Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Vicky Ford and Chris Law(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Chris Law (Dundee West) (SNP)
According to the UN Secretary General, people are 15 times more likely to die if they live in a climate crisis hotspot, which is what we see unfolding right now in Pakistan, with more than 6 million people in dire need of humanitarian aid and already more than 1,000 people dead. Last year, at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland became the first developed economy in the world, led by our First Minister, to pledge dedicated loss and damage funding. Ahead of COP27, will the UK Government finally commit to establishing a similar loss and damage policy in line with the 2015 Paris climate accord?
Vicky Ford
We are working with countries across the world to ensure that everybody holds up the promises that they made at COP26. We understand the challenges that many countries are facing, including the terrible situation in Pakistan, where we have already donated more than 10% of what the UN and Pakistan have asked for to meet their emergency need. I think, however, that the hon. Gentleman should focus on the work that the COP26 President, my right hon. Friend the Member for Reading West (Alok Sharma), has been doing with more than 50 missions working across the world to ensure that we get action before the next COP in Egypt.
Afghanistan: Humanitarian Crisis
Debate between Vicky Ford and Chris Law(2 years, 3 months ago)
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Vicky Ford
My hon. Friend makes a very good point about children. She asks what we are doing with other countries in the region, including Pakistan. My colleague the Minister for south and central Asia, Lord Ahmad, is in regular contact with other neighbouring countries, and £30 million was allocated to help other countries in the region respond to the impact of the crisis on themselves.
We are committed to ensuring that at least half the aid reaches women and girls. Just before Christmas I met NGOs and organisations representing both women’s and girls’ organisation and LGBT organisations, and their feedback from the ground was incredibly helpful. The Minister for Afghan Resettlement made a statement on the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme last week, and she mentioned that three cohorts of LGBT people have already come to the UK under the scheme. We will continue to prioritise those women who are most at risk, but we need to recognise that, although we are doing a huge amount to help resettle people in this country, we need to support people on the ground, which is why we are working with world-leading organisations to focus always on the most vulnerable, including women and girls.
Chris Law (Dundee West) (SNP)
Even before our chaotic withdrawal, it was known that the people of Afghanistan faced a humanitarian crisis this winter. In September the UN estimated that only 5% of Afghans had enough food to eat each day, so the UK Government cannot say that this famine has caught them by surprise. With 1 million children at risk of severe malnourishment and 23 million people threatened with starvation, less than 25% of UK aid money pledged to Afghanistan in 2021 had been disbursed by the beginning of December, which is shocking.
With the UN launching an appeal for nearly £5 billion in aid for Afghanistan, will the UK Government ensure that all the funds pledged urgently reach those in need? Can the Minister confirm what new money the UK will donate, above and beyond the previous announcements? Will the UK Government finally recognise that their ideological cuts to aid have cost countless lives not only in Afghanistan but across the world, and will they reverse that decision?
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Vicky Ford and Chris Law(2 years, 5 months ago)
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Vicky Ford
We will continue to work with partners, such as the US and France, to raise the north-west and south-west crisis in multilateral forums. We urge all parties to remain engaged with the Swiss-led process to promote a peaceful resolution to the crisis. As I said, our planned humanitarian aid to Cameroon this year will be £5 million, which will help to support the World Food Programme and the International Committee of the Red Cross specifically for the most vulnerable populations in those regions.
Chris Law (Dundee West) (SNP)
In her time as International Trade Secretary, the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, the right hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) blocked a genocide amendment against Chinese persecution of Uyghur Muslims, resumed the sale of UK bombs used against civilians in Yemen, and signed trade deals with human-rights-abusing tyrants from Egypt to Cameroon. Does the Minister recognise that the shoddy trade deal signed with Cameroon—a trade deal even Donald Trump would not sign because of human rights concerns—was not only a missed opportunity to insert clauses relating to genocide, mass killings of civilians and modern slavery, but, as her past record demonstrates, suggests that the Foreign Secretary does not give a jot for human rights or standing up against tyrants?
Vicky Ford
The UK and Cameroon signed an economic partnership agreement in March this year, which ensures the continuity of our trading arrangements. It is a development-focused agreement. The EPA recognises that the trade access provided is vital to the livelihoods of many, many Cameroonians. We are very clear that using trade to support development and prosperity does not have to come at the expense of protecting human rights. We continue to press the Cameroonian Government to uphold the principles of human rights and democracy which underpin the EPA.
Sustainable Development Goals
Debate between Vicky Ford and Chris Law(4 years, 10 months ago)
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Chris Law
I thank my hon. Friend for making that point. She has reminded me of another point: Scotland now has the world’s first company to look into the re-tarmacking of roads without using oil. Recycled plastics will be used instead. In the past couple of weeks, it was announced that a cul-de-sac in a building development was the first road to be surfaced with such material.
It is clear that the UK Government have not developed a focused strategy to address the sustainable development goals seriously and needs to start to deal with these issues with the urgency that they deserve. Although DFID is co-ordinating the voluntary national review, which is commendable, and is also responsible for its overall drafting process, the delivery of specific goals is spread across a variety of Departments. Despite that, the UK Government are failing to communicate the SDGs across those Departments. Witnesses have told the International Development Committee that they did not know about the SDGs until the VNR process began—that is shocking—and that there is still limited knowledge of the goals among officials. If I have one thing to say before I conclude, it is that all Departments need to understand what the SDGs are. They should be front and centre in everything they do.
Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)
May I take the hon. Gentleman back to the discussion about plastics? So many people will have seen that moving “War On Plastic” film last night. Will the hon. Gentleman take a moment to thank the colleagues from all parties who took part in the campaign at Lent to raise awareness of and support Tearfund’s work on setting up sustainable plastic-recycling facilities in developing countries? That campaign was match funded by the UK Government, under DFID, and has raised millions, and it is expanding into many other countries.
Chris Law
Indeed, on the issue of plastics, the environment and the climate, we share common views throughout the House, and I am of course happy to reflect that, as well as the great work that Tearfund has done.
As the Select Committee stated in its letter to the Secretary of State in April, given that the UK signed up to the SDGs in 2015, nearly four years ago, the current situation just is not good enough. It is becoming increasingly clear that, given the all-encompassing nature of the SDGs, DFID is not the Department most suited to ensuring that they are embedded in everything that the Government do. We cannot afford not to take the SDGs seriously and instead to treat the whole process as a box-ticking exercise that can be forgotten about once the VNR has been and gone.
We have a unique opportunity to eradicate poverty, reduce inequalities, combat catastrophic climate change and protect our natural environment by 2030. We simply cannot pick and choose which goals are important to us and which ones we can disregard. Sadly, it does not appear that the UK Government have used the opportunity of the VNR to make the SDGs better known in the UK or to take their own responsibilities more seriously. For example, in a letter on 6 June, firms and charities called for the Government to promote international development through their international trade policy. If the UK wants to do that, it should follow France’s example and call for the USA to return to the Paris agreement before it starts any trade talks.
Instead, in the same week, we saw the UK Government roll out the red carpet to President Trump, a climate change denier, in a desperate attempt to secure a trade deal, with anything up for grabs.
Going forward, it is expected that the Prime Minister will attend the first four-yearly Heads of State meeting on the sustainable development goals at the UN General Assembly in September. Should that Prime Minister be the current Secretary of State for International Development, I would welcome hearing whatever he is likely to say in September. Of course, as of yet, we have no idea who that Prime Minister will be. Although the Secretary of State understands that we face, in his own words, a climate cataclysm and would like to double the amount that DFID spends on climate and the environment, sadly the same cannot be said of several of the other candidates also vying to become Prime Minister.
One candidate endorsed a report that recommended that the UK should spend 0.7% of its income on aid only if it
“gains the freedom to define aid as it sees fit.”
He also said that aid spending should be used in the UK’s
“political, commercial and diplomatic interests”
and called to change the Department’s purpose from poverty reduction to furthering
“the nation’s overall strategic goals.”
Another candidate has spoken of her desire to halve the UK’s overseas aid budget and abandon the UK’s commitment to the UN target of spending 0.7% of national income on aid. When I saw that on “The Andrew Marr Show” on Sunday morning, my chin literally bounced off the kitchen table. Although the Government will cherry-pick their examples of progress on the SDGs in this debate today, it has been evident that their implementation of the sustainable development goals has been shambolic and the future could be bleaker should some in the Conservative party get their way.
In conclusion, I would like to quote Richard Curtis, film writer and director responsible for films such as “Four Weddings and a Funeral”, “Bridget Jones’s Diary”, and “Love Actually”. Importantly, he was in front of the International Development Committee today, because he is also UN advocate for the SDGs and co-founder of Project Everyone and Comic Relief. He summed up precisely what needs to be done by this UK Government when he said:
“The UK is reputed for campaigns such as Live Aid and Band Aid”—
those of us in this Chamber who are old enough, which is most of us, will probably remember them—
“as well as Make Poverty History, yet what we need is one person who is thinking about this all the time. We need real leadership.”
Whoever becomes Prime Minister next month needs to learn the lessons of the UK’s implementation of the SDGs so far. We are nearly one third of the way from the adoption in 2015 to the target date of 2030. I urge the UK Government to use the VNR to mark the beginning of a more thorough and serious approach to implementing the sustainable development goals—a starting point with proper leadership and proper cross-departmental engagement—and to look at some of the examples that I have mentioned and that have been demonstrated by the Scottish Government.