My Lords, it is with pleasure that I open this debate on the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals, also known as the global goals. The 2030 agenda for sustainable development was adopted by every United Nations member state in 2015. It offers a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for all people and the planet, through partnerships, centred around the 17 global goals.
The agenda built on a vast legacy of work to improve the lives of people around the world, particularly through the millennium development goals from 2000 to 2015, but 2015 raised the bar, aiming to finish the job of the MDGs. Critically, the new framework went much further, transforming an agenda aimed at developing countries to one that was not only comprehensive but universal—because we all have challenges we face. This universal approach covers all countries, looks beyond aid and aims to leave no one behind.
The UK, led by the then Prime Minister David Cameron, was instrumental in the development of the SDGs, co-chairing the high-level panel with Liberia and Indonesia that led to the eventual adoption of the goals. There has been criticism of the goals by some: that they are too simplistic given the complex policy issues to which they relate or that there are too many of them, but both the UK Government and I are strong advocates for the goals. Their interconnected nature provides an important framework for all countries to view their challenges and progress.
The 2030 agenda is about ending poverty and hunger, improving health and education, reducing inequality, catalysing economic growth, addressing climate change, and preserving our oceans and forests. This is a huge ambition; put simply, it is to make the world a better place for everyone.
One of the commitments of the SDGs was for every member state to produce a voluntary national review, or VNR. The UK has now produced its own VNR, four years on from the adoption of the goals. This has been a significant undertaking that has involved the whole of Whitehall, the devolved Administrations, civil society, business and the wider public. All of them have made invaluable contributions to our VNR.
The Secretary of State for International Development will present the UK’s VNR to the UN high-level political forum in New York on 16 July. The VNR reflects our commitment to transparency and honesty. The Secretary of State will present it with a mixture of pride in what we have achieved but also humility, reflecting the areas in which we must do better as well as the scale of the challenge that still lies before us. He will offer to share the lessons we have learned in the process, in the hope that these might help other countries, many of which have less capacity than we do, as they approach similar challenges.
This review of the UK’s progress in meeting the goals has been informed by some 350 organisations, participation in more than 35 events, 270 case studies and debates in both Houses of Parliament. I am tempted to say that the VNR is the culmination of that huge effort, but of course it is not a culmination at all. In some respects, the VNR offers a baseline, a first thorough stocktake of how we are doing against the ambitions of the global goals, but it is also just a stepping stone en route to 2030.
My Lords, I draw attention to my interests listed in the register, some of which impact on my work on the global goals. I am grateful that the voluntary national review mentions the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the UN Global Goals for Sustainable Development that we set up in 2015, which I think was the first such group in the world to be established in a parliamentary setting.
The UN global goals for sustainable development are the most ambitious set of commitments ever agreed by the international community. We know that the gender inequalities that exist pretty much everywhere but at a very extensive level in many countries, the lack of rights and the lack of education are all interlinked. We know that poor health, poor sanitation and hunger—lack of access to food—can all be very closely linked. We know that conflict, climate change and economic underdevelopment are combined key drivers of migration and of some of the problems created around the world for individuals, families and countries by that. We know that all those problems are complex, and therefore the solutions have to be comprehensive.
That is where the strategy adopted by the United Nations in 2015 to develop those comprehensive goals in a strategic sense has been absolutely right. We also know that in developing the millennium development goals, there was a lack of attention on the causes of underdevelopment and poverty, as opposed to some of the remedies. As a result, no conflict-affected or fragile state anywhere in the world achieved even one of the MDGs. Throughout the period of the MDGs and since, natural disasters have destroyed years of development in a matter of minutes or hours. We know that where there is a lack of access to justice, democratic institutions and peace, all development that takes place is at risk. Therefore, the fundamentals of a democratic and just society must be in place if we are truly to end poverty and meet the other global goals.
My Lords, it is very often frustrating following the noble Lord in these debates, because I agree with everything that he says and he says it much better. That includes the observation that, in the Chamber now, noble Lords are considering the minutiae of public lavatories. One of the global sustainable development goals for humanity focuses on the lack of toilets in public buildings in the least developed countries, and especially toilets and facilities in schools for girls. It should be the focus of all of us in the House to make sure that the UK is pushing that. A reverse of the situation would have been far more appropriate today.
That being said, I commend the Minister on securing this debate and on the very open way in which she introduced it. In many respects, she was very frank about the need for government to better co-ordinate on the domestic element of the VNR. However, I wish to approach a different subject and look at what I think will be critical to the last decade of the global goals: finance for development and the need for a new British approach.
Three weeks ago, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact published a synthesis of its findings on the current state of UK aid from 2015 to 2019. Its conclusion was stark:
“The government has clearly signalled its intention to use the aid programme to pursue direct UK national interests, in particular, by helping to position the UK as a key trade and investment partner with frontier economies. While the pursuit of mutual prosperity is not necessarily in conflict with good development practice, the focus needs to remain on building long-term opportunities, rather than securing short-term advantage”.
I agree with this recommendation and hope that the Minister does too; I hope that the Government are reflecting on it.
The current UK aid strategy dates from 2015 and has a similar timeframe to the global goals, as the Minister said. Introduced under Justine Greening and George Osborne, it heralded a “fundamental shift” towards national interest. This strategy is now almost four years old and, in a few weeks, we are likely to be on our fifth Secretary of State, which means that they have averaged just nine months in office during this period. As the ODI put it, the strategy is part of an unwelcome trend to define ODA as primarily within the national interest, as an element of the rising tide of political populism. The idea that aid should serve the national interest is gaining currency, but it is contrary to the founding principles of the goals and to why the UK took the lead on securing a 0.7% commitment. As the ODI itself has shown, there is little explicit recognition that aid orientated towards securing domestic interests is not always the most efficient or effective way of maximising global development ambitions.
I welcome the opportunity to talk in this debate, but I am sorry to say that I come as a sheep in wolf’s clothing. I am very much here to promote the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015. I have been itching to mention my interest in this Act at every opportunity.
I am very pleased to see in the voluntary national review of progress towards the sustainable development goals published by the Government that the Welsh Act,
“provides a robust legal framework for policy coherence on sustainable development”.
The report says this on 15 occasions about the Act. I would like to see it become available to the rest of the United Kingdom. I am very pleased that the Government recognised on 15 occasions in the report that the Welsh are doing something very clever in bringing together the ideas on the environment, education, and the fight against poverty and for social justice. Next year, after its fifth year, we will see how well it has done. The proof of the pudding is still in the eating.
I am inspired to promote much of the work that Wales has done. There are 17 sustainable goals—we all know them—but we could get rid of 16 of them immediately. We could throw them away because we really need only one. Goal 1 is poverty, and would it not be wonderful if we got rid of poverty, because we would be getting rid of poverty of spirit, poverty of mind, poverty of delivery and poverty itself? We do not need the other 16, because they are variations on the fact that we have not put our time and effort into getting rid of poverty.
We have not dismantled poverty. Much of the work that is done in and around poverty is a kind of handholding. It is about getting people through the day, the week, the month and the year: it is not about dismantling poverty. Eighty per cent of all the social intervention money spent in the world is spent in and around emergencies and coping, and very little in prevention and cure.
My Lords, I thank my noble friend the Minister for her excellent opening speech and for the opportunity to speak in this important debate. It is always difficult to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bird, because he is so passionate and enthusiastic, but I will do my best.
I will focus my remarks on nutrition, which underpins the success of the SDGs as a whole. Good nutrition is the foundation of good health and human capital. It is essential for the development of a strong immune system, without which the efficacy of all other health interventions is dramatically reduced. I begin by acknowledging the Government’s leadership on nutrition. The UK Government held the first ever Nutrition for Growth summit here in London in 2013. The summit raised $24 billion over seven years to help end malnutrition. The commitments made have saved and transformed the lives of millions, but those commitments expire next year when the next summit takes place in Tokyo. The Tokyo summit is a huge opportunity. To reflect its importance, we have set up an APPG on Nutrition for Growth, which I co-chair with the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, to buoy the Government’s leadership as the summit approaches. At our recent launch event, DfID’s director-general for policy, Richard Clarke, acknowledged nutrition as one of DfID’s “best buys”. He is patently correct, and that is the reason I am so supportive of investing in nutrition.
Let us take the case of Fatima Babanne as an example. Fatima is from a remote and fragile part of northern Nigeria. She has three children and another on the way. With limited local employment opportunities, she struggles to afford the healthy diet that she and her family need. Following an assessment, Fatima has enrolled in DfID’s child development grant programme, which gives her a monthly cash income of 4,000 Nigerian naira—approximately £8—and a place on an education course about health and nutrition. Fatima uses her grant to buy healthy food and saves a small amount each month to start a millet-grinding business, which now generates 10,000 naira—£21—profit per month.
My Lords, I welcome the fact that in her Written Statement on the VNR the Minister underlined that the goals apply to all people in all countries, including here in the UK, so there is a focus on the domestic in the review. It will perhaps not surprise noble Lords that that will be my focus as well.
Earlier this year, the Environmental Audit Committee identified a doughnut-shaped hole in domestic implementation of the SDGs despite the Government’s fine words, and I am afraid I do not think much has changed since then, the VNR notwithstanding. The committee used SDG 2—zero hunger—as a case study through which to examine the domestic focus. It concluded that the Government continue to see hunger and food insecurity as overseas issues, with DfID the only department to include them in its single departmental plan, and lamented the blind eye to UK hunger. It cited UNICEF data provided by the Food Foundation which indicates that a higher proportion of children live in severely food-insecure households than in any other EU nation. The UK Stakeholders for Sustainable Development rated the UK only amber or red on nutrition-related targets under SDG 2. While the decision to start measuring food insecurity is welcome, it must be only a first step.
Food insecurity is a helpful concept, but it can serve to sanitise the fact that in some cases we are talking about hunger. Let us not forget that the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which was ratified by the UK, places a duty on government to ensure the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger. According to Human Rights Watch, the UK Government are failing in that duty, as its research revealed families of children going hungry in a country with ample resources to make sure that that does not happen. This is borne out by countless other studies.
A particular issue which integrates the domestic and global dimensions of the SDGs concerns migrant families with no recourse to public funds, which was debated yesterday evening. Children go hungry because they are excluded from free school meals because of the rule. Will the Minister undertake to take this up with relevant colleagues in the context of the SDGs?
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, for initiating this debate at a time when the SDGs are becoming an ever-important response to global issues.
We are all aware that there are 17 SDGs, 169 targets and a further 232 indicators. These are big, bold aims to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. They are underpinned by the principle of “leave no one behind”.
Today, I will concentrate primarily on the first goal: no poverty. I agree 100% with the noble Lord, Lord Bird, and the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, that this goal is the most important. Ending poverty in all its forms everywhere is the most urgent goal, and one we must get right for so many millions of people across the world. It is one of the main goals that achieving many of the others relies on. With entrenched poverty, many of the other goals cannot be achieved and we will not reach the targets by 2030. If you live in extreme poverty, or even relative poverty, it is very hard to think of paying for an education, improving your nutritional well-being or worrying whether you are contributing to climate change.
If we are to succeed in eradicating poverty, we need to understand its drivers and how best to tackle them. Often, the root causes are war, conflict, drought and disease. On their own, these things do not necessarily create poverty, but displaced people, those who are ill and those who cannot grow crops cannot provide for themselves. If they cannot provide for themselves, inevitably poverty will rear its ugly head.
A 2018 UN report on the goals shows that the rate of extreme poverty has fallen rapidly and that many fewer people are living on less than $1.90 per day than in 1990. The World Bank figures for 2015 show the level of extreme poverty as 10%, down from 11% in 2013. Goal 2 is to end hunger. Achieving food security is closely linked to goal 1. Conversely, the UN states that world hunger appears to be on the rise again.
My Lords, I thank the Minister for opening this debate and for all the work she and the department are doing to ensure that we remain a lead voice in this critical area.
I have the privilege of being chair of UN Women UK, a role that I took on last October. All noble Lords speaking in this important debate today recognise that the commitments made in 2015 by world leaders in New York to the 2030 SDGs must be delivered. Critical to that is how we measure outcomes. However, the fact that we lack data for over half of the SDG indicators means that we cannot manage or measure what we do not know.
As part of our global programme, UN Women UK will be working on critical diagnostic phases to measure what gender inequality looks like across the UK. Using new digital technologies and crowdsourced reporting, we will focus on ending violence against women and girls. These issues remain prevalent here in the UK. The difference here is that our voices can shift the dial, because we currently have a Government committed to supporting the ending of the inequalities that women and girls face. The worry, however, is that the numbers are not shifting. One in four women still suffer some form of violence and two women are murdered each week. The incoming Prime Minister must show the same commitment and ensure that equality in all its forms is threaded through the work of all government departments and institutions, and that of all publicly funded bodies. We cannot have expectations of others if our own house is not in order.
A number of noble Lords have mentioned that the debate in the main Chamber is on toilets. While the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, was speaking, I was reminded of the massive programme that Prime Minister Modi has undertaken in India to ensure access to toilets for everyone in schools and colleges, particularly girls. It surprises me that such a big debate as this is taking place in the Moses Room today, when it should be on the main Floor.
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While we are pleased with the final detailed and comprehensive product, we acknowledge that, as with any undertaking of this scope, there are things that we need to reflect on and learn from. Compiling the review has taught us a lot. For example, we need to do more to raise further public awareness of the goals and to articulate more clearly how government departments will co-operate to deliver them and create the environment that enables them. I acknowledge that co-ordinated delivery of the goals within government needs further effort
Each of the 17 global goals is important, and the VNR goes into careful detail about how we are delivering each of them. We have a wealth of data from which to draw our conclusions. The goals fit neatly into the five Ps: people, planet, prosperity, peace, and partnership. I will present an overview of the report in that way.
In the people category, we have seen substantial advances in healthcare in the last few years. Since 2010, stillbirths have reduced by almost 19%. Meanwhile, the NHS—free at the point of use, of course—has long provided the sort of care that bankrupts people in other countries. That said, much greater progress is needed in tackling cancer, obesity, heart attacks and strokes. In education, in 2017, 40% of the working-age UK population were graduates, around two-thirds higher than the proportion in 2002. However, robotics and artificial intelligence show that we cannot be complacent: they hold huge promise but mean that the nature of work in the future will look different from how it does today. Some 85% of schools in England are rated good or outstanding, but we are not where we need to be on basic numeracy and literacy. We can also do much better on technical education. Nobody can seriously doubt that we need to do much more on equality. The Secretary of State has rightly identified adult social care as one of the biggest challenges facing this country.
The second P is planet, and nothing serves as a more intense reminder of the interconnectedness of our planet than climate change. The UK needs to do even more on technology and research and development. Emerging economies will feel less inclined to build coal-fired power stations if we can develop technologies like solar and light spectrum and help to drive down marginal costs. We face a climate crisis and our Secretary of State has confirmed his commitment to double the amount that DfID spends on climate and the environment. Every one of the 17 goals is at the mercy of our planet continuing to be habitable.
In terms of prosperity, some of our sectors are thriving to an unparalleled extent, especially financial services and technology. The story is much more mixed in terms of productivity, however. Significant infrastructure improvements are needed, particularly to further unlock northern England’s huge potential. The gender pay gap has reduced a little, but not enough. Employment is at record levels, however, and 700,000 more people with disabilities are employed than was the case in 2015. The economy is growing, and did so faster in 2018 than expected, but people are still being left behind. Although we are pleased to see record employment, we know that some families are struggling, even when in work.
Peace is the fourth measure, and the UK played a key role in securing goal 16—peace, justice and strong institutions—when the goals were negotiated. At the UN, the UK continues to play an active role and has long supported progress around the world towards more peaceful, just and inclusive societies. In 2015, the UK kept the international spotlight on the Rohingya crisis in Burma, actively supporting UN-led efforts to find a political solution. The UK is also pursuing a peaceful end to conflict in Yemen, Syria, Libya and Somalia. At home, crime as a whole has been falling, but there has been a concerning increase in knife crime. We can learn a lot from Glasgow’s success in taking a public health approach to knife crime—bringing key agencies together to identify risk factors early, to help prevent those crimes from occurring in the first place.
Finally, partnership is key to the goals and a word we should all hear and use more often when it comes to them. The UK has a quite incredible voluntary sector and civil society. The Secretary of State has spoken of the need to improve the way in which we in government harness it. The energy and insight of volunteers and the efficacy of community schemes for broadband, planning and land trusts should not simply inspire us; they show the great convening power of the voluntary sector and its roles as champion and enabler.
The VNR is 234 pages long which, together with a 76-page statistical annexe, goes into far more granular detail than I could hope to at the Dispatch Box. I wanted to offer your Lordships an overview of the report, but above all I am keen to hear the opinion of noble Lords on the VNR and the global goals in general. I think we will all agree that we have some way to go if we are to achieve the goals by 2030, both here in the UK and around the world. I beg to move.
The global goals provide answers to complex problems, and they are important also because of the strategic overview they give of how we should approach our global relations. The UN said, first, that the goals would be universal, that no one would be left behind, and that it was not just a case of the rich world contributing more to the poor world—the goals would apply everywhere to everybody. Secondly, the goals tried to address the key causes of underdevelopment, poverty and conflict around the world, but had a system of accountability built into them. That system revolves around Governments—countries as a whole, preferably—having national strategies. Those national strategies then develop into three or four-yearly reports to the United Nations through the voluntary national review process, and that process should include Parliaments, parliamentary debates and decision-making.
My starting point is therefore to thank and congratulate the Minister on securing this debate today. It is very important that we have a debate in advance of the VNR being presented to Parliament, although I must say that I seriously doubt the wisdom of the judgment by the Whips on all sides to move this debate to the Grand Committee, away from the main Chamber, to make way for a debate on public toilets. That perhaps says a lot about the state of British politics today.
The VNR is a distinct improvement on where we were about 12 or 18 months ago. If we are being honest, the UK was slow off the mark. Having been intimately involved with decision-making on the global goals prior to 2015—the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, was one of the many Ministers involved in that—we took our foot off the pedal. We did not have the clarity of a national strategy and co-ordinated action across the Cabinet that should have been taking place. However, the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, the Secretary of State, Rory Stewart, and their two predecessors—in particular, the noble Lord, Lord Bates, and Penny Mordaunt MP—have ensured that over the past 12 to 18 months the goals have become much more central to the work of DfID and perhaps occasionally other government departments, and that is welcome.
However, although the VNR has many positives, it has unfortunately been a bit of an opportunity missed, due to the political circumstances of the moment. On the positive side, we are perhaps showing other countries around the world how to produce objective data properly by using the Office for National Statistics and objective data that may not all be comfortable for the Government, it having been published and given to the UN back in May.
In our VNR we quite rightly comment on both the UK and the global picture—there is a balance between the two—emphasising the universal nature of the goals. While the commentary is largely positive, it is not all positive. I think the Government have tried, occasionally, to be humble and reflect that there are negatives as well. That is welcome and something we need to build on. It reflects the role of the devolved Governments, local government, business and civic society. That is all positive. Being honest, we are four years into a 15-year challenge—the biggest challenge the world has ever set itself—and we have to admit there is some way to go.
I shall briefly emphasise the areas where there needs to be urgent attention between the presentation of the VNR to the UN next week by the Secretary of State—I hope I should not say the outgoing Secretary of State—and the important SDG summit on 24 and 25 September that will take place as part of the UN General Assembly weeks. There are areas where we in the UK—I emphasise “we” because, yes, it is the Government’s responsibility, but these goals are everybody’s responsibility, so we all have a part to play—need to strengthen our resolve and make some firm decisions. The first is that the responsibility for these goals, under any new Cabinet or Prime Minister, needs to move from DfID to either the Prime Minister’s Office or the Cabinet Office. There needs to be a proper cross-department, cross-government committee responsible for implementing the goals at home and abroad. That is also true in relation to our overseas development assistance because so much of that is now spent by other departments.
Secondly, we need a proper stakeholder body—there is a reference to this in the report—that brings together business, civic society and others in the UK to build a proper partnership inside the UK that can drive action on the goals over the next 11 years. Thirdly, we need to take the initiative in the UK; because of our role in global business and because of the key role that business can play in delivering these goals around the world and transforming people lives, there should be a specific initiative to try to establish more momentum in the UK in every sector, particularly in global businesses, to ensure that the way they treat their employees and customers, source products and invest around the world is in line with these goals. The UK Government could take a greater role in that. Fourthly, we need to establish some kind of independent mechanism for reporting to Parliament that ensures that the responsibility beyond government is recognised and that we have a very honest and clear reporting mechanism that allows us to debate these goals on an annual basis.
The UK had a key role in leadership in advance of 2015. We need to recapture that role. We have an opportunity to do that this September. It is intolerable that in 2019 we live in a world where hundreds of millions of girls do not go to secondary school and lose out on all the opportunities in life that result from it. We know that there are countries around the world where people do not have basic rights and democratic choices. We know the craziness of the world today where there are more mobile phones than domestic toilets. This is an intolerable situation in 2019, one-fifth of the way into a new century. The UK could and should take a greater lead to step up action on the goals globally, not just within our own borders. We could do that, particularly on goal 16 on peace and justice and democratic institutions to which we direct a high level of our aid spending, but we have a role on the Security Council and elsewhere on conflict prevention and peace-building. We should do it more in relation to our overseas development assistance by linking it directly to the goals and insisting that there is a link between implementation of the goals nationally elsewhere in the world and our aid.
Finally, we need to ensure that through the UN Assembly in September there is an agreement for a big push in 2020, the 75th anniversary of the United Nations, to say that in the final 10 years of this programme of delivery on the goals we are really going to make a difference and leave no one behind.
The ODI’s new principled aid index ranks bilateral development assistance committee donors by how they use their official development assistance to pursue the long-term national interest but in a safer, sustainable and more prosperous world. A principled aid allocation strategy, while not excluding national interest, has lower scores for countries that have this as a stated principle or major aim. That is for good reason: too many developed countries, either formally or informally, still have tied aid, aid for arms or informal conditionality, or link aid decisions to votes in rule-making bodies such as the UN and the WTO. The UK has been a superb example of not doing that. If that were put at risk, it would be detrimental to our standing in the world. The principled aid index is therefore a superb means by which we can begin to open up this argument and have a finance framework for development for the remaining decades of the goals.
In spite of this, as the Minister said, we have seen UK leadership making major improvements and development around the world, pegged to the ambitions of the global goals. We are second on the principled aid index of all OECD countries. We fail to be top because of the national interest bias that I have outlined. Having an approach that may pander to some in the press is in fact likely to be a less effective and less efficient means of spending public money, which they claim is their concern when the pandering starts. It is an unvirtuous circle that we need to make sure is broken.
We should be proud of what we have already achieved—here I agree with the Minister’s comments. The past few decades have seen a dramatic fall in global poverty, with more than a billion people lifted out of poverty since 1990. It is estimated that around 650 million now live in extreme poverty, which is down from 1.85 billion in 1990. This trend has slowed. The rate of extreme poverty reduction is slowing dramatically. According to the World Poverty Clock, 40,000 people will be lifted out of poverty today but 13,000 will fall into it. The absolute number of people living in extreme poverty is still rising in 14 countries, primarily as a result of high population growth. Because of this and some other indicators, we are on course to miss a substantial number of goals. Aid flows are not progressing at the pace that we had expected and the UN needs. For example, there was $144 billion in development investment in 2017, but the need in that period was $2.5 trillion. We have to be open: the billions to trillions narrative is not materialising.
To attempt to address this, there will be a high-level dialogue on financing for development under the aegis of the UN General Assembly—after the dialogue that the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, mentioned—on 26 September this year. It follows the high-level political forum on sustainable development. The president of the General Assembly said that this was necessary because of the slow pace. Can the Minister ensure—maybe she cannot ensure, but certainly request—that whoever our Prime Minister is attends this dialogue on financing for development, consistent with the approach that David Cameron took when he was in office? If our Head of Government will be there, will he announce a refreshed and renewed international strategy for how we will mobilise a new coalition of the willing in the EU and the OECD based on the principled aid index? Will he also commit to an accelerated increase of flows?
We should consider a UK conference with the aim of mapping the remainder of the decade to match our long-term commitment. One reason why we in particular can lever this international leadership is that, over the next decade of the global goals, even if our economy remains stagnant, we are committed by law to provide £140 billion of international assistance. Over this decade, because we are committed to that fund, we can use this like no other country. A UN initiative to be convened in early 2020 as a result of the UN dialogue would be the best means of starting a decade of development to meet the goals.
Finally, if global Britain means anything, it is that our aid should be global in perspective and principled in execution. It should be our ambition to be at the top of the principled aid index and do everything in our power around the world to ensure that other countries reach the highest they can in that index too.
I look at this issue differently. I would like us to kick a hole in poverty because, by doing that, we could take on all the questions that have come about because of the poverty of spirit that dominates many of our political debates and the other things that we do. I keep saying—I will say it until the day I leave this place—that this House and the other place spend about 70% of our time on the problems that are thrown up by poverty. We fail 33% of our children at school and 30% of many other areas in the world. About a third of the world’s population have problems in and around poverty, which leads to despoliation.
In the poorest countries people are living in trash. I have worked in Africa, India and the Far East and have seen the relationship between poverty and poverty of spirit. If you are in poverty, you can never lift your eyes above the horizon. You are like a meerkat, waking up every day, looking around and saying, “How can I feed my children? What do I do? Do I have to prostitute myself? I’ll have to do anything”. If we want to achieve these 17 goals, let us put more effort into dismantling poverty rather than just making the poor comfortable and putting it off until another time.
I started with Wales—trying to make the UK Welsh is my big thing—because I have never seen legislation that so uniquely covers all the considerations, especially around the SDGs, in a way that enables us to say at last that we can put behind us all the rather nasty, limited political debates we have had; all the short-termism that is dominant in this House and the other House and in many of our discussions, the handholding of the poor and not getting people out of poverty.
I will come forward again and again until I get a Bill through the House. I am pleased that the VNR report praises the work of a Future Generations Commission. I hope that the Government and the Opposition will take up this issue so that we can all look forward to the day when we can put aside all the stop-gapism, tokenism and box ticking and concentrate on destroying poverty. Poverty destroys lives. It makes us cheap and makes the lives of the poor the cheapest.
As a result of DfID’s small intervention, Fatima has been economically empowered and her children will develop healthy immune systems, so vaccines and other health measures will be as effective as possible. Good health will improve these children’s chances of getting a good education and gaining meaningful employment as adults. This in turn will strengthen the Nigerian economy, promote stability and help the country become a valued trading partner and ally with Britain on the global stage.
Nutrition cuts across all aspects of sustainable development. With that in mind, I will finish with three recommendations, which have nutrition at their core but would improve the impact of UK aid overall. First, this debate comes at the beginning of a year-long period of health-financing moments. Last week, the Government announced significant support for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Replenishment of both Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative will follow soon, and the Nutrition for Growth summit will take place next summer. Each of these moments represents an opportunity to accelerate progress on global health but only if each moment is supported and considered part of a single structure, built brick by brick. Failing to fully support any one brick compromises the overall structure. The UK should invest ambitiously and equitably at every moment, certainly at Nutrition for Growth, to get maximum impact from each investment.
Secondly, nutrition needs to be more effectively integrated across all aspects of DfID’s work. Food and agricultural systems and climate resilience programmes are all needed to ensure that nutritious food can grow and reach the people who need it. Education programmes about nutrition are important so that people are aware of what constitutes a diverse, healthy diet. We have seen recent issues regarding diet in the UK, obesity and its effect on cancer. Economic growth programmes are important so that people can afford that diet. All the teams within DfID need knowledge of nutrition and its impact and should work closely and harmoniously with its nutrition team.
Lastly, I started my contribution to this debate by congratulating the Minister on her department’s leadership on nutrition, and I shall finish by encouraging her department to maintain that leadership and utilise it. It is important to improve global collaboration and country ownership of nutrition. The World Bank estimates that an additional $7 billion per year is needed to meet global targets on stunting and wasting. The UK cannot plug this alone—it should not seek to—but it can encourage other Governments, particularly those with high burdens of malnutrition, to do more. One way of doing this would be by making their support for Nutrition for Growth known as early as possible to indicate to others that this initiative is worth supporting.
I congratulate the Minister on her department’s work and encourage her to ensure that it is maintained. I look forward to hearing how she intends to do that. She will certainly have my support in all her endeavours.
The implications of hunger for children’s education has been brought home to us by numerous surveys of teachers noted in recent months in this House. Recently, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders reported a conversation he had had with a group of head teachers. When asked what was the biggest issue facing them, the answer was, “Hungry children … It’s shaming”.
The NVR document makes no mention of this shaming hunger. However, it cites investment in a national school breakfast programme as an example of action taken in the UK to deliver food security. This investment is welcome. I met recently with the leaders of the two organisations spearheading the programme and was impressed by what they have achieved in just a year. They are driven by the knowledge that “some children are too hungry to learn”.
In just a year the programme is delivering a nutritious breakfast to an estimated 280,000 children. The benefits reported by schools include improved behaviour, attendance and attainment. The Government’s contribution to the costs, at least half of which are met by schools themselves, is a mere £26 million over two years funded from the soft drinks industry levy, which raised £240 million in just one year. I challenge the Minister to come up with a more cost-effective programme to further the aims of SDG 2 domestically. Its leaders are sick with worry because the Government are refusing to give an assurance that the programme will continue beyond March next year.
A Parliamentary Question eventually elicited the response that,
“decisions about any funding beyond March 2020 will be taken as part of the upcoming Spending Review”.
However, who now knows when that will be, given the current uncertainties? In the meantime it is impossible for them to plan for the future, yet schools need to know what will happen for the new school year. Given that this comes within the purview of the SDGs, I urge the Minister to take this back to the Department for Education and seek an assurance that at the very least a year’s extension will be granted without further delay, leaving longer-term decisions for the spending review. Given that the Government’s contribution is a mere fraction of the soft drinks levy, there is no excuse not to do so.
As the UKSSD report notes,
“poverty and inequalities are major underlying factors in the nutrition targets of SDG2”.
I turn therefore now to SDG 1, “no poverty”. Here the UKSSD’s domestic scores are one green, three amber and one red. It concludes:
“Unless the UK takes a different tack, everyday life for its most financially challenged will continue to become more stressed and the prospect of achieving SDG1—conceived as a national indicator of income poverty—is a remote possibility”.
That is not exactly a vote of confidence. However, it tallies more with the evidence presented by the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, deemed “factually correct” by the lead official, than with the complacent picture painted in the VNR report.
Responsibility for SDG 1 lies with the DWP. According to the VNR report, each UK government department has embedded the goals in its single departmental plan; and each plan outlines how planned activity will support delivery of the goals. I therefore turn now to the DWP plan. The goals are so well embedded they are virtually invisible. There is not a single explicit reference to them in “our objectives”. Indeed, those objectives do not even mention tackling poverty, which I find extraordinary. There are no UK-wide poverty targets as one would expect if SDG 1.1 and 1.2 were genuinely integrated into the plan. The Scottish Government seem to be making a more serious effort to integrate the SDGs in their anti-poverty strategy and have retained the child poverty targets abandoned by the UK Government.
The plan reads as though it were drawn up without reference to the SDGs and then officials went through it, adding in parenthesis where they thought an action could be presented as contributing to them. That is not what I call embedded. Nor is there any evidence of a delivery strategy for SDG 1. The same is true of the DWP annual report, which makes but brief mention of its responsibility for SDG 1 and tells us nothing about progress in meeting it. In a recent analysis of domestic progress on SDG 1 in the journal Poverty, Fran Bennett observes that the contrast with DfID’s departmental plan,
“may suggest the Government is taking its external responsibilities relating to poverty more seriously than the equivalent domestic agenda”.
She notes:
“There has been some recent acknowledgement of the UK government’s less than stellar performance to date … especially target 1.2 relating to poverty at home”.
According to the VNR document, the International Development Secretary has overall leadership and policy oversight for the goals, with the Minister for Implementation in the Cabinet Office helping to ensure a co-ordinated cross-government approach to delivery. The Minister has acknowledged that more needs to be done on co-ordination. What co-ordination has there been between DfID/the Cabinet Office and individual departments in drawing up their single departmental plans? If the DWP’s plan, with its scant reference to the SDGs, has been deemed adequate to the task, does it not support the contention that the Government are not taking the domestic SDG agenda seriously and that the institutional mechanisms for pursuing that agenda need reviewing, as my noble friend Lord McConnell spelled out so clearly?
While target 1.2—reducing poverty in all its dimensions—is key for the UK, it would be wrong to assume that target 1.1 on eradicating extreme poverty is irrelevant. I have already spoken about hunger, which one might consider an indicator of extreme poverty, but more generally there is growing concern about destitution in our midst, to the extent that a Joseph Rowntree Foundation study developed a measure of destitution appropriate for a wealthy country such as the UK, and on that basis estimated that 1.5 million people, including 365,000 children, were destitute at some point during 2017. They could not afford to buy the bare essentials that we all need to eat, stay warm and dry and keep clean.
I fear the numbers will be even worse by now as the benefits freeze and other cuts have taken their toll, pushing many already in poverty further below the poverty line. There are particular concerns in this context about asylum seekers and newly recognised refugees, who are totally invisible in the VNR report, yet refugees have been identified by UN member states as a key group in pursuing the SDGs, as the International Rescue Committee pointed out. Will the Minister take note of the IRC’s call on the UK Government to support the inclusion of refugees in the political declaration at the upcoming high-level political forum? Will she ask colleagues to ensure that they specifically include them in their departmental plans?
Fran Bennett concludes:
“The potential of Goal 1 as a powerful instrument for driving forward positive and co-ordinated action to ensure that by 2030 in the UK extreme poverty (and destitution) (target 1.1) are eradicated, and poverty in all its dimensions (target 1.2) is cut by half, has certainly not been realised to date”.
So, when in his foreword to the VNR report the Secretary of State states,
“We are proud of what we have achieved but humbled by what we haven’t”,
I humbly suggest that the Government have little to be proud of when it comes to their domestic poverty agenda. Instead, the growing evidence of suffering as a consequence of the Government’s own actions—I reference in particular the recent study by the Church of England Child Poverty Action Group, of which I am honorary president, which details the devastating impact of the two-child limit on family life—suggests they are impeding rather than making significant strides towards the achievement of SDG 1 and related SDGs, as claimed by the Secretary of State.
It is now almost four years since the UN adopted the SDG resolution in September 2015 and established a global agenda for Governments to tackle these issues head-on, not only in the developing world but in their own countries. Four years later, as I stated, we have seen some progress on poverty internationally. The target for goal 1 is to reduce by at least half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty, in all its dimensions according to national definitions, by 2030. This target aims to address the issue in all countries, regardless of how poverty is measured.
As we know, it is not difficult to see how some people may not be defined as living in poverty or even relative poverty, but at the same time are struggling to feed and clothe themselves and their family. We are the fifth largest economy in the world by GDP, and yet in our own country homelessness is rising, year on year. Reliance on food banks is becoming the norm rather than the exception. Measured against the SDGs, progress in our own country is sadly inadequate. It is obvious that anyone without a home is living in extreme poverty.
We have had a damning report from the UN rapporteur, Philip Alston, on the issues that people in this country face. The Government have reluctantly agreed that the report is factually correct. The irony is that, as we improve the existence of some of the world’s poorest and most disadvantaged through our aid programme, our own country is falling behind.
The Government cite free school meals as an example of leaving no one behind, but free school meals do not cover the school holidays, nor the parents or carers of the children involved. Many people in the UK find themselves in work but still living in poverty. Barnardo’s—of which I declare an interest as vice-president—does a lot of work supporting vulnerable children and youths, especially in the care system. Children in care have a higher representation in the criminal courts and suffer more. For them, establishing themselves as independent adults is fraught with problems. Vulnerable children and youths such as these should be at the heart of what we do to prevent people falling into poverty.
Has austerity gone too far? Should we consider moving some international aid to this country to solve our problems at home? Can we be sure that we are not leaving anyone behind? What are the Government doing to solve the crisis in our own country?
Next year, 2020, will be an opportunity to have a good look in the mirror, as it is the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and we will be five years into the SDGs. Does the Minister believe that we are moving quickly enough to deliver the SDGs? Will we be on the right side of history? What does she think the UK can do to drive change much more quickly?
We must be better at working on multi-stakeholder delivery plans, as a number of noble Lords have mentioned today. As a former DfID Minister, I have pushed hard for civil society, government and the private sector to work much more collaboratively. It is in all our interests to shift the dial in the right direction. It makes sense on all levels: political, economical and societal.
The noble Lord, Lord McConnell, mentioned that partnership working should be embedded in every department. I am afraid to say that, like him, I do not believe this is currently the case. UN Women UK is an ideally placed partner. In a number of countries, we are already demonstrating a joined-up approach with the private sector. UN Women national committees are also working to support the work of their Governments and, in turn, their Governments are supporting them. Unfortunately, we do not yet have that relationship in the UK. Will the Minister meet with me and my team to see whether there are areas where we could work together to help deliver the SDGs nationally and internationally?
The approach to development is changing. Governments are seeing the value of supporting economic growth in developing economies. It is critical that, along with interventions that provide short-term outcomes, we work to ensure that sustainable solutions work. Institutions must therefore be strengthened and, crucially, people must be supported in their local contexts with education and training to deliver and grow the communities in which they live and work. For far too long, we have excluded the voices of the people most impacted by our actions. It is vital that they and their Governments are at the heart of the programmes and plans that we support.
I am a strong advocate of the cleaner, greener sector; the natural resources of developing countries can help them grow their economies and secure wealthier communities. The SDGs offered the world great hope that, within 15 years, we would see positive changes. Sadly, that may not happen; not if major economies start retracting by dismissing climate change, continuing fast and hard to pollute the world, drawing up bridges and closing borders, while expecting those in struggling nations to manage desperation and hopelessness as they take themselves on dangerous journeys. Will the Minister assure the Committee that the UK will remain committed to 0.7% and to raising the voices of women and girls through all our programmes, whether national or international?
My great fear is that while we are preoccupied with Brexit, we have moved far away from important issues here in our own country and, more importantly, where Governments are not supportive of their local citizens and their voices are being squeezed out. We have taken our foot off the pedal; we need to put it back on. An opportunity will arise in a few days’ time, as well as in September. I hope that the Minister, who is such an advocate for this department, will remain and will continue to push hard on this agenda.