris Club.
Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories
Preet Kaur Gill Excerpts(5 months, 1 week ago)
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Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab/Co-op)
Gaza was facing a humanitarian crisis before 7 October. The Government cut funding to UNRWA from £50 million to £10 million. The clock is ticking. Hospitals are running out of fuel, food and water supplies are almost depleted, and until a large-scale humanitarian operation is in place, many more people will needlessly die. Will the Minister update us on what progress the Government have made to secure a humanitarian resolution through the UN Security Council?
Mr Mitchell
We are working night and day for humanitarian access. On the subject of support for UNRWA, we increased aid very substantially, as the hon. Lady knows, before 7 October. Since then, we have allocated £30 million of humanitarian aid and we will do more if it is required.
Freedom of Religion and Belief
Preet Kaur Gill Excerpts(7 months, 1 week ago)
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Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I thank the special envoy, the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), for securing this important debate, and I thank all my colleagues in the all-party parliamentary group, particularly the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), for their work on the issue.
I will focus on the effects of social media on promoting misinformation, intolerance and inflammatory speech that challenges people’s right to freedom of religion or belief, especially in crisis areas. The danger of social media companies in that respect has been noted by the companies themselves. A Meta company worker said in 2019:
“We have evidence from a variety of sources that hate speech, divisive political speech, and misinformation on Facebook…are affecting societies around the world. We also have compelling evidence that our core product mechanics, such as virality, recommendations, and optimizing for engagement, are a significant part of why these types of speech flourish on the platform.”
That is partly why Labour has repeatedly warned that the Government’s Online Safety Bill may not go far enough in its focus on content rather than on social media platforms’ business models.
In 2021, many fake social media accounts pretended to be “#RealSikh” members of the community in India. A groundbreaking report by Benjamin Strick of the Centre for Information Resilience, reported on by the BBC, found at least 80 fake accounts, many using profile pictures of celebrities, posting divisive posts seeking to discredit Sikh political interests such as the farmers’ protests, often labelling them as extremist or claiming their infiltration by extremist groups. Benjamin Strick said that the aim of the network appears to have been to
“alter perceptions on important issues around Sikh independence, human rights and values”
Those accounts have now been suspended because they were fake. The danger of such information has led to religious and ethnic violence and tensions.
I took a close interest in the report at the time because many of those fake accounts also targeted me and other politicians. I could see how effective they seemed to be in generating a narrative and abuse that seemed to take on a life of their own. I have no problem with individual voters challenging me on x—it comes with the job—but I am concerned about politically motivated misinformation campaigns that appear to have money behind them and to be co-ordinating across platforms on a large scale. Areas of the media in which it is possible to buy political influence and distort debate are generally carefully regulated, but that is not the case with social media, which it is why it has become such a target for manipulation.
The network used so-called sock puppets—fake accounts controlled by real users, as opposed to automated bots—posing as independent people. Nikhil Pahwa, a digital rights activist, has noted:
“These 80-odd accounts will not necessarily make something trend, but with consistent posting, they try to discredit a point of view…This seems to be a sophisticated approach, and seems to be a part of a larger operation.”
The farmers’ protests and the decades-old Sikh independence movement were two discussion topics targeted by the network, with attempts to delegitimise both.
The same phenomenon has had incredibly grave consequences elsewhere in the world. As the United Nations found in Myanmar, hate speech and calls for violence on Facebook played a major role in fomenting the Rohingya genocide and later religious and ethnic violence in the country. The continued exile of nearly 1 million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh is surely a testament to the seriousness with which we should be taking the issue.
Similar speech is reported to have greatly contributed to the violence and potential genocide in Tigray. Meta is currently facing a $2 billion lawsuit, backed by Amnesty International and filed in Kenya, for allegedly contributing to the violence against the Tigray community. Facebook has allowed the incitement of violence in the region for years, and although there are efforts to stop it, they have not been entirely successful.
As Internews Europe told the International Development Committee in evidence submitted to its inquiry on atrocity prevention,
“media, online and social media platforms with significant reach have been deployed as part of deliberate efforts to dehumanise particular ethnic or religious groups, disseminate grievance-based narratives and incite violence”.
His Majesty’s Government must do more. More must be done to enforce respect for FORB throughout the world, particularly in the United Kingdom and its partner nations. When we see persecution and hate still rife across the world, it is incumbent on all parliamentarians across the House to reaffirm our commitment to the values and principles set out in the 2021 G7 summit communiqué, which for the first time referred specifically to freedom of religion or belief. As the Prime Minister absconds from the role of international statesman that British Prime Ministers used to hold, failing even to show up at many of the international fora at which issues such as FORB will be raised, I hold out hope that his Ministers will take a stand for human rights in his stead.
Draft Commonwealth Development Corporation (Limit on Government Assistance) Regulations 2023
Preet Kaur Gill Excerpts(9 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab/Co-op)
I am grateful to the Minister for outlining the new regulations.
I begin with some comments on BII’s role and objectives. The Opposition recognise the private sector’s important role in the development journeys of low and middle-income countries. The creation of new jobs and markets, especially for Africa’s young and fast-growing working-age population, the boosting of economic growth, productivity and tax receipts, and delivering innovative new products, services and infrastructure to meet the needs of poorer countries are all vital components of a genuinely sustainable development strategy.
Within that, I recognise the good work BII has been doing in supporting the delivery of the world’s first malaria vaccine, reducing pollution and deforestation in Malawi through investment in low-carbon building material providers, and scaling up access to off-grid solar energy systems for families and businesses that cannot access electric grid connections.
I commend all that good work, along with BII’s focus on Africa and its work on climate innovation and tech. However, we are here today to debate this amendment to the Commonwealth Development Corporation Act 1999, which would increase the maximum that the UK can funnel into BII by £3.5 billion.
We live in a time of intense converging global crises: the war in Ukraine, the global cost of living crisis, the sovereign debt emergency in Africa, record levels of conflict and displacement and hundreds of millions falling back into extreme poverty as a result of all those crises. The FCDO has slashed aid year on year, used the budget like a Government slush fund and funnelled billions into the Home Office black hole to deal with a self-made asylum accommodation crisis, so we have to ask the question: is channelling billions more pounds of scarce official development assistance into BII really the best use of Government resources?
First, let me be clear about that context. Investments through BII have a limited and specific role in Britain’s development policy if we are serious about SDG 1: eradicating poverty. Indeed, BII does not even use the standard World Bank definition of extreme poverty of having an income below $2.15 per day, instead using a higher threshold of $5.50. That shows that its work is less able to reach the very poorest and most marginalised. Even then, BII does not provide disaggregated data on the quality of jobs its investments create, including wages relative to local averages or poverty lines.
Does the Minister think efforts should be made to make that basic information publicly available, and is it something he has requested and had access to in advance of shareholder meetings? Does he share my concern about the low number of jobs BII is creating for women? By its own count, only 28% of the new jobs it created in 2021 were for women. Although I recognise the work done through the 2X Challenge, do the loose and optional objectives it set out not illustrate precisely my point that a DFI is often not the best vehicle to deliver on many of the Government’s development objectives?
That is not to say that I do not commend the progress that BII has been making on some of these points since it came under fire from the Independent Commission for Aid Impact in 2019, but there must be an honest conversation about whether this is the best use of what is left of the development budget. Given those constraints, what claim can BII make as a better investment for poverty reduction than all the other bilateral programmes being cut?
Secondly, on transparency and accountability, in last year’s Publish What You Fund DFI transparency index, BII scored 26.5 out of 100, behind its equivalent organisations in the US, France, the Netherlands and Germany. Before this Government destroyed it, the Department for International Development took the top spot among bilateral donors in the international aid transparency index for eight years in a row. The Minister used to take transparency and value for money very seriously when he was Secretary of State, and he is asking to plug more billions of pounds into an organisation that provides only basic information to the taxpayer about its work. On environmental, social and corporate governance, accountability to communities and financial information, BII came joint bottom in the transparency index. At the International Development Committee, it has been called out for its reliance on opaque financial intermediaries and for its failure to mobilise investments in projects that the private sector and other DFIs are not funding anyway.
I noted that the Minister said in a recent Chatham House speech that he accepts many of the criticisms on transparency, and he would set out a road map of commitments to improve BII’s performance. Would it not make sense to have a clear plan to improve things before handing over more billions of taxpayers’ cash? For example, one thing that other DFIs have are mechanisms that allow communities to hold them to account. The German DEG has one; the World Bank International Finance Corporation has one too. Could BII consider developing one? What efforts is BII making to ensure that the intermediated private funds that it invests in are not domiciled in tax havens, and can the Minister explain how he expects to restore Britain’s reputation as a development superpower while funnelling money into opaque private equity funds and financial intermediaries at the expense of UK-branded development assistance and aid?
These questions are not just an abstraction. Last week, I hosted a briefing in Parliament with Oxfam about this new report into DFI investments into for-profit hospitals, where I heard the story of Francisca Wanjiru, a Kenyan woman whose mother died at one of the for-profit hospitals in which BII is invested. For years, Francisca has had to live with the haunting fact that her mother’s body is lying locked inside a freezer at the Nairobi Women’s Hospital mortuary and she cannot get her out. For years, the hospital has refused to release her mother so that she can be properly laid to rest, because Francisca is too poor to pay the hospital fees that racked up when her mother fell ill.
I was deeply moved by Francisca’s story. She accrues another 500 shillings in fees every day that she cannot afford to pay for her mother’s release, and such situations are not uncommon, as Oxfam’s recent report “Sick Development” outlines. The report describes patients blocked from access or bankrupted by eye-watering hospital bills that should never have been charged—patients even imprisoned in hospitals for being too poor to pay. These hospitals are often charging fees that are simply out of reach for ordinary people to meet, and Oxfam has found some hospitals charging more than someone’s annual average income for basic maternity care. Not only is that clearly not helping the poorest people in those countries, but in some cases it is making accessibility and affordability worse. In Uganda, Oxfam found a hospital that BII invests in where prices increased by an incredible 60% in just four years.
The report contains some harrowing stories, and it raises serious concerns about the development impact of some of these investments and BII’s due diligence. Why has it taken years of careful research by a non-governmental organisation to shed light on something that basic functioning oversight mechanisms would have surely picked up and put an end to years ago? I hope that the Minister can tell us what action is being taken in response to the report, and whether, as BII’s sole shareholder, the Government will rule out any further investments in for-profit hospitals.
It is surely uncontroversial to ask that the significant sums of public money that we are talking about should not be invested in businesses that are undermining British policy objectives. Private hospitals are not the only example. There has been the Bridge schools scandal. There has been BII’s flagship billion-pound investment in DP World, the Dubai-owned parent company of P&O Ferries, which summarily sacked its British workers, frogmarched them out of their place of work and rehired foreign staff to replace them on poverty pay of around £1.82 an hour last year. There have also been its investments in the China National Investment & Guaranty Corporation, which is linked to the belt and road initiative.
I was concerned to hear the Minister’s response at the International Development Committee in response to some of these concerns, that BII should simply be left to “get on with it”. That is a remarkably lax response to the risk that millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is being funnelled into projects that undermine UK policy objectives. At a time when needs are increasing and money is tight, it is surely more crucial than ever that taxpayers’ money is spent as effectively as possible, and I hope today that the Minister can give me some answers to the concerns that have been raised.
Lastly, I wanted to ask the Minister about what is driving UK development policy, as it simply does not make sense to me. Why, one might well ask, is BII the only untouchable domain of UK development spending, when we are scaling back climate finance, when bilateral aid to Africa has been parked, and support to desperate Afghans fleeing the Taliban, who now comprise the biggest group crossing the channel on small boats, has been cut to ribbons?
I have a theory. At the last spending review, 2021, the FCDO was given a £2.4 billion target to spend on financial transactions over three years—a new category of Government spending that was introduced by the coalition Government a decade ago. These financial transactions notionally involve the purchase of an asset and are excluded from the Government’s fiscal rules on the deficit and borrowing. I understand the attraction: after crashing the economy and with inflation soaring, the Chancellor wants to channel more and more money through a mechanism that does not register as day-to-day spending but, as things stand, the target set at the spending review would mean that at least £1.2 billion—around 10% of the total official development assistance budget—must be spent on financial transactions next year. That leaves Ministers with few options but to repeatedly recapitalise BII.
The difficulty is that that is a terrible way of deciding policy. The Treasury might like it, but how will it deliver impact for the very people that the ODA budget is meant to reach, not least when as much as 40% of the bilateral budget is now being spent within the United Kingdom instead of abroad? BII is already limited in what it can invest. Often, the challenge is that in the very poorest countries there simply are not enough businesses with the capacity to absorb the kind of money that BII wants to spend. Meanwhile, war rages in Ukraine, the global economy tightens, a sovereign debt crisis in Africa grows and record numbers of people are displaced by conflict, instability and disaster.
BII has a limited role in tackling many of these challenges, even where it is integral to creating the fertile investment environment, new markets and new job opportunities in the private sector in low-income countries—never mind its own mandate to turn a profit. Despite lofty promises to repair the damage this Government have done to our international reputation in development, accounting trickery rather than impact still seems to be driving Government policy, and it is all of us who are invested in a safer, greener, fairer world who will lose.
I will not divide the Committee on the draft regulations, as I recognise that the Government have already almost breached BII’s financial limit, and I will not seek to frustrate planned investments in things like Ukraine’s economic recovery. However, I hope the Minister will respond to my concerns—I know he will.
Transparency and value for money must be restored to UK ODA spending. A Labour Government will ensure that taxpayers’ money is spent with the respect it deserves. We will undertake a root-and-branch review of BII, including its mandate, transparency reporting and governance arrangements, to ensure it is supporting and not undermining UK policy objectives. Britain once led the way in principled, poverty-focused, transparent global development. Under the next Labour Government, we will make sure it does so again.
Draft African Development Fund (Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative) (Amendment) Order 2023
Draft African Development Bank (Sixteenth Replenishment of the African Development Fund) Order 2023
Preet Kaur Gill Excerpts(9 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab/Co-op)
I am grateful to the Minister for outlining the African Development Fund orders. We will not oppose them. I welcome the support they show for tackling poverty and food insecurity, creating new jobs and opportunities to meet the demands of Africa’s young and fast-growing population, and tackling the climate crisis.
Since 2019, Africa has been hammered by the converging crises of the pandemic, the climate crisis, debt, inflation and conflict. An estimated 55 million people on the continent have been pushed into extreme poverty since the onset of the pandemic. In 2021, nearly half a billion people in total were living on less than $1.90 a day. In that context, it is essential that we do what we can to prevent the current crisis from derailing long-term development gains.
Our financial support via the African Development Bank, with its significant financial clout, strong regional identity and deep knowledge, is one excellent means of doing that. Not only has Publish What You Fund ranked the African Development Bank’s sovereign lending as No.1 in transparency out of 50 global development institutions but the bank is also well aligned with the UK’s objectives and was green in its 2020 review.
While public-private infrastructure finance volumes in sub-Saharan Africa have stagnated over the past decade, the African Development Bank has punched above its weight, far outspending other multilateral development banks in support for infrastructure partnerships with the private sector in recent years and giving donors more bang for their buck. During the new funding cycle, the African Development Bank will focus on two strategic priorities: governance, capacity building and sustainable debt management in recipient countries; and developing sustainable, climate-resilient and quality infrastructure. As we heard from the Minister, it will also focus on empowering women and girls as a condition for achieving inclusive and sustainable development. Through those investments, the total replenishment will help to connect 20 million people to electricity, benefit 24 million people through agricultural improvements, provide access to water and sanitation for 32 million people and improve transport infrastructure for 15 million people.
The bank’s work over the next three years will complement long-standing investments in regional growth and infrastructure, offer a sustainable alternative to non-concessional Chinese lending and make headway on the long road to economic recovery from the pandemic and the worsening food security crisis, all of which are priorities that we support.
In that context, I must express some disappointment that we are again seeing a significant cut to UK financial support in this area; it is down nearly £200 million. The African Development Bank has done great work in the closely linked areas of climate adaptation and food insecurity in recent years. It has prioritised high-impact investments in water resource management and climate-smart agriculture, while also holding true to a model that puts countries in the driver’s seat of their own destinies. Will the Minister say whether we should take these funding cuts as proof of the former International Environment Minister’s comments on Friday? Do we have a Prime Minister who is “simply uninterested”, is it true that
“efforts on a wide range of domestic environmental issues have simply ground to a standstill”
and are the Government
“absent from key international fora”?
They are breaking their promises on international climate finance, hoping to leave a tab for the next Government to pick up.
The African Development Bank estimates that the continent needs $7 billion to $15 billion a year in adaptation finance to meet this accelerating challenge, yet ICF, international engagement and domestic commitments were conspicuous in their absence in Government announcements at the Paris summit. Can the Minister explain whether the Government remain committed to delivering the £11.6 billion in international climate finance that they promised in 2019? How and when will that be delivered? Will the Minister explain why the Prime Minister was absent from the summit while more than 100 world leaders were in attendance at a time when, by his own admission, there is growing anger at the international community’s failure to help the most vulnerable countries adapt to a climate crisis that they did not create?
Will the Minister say something specific about the absence of an announcement on the remaining half a billion special drawing rights that the United Kingdom promised but is yet to deliver? As he may well know, the African Development Bank has proposed an innovative new vehicle for the SDRs to be lent as hybrid capital. That would mean that every 100 million of SDRs recycled to the African Development Bank will be multiplied to increase loans to vulnerable African countries by up to 400 million. In effect, the African Development Bank proposes to leverage SDRs as capital to mobilise more lending funds so the SDRs are never spent; rather, they will be held as capital in the bank’s SDR account at the International Monetary Fund. Has the Minister looked at that proposal, and will he comment on it? Why has the delivery of the 100 billion SDRs promised at the G7 in Carbis Bay in 2021 been so achingly slow?
Finally, the previous replenishment round included an element of performance-based funding dependent on positive results reported at the mid-term review. Will he clarify how much was disbursed or held back at that point, and what support has the UK provided to the bank to recruit sufficient staff in key areas, such as environmental and social safeguards and fragile and conflict-affected states, in recent years? What efforts, if any, have the Government made to encourage closer working, better information flows and better-informed oversight between the bank and Government country teams?
On the sovereign debt crisis in many African countries, I must start by noting the incredibly positive news that, three years after its default, Zambia has finally agreed a deal for debt restructuring with straight creditors, including China. The £5 billion deal will provide crucial fiscal space for its Government to serve its people, 16% of whom live on less than a $1.90 a day, although billions owed to private lenders still needs to be tackled.
The situation is an ongoing illustration of the importance of the multilateral debt relief initiative agreed at the Gleneagles G8 summit 19 years ago. That was an outstanding example of what British leadership on the world stage can achieve and one of the proudest legacies of the last Labour Government. It has since had a transformative impact on many poor countries, freeing up their Governments to invest billions of pounds in public goods, such as health systems, climate action and education, that would have otherwise been spent servicing unsustainable debts. Will the Minister tell us how much debt the UK support has enabled the African Development Bank to cancel over the recent accounting period? What expectations does he have in relation to the orders? We welcome our latest contribution to the African Development Fund’s portion of the multilateral debt relief initiative, and will not divide the Committee on the order.
Many of the development gains that we have made in Africa in recent decades are currently at risk of reverse. We can, however, choose to forge a way to a more positive future with the expertise, influence and financial muscle of institutions such as the African Development Bank. For Labour, the power of co-operation is unmistakeable. We can choose to turn to each other when confronted with global crises, rather than turning inwards. We can choose to modernise our approach to international development. Learning from each other, we can and must address the world’s greatest challenges together.
Oral Answers to Questions
Preet Kaur Gill Excerpts(10 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab/Co-op)
More than 29 million people across Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and South Sudan are now experiencing catastrophic hunger levels following a fifth failed rainy season in a row. It is also the fourth year in a row that this Government have cut aid to those countries. Oxfam has estimated that one person is likely to die of hunger every 28 seconds between now and July. Can the Minister please explain how he is restoring Britain’s leadership in international development while decimating our support to some of the very poorest people on earth?
Mr Mitchell
First, let me say that British leadership has been exercised at the two big conferences that took place in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. British expertise and technical know-how is ensuring greater resilience and adaptation spend to drive up the ability to survive these crises when they take place next. If I may say so, the hon. Member must not diminish the extraordinary support and leadership that Britain is giving across the horn of Africa. The figures we have announced are preliminary figures, as I have said. We will react to the crisis—that is one of the things we are able to do—and those figures take no account of the tremendous support that British taxpayers are giving through the multilateral system.
Afghan Women and Girls
Preet Kaur Gill Excerpts(10 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Latham, and I congratulate you on chairing your first debate in Westminster Hall. This is an important debate on UK support for Afghan women and girls, and I thank Members from across the House for their contributions. In particular, I thank the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Afghan women and girls, the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain), for securing the debate.
It is almost a year to the day since I visited Afghanistan following the fall of Kabul to the Taliban the previous summer. At that time, Labour urged the Government to set out a comprehensive strategy for their engagement with Afghanistan to alleviate the assault on human rights and the humanitarian crisis that has left tens of millions of people relying on aid to survive. As we have heard from colleagues in all parts of the House, UK policy since 2021 has remained piecemeal, unco-ordinated and inadequate to lift the Afghan people out of protracted crisis, nor has it had influence with respect to the wilful destruction of the basic rights and freedoms of Afghan women, which we all hold dear.
When I visited Kabul, I was deeply privileged to witness the incredible aid work that Britain funds, and to meet a number of women who were at the sharp end of the crisis. I will never forget the time I spent on the wards of a hospital in Kabul. Every bed was occupied, with rows of children suffering from malnutrition. I watched health workers, funded by our country, helping safely to deliver babies into the arms of their mothers.
It was painfully clear how important women are to Afghans’ prospects of surviving the humanitarian crisis and to rebuilding a decent future—not just as future doctors and teachers educated in Afghanistan’s universities, but as aid workers who help others to access everything from food parcels to maternity care. However, since then, the Taliban’s edicts effectively to banish women from public life have risked killing that future—a future we have a common interest in realising because 20 years of progress for women and girls is being erased. There are severe restrictions on women’s freedom of movement, their right to education and the right to work. As well as the ban on female university students, which is being enforced by armed guards, secondary schools for girls remain closed in so many provinces.
Women have been prevented from entering parks and gyms, among other public places, and women hold no Cabinet posts in the de facto Administration. The Ministry of Women’s Affairs was quickly abolished. Decades of progress on gender equality and women’s rights have been wiped out in mere months. Women civil society activists, journalists and human rights defenders have faced harassment and detention. Non-governmental organisations and now even the United Nations have been subjected to the same draconian restrictions. A decent future is impossible for Afghanistan while half of its population remains locked up at home. It is little wonder that many aid agencies have been forced to halt humanitarian activities. Around 25 million Afghans are living in poverty, with households spending over 90% of their income on food. To restrict humanitarian aid and women’s right to work at this time is absolutely devastating.
A January 2023 poll found that women could no longer access services from one in five of the 87 Afghan NGOs surveyed. Nearly 60% of organisations reported that their operations had been partially suspended in February. The stark reality is that until those decisions are reversed, many thousands of lives will be lost as a direct result of the Taliban’s edicts. What recent conversations has the Minister had with international partners about engagement with Taliban officials to reverse those edicts? Can he update us on why countries such as Japan have been able to re-establish some operations in their embassies? Has the Minister advocated for the UN to use its negotiating position with the Taliban to stand up for organisations that employ Afghan women? Later this month the UN Security Council will debate concerns about women and girls. What representations will the Government make to that debate?
The women I met in Afghanistan last year had a very simple message for the United Kingdom: do not forget us. That plea has to ring louder today than it did then. Those women have been out on the streets courageously fighting for their basic rights. We have all seen the footage of women with placards fiercely staring down men armed with AK47s. Those women are formidable and Britain and its allies should stand with them, yet I echo concerns raised by Members today who fear that the Government are turning their back.
The announcement of a 53% reduction in aid for Afghanistan and Pakistan this financial year is of grave concern. We now have the figure for Afghanistan itself from the Independent Commission for Aid Impact and it looks to be a 65% cut—£186 million down this financial year. Will the Minister confirm whether that is correct? Meanwhile, this weekend we have seen reports that the Government’s plan for asylum could hit £6 billion over the next two years, with much of that funded out of the development budget. That is almost half of Afghanistan’s entire GDP. Let us allow that to sink in. The Government’s basic failure to process asylum claims, including those of thousands of Afghans, means that they are now cutting support from the single greatest humanitarian crisis, which people are fleeing.
The Prime Minister had the cheek to claim yesterday that his plan is working. The reality is that 20 months after Afghan families were airlifted to the United Kingdom, 8,000 are still in temporary hotels and the total backlog has risen to 137,000. The failure to process cases has meant that asylum accommodation costs have ballooned. Britain is spending four times per head what it did when Labour came to office, yet Ministers continue to write a blank cheque to the Home Secretary, who seems capable only of making things worse. As the Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) put it in December, official development assistance spending has been “out of control”. He is right.
Last year our Government managed to spend twice as much on refugee hosting as Poland, where 8 million Ukrainians fled last year and where 1.5 million are still living. The Minister knows that in March, the World Food Programme in Afghanistan was forced to reduce the ration provided to malnourished households to 50% of people’s basic nutritional needs, down from the 75% ration that it was providing before that. Households are already spending 90% of their incomes on food. In the absence of a longer-term strategy and knowing how the humanitarian crisis is disproportionately impacting women, can he tell us what the UK support to the World Food Programme will be this year? The Minister of State is not in his place, but I wrote to him about the pressure put on the ODA budget by the asylum system in March. It is now June and I have still not received a response. Will the Minister who is in his place assure me that a response will be expedited urgently?
Last year the Government promised that they would directly support women’s rights as part of the civil society component of the United Kingdom’s Afghanistan conflict, stability and security fund programme. Since then the CSSF has been scrapped in the integrated review refresh to be replaced by a new, smaller fund about which we have received very little information. As ICAI revealed just a fortnight ago, the FCDO no longer has any direct programming with women’s organisations in the country. For what reasons have the Government decided to completely withdraw direct funding from women’s programmes in Afghanistan? Has the Afghanistan CSSF programme been completely or partially scrapped? Will it or its replacement retain a civil society component through which Afghan women’s rights are supported, or has that gone, too?
We recognise the policy challenges that the Government now face with regard to Afghanistan. The security situation remains a significant concern, and the restrictions on women’s basic freedoms are an obstruction to the country’s very future. Progress from here will be slow; however, the ongoing failure of the international community to engage with the de facto authorities and find a way through the current impasse cannot continue. We must recognise that humanitarian aid, while essential, is a sticking plaster, and no substitute for basic public services and a functioning economy. The Government must lead efforts to co-ordinate a global strategy that supports Afghan civil society, respects human rights and sets a road map to allow basic structures and public services to function. The alternative is a permanent crisis, a people perpetually reliant on aid, rising extremism, women subjugated, more instability and refugees spilling across borders.
Something simply has to change, so what discussions is the Minister having with partners about setting a unified international strategy of diplomatic engagement with the de facto authorities? What is the UK doing in the meantime to help, in country, the 1.3 million Afghans who have fled across the border to Pakistan? What consideration has he given to scaling up support to multilateral initiatives, such as the window for host communities and refugees programme and the global concessional financing facility, to support developing countries that are hosting a high number of refugees? Does he accept that the lack of international diplomatic representation in Afghanistan is increasingly problematic?
Where Britain was once a leader, we are currently bystanders, yet I believe that a path through the crisis is possible. Across the country, brave Afghans are making clear their widespread opposition to the Taliban’s edicts. Women are standing up to the Taliban in the streets. In solidarity, male students and professors have walked out of universities. Even within the Taliban leadership, reports suggest that many officials oppose the ban. In government, Labour would do things differently. The United Kingdom was the only country in the G7 to destroy its world-leading development Department in the middle of the pandemic, cut lifesaving aid programmes with days’ notice and tarnish its international reputation as a trusted development partner. It is investment in long-term development that turns the tide on the challenges that we face, so our approach to international development will actively centre women and girls to fight for their futures and a fairer world.
We will fix the Home Office meltdown with our comprehensive plan to tackle channel crossings, reform resettlement routes, break up the criminal people-smuggling gangs and address the root causes of humanitarian crises and poverty. In partnership with allies, a Labour Government would develop a strategy of pragmatic diplomatic and development engagement with the de facto authorities to help to restore Afghanistan’s economy, uphold women’s rights and save lives. We understand that the recognition and protection of gender equality is both a human rights obligation and essential to achieve peace, justice and sustainable development in Afghanistan.
Tomorrow, I will meet a group of 20 Afghan women, many of whom have escaped the Taliban and are now living in the United Kingdom. Brought together by Zehra Zaidi, they are calling for a global summit for Afghan women and girls. They include former Ministers, judges, journalists, diplomats, women’s rights defenders, chief executive officers, scientists and scholars—incredible women whom any nation should be proud to have produced and to see fulfil their full potential. As the shadow Minister for International Development, I want to be able to look those women in the eye and say, hand on heart, that Britain did not give up on them and those like them in their hour of need. That work begins by standing up for women’s place in society and playing our full part to forge a way out of despair.
Mrs Pauline Latham (in the Chair)
I remind the Minister that I will allow Wendy Chamberlain two minutes to wind up at the end.
Sudan
Preet Kaur Gill Excerpts(11 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab/Co-op)
I thank the Minister for advance sight of his statement.
It is welcome that so many Brits have been successfully evacuated. Let me put on the record Labour’s thanks to our dedicated armed services and Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office personnel, who have worked around the clock to make that happen. However, we remain concerned for British residents who remain in the country. What assessment has the Minister made of the numbers of nationals and residents still in Sudan, and what steps is he taking to ensure that they can be evacuated safely and quickly?
It is right that, in the coming days and weeks, we look at how decisions have been made during the crisis and ensure that the right lessons are learned. We know that communications with British nationals have been patchy, that our evacuation started later than those of many of our allies, and that the Government were slow to support British residents. My constituent Dr Lina Badr and her children had to make their own way to the border. Can the Minister explain why the beginning of our evacuation was so much slower than those of our allies? Does he feel that it was wise to evacuate our officials before our nationals and residents? I note that the international development head was left behind, not the ambassador. Does the Minister feel that each of the lessons of Afghanistan has been learned?
So far, Ministers have spoken about this crisis largely with regard to Brits stuck in the country, and rightly so. However, we have heard little about UK support for the Sudanese people, whose dreams of a peaceful and democratic future are being shattered by the fighting. Will the Minister please say more about his commitment to support the people of Sudan should the fighting continue? How will the UK retain a meaningful presence in the country? What assessment has been made of aid programmes that have been affected by the security situation and subsequent evacuations of diplomatic personnel? Does the Minister acknowledge the impact of cuts made by his Government to the bilateral support that Sudan receives?
Even before the current crisis began, 15 million in Sudan were reliant on humanitarian assistance. Sadly, that figure will only increase. What conversations is the Minister having with partners to secure the safety of humanitarian workers and their premises and assets so that life-saving aid can continue?
António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, has warned that the power struggle is not only putting Sudan’s future at risk, but
“lighting a fuse that could detonate across borders, causing immense suffering for years”.
Yet official development assistance to the region is set to face further cuts this year, even as Sudanese nationals are fleeing across borders in their tens of thousands. Will the Minister please set out whether the Government plan to allocate additional humanitarian support to address the crisis this year? What assessment have the Government made of risk to the security of Port Sudan, given its crucial role in Sudan’s economy, in the humanitarian response and in providing an evacuation route?
Finally, as the Minister will know, the RSF’s military power is partly sustained through illicit cross-border trade, which has taken hundreds of millions out of Sudan’s formal economy and will continue to bankroll the violence. How will the Government seek to crack down on illicit trade? Does the Minister share my concern that the turn away from Africa in British foreign and development policy has vacated space that malign actors have sought to exploit?
It is right that the British Government’s first priority has been to secure the safety of as many UK nationals as possible, but we must not allow the world’s gaze to turn from Sudan once the airlifts have ended.
Mr Mitchell
I thank the shadow Development Minister very much for her comments at the beginning and recognise that she is asking questions that require an answer. I noted eight of them, but if I miss any I will certainly write to her.
The hon. Lady asked first about the efficacy of the evacuation. We were, along with the Americans, the first to pull our own diplomatic staff out of the country. We did so because the situation was extraordinarily dangerous. As I have mentioned before in the House, the embassy and the residences were caught between the two lines so it was an incredibly dangerous situation. The Prime Minister took the decision—at a Cobra meeting at 3.15 that Saturday morning, which I attended—that it was essential that we took our staff out, which is what we did. It was a difficult and complex operation, successfully conducted, but throughout all the planning we also planned to bring out our citizens, and that operation, I submit to the House, has been accomplished extremely successfully.
The hon. Lady asked me about communications with British citizens. She is right; it is extremely difficult. On one day when we were trying to communicate, there was only 2% internet availability. She asked about the speed of the evacuation. We had more citizens in the country to evacuate than the French and the Germans, who started evacuating their citizens before we did. A crisis centre was set up immediately in the Foreign Office, working across Government. I submit to the House that the evacuation has been extremely successful.
The hon. Lady asked whether lessons had been learned from Afghanistan. They most certainly have, but of course this situation was very different from Afghanistan. We did not control the ground. There was not a permissive environment—we did not have permission, as we had the permission of the Taliban in Afghanistan, to take people out. So the positions are not analogous.
The hon. Lady asked whether we would learn lessons from the evacuation. Of course we will look carefully at every decision that was made and make sure that everything possible is learned from it. She asked about the diplomatic presence. There is a diplomatic presence at the border with Egypt and at the border with Ethiopia. She will know that the excellent British ambassador to Khartoum is now in Addis Ababa.
The hon. Lady asked about the humanitarian spend. I should make it clear that we are able to exercise a bit of flexibility on humanitarian spend, as we always must. For example, I announced last Thursday that next year we will allocate £1,000 million to meet humanitarian difficulties and disasters. She quoted the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres. He is right in what he has said, and one of the encouraging things that we are seeing is that the African Union and the United Nations are working in perfect harmony, delivering precisely the same message that there has to be a ceasefire; that these generals have to lay down their arms and return their troops to barracks.
Oral Answers to Questions
Preet Kaur Gill Excerpts(11 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab/Co-op)
Last week, the Minister said:
“A time when crises are everywhere, but leadership is not. When we can save a bank in California in three days, but Zambia waits more than two years for debt relief.”
I agree. However, the Minister knows that 90% of international bonds owed by countries eligible for the common framework are governed by English law, so what leadership is he demonstrating to ensure vulture funds cannot block debt-restructuring processes by simply refusing to come to the table?
Mr Mitchell
The hon. Lady makes a very good point. I am flattered that she has read the speech I gave at Chatham House last Thursday. We are extremely concerned about the use of vulture funds, and Britain has been the lead country in trying to clamp down on them. I assure her that we will continue with that work.
Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh
Preet Kaur Gill Excerpts(11 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab/Co-op)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Mohammad Yasin) for securing this important debate and for his excellent contribution. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West) in the shadow FCDO team for her work on Myanmar and my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) for her tireless work to keep the plight of the Rohingya on the agenda through her work on the all-party parliamentary groups on Bangladesh and the rights of the Rohingya.
It is nearly six years since that fateful morning in the early hours of 25 August 2017 when violence broke out in Rakhine state, Myanmar. The military, supported by militias, launched a murderous campaign that took thousands of lives. Villages were set ablaze, entire families were killed, and women and girls suffered atrocities, including rape. According to eyewitnesses, from August to September, the Naf river, which empties into the bay of Bengal, literally ran red with blood. Roughly 24,000 were killed in that period—an unimaginable number. Some 700,000 fled Rakhine state for Bangladesh, the majority of whom travelled by foot, walking through jungle and rough terrain, or by boat, taking the perilous journey across the bay of Bengal. Today, 1 million refugees still reside in Bangladesh. It is a humbling reminder of the horror that leads someone to flee their home.
In the last two years, what little attention has been paid to Myanmar has focused on the military’s coup and attempts to crush civilian resistance. Military attacks on the civilian population are up nearly 400%. Over 600 villages have been torched by the junta’s troops. A staggering 17.6 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance. However, the suffering of the Rohingya began decades ago, as we have heard from many Members, and continues to this day outside Rakhine state and in south-eastern Bangladesh. As António Guterres has said, the Rohingya are
“one of, if not the, most discriminated people in the world”.
Whether in Rakhine state or Cox’s Bazar, the Rohingya people are currently without a future. It is important that we confront that reality today.
I used the word “humbling” a little earlier in this speech, and I think it is appropriate, as, having spoken in several debates on this matter over recent years, I am saddened that we are still talking about it and that our hopes for the Rohingya people look, if anything, further away. In 2020, I spoke for the Opposition in a debate on this matter and said
“It is a tragedy that…the international community is still having to provide them”—
the Rohingya—
“with immediate life-saving humanitarian support. That is the situation that we need to take a long, hard look at, to learn from mistakes and rectify them so that we are not here next year and the year after having the same debate.”—[Official Report, 3 November 2020; Vol. 683, c. 55WH.]
And yet, following the coup in February 2021, the prospect of a durable political solution that allows Rohingya refugees and forcibly displaced Myanmar nationals to return safely and voluntarily to their homes looks more distant than ever.
I commend much of the work that the Government are doing to sanction the abhorrent military regime in Myanmar and support the ICJ case to bring the perpetrators of atrocities to justice, although there is certainly more that they can do, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green raised the other week—for example, on banning aviation fuel, and the role of maritime insurance companies based here in Britain in the shipping of aviation fuel to Myanmar’s military. However, in the meantime, some 1 million Rohingya refugees are languishing in south-eastern Bangladesh with no meaningful prospect of a future, and we cannot ignore that either.
The hon. Members for Loughborough (Jane Hunt), for Ipswich (Tom Hunt), for Peterborough (Paul Bristow) and for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), my hon. Friends the Members for Bethnal Green and Bow and for Birmingham, Erdington (Mrs Hamilton), and the Chair of the International Development Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion), all made excellent contributions, and some spoke of the conditions in the camps at Cox’s Bazar, which we know are poor. Hundreds of thousands of refugees are living in settlements only a few kilometres wide, in tents and huts made of bamboo and thin plastic sheeting. We can only imagine what it is like living in those conditions during the monsoon and cyclone seasons, when hailstorms, wind, rain and lightning hammer down on these homes.
In March this year, we were served a powerful reminder of the conditions in these camps when we saw images of a towering fire tearing through these huts. That inferno impacted around 15,000 refugees, destroying something like 2,800 shelters and key infrastructure networks including schools, medical clinics and service points. It also displaced 50,000 people. That is only one of some estimated 222 fire incidents between January 2021 and December 2022. According to a Bangladesh Ministry of Defence report, those fires included 60 cases of arson. For the many families living in those camps, it must seem as if wherever they go, they are not safe.
I recognise that the Government responded to the March incident with £1 million pledged through the UNHCR for pressure cookers, to replace the use of liquefied petroleum gas, but does the Minister recognise that restrictions on the materials used to construct the huts and the fact that barbed fencing restricts movement increase the risk of tragedies as well? The camp’s residents are reportedly not allowed to build permanent structures. Bricks are banned—only bamboo and tarpaulin may be used—leaving them at the mercy of the elements. Has the Minister raised this issue with her counterparts in Bangladesh?
Meanwhile, basic human needs in those camps are going unmet. Food assistance to the refugees, who have been left reliant on humanitarian aid, is dwindling: we have already heard that the World Food Programme says that it needs £103 million just to avoid further ration cuts in a community where malnutrition is already rife. In February, for the first time in five years, the World Food Programme had to cut food rations to refugees by 17% across the board due to a lack of funding. In response, the UK has offered £4 million for this year. According to the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in Burma, Tom Andrews, 45% of all Rohingya families in the camps are living with insufficient diets; some 51% of Rohingya children and 41% of pregnant and breastfeeding women are anaemic; and 40% of children are suffering from stunted growth because of a lack of nutrition. As we have heard from Members across the House, half of the people living in those camps are children. This is a tragedy unfolding in real time, day by day for these people, yet we are cutting our support to the bone.
This year’s commitments represent an 82% decrease on 2020. Asked about this issue recently, the Minister said that
“we do not look at the issue of restoring the money, we look at the issue of need.”—[Official Report, 19 April 2023; Vol. 731, c. 134WH.]
So I ask whether she can publish what possible assessment could conclude that need has declined by 82%. I know she will say that fiscal constraints—the result of her party’s dire economic record—mean that we have to keep ODA at 0.5%, but what she does not acknowledge is that within those constraints there are clear political choices to be made, including the blank cheque that the Minister has signed off to the Home Secretary for asylum hotels and the half a billion pounds going to British International Investment over this year and last.
In his speech at Chatham House last week, aptly titled “Can rhetoric match reality?” the Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), stated that food insecurity would be one of his priorities. Can the Minister explain how these cuts to food assistance to the Rohingya assist that? Likewise, can she explain how the Rohingya crisis remains one of the Government’s top priorities, as the Europe Minister claimed in October?
Of course, the Rohingya need not only food, but a future. As such, I welcome the focus on skills outlined in the 2023 joint response plan: education and development of livelihood skills are essential among the young and deprived populations that are living in these camps. It was therefore disappointing to see the UK permanent representative speak at the conference on the joint response plan in support of those provisions, yet announce not a single penny of support. This is becoming an increasing habit, so will the Minister revisit this issue and set out what support the United Kingdom is providing to the response plan this year?
The urgency of the crisis in Cox’s Bazar is starkly demonstrated by the number of Rohingya who are now attempting dangerous sea crossings. The numbers trying to get to Malaysia or Indonesia increased fivefold last year to more than 3,500, at the cost of hundreds of lives. It is again a reminder of why our humanitarian and development work is essential to tackling the causes of displacement and irregular migration, and why it is essential that we do not leave Bangladesh to shoulder the burden alone. Most countries would struggle to manage an influx of 1 million refugees—it certainly puts our own country’s struggle with just a fraction of those numbers into perspective. To do so in a country where GDP per capita is only $2,500 is remarkable, so we have to pay thanks to the Government of Bangladesh for what they are doing—I note that the high commissioner is here, listening to this debate. They are stepping up and taking a share of responsibility that we would not expect of such a relatively poor country; it is doing so brilliantly in terms of development.
We remain hopeful that, one day, the Rohingya can return to Myanmar. We recognise that that is where the ultimate solution of this crisis lies, but we must also confront the reality that that prospect has gotten further away, not closer, in recent years. Fading international attention to the crisis in Bangladesh is making matters worse. As such, does the Minister agree that we must learn lessons about our assistance to refugees displaced for many years, including prioritising local engagement from the outset, shifting from emergency assistance over time, and tipping the scales from short-term humanitarian work to development for longer-term needs? Can she say whether assessments have been made as to where investment now can generate greater returns or reduce need in the long run?
Moreover, can the Minister speak to the need for conflict and atrocity prevention in the first place? Atrocities do not happen overnight, as we have heard from Members across the House—they are years in the making—yet it was notable that the Minister of State did not mention conflict and atrocity prevention in his speech at Chatham House last week. What lessons have the Government learned about atrocity prevention, and will they be looking to take up the International Development Committee’s recommendations laid out in its important recent report on atrocity prevention?
Finally, can the Minister say something on how the Government will help to support the women and girls who continue to bear the brunt of this crisis, including the many bearing the physical and psychological scars of sexual violence? It is imperative that Britain plays its full part in the response to the Rohingya crisis to secure the decent future that they deserve. As international attention dwindles, the Government must reflect on their role and ask what will become of those million refugees—stateless, fenced in, increasingly hungry and at the mercy of people traffickers. That question is not just for Bangladesh, but for all of us who desire a humane solution to one of the world’s most harrowing crises.