House of Commons
Thursday 15 November 2007
The House met at half-past Ten o’clock
Prayers
[Mr. Speaker in the Chair]
Oral Answers to Questions
Innovation, Universities and Skills
The Secretary of State was asked—
University Spin-outs
According to data collected by the University Companies Association, or Unico, in the last five years 30 university spin-outs have been floated with a flotation valuation of £1.5 billion. The number of spin-out companies formed rose from 232 in 2004-05 to 261 in 2005-06.
Universities’ approach to the issue varies. Some, such as Cambridge, are keen to encourage their staff to set up spin-outs—Nottingham also has a strong record in this respect—but others are keener to secure the proceeds of success themselves. Have the Government a view on which approach is best, and has there been any attempt to issue best-practice guidelines?
We do not yet have an approach that we advise universities to adopt as best practice, although in a speech at the Universities UK conference in September I said that we needed to discuss how universities and wider society could best capture the benefits of the intellectual property that is developed in universities. We will discuss the issue over the year, but if my hon. Friend will forgive me I will not commit myself to producing guidance until we are sure that the current diverse approach is not a better way of allowing universities to find a way forward. We will, however, continue to invest in the higher education innovation fund which has enabled many universities to exploit innovation so successfully.
Company Start-ups
The higher education business community interaction survey records 159 graduate start-ups in Wales in 2005-06. That is, however, an underestimate, because it records only start-ups known to higher education institutions, and some graduates will set up companies after leaving higher education.
In north-east Wales, the North East Wales institute of higher education is concentrating on developing links with industry because we want to develop an entrepreneurial spirit in the area. Does my hon. Friend agree that the establishment of a university in north-east Wales for the first time in its history would make a huge contribution to the entrepreneurial spirit in the area, and will he do all he can to assist that step?
As my hon. Friend knows, both higher education policy and support for enterprise are matters for the Welsh Assembly Government, and the status of institutions is a matter for the relevant authorities in Wales. However, he is right to draw attention to the importance of universities working closely with business. I know that the North East Wales institute has a strong track record in working with the aerospace sector and a number of other important sectors in that part of the world. My hon. Friend will have to take the matter up with the Welsh Assembly Government directly, but I wish him and the institute every success.
Yesterday at Aberystwyth university there was a conference on the problems of female entrepreneurship and the growing disparity between the numbers of men and women establishing businesses. Notwithstanding what the Minister said about the devolved nature of these matters, may I urge him to contact those in charge of the female entrepreneurship programme at Aberystwyth university and see what lessons can be learned and applied across the United Kingdom?
The hon. Gentleman is certainly right about the fact that we want to encourage more entrepreneurship in our universities. According to a study published earlier this week by the National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship, our universities need to do more. In fact they have transformed themselves over the past 10 years, but if I were asked whether more needed to be done my answer would obviously be yes. If we are to ensure that we have a successful, competitive United Kingdom economy in the future, we need our universities to work ever more closely with business.
I should be happy to make inquiries about Aberystwyth university’s entrepreneurship programme. Although the NCGE survey suggests more or less gender-equal access, I am sure that there is more we could do.
Science
The Government are committed to increasing the number of young people studying science, technology, engineering and maths at higher education level. The Department works closely with the Department for Children, Schools and Families, and funds STEMNET, the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Network, which promotes awareness of those subjects and engagement among young people.
I am pleased to hear that my hon. Friend is working closely with his colleagues in the sister Department. I often hear criticisms of the careers advice given to young people in schools, which is said to be not all it should be when it comes to steering people into STEM subject areas. Is my hon. Friend aware of the excellent work that some trade associations and learned societies, such as the Institute of Physics and the Royal Society of Chemistry, do to promote such subjects so that people are encouraged to go to university to study them?
A lot of good work on the STEM agenda has been going on for a number of years and I pay tribute to all those who have been working in the area. Progress has been made and the number of STEM qualifiers has increased by 10 per cent. since 2002-03. The situation is very patchy but a lot of people are working in this area, including the learned societies. My hon. Friend will know that I was at the recent Bill Bryson awards launch from the Royal Society of Chemistry, a terrific programme encouraging young people to take an interest in science. We want more people to be excited about science and taking science at GCSE, A-level and university. That is important for our society as a whole and for our economy.
I share the sentiment expressed so eloquently by the Minister at the end of his answer, but does he accept that getting the data right is key? Does he also accept that it is progress since 1997 that should be measured, rather than picking out what might appear to be a random year for each individual subject? Will he stick to a constant set of data on STEM entrants and base it to 1997 so we can all monitor progress effectively?
We are always happy to publish time-series of data in these areas. I was trying to indicate that there has been an increasing problem but that there are some signs that the situation is getting better. It is particularly pleasing that the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service acceptances are up by 9 per cent. for maths, 9 per cent. for chemistry and 12 per cent. for physics compared with the previous year. But there is a problem, particularly in computer science, and in that we do not have enough qualified physics teachers in our schools.
Let us not forget some of the progress that has been made, or that the level of science graduates aged between 25 and 34 in the UK work force is higher than in the United States, Germany or Japan. In fact, our figures are 50 per cent. higher than the European Union average. There are a range of further things that we as a Government need to do to encourage the STEM agenda, but we should not forget where we are today in terms of the labour market.
I praise the Minister and the Government for all they have done to promote science. Never in my lifetime have I seen a Government promote science as well as this Government have. Given that nuclear power is once again on the political agenda, I am seriously concerned that there are no undergraduate courses in nuclear engineering in this country. I urge the Minister to talk to the universities and to explore the possibility of setting up nuclear engineering courses, as there is no doubt in my mind that we will need far more nuclear engineers in the future.
There is a lot of nuclear engineering research capacity, particularly in the north-west, and we had the recent announcement of the development of a nuclear skills academy. This is an important area, not least because the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency is doing substantial work and will continue to do so over the next 20 to 30 years. The Government will have to make decisions on a new generation of nuclear power capacity. Those decisions have not been taken yet, but I would expect the academic community to want to do its bit to ensure that we have the high level of skills that will be required in the future if the Government make those decisions.
We certainly welcome the Government’s recognition that the number of students studying science at university is a key part of the overall investment package for science. Indeed, the Minister and the Government has been almost evangelical in preaching to higher education institutions and industry about the virtues of investing in scientific research and development. However, since 1997 the Government’s departmental spending on scientific research and development has been falling, both in percentage terms and in real terms, over the last few years. Why is that?
My Department has been in existence for only just over three months so it is a little difficult to refer to such figures. The simple fact of the matter is that the science budget was £1.3 billion when we came to power in 1997 and it is £3.4 billion now, so it has more than doubled—and it will have more than trebled by the end of this comprehensive spending review period. We now have 150,000 more undergraduate students studying science subjects than in 1997-98, so we are making considerable progress. There is a challenge, however. David Sainsbury’s report, which the hon. Gentleman is waving around, talks about the race to the top, and that is exactly where we need to go. That is why the Government are implementing in full the findings and recommendations of the Sainsbury review, and we are launching a debate on how we can move beyond Sainsbury. I want us to have the world’s best innovation ecosystem. We are starting from a strong position, but we can and must do better.
If we are to have enough science graduates to meet the needs of a globalised society and the challenges from China and India, we cannot leave it all to the boys; we will have to ensure that we encourage girls to take up science subjects. I am encouraged that my hon. Friend is having discussions with the Department for Children, Schools and Families. There is some evidence that teaching science in a single-sex environment encourages more girls to come forward. Will my hon. Friend please have more such discussions on that subject?
I am always happy to have discussions with my colleagues in the DCSF on the STEM agenda and how we can encourage both more young men and more young women to take science subjects. We currently fund a UK resource centre that is specifically targeted at encouraging more women to take up science subjects, but I will be happy to have the discussions my hon. Friend recommends.
Work Placements
Since 1997, we have expanded the number of apprenticeships from 75,000 to about 250,000. In 2013, we aim to introduce an entitlement to an apprenticeship place for all 16 to 19-year-olds who meet the entry criteria, and our longer-term commitment is to increase the number of apprenticeships in England to 400,000.
May I draw the Secretary of State’s attention to a survey by the excellent Building magazine which found that last year some 50,000 youngsters applied for 7,000 construction apprenticeships, and that number of placements was about 25 per cent. lower than in the previous year? Providing training places is only one part of what needs to be done; there must also be training placements in industry. Does the Secretary of State accept that that requires clients to insist on proper training on the job? What will his Department and other Departments do to insist on apprenticeship training on the jobs that they are paying for?
I must make it clear that the figure of 250,000 is for work-based apprenticeships, so it does not include the extra number of programme-led apprenticeships. My right hon. Friend raises an important point, however: in some sectors of the economy the need for apprenticeships and our capacity to fund them exceeds the number of employers willing to create them. Over the next few years we will significantly increase the resources available for apprenticeships in sectors such as construction and, possibly, some areas of engineering. We will need to engage with employers both directly ourselves and through the sector skills councils, because we as a Government do not want to be in the position of putting money on the table to fund apprenticeships without the employers being willing to match it. The offer is a substantial one, and we need to get across to employers the advantages of taking it up.
The economy of north Oxfordshire is almost entirely made up of vibrant small and medium-sized businesses. At a recent business breakfast in Bicester, I conducted a straw poll and found that not a single employer had yet heard of diplomas or what would be expected of them in terms of their involvement. The same point applies to apprenticeships. I have a simple question for the Secretary of State: who is meant to be going out and talking to employers, and signing them up and getting them involved in both apprenticeships and diplomas? If that does not happen, there will be a complete disconnect.
That is a very important question. At the moment, responsibility for that matter is led by the sector skills councils, as well as my Department, and we have enormous support from the private sector, particularly through the apprenticeship ambassadors network of senior employers. However, the hon. Gentleman has put his finger on a really important question—whether the apprenticeship programme as a whole needs a clearer focus and leadership. That issue was raised by the House of Lords report on apprenticeships, and we are looking at it and a number of other issues. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister announced a couple of weeks ago that we want to reform the programme so that a young person who qualifies for an apprenticeship effectively has a credit—the value that we are prepared to pay to them to fund the apprenticeship—so it becomes clear to an employer that the value of taking on an apprenticeship might be £3,000, £5,000 or even £15,000. That will really encourage the small businesses that the hon. Gentleman is talking about.
When Stafford college and I make joint presentations to employers about the “train to gain” initiative and apprenticeships, we find that we can stimulate greater interest among employers in providing places for apprentices. Will my right hon. Friend consider what more he can do personally to approach employers at a national level, and how he can make the best use of Members in approaching employers at a constituency level?
First, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend who, like a number of other Members, is very active at a local level in pushing training. My ministerial team has already committed itself to meeting representatives of every CBI region. We are about halfway through that programme, and we hope to undertake a similar exercise with the British Chambers of Commerce later this year and next. So at a personal level, we are trying to get out there to talk about “train to gain”, the skills pledge and apprenticeships in particular. However, my hon. Friend is right—an enormous amount of work can be done by Members at local level, and I shall certainly give consideration to writing to them setting out the practical actions that can be taken at local level to promote these important issues.
In answer to my parliamentary questions, the right hon. Gentleman has acknowledged that the number of advanced apprenticeships has fallen, but he has admitted that he does not know how many are provided by employers directly. He talks about the House of Lords report, which said that of the 130,000 businesses that the Prime Minister claims are providing apprenticeships, many are in fact private training providers. Yet in 2002, the Government agreed with their own advisory committee that apprenticeships should be employer-led, with training providers acting as agents providing support for work-based schemes, rather than providing the bulk of training. Five years on, the Government have failed to honour that agreement. Is that not because on apprenticeships, as with so much else, this Government are just bluff, bluster and blunder?
Let us just recall that some years ago—around the time, I think, that the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) was a senior economic adviser to the then Government—not a penny of public money went into apprenticeships and there were just a few tens of thousands of them. When we became the Government, there were just 75,000 apprenticeships; now there are 250,000 and, what is more, we are achieving higher completion rates than ever before, so I am happy to defend the Government’s record on apprenticeships. However, I want to ensure that apprentices receive uniformly high-quality training, based with employers, that provides a proper combination of work-based learning and the additional skills that a fully fledged apprenticeship needs to bring with it. If there are any parts of the system in which that is not so, we need to deal with that as we expand the programme.
Vocational Courses
I and my Ministers regularly meet a number of representatives of the small firms sector, such as the CBI, the British Chambers of Commerce and the Engineering Employers Federation. As I said a few moments ago, we are embarking on a programme of meetings with representatives of the CBI regions to push “train to gain”, the skills pledge and apprenticeships in particular.
I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman recognises the role of small businesses; incidentally, I am very glad that he has been appointed Secretary of State, because he will do an absolutely first-class job. However, can he confirm that figures from his own Department reveal that the number of 16 to 18-year-olds not in education, employment or training—the so-called NEETs—has gone up from 154,000 in 1997 to a staggering 206,000 in 2006? Is that figure not an absolute disgrace and an indictment of his Government?
Everyone recognises the challenge of those young people who are not in education, employment or training; the most recent figures for 16 and 17-year-olds are actually down, which is welcome. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families set out a number of measures on 5 November to strengthen our current work. In particular, we will ensure, through Connexions and other means, that we do not lose track of young people who drop out of the system and that there are no artificial barriers, time delays and so on to bringing young people back into training when we can encourage them back.
The hon. Gentleman will perhaps share my disappointment that his party is opposed to the aim of raising the participation age for these young people so that each of these 16 and 17-year-olds is either in work with training or in education. Given his concern about these issues, I hope that he will speak to his Front-Bench team and persuade them to change their policy.
Given the Secretary of State’s previous answer, I think that he has missed the point. Under the previous Conservative Government, when I was in business we took on young people and trained them on the job. They went away for academic education once a week and obtained a qualification at the end. That is because they wanted to be there, rather than because they were forced to be there. Was not the Conservative Government’s approach better?
No, because what went hand in hand with the Conservative Government’s approach was huge numbers of long-term young unemployed people who were out of work year after year. The new deal has achieved an end to that long-term youth unemployment. There is an issue to address concerning young people who are in and out of work. Too many young people are not engaged in education, work or training, but what we are doing, both in the short term and by raising the participation age, is the best way of ensuring that that group of young people does not slip through the system. Because we will introduce diplomas and strengthen the apprenticeship system, the offer in place for young people will be of higher quality than we have been able to provide in the past. That is the attraction that will keep them in the system.
Bursaries
The university bursary system is an integral part of the wider student finance package that ensures access to higher education. The system is working. Applications have increased this year by more than 6 per cent., the proportion of applicants from the lowest four socio-economic groups has increased too, and universities are committed to paying more than £300 million in bursaries to students.
I thank the Minister for that encouraging response. However, in my constituency, potential university applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds still have concerns about the financial cost of going to university. When the Government raised the upper limit for top-up fees last year, they said that they wanted each institution to prove that it was widening access. What more can the Government do to encourage and reassure potential students that they will get the necessary support from bursaries or whatever if they come from disadvantaged backgrounds where their families have no history of going to university?
I think the challenge of ensuring that we get people from all backgrounds to fulfil their potential and to access higher education is one of the most significant that we face. We have done more to bring in our fairest and most progressive system of student financial support, but we are going even further with a series of changes for next year. We are significantly increasing the proportion of students who will get non-repayable grants and, crucially, we are guaranteeing to young people who get the education maintenance allowance at 16 the amount of money that they will get when they go to university at 18. That is a positive and important step forward, and I hope that the hon. Gentleman welcomes it.
I agree with my hon. Friend on that last point, in that a much earlier intervention in the individual’s aspiration to go to university is required. What steps is he taking to work with other Departments to ensure that university remains an option to children earlier on in their schooling, not just because of the financial background but because of an aspiration that university is part of their education and a gateway to a much better life in terms of training and their ability to earn as they go on?
I agree with my hon. Friend. Student finance is important, but I think that aspiration is the most critical challenge that we face. That is why the Aimhigher programme, for example, which runs taster weekends and taster schools to encourage students from non-traditional backgrounds to go to university, is so important. We also need a much better relationship between universities and the school system, with universities taking responsibility for widening access. The recent announcement from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State about the importance of more partnerships between universities and schools is particularly important.
Further to that question, could the Minister expand on the success of the Aimhigher programme so far in reaching those groups who do not have a tradition in their families of going to university?
I think that the Aimhigher programme is particularly important, and we have recently announced the continuation of the funding of that programme for the next three years. The evidence shows that the scheme is working, but we also need to ensure that it is targeted as effectively as possible. That is why last year we asked the Higher Education Funding Council to ensure that that is happening and we will bring forward proposals to make it happen.
Maintenance Grants
From September 2008, the income thresholds for the full maintenance grant will be increased from £17,500 to £25,000 a year, with a partial grant available for incomes up to £60,000. We estimate that an additional 100,000 students will ultimately be eligible for a maintenance grant. Around one third of all students will be entitled to a full grant and a further third to a partial grant.
I thank the Minister for that response. I welcome the answer given by the Minister for Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education in response to the previous question about the fact that pupils receiving educational maintenance allowances will get confirmation at 16 that they will be entitled to a grant. Could the Secretary of State tell me what is being done to reach out to people who leave education but then want to re-enter it slightly later, and to educate them and inform them about their right to grants?
For those who would be eligible for the same financial assistance for their first degree, I draw my hon. Friend’s attention to the DVD that I have recently advertised to all Members. It is available to Members from my Department in suitable numbers to communicate with all constituents; or the simpler way is to provide a link to the new website created for our advertising campaign. We are keen to get the message across to as many people as possible.
If my hon. Friend is talking about people who are later on in life and would not come under the same financial provision, perhaps because they are working, she is right. There will be a need to encourage older people back into university, often to study part time, as well as those young and first-time undergraduates whom we are encouraging through the current financial system.
The way in which the package of measures for maintenance grants and tuition fees available to students in England and Wales is arranged means that there is a financial incentive for Welsh students to go only to Welsh universities. Does the Secretary of State agree that it would be profoundly depressing if we had reached a situation where youngsters in the Rhondda, one of the most disadvantaged areas in the country, went only to Welsh universities? Will he engage in conversations with his counterpart in the Welsh Assembly to ensure that youngsters in my constituency have a full range of possibilities when they go to university?
I am responsible for the financial arrangements in England; the devolved Assemblies have to make their own arrangements. Although we discuss these matters with the devolved Administrations at an official and ministerial level where necessary, it is for those Administrations to take their own decisions on them.
Skills
We are already working to address employers’ higher-level skill needs. The Higher Education Funding Council’s three regional higher-level skills pathfinders linked to “train to gain”, the 13 higher educational institutional employer engagement pilots that are developing new approaches to co-funding by employers, and the growing number of foundation degree enrolments all exploit close links with business. Our forthcoming higher-level skills strategy will boost that activity further.
I thank my hon. Friend for his reply and for his forthcoming visit next Wednesday to Keele university in Newcastle-under-Lyme, where he will find Labour well and truly alive and kicking. Keele Labour club has record membership and is busy seeking student views on the lifting of the £3,000 tuition fees cap. I am sure the Minister agrees that the best way to meet employers’ and the country’s needs is to encourage as many students as possible from all backgrounds into higher education. Where does the review process on the cap now stand? Will he ensure that the process is not monopolised by vice-chancellors, and encourage students in higher education, further education and schools to send in their views?
I am very much looking forward to my visit to Keele next week. Our position on the cap has not changed one iota. We want to see the first full three years of operation of the new system, and then we will have an independent commission that will report to Parliament. That is the right stance. It would be wrong to rush to premature judgment. It is a pity that the Conservative party does not take that view. We have recently heard from the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) that he wants to see the cap lifted, and we have heard from the hon. Member for—
Order. These are not matters for the Minister on the Floor of the House.
Two months ago the Department announced that it would withdraw funding for students in higher education studying equivalent level qualifications. Will that not have a disproportionate impact on institutions such as the university of Northampton, which have been successful in attracting students from disadvantaged groups? Does it not go against all the principles that the Government espouse about people being able to retrain for better career opportunities?
I respect the hon. Gentleman’s point of view, but I profoundly disagree with it. Spending public money to give people who already have a degree a second degree, while 70 per cent. of adults in the working age population do not have even their first degree, is not the right priority. One could argue that we should choose to focus more on those with existing qualifications and less on those without them. I would disagree with that proposition, but it is at least a coherent view. However, one cannot legitimately argue that the choice is not there to be made.
The Secretary of State spoke earlier about encouraging adults back into the education system. Does he not appreciate that institutions such as the Open university, which have such a major contribution to make to educating adults, expect that they will lose up to £32 million of funding? Does he value the contribution made by such institutions, and how can he equate what is happening with his other statements about wanting a flexible work force that embraces retraining?
It is simply not the case that the Open university will lose that amount of money. I and the Secretary of State have met people from the Open university to make that clear. We have also made it clear that no institution will lose in cash terms, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England is currently consulting on the issue. We are not cutting funding from higher education. We are saying that £100 million over three years ought to be reprioritised from those people who already have undergraduate qualifications to those who do not have even their first degree. I believe that that is the right priority in public policy terms.
If the Government are serious about improving skills, why have they cut £100 million from institutions devoted to part-time and mature students? The funding change was sneaked out over the summer by the Secretary of State, probably because it contradicts the Leitch report. It appears that the Government do not wish to support graduates who need to retrain.
Following on from what my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr. Hollobone) said, can the Minister explain how ripping £8 million out of Birkbeck college’s budget and £30 million from the Open university’s budget increases opportunities and improves skills? Does that not send out the message that the Government have abandoned—
Order. The hon. Gentleman has had a few supplementaries there.
I welcome the hon. Gentleman to the Front Bench; I think that this is his first appearance there at Question Time. May I politely urge him on future occasions to listen to the previous answer before he commits himself? I made it abundantly clear that we were not cutting £100 million from the higher education budget. We are seeking to reprioritise the budget from people who already have a degree to those who are not even at first base. If the Conservative party’s position is credible, it must go to adults in the workplace and tell them that they are not a priority for public funding.
Low-income Families
The submissions that I have received tell me that there has been a steady increase in the number of young people from lower socio-economic backgrounds entering higher education. The proportion of young people from the bottom four socio-economic groups entering higher education increased from 17.6 per cent. to 19.9 per cent. between 2002-03 and 2005-06. The new package of financial support that I announced in July will help to remove any financial barriers to going to university, but we also expect universities to become more active in helping to spot and nurture talent in schools at an earlier age, which is why Lord Adonis and I published a prospectus on encouraging university, trust and academy links.
Distribution of educational quality at primary and secondary levels along class lines lies at the heart of a situation in which the 7 per cent. of those who are privately educated bag 40 per cent. of the places at the top 20 universities. That is not only a national scandal, but damages economic competitiveness and impedes social mobility. Despite what the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph might say, will the Secretary of State try even harder to get a broader spread of people into higher education, especially into the Russell group, which has such a chronic and dismal record in that regard?
I assure my hon. Friend that we shall continue to work with universities to ensure that they operate fair admissions procedures, unlike the Opposition, who recently announced that they would abolish the Office for Fair Access. My hon. Friend pointed out that educational disadvantage can happen at an earlier age. We want to get more universities engaging deeply with schools so that young people as young as 12, 13 or 14 are identified and encouraged to apply to all universities. That is why we are so keen to see universities working with schools to establish trusts and academies.
Career Development Loans
Career development loans are a successful programme administered by the Learning and Skills Council to help individuals invest in improving their skills. Loan capital is provided by three high street banks at commercial rates. The Learning and Skills Council meets interest costs on loans while individuals are participating in their chosen course. Since 1997, 160,000 loans have been lent by the banks, with a total value of £689 million.
I welcome the scheme, but I should like to bring to my hon. Friend’s attention a case involving one of my constituents and his son, who took out an £8,000 loan, which was paid to a training provider who then disappeared with the money, leaving my constituent with debt. Will my hon. Friend look into the issue to ensure that there is not a wider problem with the vetting of training providers? And what will happen to my constituent and his son, who still have to pay back the £8,000?
I am genuinely sympathetic to anyone who has been affected as my hon. Friend’s constituents have. In general, career development loans work. Of those who take them out, 85 per cent. have said that they would recommend the scheme to a family member or friend. That would not be happening if there was systematic failure. In the small number of cases where a provider has ceased training, the Learning and Skills Council has taken steps to allow individuals with loans to delay the repayments, extend their loans to complete training elsewhere and protect their credit rating. I understand that my hon. Friend’s constituents were written to to that effect. However, given the concerns that she has expressed, I would be more than happy to meet her and discuss the issue in detail.
Apprenticeships
We have raised the proportion of young people completing their apprenticeships from 24 per cent. in 2001-02 to 63 per cent. in 2006-07. That has been achieved while the number of apprenticeships has trebled since 1997, standing now at 250,000. We are on track to achieve within the next few years completion rates similar to those of the best of our competitors in Europe.
I hear what the Minister says, but a number of my constituents regularly tell me that they would like shorter and more intensive apprenticeships and similar training courses. Does he not agree that for people on low incomes, or perhaps even no income at all, that could be a useful solution? Can he give me any encouragement on that subject?
There is a balance between the length of a course and its quality. Nevertheless, we will shortly be making some announcements about how we can ensure that there is greater flexibility for people coming forward with qualifications below level 2—the equivalent of five GCSEs. We need to do more to expand the number of apprenticeships, and we are committed to doing that—but there are already three times as many apprenticeships as there were 10 years ago. That represents real and significant progress.
Topical Questions
In a rapidly changing world, Britain can succeed economically and be socially inclusive only if we develop the skills of all our people to the fullest possible extent, carry out world-class research and scholarship and apply knowledge and skills in order to create an innovative and competitive economy. My responsibility is to lead my Department in working to meet those challenges.
I thank my right hon. Friend for his response. Will he comment on his Department’s responsibility for the provision of English for speakers of other languages—ESOL—for people who need English and citizenship in order to acquire indefinite leave to remain? I am hearing some unfortunate stories about dodgy characters setting up organisations that simply charge £200 for a certificate that states that a person has attained a certain level of English. There are other organisations, such as the English Speaking Board Ltd, which are apparently perfectly all right. They charge, but the people who use them do not end up with no English; they are tested, and the courses are very useful. We need to get through to our communities the importance of knowing English. This is not just about getting a certificate; it is about actually using English.
My hon. Friend has made two points. She is absolutely right to identify the importance of ESOL, and I am determined that my Department’s budget for the teaching of English—which has trebled over the past few years—should be used to support the broader Government agenda on integration and community cohesion. I believe that the vast majority of ESOL courses that we fund are of a very high quality—the reports from organisations such as Ofsted support that view—but I invite my hon. Friend to contact me if she has concerns about particular providers, as I would be happy to have my officials investigate them.
The Secretary of State has talked about expanding the numbers in the apprenticeship programme, but how many of the extra apprenticeships are likely to be in London? Is he talking to the Home Office about ensuring that his strategy for expansion works alongside the economic migration strategy? As a London MP, I am aware that many economic migrants are working in precisely the kinds of industries in which he would like to see the apprenticeships being established. Is he having discussions with the Home Office on this issue?
The hon. Lady raises an important point. The distribution of apprenticeship opportunities is uneven across the country, and it does not always match where one might think that the greatest demand is. That is certainly an issue that we want to address. Indeed, I met the Mayor of London only yesterday evening to discuss the work that we can do with him to increase the number of apprenticeships in the city. The hon. Lady is also right to say that expanding the number of apprenticeships, and the opportunities in general for young people and adults to acquire higher skills, offer the best chance for those people to get the available jobs, thereby reducing the pressures that some employers feel to bring in migrants to fill them.
Does the Minister agree that in order to be globally competitive, we need strong regions across the whole UK? Will he join me in praising the Harraton skills centre in Washington in my constituency, which is doing innovative partnership work with all the high schools across Sunderland and giving vital skills to young people to enable them to go out and play their part in the world?
I agree with my hon. Friend, and I congratulate her on the work that she does in her constituency to champion these issues. We need more training providers—whether colleges or independent providers—to work proactively with schools in their area to ensure that we have continuity, that we raise aspirations and that we drive skills up to the highest levels. This will be critical in enabling us to meet the economic challenge that we face, on both a regional and a national basis.
No, I do not agree. Actually, the target for the United Kingdom is not for 2010 but for 2014. In fact, a target of 2.5 per cent. of research and development at aggregate level does not make a lot of sense; it is a crude input measure. Yes, we want increased R and D, and on Monday the Government published the 2007 R and D scorecard, which shows that our top-performing companies are increasingly investing in R and D; the top 850 are up 9 per cent. this year, which is welcome progress.
The hon. Lady raised the issue of hard or easy school subjects. We talked earlier about the STEM agenda. The Government are doing a lot of work to encourage people to take science, technology, engineering and mathematics and we are seeing some real progress, but that is due to the hard work of many individuals over several years.
I am just trying to master the finer points of the new topical questions procedure, Mr. Speaker. I hope that the Secretary of State is the person to whom my question is addressed, but I am not quite sure.
I hope that the Secretary of State will confirm that the number of young people aged 18 to 24 not in education, employment or training has increased by more than 100,000 since 1997. I am sure he agrees that those are wasted opportunities and blighted lives. He would have been outraged if 10 years ago we had forecast that under a Labour Government that number would deteriorate. What is his explanation of the deterioration?
The hon. Gentleman knows very well that he greatly overstates the situation. The figures that he is using include, for example, young women who are not in work because they are having a child, and university students who are taking a year out before they go to university or before they start work after university. I do not at all diminish proper concern about anybody who is not engaged gainfully in employment, education or training, but the hon. Gentleman does his case no good by overstating it and including a significant number of people who are undertaking perfectly legitimate and proper activities.
But the definition has not changed in the past 10 years—and in some of the groups the Secretary of State identified, such as young mothers, the number has fallen over the past 10 years. The problem seems to be serious, so will he confirm that the number has gone up from 910,000 to 1,050,000? I observe that he did not suggest that compulsion was the answer for the 18 to 24 age group. Will he confirm that he does not believe that compulsion is the answer, and that the right answer is better education, better training and better opportunities?
I certainly do not believe that compulsion is the right answer with that group, but I do believe that compulsory participation up to 18 is the right answer and that the hon. Gentleman is wrong, because it is important that as a society we organise ourselves to give maximum opportunities to ensure that at 18 people are equipped to enter the world of work successfully. Beyond that, there is certainly a major challenge for my Department, with the Department for Work and Pensions, to join up Jobcentre Plus services with the training that we offer to ensure that that group of young people—the ones we should be worried about—not only get into work quickly, as a great majority of them do, but also that they stay in work, gain qualifications and remain in employment. Doing that over the next few years is a major challenge for the Government, and one that I shall be undertaking with the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.
I entirely endorse the position of principle set out earlier by my hon. Friend the Minister for Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education, but transitional protection will be put in place by HEFCE for the Open university and for other institutions that might otherwise be hard hit by a sudden transition. More importantly, I cannot think of an institution better able to offer new forms of higher education to the millions of people in the adult work force who have never been to university and never had the chance of higher education, but will need to do so in the years to come. We will, with HEFCE, willingly work with the Open university and every other institution to make it clear how the advantages offered by the rising number of people who we want to come into higher education can be taken by such institutions. So I think that the future can be enormously positive.
The answer to that challenging supplementary question is that the reorganisation of the Government into a Department focused on skills, research and innovation—my Department—and a Department focused on children and families is radical but entirely logical. It poses some serious issues that we need to deal with—for example, the funding of further education colleges that have both 16-to-19 and adult provision—but none of those problems is impossible to solve. I am working very closely with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, and we will consult on the way that we intend to handle these issues in the spring. It was not quite so difficult as the hon. Gentleman thought.
The latest figures clearly demonstrate that the numbers are coming down. However, I would be the first to admit that this is an exceedingly challenging area. That is why, for example, we have local authorities, the Connexions service and others looking at the hot-spot areas in the county, to learn, from best practice, what works to target that challenging group. It is also why—I agree with the Secretary of State about this—the raising of the compulsory education and training age has a role to play. When I heard the Leader of the Opposition say yesterday that he could not give an answer on that issue because the Conservative party’s position was in flux—
Order. I call Lynda Waltho.
I congratulate my hon. Friend on the close working relationship she has with her local college and the support that she gives it. Her college is doing exactly the right thing. The system of funding for adult skills is changing and will be led much more by employer demand. Colleges that succeed will be the ones that organise themselves to make the greatest contribution to “train to gain”. I am pleased to hear about what she is doing locally. I know that my hon. Friend the Minister for Science and Innovation is already planning to visit the college, and I hope that I may have the opportunity to do so in the future.
Apprenticeship places are created by employers, who do that because they believe that it will help them to meet their skills needs. By introducing the credit that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister announced a few weeks ago, we hope to make the financial support available to employers much clearer. With that, and the further reforms that we will produce later this year with our draft apprenticeship reform Bill, we can make sure that apprenticeships are of a uniformly high quality. We inherited a situation in which less than 30 per cent. of apprenticeships were completed. We have done far better than the Conservative Government, with far more apprenticeships.
Absolutely—I give my best wishes to all the team members in the world skills competition, and we all look forward to the world skills competition coming to this country in four years’ time. I am grateful that Members on both sides of the House have supported the local, regional and national competitions that helped to select the team, and I hope that they will continue to offer that support in the future.
Business of the House
Will the Leader of the House please give us the forthcoming business?
The business for the week commencing 19 November will be—
Monday 19 November—Second Reading of the European Communities (Finance) Bill.
Tuesday 20 November—Second Reading of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (Supplementary Provisions) Bill.
Wednesday 21 November—Opposition day [1st allotted day] there will be a debate on health care- associated infections, followed by a debate entitled “Failure of the Government to Pursue Schools Reform”.
Thursday 22 November—Topical debate—subject to be announced, followed by Second Reading of the Sale of Student Loans Bill.
Friday 23 November—The House will not be sitting.
The provisional business for the week commencing 26 November will include:
Monday 26 November—Second Reading of the Health and Social Care Bill.
Later today, the House will have the first of the topical debates under the new system. I have chosen the subject of immigration. Members should contact me to propose subjects for future topical debates. Each week, the subject I have chosen for a debate on a Thursday will be put on the annunciator on Monday evening.
I thank the Leader of the House for giving us the future business. Last week, I asked her what had happened to regional Select Committees. Yet again she talked about regional accountability, but not regional Select Committees. Will she make a statement on the Government’s position? Do they believe in regional Select Committees or not?
The mandate for EUFOR, the peacekeeping force in Bosnia, expires on 21 November. Its renewal is vital. The 10 December deadline for the final status of Kosovo is approaching, still without any indication of an agreement. May we have a statement from the Foreign Secretary on the situation in the region and the status of EUFOR’s mandate?
When the Government introduced 24-hour drinking, we opposed the decision because of the obvious impact on crime and public health, but the then Home Secretary rubbished our argument, and said:
“This is a committed and coherent effort to promote responsible drinking”.
The Nuffield Council on Bioethics says:
“There is…an urgent need for an analysis of the effect…on…alcohol consumption, as well as on anti-social behaviour”,
but all that we have had from the Prime Minister is a half-hint to the media, some spun headlines and no change in policy, so may we have a debate in Government time on the impact of the ill-considered licensing reforms?
On Home Office targets, the chief executive of the National Policing Improvement Agency says:
“Because…a stolen milk bottle counted the same as…a murder”,
the police concentrate on
“volume crime rather than serious crime.”
After 10 years, five Home Secretaries and countless Criminal Justice Acts, the police seem too busy to solve major crimes, so may we have a debate in Government time on Labour’s total failure to get a grip on serious and violent crime?
Today it has been reported that the Government want to extend the period for which terror suspects can be held without trial to 58 days. The Leader of the House has consistently said that such announcements should be made to the House first, but yesterday, when the Prime Minister made his security statement, he made no mention of 58 days. In interviews two days ago, the Home Secretary refused to set a limit. What changed the Home Secretary’s mind? Why did the Prime Minister not announce the decision to Parliament in yesterday’s statement, and when will the Home Secretary come to the House to make a statement?
At 8.20 yesterday, Admiral Lord West said he was not
“fully convinced that we…need more than 28 days”.
By 9.5 he said that he was “personally, absolutely” convinced. Another Minister in the Government of all the talents, Lord Jones of Birmingham, attacked the Government’s change to capital gains tax, saying that it was a “terrible thing”. Lord Malloch-Brown—another GOAT, currently resident in Admiralty house—believes that we need to talk more to Hezbollah but less to Washington. With every passing week, the Prime Minister’s big tent looks more like a circus marquee, so may we have a debate in Government time on collective ministerial responsibility?
Mr. Speaker, you couldn’t make it up. Finally, may we have a debate on maritime safety, in which we could discuss the appropriate use of maritime flags. Yesterday Admiral Lord West raised the maritime flag D: “Keep clear: I’m manoeuvring with difficulty.” Perhaps the Prime Minister should have raised flag M: “My vessel is stopped and is making no way through the water.” Is it not time that he pulled into port and let another captain take over the job?
The shadow Leader of the House raised a number of serious points, one of which was about regional accountability. The Government remain committed to strengthening accountability, through the House, for regions in England. That is the position that we are taking forward, but we need to discuss how we develop proposals. We have suggested that the issue be looked at by the Modernisation Committee; as the right hon. Lady is a member of it, she knows that it will discuss regional accountability. Our position remains absolutely clear: we want strengthened regional accountability to the House. The exact form of that accountability will be a matter for discussion and agreement within the House.
The right hon. Lady mentioned EUFOR, to which the Foreign Secretary referred when he led the debate on the Queen’s Speech. The right hon. Lady and other colleagues will, if they see fit, have the opportunity to raise the issue again in Foreign Office questions on Tuesday.
The right hon. Lady raised the issue of alcohol consumption; I know that that is a concern among Members on both sides of the House. That may well be a subject for a topical debate, as it seems to be topical almost on a weekly basis.
The right hon. Lady talked about Home Office targets for the police. I do not accept the idea that the police treat the crime of a stolen milk bottle and murder with the same seriousness; I think that that is completely wrong, and a wrong point.
The House had an extensive discussion about detention yesterday, following a statement by the Prime Minister. The Home Secretary has made it clear that she will seek discussions with all parties. We want to have the right powers to protect everyone in this country and the right safeguards for all suspects. Proposals will be brought before the House, hopefully on the basis of an agreement across all parties. We will continue to consult and hope that agreement will be reached.
Will my right hon. and learned Friend find time for a debate on the next round of post office closures? As Royal Mail will not tell me anything of its plans for closures in my constituency, although it tells me in a letter that “as an important stakeholder” I will be “notified” but not consulted, at least a debate would give Members an opportunity to discover how much more damage that pretty awful management is to inflict on the post office network.
The future of the Post Office and individual post offices is important for all Members of Parliament. My right hon. Friend will know that the Government have committed £1.7 billion of investment in the post office network up to 2011. He referred to the post office local area implementation plans. The Government remain committed to national networks, and it is important for all hon. Members to respond and be involved in the consultation. The Post Office should take representations from hon. Members seriously and not simply notify them of the outcome.
Following yesterday’s statement, may we have a further statement outlining the details and practicalities of the e-borders proposals? Given that 90 items of information can be required of people going in or out of our airports, which will be an El Dorado for identity theft, what security measures will be in place at every airport to make sure that that information does not get into the wrong hands?
On 4 July the Prime Minister said that
“the extradition treaty with the United States is a matter for continuing discussion.”—[Official Report, 4 July 2007; Vol. 462, c. 954.]
As many of us still feel that the extradition treaty is one-sided and unfair and needs urgent revision, may we, as a House, join in that continuing discussion?
May we have a statement on the arrangements for the loan to Northern Rock? Yesterday the Prime Minister refused to answer questions on the terms of the loan to Northern Rock on grounds of commercial confidentiality. As that information has been freely available on the internet and is in the hands of every banker, market maker and trader, why is the British citizen—the taxpayer—the only person who is not allowed to know what has been done with our money in that respect?
Lastly, may we have a debate on multitasking, with particular reference to the Home Secretary? When she was reporting the latest fiasco to have befallen the Home Office—only four months after the event—the Home Secretary said that she wanted to be a Minister who acts rather than talks about that situation. May I gently suggest that we want a Minister who does both?
The hon. Gentleman asks about data collection when people leave and arrive in the country. We are clear that as much data as can be captured to help with immigration information and anti-terrorist information should be collected and, subject to appropriate safeguards, shared. He has a regular opportunity to raise such issues at Home Office questions.
The hon. Gentleman asked about the extradition treaty. Nobody in the House should argue that if there is evidence that somebody has committed a criminal offence abroad, such as in America, we should allow them to escape justice in this country and not be extradited. We have to remember that that is the basis of extradition—[Interruption.] There is a question about reciprocity, but we should first say what we want to do in this country. Do we want to harbour criminals from other countries? We certainly do not. Do we want to ensure that those who have committed offences here are brought back? Yes, we do. It is not about doing a deal, but about doing the right thing in respect of each possible offender in each possible country.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned Northern Rock, which would be a suitable subject for an Opposition day debate. The Chancellor set out the position clearly yesterday—that he will bring to the House by way of an oral or written statement any further information that can be made available.
Is it the Government’s intention to bring to the Floor of the House for debate—before they develop the next 10-year strategy—the results of their recent consultations on the current 10-year drug strategy?
The relevant Minister will no doubt bring further information to the House, but my hon. Friend could propose that subject for a topical debate. It crosses a number of areas of concern, so it would be appropriate for such a debate.
Let me return to yesterday’s security statement by the Prime Minister. The Leader of the House will have seen—it was all over the newspapers, television and radio this morning—stories suggesting that the Government are about to extend the detention limit from 28 to 58 days. If so, the Prime Minister should have told us yesterday, or will the Leader of the House confirm that it has all been made up by the media and that there has been no briefing whatever?
What I can tell the House is that the position is as it was set out by the Prime Minister yesterday. Before that, it was set out in a document laid before the House by the Home Office on 25 July, which says:
“The scale and nature of the current terrorist threat… lead the Government to believe that we need to look again at the time limit on pre-charge detention.”
Four options were set out then and hon. Members have set out further options. As the Prime Minister told us yesterday, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary will seek talks across the parties to determine what proposals we can put before the House.
Does my right hon. and learned Friend agree that there is now hope of universal agreement that this Parliament has to act in the interests of democracy against the arms race in party political spending, which has grown out of control over recent elections? Does she also agree that, as a democratic Parliament, we should be very cautious about accepting the suggestion of the leader of the Conservative party that we trade off party political donations—they may have to be examined—especially when at the moment there is no national consensus about state funding for political parties? The British public have not yet been properly consulted, so we need to adopt great caution before moving in that direction.
Order. I ask hon. Members to ask about next week’s business. It is easy to get a question in, but we are supposed to be debating the business for next week.
My hon. Friend will have an opportunity—not next week, but in due course—to debate his important point further. Provision is made in the Queen’s Speech for a Bill to ensure correct controls on party campaign funding at elections. I agree that we must tackle the problem of the arms race. No one wants to see more and more money being spent by the parties in an arms race on election spending, particularly when fewer and fewer people are voting, so it is right to move forward on tackling that arms race.
Judith Todd, daughter of the late Garfield Todd, long associated with Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, came to Parliament yesterday to discuss, among other things, the desperate plight of the people of Zimbabwe. Their plight is easily forgotten. When he was Leader of the House, the current Secretary of State for Justice promised that there would be a major debate on this subject here in the Chamber in Government time. Although we had one debate just before the recess, we were promised a debate on the Floor of the House before Christmas. Will the Leader of the House tell us whether we can have that debate? I would like it next week, but that might be expecting too much. Will she promise me a debate on Zimbabwe before Christmas?
I will take the hon. Gentleman’s point as a suggestion for a topical debate next week.
Does my right hon. and learned Friend agree that it might be useful to have a debate next week on the importance of Select Committees in providing checks and balances between the Chamber and the Executive? It has been suggested that we should move forward to regional Select Committees. It seems to me, however, that all parties are having difficulties in providing personnel for the existing Select Committees. Is it therefore a good idea to have many more?
My hon. Friend’s point is one of the reasons why proper consideration of how regional accountability is to be introduced is necessary. I pay tribute to the work of Select Committees. All Members will recognise that they have enormously improved the House’s scrutiny of the Executive. We want to make sure that we bring in strong, robust, credible, regional accountability, but in the process we must in no way damage the important work of departmental Select Committees.
Yesterday, in the statement on national security, to which my party has given broad support, the Prime Minister announced a strengthening of the e-border programme. While we recognise the importance of checking the background of those who enter the United Kingdom, in the absence of that programme being implemented in the Irish Republic, or being applied along the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, people from Northern Ireland are likely to be treated as foreign nationals when travelling to this country. That has grave implications for the Union. Will the Leader of the House arrange a debate to discuss the economic, social and constitutional consequences of the strengthening of the e-border programme?
I will bring the hon. Gentleman’s important and substantive points not only to the attention of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland but to that of my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary. I am sure that they will want to reassure him, and it might be a good idea for him to seek a meeting with them to ensure that the matter is dealt with satisfactorily.
May I support the comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig) about post offices, as I am dismayed by the announcement of closures in my area? My point, however, is about yesterday’s security statement. I was pleased that the Government have consulted Muslim women and plan to set up a committee to consider access and influence in mosques. Will my right hon. and learned Friend use her position and talk to other Ministers to ensure that Muslim women in Wales are involved in such important discussions? May we debate the issue next week? The key to capturing hearts and minds lies with Muslim women, and they should be at the centre of any strategy.
I thank my hon. Friend for that point. As she will know, I and the other Minister with responsibility for women have as one of our priorities the empowerment of black and Asian women within their communities. We are also determined to ensure that there are more black and Asian women councillors. Part of the process is to include all communities within democracy so that they feel that they have a real stake in its future.
May I be this week’s shop steward and ask about the Senior Salaries Review Body report on pay and allowances? What could that report conceivably have contained that requires four months for the Government to reflect on it? Is this a unique example of the Government seeking to bury good news?
First I said that it would come shortly. Then I reassured the House that it would come very shortly. Last week it was imminent. Today I can say that the time draws nearer and nearer —the time that will surely come.
The whole House will be aware that the High Peak constituency is the spiritual home of the right to roam. I therefore welcome the Government’s intention to extend the right to roam to coastal areas. At present, however, the intention is to introduce that right as part of the marine Bill. As we all know, the marine Bill has been delayed beyond this Session. Will my right hon. and learned Friend consider, perhaps next week, introducing the right to roam in coastal areas in a stand-alone Bill, separate from the marine Bill, so that we can fulfil our commitment?
It has been announced that the marine Bill will be produced in draft, which will enable full involvement and consultation, not only by Select Committees but by those outside the House. This matter is a priority for the Government, so we will bring the Bill forward. No doubt all those concerned with the matter in my hon. Friend’s constituency will contribute to that process.
May we have a debate in the House on the capacity of local police teams and community safety teams to deliver on Government targets? My part of London now has fewer police than it had a decade ago. Our policing is 24 head-count below the budgeted total that it is meant to have. At the same time, safe and stronger community funds are being cut. Meanwhile, only yesterday, the Prime Minister talked about what needs to be done in communities such as mine to help national security. May we have a debate on the overall Government strategy, so that we can make sure that it works as a whole?
I will bring the hon. Lady’s comments to the attention of my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, and ask her to write to the hon. Lady. But the hon. Lady is struggling under a misapprehension. Her constituency has more police than 10 years ago.
indicated dissent.
Indeed it has. There are more police community support officers, and a big investment has been made. I will invite my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary to write to the hon. Lady and place a copy in the House of Commons Library, as other Members are showing an interest in this point.
My right hon. and learned Friend might be aware that I have been campaigning for justice for my constituent, Michael Shields, who has now been transferred from prison in Bulgaria to prison in this country. Now that there is confusion about whether it is appropriate for the Bulgarian or the United Kingdom authorities to consider granting a pardon for Michael Shields, will she ensure that there is a debate, or if not, a statement in the House?
I understand that my hon. Friend, who has championed her constituent’s cause, has sought an Adjournment debate. It is important to be able to repatriate to this country people who have committed offences abroad so that they can serve their sentence nearer their families. If the original conviction was made abroad, however, it appears that its overturning must be campaigned for and achieved abroad. No doubt she will bring the matter further to the House’s attention.
All Members of the House will be aware of growing concern over the military covenant. Last week, the nation came together to pay tribute to servicemen and women who made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of their country. Given the Royal British Legion’s campaign to honour the covenant, does not the Leader of the House feel that it is important to have a debate in Government time to consider such issues further?
There are regular defence debates, and perhaps I can take the hon. Gentleman’s point as a suggestion for next week’s topical debate.
Will the Leader of the House consider allowing a debate on the public health impact of nail bars? A constituent has drawn my attention to the fact that the proliferation of nail bars with staff who are not properly qualified is leading to, in particular, problems resulting from the use of methyl methacrylate to attach nail extensions. The chemical damages the nail bed, and is banned in the United States. This issue is of great importance to women in my constituency and throughout the country, and it would be helpful to have a debate about its public health aspects as soon as possible.
I will bring my hon. Friend’s points to the attention of my ministerial colleagues. There has indeed been a proliferation of nail bars, and I think that if there are public health implications we need to be confident that they are being looked into. I will ask my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health to write to my hon. Friend.
The hon. Member for Manchester, Blackley (Graham Stringer) has secured a debate on the Barnett formula next week, when no doubt we shall hear the usual nonsense about relative spending in the United Kingdom. Given the finding by Oxford Economics that there is more public spending per head in London than in Scotland, surely we should debate the matter on the Floor of the House and put to bed once and for all the nonsense peddled by the Conservatives about subsidy and Scotland.
As the hon. Gentleman said, there will be a debate on the Barnett formula in Westminster Hall next week.
I strongly endorse what was said by the right hon. Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig).
Forty-five days ago, we raised the minimum legal age for purchasing tobacco products to 18. Can the Leader of the House tell us whether, if any of those who entered today’s ballot for private Members’ Bills are successful, the Government will back the sentiments of early-day motion 235, introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Brent, South (Ms Butler)?
[That this House welcomes the increased legal minimum age of sale for tobacco products from 16 to 18 years of age; notes that, according to a recent survey by the British Retail Consortium, retail crime has increased by 50 per cent.; notes retailers' concern that they may face intimidation or violence as a result of the change and that smaller independent retailers are at greatest risk; further notes that fixed penalty notices can be issued to those under the age of 18 years who attempt to buy alcohol; considers that if it was an offence for those under the age of 18 years to attempt to purchase tobacco this would act as a deterrent to children from doing so and relieve pressure on shop owners and reduce potential violence; and calls upon the Government to bring forward proposals to bring into line the legal penalties for the attempted purchase of tobacco with that of alcohol as well as increasing support in all areas for under 18s to quit smoking.]
I tabled an amendment, early-day motion 325A1, which reads:
after ‘proposals’, insert ‘both to ban cigarette vending machines from which under 18s can buy tobacco products and’.
The amended motion envisages the creation of an offence of attempting to purchase tobacco under 18—similar to the existing offence involving alcohol, and attracting a fixed penalty notice—and the banning of cigarette vending machines, which constitute a way of overcoming the important public health legislation introduced on 1 October.
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend’s persistent campaigning for better public health, which is ensuring that there is less damage to the health of people who take up smoking and continue to smoke. I will draw his comments to the attention of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health.
The interpretation of new driving licence regulations involving minibuses in a way that was never intended in the legislation may have disastrous consequences for the ability of schools to field teams and provide sports, extra-curricular activities and, indeed, other types of activity. Is there any prospect of a debate on that?
I will bring the issue to the attention of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families as well as that of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport, but the hon. Gentleman could also make it the subject of an Adjournment debate.
Will the Leader of the House find time for a debate next week on the impact of unnecessary bureaucracy on farmers? My constituent Mr. John Collinson, who has farmed for 40 years, is now having to attend a course on how to put a trailer on the back of a Land Rover and another course on how to drive cattle from one side of his yard to another. Such bureaucracy imposes an unnecessary burden on a struggling industry, and I hope that the Government will give priority to a debate on it.
I will bring the hon. Gentleman’s comments to the attention of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Let me add, however, that one of the most important causes of increased record-keeping among farmers is the importance of public health and disease prevention, and we must ensure above all that that continues.
May I echo the request by the shadow Leader of the House for a debate on the Government of all the talents? Lord West, probably one of the finest naval officers of the post-war years, told the truth and was then undermined by the Government. Lord Drayson has gone racing, Lord Darzi is part-time, Lord Malloch-Brown has confused everyone and Lord Jones will not vote. The only person who has come out of this with any credit is my hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer), who had to tell the Government what to do.
I will not be suggesting that as a topic for debate. As the House will know, the question of ministerial appointments is a matter for the Prime Minister.
Please will the Leader of the House ask the Minister with responsibility for roads to come to the House on Tuesday and make a statement on the A303 Stonehenge upgrade project? Twenty-one years ago, when the Leader of the House and I were fresh young Members, it was identified as a flagship project. Ten years ago the Culture, Media and Sport Committee branded Stonehenge a national disgrace, and there was a public inquiry. Three years ago the inspector submitted a report to Ministers, but a decision has not yet been announced. We need an announcement, not just for the benefit of my constituents who regularly experience gridlock but for the benefit of the whole economy of the south-west and, above all, for the sake of the heritage aspect of Stonehenge. It is a world heritage site. If we do not get a decision soon we shall have years more dither, and we cannot afford that as a nation.
I remind the hon. Gentleman that he and I are still only approaching our prime. As for the A303, the Department for Transport is considering it. No doubt the hon. Gentleman has made representations which the Department is considering sympathetically.
Early-day motion 279 is entitled “Scope’s no voice, no choice campaign”.
[That this House notes the significant difficulty many disabled people with communication impairments face in getting the Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) equipment they need to communicate; further notes that as many as 600,000 people in the UK could benefit from access to AAC equipment; further notes that without the means to communicate people cannot express themselves freely, discuss ideas or make choices, which severely limits their life chances; further notes that freedom of expression is a fundamental right enshrined in the Human Rights Act 1998; regrets that access to AAC equipment remains a lottery for most people based on age, postcode and education status; further regrets that 23 per cent. of respondents to Scope's recent No Voice, No Choice survey had not had an assessment of their communication needs before they were 16 years old; further regrets that over one quarter of respondents to the same survey had to pay for equipment themselves or ask a charity because they could not get their equipment funded by a statutory agency; and calls on the Government to recognise communication as a fundamental right and ensure that people with communication impairments of all ages get the AAC equipment and support they need so they can lead more independent lives, access work, leisure and education opportunities and fulfil their potential as full citizens.]
May we please have a debate in Government time on the Floor of the House next week on the provision of alternative and augmentative equipment for those with communication impairments who need such equipment? Given that Scope and others have estimated that approximately 600,000 people in the country could benefit from such equipment, given that 23 per cent. of people who need it are not assessed for it until they reach the age of 16, and given that more than a quarter of deserving cases cannot obtain statutory funding for such aids and must therefore either pay for them themselves or secure charitable support, is it not high time that we had a debate on how we can improve provision so that people who are in desperate need can lead independent lives, gain access to education, work and leisure and have the opportunity to realise their full potential?
The hon. Gentleman has just demonstrated that he is one of the talents. He has proved the point that we want to listen to people with deep convictions, a great deal of experience and something to contribute to the Government’s work. I will bring his serious and important points to the attention of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, as I know the hon. Gentleman does himself.
Kettering hospital, which my constituents must attend, has the worst rate of Clostridium difficile in the country. Their chance of contracting it is three times the national average. Unfortunately one of my constituents caught the infection on going into hospital, and died some months later. When the relatives went to register the death, the registrar wanted to put something other than C. difficile on the death certificate. When the relatives queried it, the registrar said, “We do not like to put it down because it makes our figures look bad.” May we have a debate in Government time—while the Leader of the House is still in her prime—on the fact that the Government seem to be fiddling the figures rather than dealing with the underlying problem?
An Opposition day debate on hospital-acquired infections will take place next week, and no doubt the hon. Gentleman will be able to raise those points then.
Could one of the early topical debates be on housing expansion and infrastructure, concentrating on the lack of co-ordination between the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Department for Transport? The Government’s housing expansion programme for the borough of Kettering envisages the building of 13,100 extra houses by 2021, increasing the local population by a third; yet last week the Highways Agency confirmed that it would issue proposals to restrict local vehicular access from Kettering to the A14, which is the main road through my constituency.
I will take that as a suggestion for a subject for next week’s topical debate. Should I choose it, I imagine that we would hear many Labour Members concerned to ensure that there is more affordable housing to rent and to buy so that people can have the housing they want to meet rising expectations. I would also expect Opposition Members to say that they did not want any extra housing, with the Opposition Front Bench saying different things depending on what day of the week it was.
The Leader of the House will know—I wrote to her last week with the information—that the performance of Government Departments in answering named day questions varies; some are very good, some are very poor. The Ministry of Defence and the Department for Work and Pensions are particularly appalling. The MOD answers only 22 per cent. of named day questions on the due date and the DWP answers only 30 per cent. Mr. Speaker, I know the importance that you attach to Ministers answering questions from hon. Members on a timely basis. What action will the Leader of the House take to get her more recalcitrant Government colleagues to pull their socks up and treat this House with courtesy and respect?
The hon. Gentleman raises an important point. I thank him for the information that he has brought to my attention, which I shall raise forcefully with my ministerial colleagues. The whole point of this House is to hold the Executive to account. Ministers do not operate on their own behalf; they operate in the public interest and are accountable to this place for what they do. Parliamentary questions are very important in that respect, and I shall take forward the hon. Gentleman’s points.
Points of Order
On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Earlier in business questions, the Leader of the House said that my London borough has more police officers now than it did in 1997. I have just had time to go and check. May I refer her to a parliamentary question from the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey)—
Order. I am going to stop the hon. Lady. She should remember that I was an Opposition Back Bencher, and the one thing she will learn is that you are sometimes disappointed by the answers that Ministers give. [Interruption.] No, it is not the done thing to raise a matter as a point of order because you are unhappy with the reply. If the wrong information was given, there are other ways of dealing with it.
Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. The matter is whether the Leader of the House gave correct information to this House. The Leader may have inadvertently—
Order. The right hon. Lady has more experience than the young Back Bencher; I do not want to be patronising. Ministers give replies in good faith and I will not allow an hon. Member who feels that information is wrong to use points of order. There are other ways to raise these matters. I do not wish to prolong the matter—[Interruption.] I hope that the right hon. Lady is not challenging me. I am in a good mood today and I do not want to be in a bad mood.
Bills presented
Housing and Regeneration
Secretary Hazel Blears, supported by the Prime Minister, Mr. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Secretary Des Browne, Secretary Hilary Benn, Mr. Secretary Hutton, Yvette Cooper and Mr. Iain Wright, presented a Bill to establish the Homes and Communities Agency and make provision about it; to abolish the Urban Regeneration Agency and the Commission for the New Towns and make provision in connection with their abolition; to regulate social housing; to enable the abolition of the Housing Corporation; to make provision about sustainability certificates, landlord and tenant matters, building regulations and mobile homes; to make further provision about housing; and for connected purposes. And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time on Monday 19 November, and to be printed. Explanatory notes to be printed [Bill 8].
Health and Social Care
Secretary Alan Johnson, supported by the Prime Minister, Mr. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Secretary Jacqui Smith, Secretary Des Browne, Mr. Secretary Hutton, Mr. Secretary Hain, Secretary Hazel Blears, Secretary Ed Balls, Mr. Secretary Woodward and Mr. Ben Bradshaw, presented a Bill to establish and make provision in connection with a Care Quality Commission; to make provision about health care (including provision about the National Health Service) and about social care; to make provision about reviews and investigations under the Mental Health Act 1983; to establish and make provision in connection with an Office of the Health Professions Adjudicator and make other provision about the regulation of the health care professions; to confer power to modify the regulation of social care workers; to amend the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984; to provide for the payment of a grant to women in connection with pregnancy; to amend the functions of the Health Protection Agency; and for connected purposes. And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time on Monday 19 November, and to be printed. Explanatory notes to be printed [Bill 9].
Topical Debate
Immigration
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the matter of immigration.
Mr. Speaker, I am very grateful for the opportunity to open this debate and to break some new ground in the modernisation of this place. As the House will imagine, I was delighted to be informed by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House earlier this week that I would have the honour of opening this debate. I think that we can say with a rare degree of confidence that this afternoon’s debate is certainly a question and is certainly topical.
I am delighted that the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) is to answer for the Opposition. We are fast becoming pioneers of constitutional innovation; I reject the label “guinea pig”. Both of us saw the UK Borders Act 2007 through one of the first public evidence sessions at Committee stage. I can assure the House that although a Conservative, the hon. Member for Ashford gives an excellent impression of being someone comfortable with the modern world. Indeed, that is one of the reasons why he is such a successful deputy to the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis).
I do not plan to detain the House for long, as today is an opportunity for us to hear from right hon. and hon. Members about one of the most important questions in public life today. I will confine my remarks to a few points. Eighteen months ago my right hon. Friend the Member for Airdrie and Shotts (John Reid) provided the House with one of the more memorable analyses of what he felt he found in a Government Department. He later asked me to lead a programme of reform, which is now beginning to deliver results. My right hon. Friend said at the time that change would not be instant, but nevertheless reform of migration control was essential and achievable. He said at the time that
“there are problems that can be resolved but I do not pretend to you that they are going to be resolved quickly.”
A year and a bit on, I believe that we are beginning to see some of these reforms bear fruit. We are around 100 days away from the introduction of a points system for migration control, which means that only those whom this country needs will be able to come and work and study.
My hon. Friend says that the points system will control the numbers of people coming into this country. I should have thought that there was huge support among voters for that strategy. However, it will do nothing about the numbers coming from the new accession countries. What plans do the Government and our colleagues in Europe have to try to control the mass movement of people here from those countries? How many people does he estimate will come from the accession countries over the next few years?
I have learned not to make projections about future numbers, but my right hon. Friend will know that where it is possible for us to impose restrictions on new accession countries, we plan to use the powers that we have under the different EU treaties. That is the decision we took when we renewed our policy towards Bulgaria and Romania.
When we set the points score for migrants, we will listen to independent advice on where in the economy we need migration and where we do not, and on the wider impact of migration. Both the independent committees are now fully up and running. Once policy is set, it is vital that that policy be enforced. It is for that reason that today about half the world's population now need a fingerprint visa to come to the UK. Yesterday we signed contracts for systems that will, in time, screen all travellers against no-fly lists and intercept lists. At our borders from January, a unified border force will deliver tougher policing of our airports and ports, as the Prime Minister set out yesterday. Following Royal Assent a week or two ago to the UK Borders Act, and in addition to the Terrorism Act 2000, that force will have the powers it needs from the outset.
Will the Minister review his stated reluctance to enter into any kind of estimate of future numbers? Surely it is the case that if we cannot count them, we certainly will not be able to control them.
I shall talk about numbers in rather more detail in a moment and I hope that the hon. Gentleman will take the opportunity to intervene again; indeed, I may pose him one or two questions during my remarks.
Backing the border force are the immigration police, equipped with greater resources but also prioritising the removal of those most harmful. We are beginning to see the results. About 180,000 people whom we believe have no right to come to Britain have been taken off planes from around the world over the last five years; that is about two jumbo jets a week. The tests of our border screening systems have already triggered alerts, resulting in 1,200 arrests. In 2006, we removed nearly 3,000 foreign national prisoners, the highest figure on record. In 2006, we removed more than 16,000 failed asylum seekers, more than the number of unfounded claims made—that is about one every half an hour, 24 hours a day. We are now resolving asylum cases faster than ever before; about 40 per cent. of asylum cases are now resolved in just six months, compared with the extraordinary spectacle of two years just to make an initial decision back in 1997.
Is the Minister aware of something that happened in Northampton a few weeks ago? A lorry driver discovered people trying to get into the country illegally in the back of his lorry. That was reported to the police, but all that happened was that they were told to get on a train and go to Croydon. Is that an example of the Government controlling illegal immigration?
That practice is unacceptable, and it is precisely why we are now putting together agreements with police forces up and down the country. It is also why we are putting in place extra resources for in-country immigration policing. I must tell the hon. Gentleman, however, that when I moved the motion through this House to increase visa fees overall by £100 million in order to strengthen the resources that our immigration police had at their disposal, his party decided to abstain. I thought at the time that that was surprising—but sometimes we witness surprising things in the House and in such debates.
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way—I almost referred to him as “the right hon. Gentleman” as I thought that that might be his correct title, but if that is not the case yet I assure the Minister of State that it is only a matter of time. In his enthusiasm to secure the removal of failed asylum seekers he must be very careful indeed, not least when dealing with people who have come—I would say “fled”—to this country from Darfur. In light of the evidence collated by both the Aegis Trust and the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, it is dangerous for the Government rashly to assume that although it certainly might be unsafe to return a Darfuri asylum seeker to Darfur it is somehow safe to do so to Khartoum. These people are at risk of imprisonment, torture, death or a grisly combination of all three.
I am genuinely grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that remark. He has consistently raised the matter with me, and he will know that it was the subject of a court case in another place yesterday. The judgment was that in certain circumstances it might well be safe to return people to parts of Sudan. However, that is no substitute for giving careful and individual attention to the specifics of any case, and we will continue to operate that policy. I hope that we shall debate this matter again.
I wish to draw the Minister’s attention back to a point that he made just before the intervention of my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (John Bercow). He said that extra funding had been allowed for the police to compensate for migrants moving into areas. Will the Minister undertake to ensure that the figures used for taking such account of areas are up to date? In my county of Cambridgeshire the chief constable, Julie Spence, has gone on record to say that the figures the Home Office are using in respect of paying for police officers are out of date and inconsistent with the much larger number of people in the county now as a result of immigrants moving into the area.
Order. I remind Members that their interventions must be brief.
As the hon. Gentleman knows, I welcomed Julie Spence’s comments. She helpfully said that migrants had been the powerhouse behind some of the economy in Cambridgeshire such as agriculture and some other services. My right hon. Friend the Minister for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing will have more to say on that when settlements for the police are announced later this year.
I wish to contrast this Government’s policy with the Conservative party’s absence of policy in some regards. Its policy is benighted by two simple problems: there are no figures and there is no force. Let me start with the figures. In January 2005, the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) said that he would limit the number of refugees coming to Britain. In December 2005, the hon. Member for Ashford said, which I welcomed:
“We will be looking at that again”.
Needless to say, that policy disappeared from sight. The idea for an overall cap then emerged. The details were not very clear, but the hon. Gentleman was quoted in The Observer on 12 August this year as saying that the proposed cap would apply only to
“economic migrants from outside the EU”.
The right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) repeated that on 29 October. That can only mean one thing: it will apply only to migrants from outside the EU coming to the UK primarily for work-related purposes.
In the absence of specifics from the hon. Gentleman, I asked the Office for National Statistics to tell me exactly what this would mean. Based on the international passenger survey for 2005, the ONS estimates that only approximately 23 per cent. of foreign nationals who came to the UK in 2005 for a year or more indicated that they were non-EU citizens and that the main reason for their stay was work-related. In other words, of the 496,000 who entered in 2005, 403,000 were either EU citizens or were non-EU citizens not coming for work-related reasons. They are presumably outside the cap. On that basis, it appears that the cap would not cover four out of five such people. The question of who is left is therefore a matter for debate. We can tell a little about them from the work permits that we issue. The following figures are for the year up to September 2006: 31,000 in IT, 20,000 in health, 17,000 in business and management and 13,000 in financial services.
The hon. Gentleman must answer this question: who will he stop coming to Britain? Is not the truth that his refusal to name a figure is a fig-leaf for the fact that there is almost no difference between us? Is there not in fact a consensus between us, which he is trying to deny?
I understand why the Minister is desperate to pretend that he is adopting a Tory policy, as that is very fashionable in his Government. He has just been quoting figures from 2005. Is he therefore telling the House that, contrary to his assertion to the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) that he will not make estimates, he is assuming that the level of immigration to this country from inside the EU in 2005 will be the permanent level of immigration from inside the EU? If the Minister is assuming that, I suggest he is wrong; it is extremely unlikely that the enormous influx that we experienced from Poland and the other A8 countries—the accession countries—in 2005 will be the normal level of immigration from inside the EU. I assure him that under a Conservative Government, who would insist on transitional arrangements for all new EU member states, it would not be that high.
We have put in place transitional arrangements for Bulgaria and Romania, and I think that the hon. Gentleman supports that policy. The right hon. Member for Witney clearly said on 29 October that
“what matters is the net figure”.
Today’s figures show that the net balance is down again; it is 191,000. The right hon. Gentleman said it would be much higher. This is the second year in a row in which it has declined. My point is simple: what is the hon. Gentleman trying to hide by refusing to name a figure?
There is a second, and equally important, point. In addition to the absence of a figure, there is an absence of force. It is crucial for migration control in the future that we have biometric identification of foreign nationals coming to this country, so that we can screen them before they come, and make it possible to check them when they are here. I thought we agreed on that. The hon. Gentleman said in the Committee on the UK Borders Bill that
“there is no difference on either side of the Committee in our recognition of the need to combat illegal working. If the new documents”—
ID cards for foreign nationals—
“are to prove useful in doing so we have no objection to them.”––[Official Report, UK Borders Public Bill Committee, 8 March 2007; c. 238.]
Imagine my surprise when I read in the fine print of a press release from a colleague of the hon. Gentleman that the start-up costs of the ID card system for foreign nationals would be among the cuts the Tories would make. At this year’s Conservative party conference, the Tories said they would cut the set-up costs of ID cards for foreign nationals—some £40 million in 2008-10. I shall give way to the hon. Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier) in the hope that he might be able to help me understand this.
Will the Minister confirm that total net immigration is broadly equivalent to the number of people coming in now thanks to the unprecedented number of work permits issued—that is work permit holders and their families—and that non-EU work permit holders make up the whole of net immigration? Can he explain why some of the countries with the highest number of work permits—Pakistan is an example, although many people from that country make a great contribution—have exceptionally high levels of inactivity, according to both ONS and International Labour Organisation figures?
The hon. Gentleman will recognise the need to distinguish between those coming here for work, those coming to study and dependants. According to what the ONS said this morning, a quarter of the inflow is students; I assume that they are outside the cap, but perhaps the hon. Gentleman can enlighten us. I do not think that the Conservatives are proposing reintroducing the primary-purpose rule, but I should be interested to know whether dependants will be inside or outside the cap.
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
In the interests of time, I shall move on; I have only one minute left.
I want to strike a final note of consensus and to do something unusual for a Minister—I want to congratulate the Conservatives on some of their principles. It was welcome that they insisted that their candidate for Halesowen and Rowley Regis step down. It was wrong for him to say that Enoch Powell was right, and the House will know, as I discovered by reading The Birmingham Post last week, that much of that speech was completely unacceptable. Comparing our immigration policy with
“a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre”
is something that we need to remove from British politics. I hope that the hon. Member for Ashford will join me not only in applauding the Conservative candidate’s resignation, but in condemning his remarks. Will he join me in rejecting the arguments of Enoch Powell and in sending a clear message to this House and beyond that the days of the politics of—
Order. I call Damian Green.
I, too, am delighted by the innovation of the topical debate, and I am further delighted that in the first such debate we have the opportunity to discuss this week’s scandal surrounding the Home Office and immigration. My only fear is that if this becomes the slot in which we discuss the Government’s worst mistake of the week, the Minister for Borders and Immigration and I might get more than our fair share of opportunities.
Is not one of the tragedies of all these scandals that no one ever says sorry? The National Audit Office has just discovered that the Home Office wasted £33 million on an asylum centre at Bicester that was never built; no brick was laid and no sod was turned. No Minister has said sorry, no one has resigned and £33 million has been totally wasted. There is scandal after scandal and no one apologises.
My hon. Friend is exactly right. The Bicester scandal would doubtless have made a good topical debate in the week when it happened—all of about three weeks ago. However, we have of course moved on to new Home Office fiascos, for which I am sure no one will ever apologise.
I do not want to spend all my time on the events surrounding the Security Industry Authority cover-up. However, I am slightly surprised that the Minister did not devote one second of his speech to the topical issue of the day relating to immigration, preferring instead to delve—in a very welcome way—into Conservative policy, which he would of course like to adopt, in the mode of this Government. One or two aspects of this week’s scandal have emerged since Tuesday that the House should be made aware of. As the Minister knows, there are two big questions: did the Home Secretary behave competently, and was she open and honest with this House and the public?
Let me take the second question first by quoting what the Home Secretary told the House on Tuesday:
“My approach was that the responsible thing to do was to establish the full nature and scale of the problem and to take appropriate action to deal with it, rather than immediately to put incomplete and potentially misleading information into the public domain.”
In other words, she was only waiting until she had the full facts before publishing them. I do not think that that is an unfair characterisation of what she told us; she said that, when she could tell us the facts, she would.
What are we to make, therefore, of one detail of the documents published on Tuesday that has been neglected? In paragraph 22 of a document dated 30 August and written by Mr. Peter Edmondson of the policing policy and operations directorate, he says:
“Press Office do not recommend any sort of public announcement on this, as the full extent of the number of illegal workers with SIA licences is not yet known and there has been no failure in the system. Instead they propose to use reactive lines should this issue ever come to light.”
That is not the response of a department waiting to collect information before publishing it;
“should this issue ever come to light”
is a phrase used by a department that was hoping that it could keep the whole situation out of the public domain permanently. I do not want to stray over the boundaries of permissible parliamentary language, but the memo reveals that the Home Secretary was not being fully candid with the House when she said on Tuesday that she did not want
“immediately to put incomplete and potentially misleading information into the public domain.”—[Official Report, 13 November 2007; Vol. 467, c. 532.]
She hoped that she would never have to put anything in the public domain, and she has been caught out.
What is the point of the leader of the hon. Gentleman’s party calling now and again for a mature debate on immigration if Front-Bench spokesmen—and, indeed, many Conservative Back Benchers—continually leap on every passing tabloid bandwagon? I hope that the hon. Gentleman will find some time in his speech to address the big picture.
I am disappointed that a former Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee does not think that a Home Secretary covering up a scandal in her Department is a serious matter for public debate. It is perfectly clear that she wished to evade any kind of public responsibility for, and public debate about, a use of illegal immigrant workers in areas of the utmost national sensitivity. If the hon. Gentleman does not think that a serious issue that this House should debate, he is just wrong. I also refer him to the letter that the Home Secretary has now placed in the Library of the House, which contains—
Could the hon. Gentleman let me know whether he is going to debate immigration today? If he is, I am happy to stay and listen; if he is not, I have letters to sign.
I am terribly sorry that the hon. Lady has been kept from her letters by the discussion of a scandal affecting one of the big Departments of a Government whom she purports to support. She would benefit from listening to what the Security Industry Authority said to the people whom it was dealing with in August:
“If you use security operatives to protect your premises or your people, then there is a risk to your operations and to your reputation if you do not take steps to review the situation. The risk could be at the level of incompetent security or poor reputation if illegal workers are discovered on your premises. However, it could be that your defences against crime or terrorist action are compromised.”
That is one of the most serious messages that could have gone out. The Home Secretary told us on Tuesday that the Metropolitan police had said that there was no compromising of security in the various buildings affecting it, or, indeed, in the compound with the Prime Minister’s car in it. That is clearly contradicted by what the SIA was telling people. Even worse, the Home Secretary has still refused to publish a list of the sites where security might have been compromised. More to the point, what has been done to correct this?
The Home Secretary asked us on Tuesday to judge her on her actions, rather than her words, but that is impossible if she will not tell us what the effect of her actions has been. Perhaps the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier), who is winding up the debate, can address some of the questions that the Home Secretary declined to answer on Tuesday. The Home Office has now had 48 hours to get its story straight, so perhaps it can address those questions. How many more illegal workers were guarding Government buildings or other critical national infrastructure? Can the Minister guarantee that no illegal worker is still guarding any Government, police or military building or any other part of our critical national infrastructure? How many of the 5,000 illegal workers identified have been caught, and how many have been removed from this country? Until Home Office Ministers answer those questions in this House, the public will know that they can have no confidence that Ministers have solved this problem. The fact that they have spent the past four months trying to hide its extent suggests that they are more concerned about saving their own skins than protecting this country’s security.
The background to all this is the long-term failure of this Government’s immigration policy. The Minister for Borders and Immigration is a good man in a bad Government. His predecessor summed up the ineptitude of the Government’s policy when he stood at that Dispatch Box and accused me of playing the numbers game with immigration. This Minister is at least bright enough to recognise that immigration is a numbers game. Numbers matter in immigration, and they have been out of control under this Government. The key fact that they have missed over their 10 years in power is that even if immigration is economically beneficial, which broadly speaking it is, if it runs at too fast a rate it can cause stresses and strains. In recent weeks, I have seen examples of that in places as far removed from each other as inner-city Bristol and Boston in rural Lincolnshire. We have heard the same stories of schools finding it difficult to cope with children who arrive unable to speak English and of communities—many of them established ethnic minority communities in this country—that are made uneasy by the pace of change around them.
I shall give way to the hon. Lady, who has a very distinguished record in this field.
The hon. Gentleman is talking about keeping down numbers. In the exchanges during the opening remarks of my hon. Friend the Minister for Borders and Immigration, mention was made of the primary-purpose rule. Does the hon. Gentleman intend to reintroduce it if and when the Conservatives are eventually re-elected?
The straight answer to a straight question is that we do not. We have suggestions for improving the position, particularly on forced marriages—an issue that I know deeply concerns the hon. Lady—and I shall come on to those in a minute, because I want to spend some time discussing our policy, although, unlike the Minister, I do not want to spend all my time doing so.
Wellingborough has an extremely complex mixture of races and religions. It works exceptionally well, but tension is beginning to arise because of the numbers coming in from the European Union. I am concerned that the extreme parties will move in to exploit the situation unless politicians from the main parties start talking about the matter. Is not this debate a good example of how we should proceed?
I agree. One of the things that I suspect would unite the Minister and me is the idea that if mainstream politicians do not talk about immigration, we leave the field clear for extremist politicians. We must not do that. I am delighted that this House is having this debate now, because many of the underlying tensions that extremist parties seek to whip up are about the rate of change being too high. It is too high and it is accelerating. The Government have recently had to increase their long-term projection of net annual immigration from 145,000 a year to 190,000 a year. Today, we received figures confirming that. More than two thirds of the total increase in our population is due to immigration. Net immigration means that we need to build more than 70,000 new houses every year in addition to those that we need for other reasons, such as longer life expectancy and an increasing number of family breakdowns.
Immigration is about more than economics, although we must be clear about the economic effects. As I said a few minutes ago, they are generally positive, but the impact is different for different groups of people.
Will my hon. Friend give way?
In a second.
One of the most dishonest and irresponsible phrases mentioned in this debate has been used repeatedly by the Prime Minister:
“British jobs for British workers.”
The Minister cited Enoch Powell. I simply point out that the most Powellite use of language that we have recently heard on this subject came from the Prime Minister. I hope that the Minister and many of his colleagues who are present are ashamed to belong to a party whose leader uses phases such as that one, not least because the Prime Minister knows that it is meaningless. If a firm in this country advertised, “British jobs for British workers”, it would be prosecuted. It is a promise that he cannot possibly fulfil.
The Government are being simplistic on this subject because of their policy’s failure over such a long period of time. They have had to resort to ever-tougher rhetoric. I am afraid that the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of the chaos in the immigration system that people see in their daily lives leads to precisely the sort of position in which extremist politicians and politics can flourish. The Government should be ashamed of their performance on immigration over 10 years.
The hon. Gentleman rightly highlighted the demands that immigration is making on this country’s resources, such as housing and schools. The pressure is now being felt in Northern Ireland. Yesterday, the Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs visited Belmarsh prison, where officers are doing a magnificent job in extreme circumstances. As 25 per cent. of the prison’s population are not even able to speak English, because they are foreign nationals, immense pressure has been put on its resources, as has probably been the case in prisons across the United Kingdom. That is another factor that needs to be considered.
The hon. Gentleman makes a powerful point. The Government’s policy has failed. In the face of that failure, the Conservatives have made proposals designed to produce a balanced immigration policy, seeking to capture the economic benefits while minimising the strains.
The Chairman of the Select Committee on Home Affairs should listen to his own Minister, who spent his entire speech talking about our policy. We believe in a cap on economic migration from outside the EU. We should have transitional controls on migration from any new EU entrants. Such controls are allowed by the EU treaties and we are using them to regulate the flow of new migrants from Romania and Bulgaria. It was a mistake for the Government not to follow France and Germany‘s example of using this transitional measure when the eight central European countries entered the EU in 2004. Anyone who comes to the UK from outside the EU to be married should be at least 21 and should have some command of English. To enforce controls against illegal immigration, we should set up a proper unified border force combining the police, the immigration service and Customs so that we have an effective, specialist force. This is a balanced set of proposals, with no hint of alarmist language and no sense of pulling up a drawbridge. They would restore public confidence and improve community cohesion.
Let us contrast that with the current position. The Prime Minister promised us a new style of government. He said that his Government would be frank, candid and competent. Instead, we have a Home Secretary who this week has been exposed as shifty, evasive and incompetent. The immigration system is failing, the Home Office is still not fit for purpose and the Government’s reputation is deservedly in tatters.
Order. The House will understand that we are on an experimental journey with the first of these topical debates. The powers of the Chair to alter the time limits come in very handy at this moment, so I propose that instead of the 12-minute limit on Back Benchers’ speeches, we will have a 10-minute limit. Hopefully, that will accommodate all those who are seeking to participate. I refer to those from whom I have had notice that they are seeking to participate, because there is a distinction.
Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I am delighted to be taking part in your experiment this afternoon.
It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green). I think that he spent nine minutes on Government policy and about 30 seconds on setting out Conservative party policy. It did not include the identity of the island that will be the offshore centre for the processing of immigration cases under a Conservative Government. Perhaps we should wait for the winding-up speeches for that.
We all lavish the Minister with praise and think that he is a wonderful man. I believe that he was described as a good Minister in a bad Government. I think that he is a nice man in a tough job. He is not all that nice, though: I have found him to be pretty tough in dealing with immigration cases, and certainly with the ones I have brought to him for consideration. I sometimes think that he considers the word “discretion” to be some kind of perfume by Chanel rather than a ministerial power. He certainly has not exercised it very often when I have come to him with cases that I believe to be important, but I suppose that that is the nature of his job.
The Conservative spokesman, the hon. Member for Ashford, was right to point out the problems that the Government have had, and everyone acknowledges that there are problems with certain aspects of immigration policy. This week, the Home Secretary gave us a full explanation about the Security Industry Authority, in which she set out the steps that she and Ministers have quite properly taken to ensure that the problem will be resolved by Christmas. The hon. Gentleman said that some questions remain unanswered, but that is wrong. The relevant questions have been answered, and any that remain must be answered only after all the facts have been considered in full.
I am pleased that the Minister is to give evidence to the Home Affairs Committee on 27 November. As well as considering Romania and Bulgaria, we shall pursue with him the question of how the Government have handled the SIA’s employment of illegal immigrants. We shall also consider the problem with the figures—to be fair, they were produced by the Department for Work and Pensions and not the Home Office—that recounted that about 300,000 people were not on the official register of those who had come to this country to work.
We will also consider the most recent developments on eastern European migration to this country. The Conservative party participated in the all-party support for the enlargement process over a number of years, and it also claims to have supported the Nice treaty. How sad, therefore, that it should be so critical of the large number of eastern Europeans who have quite rightly taken advantage of treaty obligations to come to this country.
I ask the hon. Member for Ashford to have a word with the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands) about the wonderful relationship that he has developed with his eastern European community in west London. A recent Home Office report showed that the contribution of migration, especially from the A8 countries, had boosted the British economy. That is why I am glad that we took the decisions that we did in 2004, as those people are most welcome in this country. I am disappointed, of course, about Romania and Bulgaria, but on 27 November we will hear from the Minister why he came to those conclusions. We will also hear from the Romanian Minister for Europe about that country’s views on the subject.
The figures are serious and need to be examined, but we must consider immigration in a balanced and non-hysterical way. I am sorry that, every time the matter comes up, the Opposition try to hype it up as though vast numbers of people were coming into the country. As the hon. Member for Ashford knows, Government immigration rules still make it very difficult for people to come into the UK.
I commend the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier), on her proper and balanced performance on a recent “Newsnight” programme on immigration. She set out the facts and the Government’s attempts to tackle illegal immigration very clearly.
If we both get the train, I shall meet the Minister for Borders and Immigration this afternoon—not in Jerusalem, but in Birmingham, where staff from the British high commission in India are going to talk about illegal immigration into the UK. They will seek the support of the stakeholders involved—community groups and leaders, and families—and their message will be that there is a better alternative to paying vast amounts of money to people traffickers in Amritsar. The people who do that are made to travel all the way through Asia and Europe before they enter this country, where they live in the shadows, unable to be proper members of society. I hope that that message is taken on board.
The Minister is right that there have been improvements over the past year. The Select Committee will examine those improvements in due course but, as my hon. Friend knows, I feel strongly that the Home Office is not doing enough to get the backlog down. It is wrong that it takes three weeks to get a reply from the director-general of the immigration service. It is now called the Border and Immigration Agency, but merely changing to a new name does not improve the efficiency of the service on offer to Members of Parliament.
In addition, it still takes too long to get a reply from my hon. Friend the Minister, who took four months to reply to a letter from me. That is wrong: he is right to be tough, but the process can be improved only if Members of Parliament are provided with information that they can readily give to their constituents so that they are satisfied. If people who wish to stay in the country are told that they cannot do so, that response should be given quickly, at the very least. In that way, the people involved will be able to make the decisions that will genuinely affect their lives.
I turn now to the issue of foreign prisoners in our prisons, something that I have written to the Minister about. In one case, the prisoner involved left the country within a couple of hours of being released from prison, but we need to improve the system, so that prisoners who finish their sentences are on the plane back to their country of origin as quickly as possible. I do not want the House to believe that I spend all my time visiting prisons, but one governor, whose prison has a lot of foreign prisoners, gave me anecdotal evidence that paperwork from Lunar house and Apollo house was needed before people at the end of their sentence could be allowed to leave the country.
That shows that there is a problem when it comes to administrative efficiency. I am sure that the Minister goes into his office on a Monday morning and tears his hair out—I mean that imaginatively!—when he sees the list of questions and letters from Southall, West Ham and other places all over the country. In their surgeries, MPs are always asked, “Why is it taking so long?” and “When will they give us the time limit?” I am sure that my hon. Friend hears the same questions in his surgeries, but we are talking about being fit for purpose, and ensuring that the people who respond to such correspondence get the answers right.
Finally, I know that the Minister puts a great deal of faith in the points-based system, which he inherited rather than created. Although I do not share his optimism about the success of the scheme, I shall give him a degree of latitude and take it on faith when he says that it will work, but it will affect people who come here from outside the EU. As he knows from the recent work done by the EU presidency, the EU has a falling population. We need to look abroad, beyond the boundaries of Europe, if we are to sustain ourselves as the finest and largest single economic market in the world. That was the aim of the Lisbon agenda, but we cannot do that unless we have the people. Even enlargement, with Turkey coming in, will not solve that problem.
The points-based system discriminates against those who want to come from outside the EU. It means that we will still have problems with shortages of skills in restaurants, for example, and with getting chefs into this country. Those are the sort of specialist problems that I hope that the Minister will address. I know that he has his migration impact forum and a lot of advisers, and that he deals with the subject properly and seriously because of his constituency interest. All I ask him to do is to consider the evidence. If the system needs a bit of tweaking by the start of next year, I hope that he will look favourably on our suggestions and see whether we can improve it even further.
It is a great privilege to take part in this first topical debate. The rules, as I understand them, are that everybody can speak for 10 minutes—unless they belong to the Liberal Democrat party, in which case they get six minutes. Labour and Conservative Members agree on the issue of immigration, as on many others, so it falls to me to make the liberal and enlightened contribution. Six minutes is long enough to do that.
This week has been particularly embarrassing for the Home Office, given the scandal about the SIA. The Government still need to make it clear why the Home Secretary did not take the opportunity on 8 October, when the House of Commons returned after the summer recess, to make the statement that she made earlier this week, but there is a wider point about the culture of the Home Office. It has legions of press officers who are paid for out of our taxes—people who could otherwise be employed as teachers or nurses, or in other parts of the public sector. However, they are being used and deployed not to reveal information to the public, but to conceal it. That is an extremely bad way for a Government Department to proceed.
European Union immigration has had a big impact on constituencies across the country. I depart from the Conservative party view on this. People often forget that there are huge mutual advantages to the arrangements. Many of our constituents choose to retire, say, to Spain, or their children choose to spend a gap year working in Paris. We should not forget that there are benefits to our constituents of arrangements with other EU countries, as well as benefits to us of having people from the new accession nations working in our communities.
In the constituency that I represent there are huge labour shortages, especially in unpopular areas of work such as in slaughterhouses and agriculture. It can be difficult to recruit people from the immediate community to work in those areas. However, people do not come to work only in relatively low-skilled jobs. People such as dentists have come from eastern Europe and are making a huge contribution to our society. If the Conservative party wants to keep all or a large number of the people from eastern European countries out of the UK, how much more does it estimate it will cost to have services such as plumbing provided? There has clearly been an increased supply of skilled labour from eastern Europe and if it were removed, that would have a detrimental impact on our constituents.
Many people in the community that I represent are extremely positive about the contribution that has been made by people from new accession countries. They think that they work hard and have made a genuine effort to integrate. I make a prediction here and now that if living standards increase significantly in eastern Europe—I hope that they do—there will come a point perhaps 10 years from now when people in constituencies such as mine will resent all the Polish people going back to Poland because they will leave us in the lurch in many parts of our local economy. The whole story will have been turned on its head.
I want to talk a little about the wider shame of what I heard the Conservative spokesman say. When I was growing up, the big issue of foreign policy was the cold war and how it could be brought to a conclusion. The British Government at the time—a Conservative Government—made a point of saying to countries such as Poland and Hungary, “We are on your side; we stand with you against the Soviet tyranny.” But as soon as the Conservatives have an opportunity to demonstrate that in any meaningful terms, they abandon those people altogether. Someone of my age was brought up with the assumption that the most access that we would ever have to Polish people would be fighting them in the third world war. How fantastic it is that instead Polish people are coming here within an enlarged European Union, sharing our values of democracy, belief in liberal free markets and freedom of speech and are living in our communities, making a contribution and filling labour shortages. What an enlightened change that is; what an amazing success of British foreign policy, and how sad it is that the Conservative party is so small in its outlook and unable to recognise and acknowledge that change. It is still seeking to put barriers in the way of those people and restrict their opportunities.
I assume that the hon. Gentleman also condemns the Governments of the vast majority of other countries in the EU which all welcomed, as we do, the accession countries into the EU but put on precisely the transitional controls that we neglected to put on? The French, Germans, Italians and Spanish all put on transitional controls. They welcome the Poles and other workers, but they want a controlled system. That is a more sensible way of enlarging the EU.
I disagree with that.
So they were all wrong.
The usual assumption of the Conservative party is that the other countries in the European Union are all wrong. I give credit to the Government. The British Government were enlightened and intelligent in terms of self-interest but also of generosity of spirit to the 10 new accession countries in allowing those people to come and work here. The situation in Germany was slightly different because it shares a long land border with Poland so the effect might have been even more pronounced. We have benefited hugely and we have demonstrated to those countries, their Governments and their people that Britain is a trusted ally within the EU. Immigration is helpful to us in our foreign policy and our domestic economy. It is no coincidence that we are in a better position to grow and expand our economy than many of the more sclerotic economies that the hon. Gentleman holds up as an example.
There are problems with large numbers of people coming into the country. There is pressure on housing and other services—schools were mentioned. If large numbers who do not speak English as a first language come into the education system, that is problematic. However, overall we have a reasonably dynamic economy in Britain. It has shown continuous growth for the past 15 years, and successful economies attract labour. People want to come here, work here, provide for themselves and their families and create new opportunities for themselves. That creates a better, more open, more dynamic economy and society for us in this country. We should celebrate the contribution that has been made by people from outside the United Kingdom while recognising the pressures on some public services. We must have an enlightened and liberal approach to immigration in this country.
I listened to the speech by the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green). Apparently we now have a balanced immigration policy from the Conservative party. The policy starts from the assumption that there are too many people coming here and that we have to control the numbers, without giving any idea how, or what sort of cap would work. It makes only nodding reference to the economic benefits of migration. That does not strike me as a balanced policy. Conservative Members try to give the impression that if there were a Tory Government everything would be fine and we would be in control of what was happening.
I recognise that after 10 years in Government, we have to be responsible for what has happened in those 10 years, but those of us who have been here for rather longer than 10 years remember what it was like dealing with immigration and asylum cases under a Tory Government. We remember the chaos in the Home Office and the huge and growing backlogs during the 1990s. We remember the unofficial amnesties that happened without anyone outside the Home Office ever being told. The failure to remove people was endemic. The Tory Government stopped recording people who left the country in the 1990s. Then the all-singing, all-dancing computer system was commissioned. Home Office staff were let go on the back of that, and of course it never worked. So please do not tell me that the Tory party would run an immigration system that worked. We can look back to the record of the early 1990s and remember what happened then. Those of us who were here then remember that very well.
I want to say something about numbers, because they are an issue. Sometimes in debates about the numbers, people try to give the impression that we have no idea how many people are coming in, but we have a great deal of data and they are accurate. We know how many people apply for visas to come here as spouses; we know how many people apply for all sorts of visas to come into the country. We know how many people come here on the highly skilled migrant programme. The holes in the data are clearly on movements from within the EU. For people coming from one of the A8 countries who wish to seek employment, there is a registration scheme, but there is nothing to stop someone from coming here and becoming self-employed, and a lot of people do.
We have got problems. There is a genuine problem, and it does not help to address it if all that people do is shout that there are too many, in getting to grips with the numbers. We have census data, which we know are out of date. We have national insurance numbers. We have labour force surveys and the international passenger survey sampling. We also have data from registration with GPs and we can get data from schools. There are real difficulties in getting accurate data not so much at the national level but at the local level. The e-borders programme will get us to the point where we have much more accurate data at national level, but no one has come up with any real suggestions about obtaining accurate local data. It would help if we could have some genuine discussions about how we might get a better grip on the data at local level. It is local communities who see the impact and the data affect the distribution of resources to local authorities. The issue is difficult and complicated. There is no simple answer to it, and it is certainly not an answer just to shout slogans about the Home Office not having detailed and accurate figures.
My hon. Friend must be aware that there are many people, particularly in London but also in other cities, who lead a twilight existence—a dangerous and vulnerable existence. We should reach out to them and recognise first, the contribution that they make and secondly, that if there is a transition from migrants into citizens, everybody in our society will benefit and some of the counting problems to which he has rightly referred will be removed.
That is an important point, to which I shall return in more detail.
There is an issue that we need to think about. There is not one simple answer, and just shouting slogans does not help to address the problem at all. It is not even just people who are new immigrants into the country who are affected. Any hon. Member representing a London constituency will know about the mobility that exists. One has only to look at an electoral register and see a year-on-year change of perhaps 20 per cent. to appreciate that mobility and realise the difficulties that it creates in providing local services. We need to talk about the numbers, but we need to do so sensibly and not just talk about simplistic stuff such as imposing a cap, because that is not an answer to anything.
On controls, it is only in the past six or seven years that we have had a sensible debate about what immigration policy ought to be. From about 1971 to 2001, we had lots of debates about mechanisms and controls, but we did not talk about what the policy would be. It was only when the then Minister with responsibility for immigration, Barbara Roche, initiated a debate around 2000 that we started to make the linkages between labour market needs, the economy and what sort of migration we need. The Government’s current approach, in moving away from the plethora of different routes into the country and introducing a points-based system, is sensible.
I have some issues about the points-based system and how exactly it will work. The first is that it seems that we are to have a points-based system that will shut out unskilled labour from outside the EU. That will be a problem. The second problem is that those who can enter through the lower tiers that relate to unskilled work will have little in the way of rights, such as those relating to family reunion and the ability to reach the point at which they can apply to stay in the UK permanently. Those issues could cause us difficulties in the future.
There are issues about the transition on the highly skilled migrants programme, too, as the Minister knows. That links to the question that my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn) raised about those who are already here, but who are often undocumented and working illegally. They will have come through all sorts of routes. Sometimes people have an image of an illegal worker as someone who arrived in the back of a lorry and then stayed to work, but we are talking about people who have come through all sorts of different routes.
Some of those people are failed asylum seekers who were given permission to work years ago and technically lost it when their asylum claim was refused, yet nothing has ever been done about it. Others include people who came here as visitors or students and overstayed, or people who came here years ago from countries such as Jamaica when visas were not required. A large number of those people work, have a national insurance number and in many cases, but not all—there are of course people working in the moonlight economy—pay tax. They have families and children, but they do not have a settled immigration status. If we are to start cracking down more on employers who employ people illegally, as is intended, more people in that situation will turn up. They have no security and no method of enforcing rights at work, because if they attempt to do so, an employer who knows that they do not have legal permission to work will not be easily swayed.
My hon. Friend mentioned the “strangers into citizens” campaign. We must seriously think about how we deal with those people. The reality is that we are not going to remove them all. In many cases they are people who have been here a long time. I would argue, as I know a number of my hon. Friends would, that we need seriously to consider a regularisation scheme—that is, a mechanism to allow people to earn the right to stay here. If we are to introduce a transparent points-based system that is seen to work fairly, we shall sooner or later have to deal with the problem, because otherwise it will always be there in the background.
We have done things like that before. When the Tories were in government they ran amnesties that were not publicised. We, too, have run concessions and amnesties of one sort or another. Other countries have run regularisation schemes. That is something that we must start to address. A regularisation scheme would allow people who are effectively settled here to enjoy the benefits from the tax and national insurance that in many cases they have paid. Regularisation would also make it easier both to go for the rogue employer and to give protection and rights to the whole work force, because if people with this doubtful status are working in an industry, everybody is affected. That is something that we should address, as we introduce the new points system.
rose—
Order. I am reluctant to reduce the time limit further at this stage, as I realise that that can have a disproportionate effect, but we are going to run out of time. May I therefore appeal to those whom I call to try to compress their remarks?
I shall pick up one or two of the remarks that the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Gerrard) made, at the end of my speech. My hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green) is right to point to the shocking revelations earlier this week and to the wider problem of the breakdown of border controls, which is what most concerns us all. When the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz), of whom I am extremely fond, teased my hon. Friend about the fantasy island yet again, one had the feeling that he might have been planning a Select Committee visit.
If the hon. Gentleman gives me the destination, we shall consider it.
Immigration has brought many benefits to this country over the years, from almost all of our major supermarkets, founded by descendants of turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants, to the Indian software analysts who play such a big part in our most exciting service industry. However, I want to set the issue in a demographic context. In terms of population density, Britain is the most overcrowded country in Europe, apart from the low countries. If we take England alone, which is the destination for the vast majority of population movements, we are more crowded even than them. So many of the matters that we debate and discuss in the House come back to problems of overcrowding. They include housing shortages—a desperate problem in my part of the world—congestion on the roads, overstretched public services, and water shortages in summer and floods resulting from building on flood plains in winter.
Projections by the Office for National Statistics suggest that in a single generation, to 2031, we will experience a population increase of 10 million, from 61 million to 71 million, 70 per cent. of which will be caused by net immigration. However, the ONS keeps revising its estimates upwards—I have no doubt that the figures will be even larger within a year or two—and at no point does it take account of hidden, illegal immigration. Crucially—particularly in the light of the largely irrelevant contribution from the Liberal Democrat spokesman—70 per cent. of all immigration to this country is projected to come from outside the EU. That is about the same figure as for the last year for which we have figures.
There has rightly been a great deal of discussion about numbers; this is a numbers game. The key to the numbers is to understand that, when the Government increased the number of work permits from 40,000 a year to a projected 200,000 a year—the present Prime Minister’s figure, bizarrely announced in a Budget speech—they effectively determined that the number of work permit-holders and their families would exceed the total level of net immigration.
The hon. Gentleman asked what would be done on numbers. He challenged my hon. Friend on this point. The truth is that work permits are wholly under the control of the Government, and the sheer arithmetic tells us that work permits alone cover the whole of immigration.
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way; I know that time is tight. If he looks at the international passenger survey statistics for 2006 in relation to Commonwealth and other foreign countries, he will see that 78,000 were students and 114,000 were dependents, with 27,000 others. That is 219,000 people who were not coming here primarily for work-related reasons.
The Minister is a good man in a bad Government, and he knows perfectly well that we have almost unprecedentedly high levels of emigration. The point is that, on the Government’s own target, the level of work permits exceeds the current net immigration level. Net immigration is only one third of immigration.
Previous Governments—Conservative and Labour—only accepted between 35,000 and 40,000 people a year from outside the EU, but the checks and balances that existed in the work permit system under all those Governments have now largely disappeared. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) has pointed out, one indication of that is that well over 90 per cent. of extensions are granted—often, one suspects, with very little checking.
It is bizarre, when we are facing so many population-driven pressures, that we should have a demographic problem on this scale that it is effectively within the Government’s power easily to alter. I want to look at two further points that will help us to explore the issue a bit more deeply. An interesting study written by Anthony Schofield, published by the Social Affairs Unit, looks at the sheer economics of immigration from two angles. First, it looks at the cost of infrastructure and the net impact of immigration on the net wealth of the nation, and concludes that the vast majority of immigrants who bring no capital with them would have to earn extremely high incomes to be net generators of wealth.
The study’s second conclusion brings me back to the comments of the hon. Member for Walthamstow on the position of the less skilled immigrants in the work force. Surely one does not have to take a particular view—left or right wing—of economics to understand that if we greatly increase the supply of something, its price goes down. The truth is that the impact of heavy levels of net immigration, particularly of young males, into the work force is depressing the wages of the least well-off people—the poorer and least advantaged people—who are already here, including many from ethnic minorities.
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way, because this relates to a point that I was trying to make in my speech. I accept his point that, if we increase the supply of labour, we reduce the price of the service—that is, the wages. Will he give us an estimate of how much more those services would cost his constituents and mine, had the supply of labour from the new EU entrant countries been restricted in a way that those on his Front Bench would have supported? In other words, how much more would people have had to pay for, say, plumbing or building services in his constituency?
I am glad that we have now discovered that there was a point to the hon. Gentleman’s speech. If he wants to see the best and most detailed mathematical calculation that I have ever seen, he should look at the study to which I have just referred; I will gladly show him afterwards. The answer to his question is that it would be very much less than the cost on the net wealth side. The loss of wealth accounts for far more than the economic gain to which he has just referred. He can check those calculations if he likes. I have a simple question: who is going to bother to employ and retrain a Brit—of whatever ethnic background—in his 50s who has perhaps been made redundant twice, if he can get a young fit 19-year-old to do the job instead?
There is nothing inconsistent in taking a compassionate view, as described by the hon. Member for Walthamstow, of individual cases of people who have been here for a very long time, and who came in before the current people. I have one such case before the Minister at the moment. He earlier assisted me in getting a very nasty criminal deported from my constituency, and I hope that he will now be able to help me in the case of Hartley Alleyne, a first-class cricketer who has played for the West Indies, for Worcestershire and, above all, for Kent county cricket club. He has given 30 years to this country, but is now facing deportation. The Minister is reviewing his case, and I am most grateful to him for doing that. There is no inconsistency whatever in taking a sensible view of people who have been here for a long time while restricting the numbers of work permits.
It is grossly unfair that the county of Kent, and one or two other boroughs, are picking up such a disproportionate part of the bill. The last time I looked, we were owed £6 million, the equivalent of 1 per cent. on the council tax. I know that there are other bodies involved too.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green) and me, he listened to a presentation this week from no fewer than nine local authorities making exactly this point. Did he share my frustration on hearing that the Government appear to be entirely deaf to this message, and that a number of requests for meetings have been declined? Will he join me in pressing the Minister to meet representatives of those councils to discuss the funding shortfall, which is causing real difficulties?
I certainly will. Ministers should grant those councils a meeting.
We have had yet another nasty scandal this week, but it must not blind us to the collapse in border controls. If and when they are gradually re-established, we must get the numbers back to sensible levels.
I am grateful for the opportunity to take part in this debate. I am also grateful to the Labour Members who, while being rather critical of what the Conservatives have to say on these matters, have not resorted to the usual tactic of denouncing anyone who queries immigration as being some sort of racist. We have had a sensible debate—[Hon. Members: “So far.”] Indeed. It is important that we have a debate, because the failure to discuss immigration over the past 10 years has been a direct factor in the increased support for extremist parties such as the British National party. Mainstream politicians on all sides should not be afraid to engage in this debate.
People have become concerned about immigration for several reasons, the first of which, as my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier) said, is the sheer numbers involved: 10 million or so over the next few years alone. The hon. Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Gerrard) talked about amnesties for those who are already here and who have decided to overstay illegally. Would not that simply lead to an even greater number of people coming here, many of whom might risk their lives paying people smugglers to do so? Amnesties would send entirely the wrong message and encourage even greater numbers to come here.
Anyone who knows anything about British history—sadly, fewer and fewer people do these days, thanks to the curriculum, which we will discuss another time—will know that, whenever there has been large-scale immigration in this country, it has always been quite disastrous. The best examples of immigration have, on the whole, been small in scale, involving manageable numbers of people coming from one country or one ethnic background. Most importantly, they have involved people who have wanted to integrate. The Ugandan Asians and the Jews who came over here in the last century are good examples of people who have come here wanting to integrate and to adopt the cultures of this country.
The sad fact is that many immigrants do not want to integrate at all. Worse still, they demand that our laws be changed to accommodate their cultural beliefs. We have a right to say that that is unacceptable. It is unacceptable that we have legitimised polygamous marriage in the UK. It is unacceptable that we hand a schoolgirl hundreds of thousands of pounds to fight a case to allow her to wear the hijab in contravention of school policy. It is unacceptable that Government organisations send cards celebrating Eid, Diwali and other religious festivals, about which I am quite happy, but will not send Christmas cards in case it gives offence. There are many examples of our laws, culture and traditions being overturned to accommodate people who have no intention of trying to integrate.
Members have spoken about the impact of immigration on the economy. On various occasions it has been stated that the effect of immigration on the economy has been universally good. That is an impossible statement to make unless we are prepared to look at the costs of immigration to the economy as well as the benefits. It is undoubtedly true that there are benefits. As the hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. Browne) pointed out, as a result of immigration it is much cheaper to get a plumber or an electrician in some areas. He asked how much more it would cost to get our pipes fixed if we had not allowed immigration from the EU. The answer is that it depends on how much more a British plumber would have charged and how much higher his wages would have been.
There is no doubt that the wages of many skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled people living in the UK would be substantially higher now if large-scale immigration had not taken place. There is no need to take my word for that; the CBI joyfully produced that analysis in a report that a Select Committee considered recently.
There have been other effects on the economy; we have heard about the impact of large-scale immigration on education. There has also been an impact on the national health service. Although many immigrants work in the NHS, many more are taking from the health service and costing us large sums of money because they are not entitled to NHS treatment. The Government have chosen to ignore that and are doing nothing about it. In all their targets, and in all the paperwork and forms they expect NHS trusts to fill in about patients, the one thing they constantly choose to ignore is the number of people who are incorrectly accessing NHS services at great cost.
Would the hon. Gentleman take a brief pause from his rant and reflect for a moment on what kind of national health service, what kind of education system, what kind of transport system and what kind of science base we would have if our economy had not had a significant level of highly skilled and highly motivated immigrants over the past 30 years?
Many people who have come to the UK to work—primarily in the NHS, not so much in education—have been highly motivated, skilled and educated, but in many instances that has caused problems in the countries they left. They have taken their skills away from countries that desperately needed them. We need to be specific. For example, the immigration of Filipino nurses, many of whom work in my constituency, has been positive because there are more nurses in the Philippines than there are jobs for them. However, by allowing nurses from some African countries to come to the UK we have caused enormous problems in countries where they were desperately needed. It is a case of swings and roundabouts and it is difficult to generalise about immigrants in a wide sense; we have to consider the countries from which they come and the problems that may be caused by accepting them.
Earlier this week, issues were raised about the Security Industry Authority licensing illegal immigrants to work in the security industry. I find it difficult to believe that the Government did not find out about that until April 2007, given that I had tabled questions in September 2006, following a meeting I attended the previous June with a local representative of one of the security trade associations in Abergavenny who was trying to tell anyone who would listen that the practice was going on. It is difficult to believe that a Back-Bench Member of Parliament could have known about it almost a year before the Home Secretary, and that following questions tabled in September the then Home Secretary was still unable to work it out for himself.
I have tried to draw Ministers’ attention to a number of other scandals at the Home Office that are yet to come out. I shall put them on the record now. Large numbers of people are taking driving tests in languages other than English and obtaining a full British driver’s licence as a result. About 100,000 people took their theory test in a foreign language last year and 15,000 took the practical test with an interpreter in the back of the car translating the examiner’s instructions. It is unacceptable that people can come to the UK without speaking a word of English and gain a British driving licence. That will lead to road accidents, and no number of local authorities translating road signs into Polish will solve the problem.
As I indicated earlier, there is an enormous problem in the NHS. People are accessing care when they have no right to it, which costs British taxpayers a vast amount and makes it harder for UK residents who have paid their taxes to have the health care to which they are entitled. The Government should do something about that.
Finally, there is, rightly, a licensing regime, similar to the SIA one for security guards, for people who want to become teachers. I have been told that a number of people are applying to become teachers from countries where it is almost impossible to check their academic or criminal records, yet they are still granted a licence and can seek work as teachers. I have already drawn that to the attention of Welsh Assembly Ministers. Westminster Ministers may know about it and I suggest that they investigate it before it becomes another subject for a tabloid headline.
Almost every speaker in the debate has described the Minister as a good man in a bad Government. I agree, but he will have to do much more if he is to tackle the problems caused by his predecessors. There is too much immigration; too many people are coming to this country and not enough of them are prepared to learn English and adapt to our culture and our traditions, which is causing much genuine concern.
I would have said that it was a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies), but the xenophobic rant we have just heard shows what is wrong with the modern Conservative party. The right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) asked for a grown-up debate on immigration. I agree entirely, but I do not think we heard it in the contribution of the hon. Member for Monmouth.
I am fond of the hon. Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier), and usually agree with him on quite a few issues, so I thought we were doing well when he talked about the benefits of immigration in terms of the supermarket dynasties founded as a result of Jewish immigration. However, he then fell into the numbers trap, as the Conservatives always do, although their Front-Bench spokesman, the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green), admitted that broadly speaking immigration is a good thing economically. We should be saying that.
I would not mind debating with the Conservatives things such as our skills shortages, the demographics to which the hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. Browne) referred and the benefits of immigration to the UK economy, rather than numbers. We need to separate the issues. We need to discuss immigration from the EU separately. Who do we have to thank for open borders in Europe? We should remind people that Baroness Thatcher signed us into the Single European Act and opened up the free transfer of people across Europe, which is not a bad thing. I agree with the hon. Member for Taunton; it has been positive for most of our constituencies.
The next issue relates to what the hon. Member for Tatton (Mr. Osborne) described in a recent speech as the rest of the world. I agree completely with the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow)—a rare beast in the Conservative party—that our borders should be open to people fleeing violence and persecution. We have a long tradition in that regard and we should be proud of it. However, it is right that we take a tough stand against people who come to the UK illegally and bend the rules.
As was said earlier, without the benefits of immigration our health service and our transport system in London and elsewhere would be much poorer. We need to get away from the idea that all immigration is bad.
Durham university in the north-east of England is a first-rate and world-class institution that benefits tremendously from huge numbers of foreign students. They do two things. First, they bring money to the city of Durham and the university. Secondly, as I know from having met many of them in various parts of the world, when they leave they act as ambassadors not only for the great county and city of Durham but for the UK. That is important.
I welcome the proposal by the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) to hold a grown-up debate, but let us have that grown-up debate; let us not get into the xenophobic nonsense that we have just heard from the hon. Member for Monmouth. Let us talk about the net immigration that we need over the next few years, to which the hon. Member for Taunton referred, not just in this country but across Europe.
We also need to pride ourselves on the economic impact that those people, including Margaret Thatcher, who signed the Single European Act wanted to achieve. The economies of eastern European countries—certainly Poland and others—are growing because money is being transferred back to them. I do not usually agree with the hon. Member for Taunton, but he is right: we cannot say that they should be free from the yoke of the Soviet Union but leave them in abject poverty, without ensuring that they get the benefits that the rest of us have in the EU. That is the way to stability across not just Europe but the world.
Finally, I should like to point out that the Conservatives also need to be clear that, when they talk about limiting and taking a tough stance on immigration, they ought to start to vote for that when such measures come before the House. I am thinking of their failure to support the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 and their continued opposition to identity cards. The public need to know about such things.
Owing to the time allowed, I am afraid that I will not take interventions; I need to respond to a number of points. I want to thank hon. Members for their contributions to what has been a measured and sensible debate in most parts.
I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz), who made, as ever, some sensible and measured points. I should like to reassure him that, as I am now the champion for the Home Office on Members’ correspondence—and also the second-largest customer of the Home Office on this issue—I am taking it up with vigour, and he will see continued improvements. I should also like to reassure him that last year the Border and Immigration Agency removed 2,784 foreign national prisoners, and it doubled removals in the first quarter of this year, compared with the number of removals in the first quarter of 2006.
The hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. Browne) was very interesting, as ever, and if I had any sway in his party, I would recommend him for promotion, given that he stands in so regularly for the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Clegg).
My hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Gerrard) was a pleasure to listen to, as always, and I benefited, as did the House, from his wisdom, experience and thoughtfulness. He rightly raised issues about local data. That is one of the reasons why we have set up the migration impact forum, which is chaired by my hon. Friend the Minister for Borders and Immigration, along with the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Mr. Dhanda). Other hon. Members have said that we do not meet the representatives of local authorities, but the forum does, and we are keen to hear from local authorities, because we believe that often we hear first from them about some of the issues that affect local communities.
In reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow and my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East, I would say that we will produce the statements of intent on the points-based system before they come into effect. We are very keen to hear hon. Members’ views on that, and we can benefit from their experience.
Time is short, so I want to say that I feel rather let down by Opposition Members. Although I have great respect for the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) personally, he has resolutely refused to answer questions about the Conservative party’s cap proposal. The Conservatives have resolutely refused to square their approach to immigration with the UK’s membership of the European Union. The fact that the Conservative party did not vote against the free movement directive when it was introduced in 2006 demonstrates that they say one thing and act differently.
On the Security Industry Authority, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary made a statement to the House on Tuesday and gave a commitment to come back to the House in December. That is all that I can say on that in the time that I have available.
The hon. Member for Ashford also referred to British jobs—
It being one and a half hours after the commencement of proceedings, the motion lapsed, without Question put, pursuant to Temporary Standing Order (Topical debates).
Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards
I beg to move,
That Mr John MacDonald Lyon CB be appointed Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards on the terms of the Report of the House of Commons Commission, HC 1096, dated 24th October.
Hon. Members might recall that, on 28 June, Mr. Speaker informed the House that the current Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Sir Philip Mawer, had indicated his desire to step down from the post at the end of this year, after almost six years in the post. This debate provides the opportunity to thank Sir Philip for all that he has done in that time; but before I do so, I shall briefly report on the process that has led the Commission to recommend that John Lyon should become the fourth person to hold that office.
The process followed very much the same path as the one that led to the appointment of Sir Philip in 2002. There was an open and competitive selection. We were very pleased that 46 candidates of notably good calibre were considered. Five of them were interviewed by the selection board, and the final two came for interview by the Commission. They were two excellent candidates, and the recommendation to the House was a very tough call.
I am grateful to the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) for taking part in the selection board, as the Chairman of the Standards and Privileges Committee, to the two senior House officials who sat on the board and to Sheila Drew Smith from the panel of the Office of the Commissioner for Public Appointments—an independent member of the selection board.
John Lyon is a senior official in the Ministry of Justice. He is currently responsible for handling relations between the Executive and the judiciary, which, one presumes, is no bed of roses. He impressed the Commission with his long experience of dealing with Ministers from both parties, dating back to the late Merlyn Rees in the mid-1970s. He also showed a good understanding of the importance of the job to the House’s reputation and the need to strike the right balance between prevention and investigation.
If the House agrees the motion today, John Lyon will serve a single term of five years, starting in January 2008. Members will recall that, in June 2003, following the recommendation in the eighth report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, the House resolved that the commissioner should serve a non-renewable term of five years, to avoid any suggestion that an incumbent might tailor their judgments on account of a desire to have the term renewed.
The Commission attaches great importance to ensuring that the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards has sufficient resources to carry out his duties properly. The cost of running that office in 2006-07 was £386,500, almost all of which was staff costs. If the new commissioner finds that he needs extra assistance, he will get a very sympathetic hearing from the House of Commons Commission.
I would not want to steal the thunder—nay, more likely the warm sunshine—of the Chairman of the Standards and Privileges Committee, but on behalf of the Commission I should like to record our appreciation of the way in which Sir Philip Mawer has carried out his task. As a member of that Committee, I have seen that at first hand over the past couple of years. Sir Philip has shown a high degree of integrity, diligence and impartiality in carrying out complicated and sensitive inquiries. In a typical piece of understatement, his final annual report concludes with the words
“It has been a privilege to have wrestled with those challenges”.
We wish him well in his next appointment as the Prime Minister’s independent adviser on ministerial interests.
It gives me great pleasure to support the motion, moved by the hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey), to appoint John Lyon as the House’s new Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. I welcome what the hon. Gentleman has just said about resources from the House. As he explained, as the Chairman of the Select Committee on Standards and Privileges, I played a part the selection process, and I can confirm its rigour and integrity.
The current commissioner, Sir Philip Mawer, will be a hard act to follow, and he was the benchmark against which I judged the applicants. John Lyon has a similar pedigree. He has a distinguished record as a career civil servant and a good insight into the ways of the House and its Members, both through his private office experience in the Home Office and through his involvement with our legislative programme. He has demonstrated his ability to deal effectively with sensitive matters and to balance conflicting interests, not least in some of his work in Northern Ireland. He has shown his ability to act discreetly and fairly and I am sure that he will prove to be a worthy successor to Sir Philip. Both the Committee and I look forward to working with him.
What are the skills that John Lyon will need? It is self-evident that an ability to act fairly is essential. The commissioner must also be able to prioritise, and to identify and concentrate on, the key issues. He must be resolute in the face of obfuscation, as successive commissioners have demonstrated. Given the extent of the commissioner’s direct personal involvement in investigating complaints, he needs the ability to run investigations, and to draft complex reports succinctly.
Besides ensuring that the system runs successfully, the commissioner needs to keep the wider picture under review. The standards system is a dynamic one, and the commissioner plays a leading part in ensuring that it continues to meet expectations, both inside and outside the House. He also has to seek to ensure that the system's achievements are better known. The commissioner’s annual reports—referred to by the hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey)—the most recent of which was published a couple of weeks ago, have an important part to play in this.
John Lyon will inherit a standards system that is in much finer fettle than that which awaited his predecessor in February 2002. Then, there was a distinct feeling, inside and outside the House, that the arrangements the House had put in place in 1995 were failing and were in need of radical reform. The Committee on Standards in Public Life initiated an inquiry, which could have recommended an end to our self-disciplinary procedures. The committee, rightly in my view, put its faith in continued self-regulation, and subsequent events have shown the wisdom and foresight of that decision. That the reputation of self-regulation was restored is due in no small part to the work of the current commissioner.
I have already mentioned that the standards system is a dynamic one, and the commissioner has a key part to play in ensuring that it develops effectively. This debate provides a welcome opportunity to pay tribute to the work of Sir Philip Mawer in this respect. The Standards and Privileges Committee supported a three-legged strategy: first, emphasising prevention; secondly, carrying out impartial and robust investigations of complaints; and thirdly, proposing initiatives aimed at ensuring that the standards arrangements continue to reflect expectations both inside and outside the House. Sir Philip has enhanced the reputation of the House’s standards arrangements.
On the first count, the proactive work of the commissioner and his team, particularly at the start of Parliaments, but also at other times—including when changes are made to the system—has helped to reduce the scope for inadvertent breaches. That is important, because all breaches, deliberate and inadvertent, impact on public perceptions of, and confidence in, Members generally and the reputation of the House as an institution. In tidying up the registration requirements and rationalising, where possible, those of the House and the Electoral Commission, he has made it simpler for Members to meet their obligations. He has also improved the visibility of Members’ interests: up-to-date versions of the register are now more readily accessible as a result of the decision to update the internet version fortnightly when the House is sitting.
On the second count, the commissioner has made 47 formal reports to the Committee, one of which—that relating to the complaints against the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Mr. Galloway)—was the most lengthy and one of the most complex reports ever undertaken. On the basis of those reports, the Committee required remedial action in six cases, and the House took action against Members, on the Committee’s recommendation, in three further cases. Sir Philip’s inquiries have been fair and thorough in all cases, and his reports clear and succinct. I am heartened, though, that so few serious cases have arisen on his watch, which reinforces my own view of the generally high standards of Members’ conduct.
On the third count, the commissioner has led a review of the code of conduct, approved by the House in 2005, and a review of the guide to the rules, which the Committee expects to report on soon. He has introduced extensions of the rectification procedure, to increase the range of circumstances in which minor infractions can be dealt with effectively without the formality of a report to the House. Other developments are also in prospect, as outlined in the commissioner’s most recent report.
Sir Philip Mawer has been an outstanding commissioner, who took over one of the most difficult jobs in public life and made a success of it. He has played a key part in restoring confidence in our disciplinary procedures. The extent to which his experience is sought out internationally is a tribute to the distinguished service he has given the House for some five and three quarter years. We wish him well in his new post as the Government’s adviser on ministerial interests, and we welcome his successor to the post.
I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey) and the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) in asking the House to agree to the motion. Both Members emphasised the significance of this issue. It is important that the House has high standards and that the public know that to be the case. To ensure that it is the case, it is right that there is a clear, visible and effective process in place for addressing possible breaches of the code and the rules of conduct for Members of Parliament, and that there are arrangements to offer authoritative advice to Members to ensure that they can be confident that they are adhering to those requirements.
Since 1995, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards has played an important part in that: by giving Members appropriate advice to avoid situations that might give rise to allegations of breaches of the code of conduct; by helping to keep the code of conduct for Members of Parliament, and the associated mechanisms for enforcement, up to date; and by investigating and reporting complaints, where necessary, to the Standards and Privileges Committee.
The motion asks the House to approve the appointment of Mr. John Lyon CB as Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards from January 2008 for a non-renewable period of five years. The document that has been published by the House of Commons Commission about the selection process for the new appointment has been helpfully explained. It sets out how Mr. John Lyon was chosen and provides information both about the post and about him. I know him to be an eminent public servant with substantial experience in areas requiring significant discretion and judgment. I had the privilege of working with him when he was a senior civil servant and I was a Minister in the Ministry of Justice. He has been selected following an open competition. I am very happy to add my voice to the recommendation to the House to agree to the motion providing for his appointment. I wish him well in the task and I know that all hon. Members will give him their full co-operation.
This is also an opportunity to thank—as other Members have done—Sir Philip Mawer for all he has done in his nearly six years serving the House as commissioner. Sir Philip has contributed greatly to the further development of the role of the commissioner, through the publication of annual reports and through his contributions to changes in the way complaints are handled by the Standards and Privileges Committee. He has had some difficult cases to investigate. As the House will know, Sir Philip is to become the Prime Minister’s independent adviser on ministerial interests, and we wish him well in that new role.
This is an appropriate opportunity also to thank those involved in the other parts of the House’s system for delivering standards: the Registrar of Members’ Interests—Alda Barry, who is always helpful to Members—and her team, and the Standards and Privileges Committee, chaired by the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire. The sort of post that has been taken up by the hon. Member for North Devon is not likely to mean that people march in the streets demanding that he become the next leader of the Liberal Democrats, and people are not queuing up to thank the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire for his work. However, if they did not do that work, the House would not operate properly. It is important that they do their work and that we have an opportunity to recognise it, given that it is insufficiently recognised outside the House. I pay tribute to them for the way in which they do their work. They get little credit for it, but it is important.
The House will have noted from the latest annual report of the present commissioner, published recently, that the Committee plans in due course to bring to the House a revised guide to the rules relating to the conduct of Members—including the outcome of discussion with the Electoral Commission about the alignment of the House’s registration requirements with those of the commission—and provisions for the reform of the rules on all-party groups. The House will, of course, have an appropriate opportunity to consider those matters in due course.
In conclusion, I once again record our thanks to Sir Philip for his contribution to the work of the House over the years and to improving public confidence in that work, and, in the expectation that the House will endorse the motion, I welcome Mr. Lyon to his new responsibilities from January 2008.
I, too, take this opportunity to recognise the work of Sir Philip and the Committee on Standards and Privileges. Without them the integrity of the House could not be protected. Without their hard work and due diligence the standing of the House and MPs would be affected, and it would be much more difficult to deal with problems. As the report says, Sir Philip’s integrity and impartiality has been recognised. Public confidence, the lack of media headlines on the subject and the fact that there are not too many complaints within the House suggest that he has found a careful balance between keeping the House’s reputation and ensuring the smooth operation of the House’s work.
Like the Leader of the House, I pay tribute to members of the Committee and of the House of Commons Commission, because their work does not have a high public profile—or hopefully does not; occasionally it can. The fact that they get on with their work smoothly behind the scenes makes it easier for the rest of us to operate.
The process for appointing the new Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards appears to be fair, with a proper, open and transparent system of advertising, nominations and interviews. The House of Commons Commission and the interview board seem to have done their work, and I see no reason why the House should not endorse that work by supporting the motion. I welcome Mr. John Lyon to his job for the next five years. The House took the right decision in making the post non-renewable, so that the appointee has clear and transparent independence. I wish Mr. Lyon all the best for the coming years in which he will serve the House and its integrity. Again, I pay tribute to the work of Sir Philip, and wish him all the best in his new career.
I have been on the Committee on Standards and Privileges for only the last year or so, but I would like to pay tribute to Sir Philip, as the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) has done, for the calm, dispassionate and forensic way in which he carried out his duties. I wish him well in his next incarnation, and welcome his successor, John Lyon, who seems admirably qualified. The introduction of the new communications allowance has provided Sir Philip’s successor with a rich treasure trove of new complaints and issues to get to grips with, and I look forward to seeing how that pans out in the years ahead.
I support the motion to appoint John Lyon the new Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, and I echo the comments made by other right hon. and hon. Members. First, I should like to mention the work done by the Committee on Standards and Privileges, chaired ably by my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young). The Leader of the House said that my right hon. Friend’s role—and that of the hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey), who is spokesman for the House of Commons Commission—is not the sort of role that is likely to get people dancing in the streets and crying out, with acclaim, that those who hold them should have more senior roles in their parties or in Parliament. Similarly, the role taken by members of the Standards and Privileges Committee will not necessarily always endear them to their peers in the Chamber, but they all carry out their responsibilities with distinction, and we are grateful to them for their work.
The House owes Philip Mawer a debt of gratitude for the way in which he undertook his role; he has performed it with great distinction. Crucially, he has enhanced the belief, and the comfort that people take, in self-regulation in the House. He undertook his role with impartiality, but with robustness, and dealt with Members of the House with courtesy. I wish him well in his future endeavours, as others have done.
I am pleased to welcome the motion to appoint John Lyon to the position. He has had a distinguished career in the civil service. Throughout that career, he has shown integrity and, crucially, steely determination, as well as a willingness and ability to stand up to Members of Parliament and others. He has an understanding of the House and of the role that he must play as Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. As the hon. Member for North Devon says, John Lyons understands the balance between prevention and investigation. His ability to marry that steely determination and integrity with an understanding of the House will make him a worthy successor to Sir Philip Mawer.
I support the appointment of the new Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, and I want to pay tribute to Sir Philip Mawer. I may have caused him some sleepless nights over the past 12 months, given the large investigation that he undertook into the complaint that my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) and I made about the alleged misuse of Commons dining facilities. It was a complex investigation, and he dealt with it fairly and conscientiously. On a few occasions, I was on the receiving end of a rebuke from him for not getting the procedure right, but even that was done in a courteous and dignified manner. He has set the standard, as the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) said.
We need to keep reinforcing in the public mind the fact that politics is an honourable profession, and that the House has honour. If the Standards and Privileges Committee and the new commissioner keep their high standards, those standards can be raised in the eyes of the public. We too easily become targets for sniping, although all hon. Members whom I know, on both sides, came into politics with the best of motives.
One issue that needs addressing, and which the hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey) raised, is the capacity of the commissioner’s office. The investigation that followed my complaint led to a lot of work for the commissioner, and very early on the new commissioner may have to review the issue of whether he needs extra resources. One investigation can take up a lot of time, and if two or three investigations are undertaken at one time there will be severe pressure, not just on the commissioner, but on his dedicated staff.
Finally, I wish Sir Philip all the best and thank him for his work on our behalf. His new regulations have been adopted by the Administration Committee, but I hasten to tell him that I think that I have found one Member who is in breach of them. However, if I have to submit a complaint, I may well wait and do so to the new commissioner.
I apologise to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and to the House for not being present for the first few minutes of the debate; it started five minutes before I thought that it would. That was a lowering of my standards, for which I ask forgiveness. I support the motion moved by the hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey), and I am grateful for the chance to have learned what my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) said.
There are two or three points worth making, in addition to recognising the merits of the appointee and the way in which Sir Philip Mawer carried out his job. It is worth the House remembering that we do not always have to agree—and indeed have not always agreed—with what commissioners put forward. To take one relatively small example, during the investigation of complaints about Neil Hamilton, the Standards and Privileges Committee explicitly voted not to endorse one of the findings of the commissioner, Sir Gordon Downey. That did not cause a row and it was not done in a sensational way; it was just a matter of consideration of the commissioner’s report.
In the case of the second commissioner, Elizabeth Filkin, I believe that those who write the histories of these matters will notice—I intentionally put this delicately—that sometimes those on what is now the House of Commons Commission intervened in ways that were unjustified. Even if they had been justified, and I do not think that they were, they were unwise. The House of Commons Commission has learned the lessons from what was clearly a series of errors during Elizabeth Filkin’s period as commissioner. For example, in the week before she gave up her post, in the times when there was the possibility of reappointment—I think that I am right in saying that her predecessor had been reappointed, but she was not—it turned out that she had been underpaid by almost a year’s salary. I may have got the figures wrong, but she had done an enormous amount of unpaid work, although some people in authority in the House believed that she did not have enough to do, or was taking too much time to do things. I think that that period has gone, but while I am in the House I shall be vigilant to make sure that it does not happen again.
My final point follows on from the remarks of the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones) about the change in the arrangements for using the House of Commons banqueting facilities, although “banqueting” is a rather strong way of describing what is sometimes a constituency tea party. It is offensive to the people who take part in politics that, as I understand it, a group of women, who may be part of a Member’s political party and who may be active in supporting that Member or may just be members—we want to encourage members of political parties—apparently cannot pay for their own tea and have it arranged by their own Member—
They can. Read the report.
I may reread the report, but as I understand it, that was one instance in which the recommendation made by the commissioner was hardened up. If I misunderstand it, I do not think I am the only one. I hope that I shall be able to put myself right and get my constituents to come up again, as they used to do.
Question put and agreed to.
Ordered,
That Mr John MacDonald Lyon CB be appointed Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards on the terms of the Report of the House of Commons Commission, HC 1096, dated 24th October.
International Development
[Relevant documents: The First Report from the International Development Committee, Session 2007-08, on the Department for International Development Annual Report 2007, HC 64-I and -II, and the Department for International Development Annual Report 2007, HC 514.]
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the matter of international development.
It is right that the House should concern itself with ending the injustice of global poverty, and that it should debate that issue today. I am grateful for the experience, expertise and scrutiny that many Members bring to the issue, not least my right hon. Friend the Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr. Clarke). He has been, as I am sure the whole House will agree, a tireless campaigner against global poverty for many years, and the International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Act 2006, which originally carried his name as a private Member’s Bill, is and will prove an excellent contribution to my Department’s reporting. That Act will help the British people to hold Government to account for promises made, and the Department for International Development’s 2007 annual report, which we have tagged to today’s debate, is the first to be produced according to the provisions of the Act.
Today the International Development Committee published its response to the Department for International Development’s annual report, and I thank the members of the Committee for their detailed consideration of these issues. My Department will formally respond to the IDC’s report in the coming months, but in the course of my remarks this afternoon I will highlight the recent comprehensive spending review settlement and its implications for my Department’s work, highlight emerging challenges that I believe we must address in order to see progress towards the millennium development goals, and briefly touch on the main conclusions of the IDC’s response to the Department’s annual report.
Yet amid all those discussions of funding and financing, of policies and programmes, we must recognise the scale of the human suffering that we are called to address. In a world that is eight times richer than just 50 years ago, every three seconds a child still loses their life simply because they are poor. Every 11 seconds, a person still loses their life from AIDS, an illness that should no longer be a death sentence, for we have the medicine to manage it. Every minute, a woman dies because of complications during pregnancy or childbirth—500,000 women are losing their lives each year simply because they sought to give a life.
Although those figures reveal the scale of the challenge that we face, I suggest to the House that with courage, ingenuity and commitment, real progress can be achieved. In the past 40 years, life expectancy in developing countries has increased by a quarter. In the past 30 years, illiteracy rates have halved. In the past 20 years, 400 million people have been lifted out of absolute poverty. We are close to eradicating the disease of polio from the face of the earth.
Such work has been the mission of the Department for International Development for the past decade, since we brought international development from the periphery of Government to the Cabinet table. We again showed our commitment as a Government to global poverty eradication in last month’s comprehensive spending review. Today marks the first opportunity for the House to discuss fully the implications of that comprehensive spending review settlement for development.
Through that settlement, the Government will provide more than £9 billion of aid a year by 2010, four times as much as back in 1997. That keeps us on track to meet our timetabled commitment—the first such commitment made by a UK Government—to spend 0.7 per cent. of gross national income on aid by 2013. This increase in aid will enable Britain to deliver on our promises to help developing countries make faster progress towards the millennium development goals.
We will double aid to Africa by 2010, as promised at Gleneagles. We will meet our pledge to spend £8.5 billion on education by 2015, providing enough resources to pay for 10 years of education for 15 million children. We will provide £1 billion for the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, to tackle three diseases that together account for 6 million deaths a year. Our contribution of £1.4 billion for the international finance facility for immunisation will help to save the lives of 5 million children by 2015.
The scale of the increase in official development assistance provides new opportunities to tackle disease, illiteracy and poverty, but with these enhanced opportunities come enhanced responsibilities. The IDC’s report today raises the issue of ensuring aid effectiveness while my Department simultaneously reduces administrative costs. I believe that the British people would expect efficiency savings in a Department that received such a generous increase of resources in the comprehensive spending review. They have a right to know that their money is being well spent on their behalf, and the nature of DFID’s work does not, and should not, exempt us from such scrutiny. Indeed, when the very pounds that we spend can mark the difference between life and death, between schooling and illiteracy, it is all the more urgent.
In recent years, while my Department’s overall budget has increased, our overall staff numbers have decreased, yet the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s authoritative Development Assistance Committee review last year described the period as
“a golden age of growth and achievement”
for the Department for International Development. The IDC says that our work in the poorest countries and in fragile states requires particular resources. I can assure the House that we keep such staffing under review. By way of example, I draw the House’s attention to the fact that our staffing in the Democratic Republic of Congo has more than doubled in the past two years, from 18 to 39, and our staff in Sudan has increased from 15 to 27 in the past year.
As I hope my remarks at the Dispatch Box today have reflected, I am determined that the Government’s aid, whether bilateral or multilateral, should aim to deliver maximum impact and represent value for money. So to provide further scrutiny of my Department’s efforts, I am pleased to announce to the House today the appointment of David Peretz as chair of the new independent advisory committee on development impact. Mr. Peretz brings great experience to the committee from his work as an independent consultant and senior adviser to the International Monetary Fund independent evaluation office, the World Bank, and the Commonwealth Secretariat. I have placed details of the membership of the committee in the Commons Library, and Members of the House will note that it contains leading experts on development and evaluation. The committee will meet for the first time next month, and I am confident that it will provide effective scrutiny of DFID’s evaluation, and in so doing help to ensure the continued quality of our aid spending.
Will the Secretary of State kindly expand a little on what the committee will do? Is it to evaluate projects once they have been completed, rather like the National Audit Office, to see whether the money has been wisely spent and how effectively it has been spent, or will it simply confirm that the money that DFID says will go to particular projects has gone to those projects? The House would be greatly helped if the Secretary of State could explain in greater detail the methodology of the committee.
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for seeking that clarification. The committee would in no way prejudice the ongoing scrutiny of the Department for International Development by the National Audit Office. Essentially, it has three purposes. It will determine which programmes and areas of UK development assistance will be evaluated. It will then identify any gaps in the planned programme of evaluations and make proposals for new areas or other priorities, as required. Finally, it will check that international standards are being applied and comment on the quality of the evaluation work.
In line with its role, the committee will operate in a transparent and independent way. The chair will report annually to me as Secretary of State on quality and independence of studies, what needs to be done to improve evaluations and how far the Department for International Development is following up on them. All findings will be published and the committee will have its own website to ensure that that information is made available to the widest possible group of people.
What consideration has the Secretary of State given to greater parliamentary scrutiny of that body and the reports that it produces? Will the Select Committee have a particular role in examining those reports, rather than their going to the Secretary of State and potentially being delayed, not by him, but perhaps by other Secretaries of State?
I am grateful for that ringing endorsement of both my motives and the effects in respect of the receipt of those reports. Of course, it is a matter for the Select Committee to determine the scope of its inquiries, and, indeed, the time scale for its investigations. As I said, the fact that the findings will be published and that there will be a website, which can be accessed by all members of the Committee, means that we can be confident that if the IDC so chooses it can turn the gaze of its inquiry to that matter.
The future of those living in developing countries will not be determined solely by the work of evaluation. It will be affected, above all, by the choices made by the leaders, institutions and citizens in the developing countries themselves. While it is for each society to forge its own path to good governance, we can support them in that endeavour. That is why, under the terms of the comprehensive spending review, my Department will continue to use our aid to support good governance, as set out in last year’s White Paper. In doing so, we will not only help to build more capable states that better serve the poor, as we will also secure our investment in aid as countries become increasingly transparent and accountable. We can help to build up the sustainable governance institutions, such as independent judiciaries, that are vital for long-term development success. We can also support efforts to tackle the corruption that we know harms countries’ development prospects.
In July 2006, my predecessor announced a new £100 million governance and transparency fund to help civil society and the media to hold Governments to account. I can report that there has been an overwhelming interest in the fund and that we have received more than 250 applications from non-profit organisations around the world. In the light of that tremendous response, I am pleased to announce today that we will provide a further £20 million for the governance and transparency fund further to extend our work to increase accountability in developing countries.
Even where governance standards are at their worst, we will not abandon the poor, for that would be doubly cruel. Britain will continue to support the people of Zimbabwe with some £40 million of humanitarian assistance this year, delivered entirely through the UN and non-governmental organisations. I announced recently from this Dispatch Box that we will double our aid to the Burmese people from £9 million to £18 million a year by 2010-11. I am aware that some hon. Members believe that we should commit now to providing more over a longer period, but I do not consider the announcement to be the limit of our spending for Burma in the coming years.
There is no greater collapse of governance than when countries are embroiled in conflict.
I very much welcome my right hon. Friend’s commitment to the good governance programme. I have witnessed it at first hand in Uganda, Kenya and, particularly, in Afghanistan. It is important to stress accountability in countries that are receiving a great deal of aid, so that everyone can see that it is being delivered on the ground to the people who need it. We also need to build the capacity of MPs in those countries themselves to scrutinise where the money is going.
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend’s experience and expertise in this field. I travelled to Afghanistan in August—next week I will be in both Tanzania and Kenya—to see for myself the difference that British taxpayers’ resources can make to the development efforts within those countries. We have shared peer-to-peer review and a whole system of accountability mechanisms directly with Governments, but little proves to be more effective than ensuring that there is a strong and effective Parliament capable of holding an Executive to account. In addition, the strong support of civil society can throw the torchlight of transparency on to expenditure in those countries. That is why I was pleased to announce that additional £20 million today to help assist the efforts of non-governmental organisations in countries such as those we have described.
To return for a moment to the issue of Darfur and Afghanistan, our aid is helping communities that are affected by conflict. Indeed, just last week, President Karzai announced that, thanks to improvements in health care supported by DFID and other donors, almost 90,000 children who would have died under Taliban rule will now survive. The new cross-government stabilisation aid fund, together with the conflict prevention pool set out in the comprehensive spending review, will provide nearly £600 million over the next three years to prevent, manage and resolve conflict. By doing so, we can create the conditions needed for effective state-building and economic development.
The comprehensive spending review will enable Britain to meet its promises on increasing aid for basic services, to improve governance—as we have just discussed— and to reduce conflict. But tackling global poverty of course requires more than simply more aid. I am determined that my Department will build on its successes in aid agency in recent years to tackle the challenges facing developing countries at the beginning of the 21st century. Two of those greatest challenges are how to increase growth and trade and how to tackle climate change. Let me deal with both those issues.
The importance of growth to development is clear. About 500 million people have been lifted out of poverty in the last 20 years alone and 80 per cent. of that poverty reduction has been due to increased economic growth. To increase growth, we must support poor people to maximise their economic activity. For seven out of 10 Africans, that activity remains agriculture. The IDC report today highlights the importance of agriculture to the developing world, to which I now turn my attention.
My Department has committed more than £200 million over the past five years to agricultural research. Our support for research to date has helped to identify drought-tolerant maize, which will help African farmers to increase their harvest by up to 50 per cent. We have helped to develop new rice varieties for Africa, which, in Nigeria, for example, have helped to reduce imports of rice by more than 800,000 tonnes in one year alone. In recent weeks, I have met Kofi Annan to discuss how we can best support his new alliance for a green revolution in Africa to produce further breakthroughs. My Department also provides support for the agricultural needs of rural communities through other programmes such as social protection, land reform and the provision of rural roads. In Malawi, our support for the Government’s fertiliser and seed subsidy programme has contributed to a harvest surplus of 1 million tonnes. In Uganda, we have provided direct budget support to the Government, supporting reforms that have reduced rural poverty in the past 15 years from nearly two thirds of the population to just over one third.
Is the Secretary of State aware of any work to produce cotton seeds that need less water? Cotton is a tremendously thirsty plant. The Secretary of State mentioned a number of other crops, so can he tell us more about cotton?
The hon. Gentleman will have to forgive me, as I cannot give a detailed exposition on cotton seeds. If my ministerial colleague cannot respond in the winding-up speech, I will write to the hon. Gentleman and ensure that he is provided with the information. In a recent discussion on the lead issue of agriculture, officials were keen to stress that we are not only providing £200 million of support for agricultural research, but are highly influential on international bodies that determine what agricultural research should be undertaken. That is consistent with the approach that we want, where we contribute to multilateral funding while also bringing influence to bear. If the hon. Gentleman has any particular concerns about new varieties of cotton seeds, I will ensure that they are passed on directly to officials.
I am grateful for what the Secretary of State has said about the Department’s commitment to agriculture, but does he acknowledge that we have a capacity in agricultural research because of our traditional links with Commonwealth countries, which could be tapped more effectively? When the Select Committee was in Afghanistan two weeks ago, we met farmers who had come out of poppy and were growing melons, maize and wheat, but who received no advice when they developed problems with yields or pests. There was no adequate extension service. Does the Secretary of State not think that DFID could help in training in extension service in a country such as Afghanistan?
The right hon. Gentleman brings his considerable expertise to bear on this question. I have reflected on the issue in recent months in the Department. In a previous era, the United Kingdom gave a great deal of direct support for agriculture through the provision of experts to developing countries. Since we have moved to a country ownership model of development, that has changed. DFID’s work on agriculture and infrastructure has been given a re-emphasis and a redirection.
It is right to acknowledge the continuing priority given to basic services, whether in health, education or water and sanitation. Given the resource base that the Department has now secured, however, I am convinced that an opportunity exists for real thought leadership. That applies equally to growth, where we can provide growth diagnostics and assistance to countries to develop their own growth path, and to agriculture, given the expertise of the research base in the United Kingdom.
In recent months, in relation to agriculture, I have set a challenge to my officials not to seek to replicate in every country a provision that is now deemed outdated, given the country leadership approach. Instead, they should see what better links can be made between the quality of expertise that the United Kingdom still retains, the effective matrix of international research now undertaken in agriculture and the work continually undertaken by developing country Governments, given the overwhelming significance of agriculture in many of their economies. Therefore, the point is well taken.
The Secretary of State is right to identify economic growth as the major driver in ending poverty, as it has delivered many people out of poverty. Is he not therefore concerned about the early introduction of the economic partnership agreements to the six African, Caribbean and Pacific regions, possibly against their best interests? Why the rush? Why the December deadline? Should not we wait to ensure that what we do is in the best interests of those countries, so that we do not destroy the economic growth that could bring more people out of poverty in Africa?
The hon. Gentleman anticipates a point that I was going to make, but I will deal briefly with his substantive point. This week, I have had a long and detailed telephone conversation with Peter Mandelson, the Trade Commissioner, on the issue. Next week, I will travel to Brussels for the General Affairs and External Relations Council, at which economic partnership agreements will be one of the key issues. Also this week, with my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for International Development, in his joint role as Minister with responsibility for trade, I had a discussion with non-governmental organisations from the Trade Justice Movement and related organisations. Economic partnership agreements are therefore very much at the forefront of our minds.
The hon. Gentleman posed a question to me about the urgency. Straightforwardly, the urgency is not set down by the European Commission per se, but the Cotonou agreement has been deemed World Trade Organisation-incompatible, and the deadline of 31 December is of long standing. Simply rolling forward the Cotonou provisions would be WTO-incompatible, and the deadline has been clear.
That being said, United Kingdom NGOs have expressed concerns to me that, notwithstanding the urgency of finding a way forward with each of the ACP countries, the British Government should not resile from our policy commitments of March 2005, when, in a previous incarnation as Minister with responsibility for trade, I was responsible for framing our policies on economic partnership agreements. This week, I have talked those issues through with the NGOs and the Trade Commissioner. I made it clear to him that we continue to want to see the type of economic partnership agreements for which we have long argued—those that can reasonably be understood as development-friendly and assisting developing countries.
It is important, however, to uphold the case, for which the evidence is now overwhelming, that trade, given the right support and context, is a hugely powerful driver of economic growth and poverty reduction. It is impossible to cite a country that has lifted itself out of poverty in the past 40 years without external trade. While I have great sympathy with those who campaign, as I have done, for a fairer set of trade rules, I have little sympathy for some in the anti-globalisation movement who suggest that the quickest way out of poverty is somehow not to see a greater degree of liberalisation and a reformulation of the world trade rules. The challenge is to make sure that we are in the room arguing not simply for free trade but for fair trade. Economic partnership agreements can contribute to that development-friendly goal that we share, and that is why I will make that case in Brussels early next week.
I am pleased to hear the Secretary of State laying emphasis on the importance of a private sector to growth. I hope that he shares the belief that it is important to develop in Africa an indigenous small business sector that lies between foreign investment by multinationals and micro-credit at the lower level. That is particularly important in relation to agriculture, because a lack of credit is one of the things that stops small farmers becoming bigger farmers. Will he talk with the African Development Bank, possibly with CDC, and possibly with, for example, the German bank ProCredit, to see whether more can be done to provide small and medium-sized African farmers with the credit that they need to increase production?
I find myself in agreement with my hon. Friend. The approach in relation to the African Development Bank, the principal regional development bank dealing with that continent’s challenges, is consistent with the approach that I want DFID to take more broadly with the other multilateral institutions within the international system. Given that we have resources to deploy following the generous comprehensive spending review settlement that we have achieved, we should try to provide generous finance. In the coming weeks there will be a decision on the next round of funding for the African Development Bank, and we are giving serious consideration to that. However, as well as providing extra resources, we should aim to exert more influence over the policy choices made by institutions such as the development bank.
My hon. Friend has made a good point about the need for credit to enable small businesses to develop in Africa, but I do not think we should limit our ambitions to the livelihoods of small farmers and traders, vital though that is. We should reflect on the business achievements of Mo Ibrahim, who has been much in the newspapers in recent months following the establishment of the Mo Ibrahim international prize. It is a powerful illustration of the transforming economic effect of Africa-based organisations such as Celtel. The use of mobile phones in Kenya is an example. Celtel has radically transformed not just the connectivity of the continent of Africa, but its opportunities for economic development. Interesting statistics are emerging about the effect on economic growth in the immediate community when Africans are given mobile phones.
Certainly we want to support the livelihoods of small traders and farmers, and certainly we want more provision of credit to allow businesses to be started. However, we should also support the work of multinational enterprises in Africa as well as the development of major international players out of Africa. In recent days I have met representatives of Business Action for Africa, a combination of multinationals working on the continent. Where they comply with the best standards and the international guidelines, many of which we have been central in devising, we strongly welcome their engagement as a means of providing the people of Africa with additional support, investment and opportunities.
In the last month alone I have met Pascal Lamy, Kamal Nath and Susan Schwab, the United States trade representative, and have engaged in conversations with the Kenyan and South African Trade Ministers. In each of those conversations, I made clear that the United Kingdom’s No. 1 trade policy is to deliver the promise of a development round in the Doha development talks. There is little be gained and much to be lost from further delay.
As I have said, we will participate in discussions on economic partnership agreements with the Commission next week through the General Affairs and External Relations Council. We will reiterate our concern to ensure that such agreements benefit African, Pacific and Caribbean countries. However, all the benefits of growth that we have discussed this afternoon, and the opportunity for trade to contribute to that growth, are imperilled unless we also recognise the threat posed to development by climate change, whose effects—feared by many in developed countries—are already being felt in the poorest regions of the world. Lake Chad is no longer a lake but a dust bowl, malaria is spreading to the highlands of Kenya owing to temperature rises, and declining rainfall in Darfur has turned millions of hectares of grazing land into desert.
Today’s report from the International Development Committee rightly raises concerns about the impact of climate change on development. My Department has committed £74 million for research and improving adaptation in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It has also conducted climate risk assessments in countries as diverse as China, India and Kenya, and we are helping to build the capacity of developing country Governments to tackle climate change in the years to come.
Since 2004, the Department has been working in Bangladesh with the country’s Government on a number of climate change projects, including helping communities to prepare for disasters such as flooding which afflict the country all too often, particularly in coastal areas. The new environmental transformation fund, valued at £800 million, will provide further help for developing countries, enabling them to adapt, safeguard their environments and fund low-carbon paths towards growth and economic prosperity. We are also working across Government to press for global post-Kyoto agreements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Bali conference next month will be a vital next staging post on the journey.
Another issue raised in the IDC’s report is the central importance of helping women to achieve the millennium development goals. Only last month, at the World Bank annual meetings, I worked with my Dutch, German and Nordic counterparts to secure language in the communiqué to highlight the fact
“that gender equality and women’s rights are crucial for sustainable poverty reduction”.
My Department set out its commitment in a gender equality action plan earlier this year, in last year’s White Paper, in the new public service agreement and in the 2006 White Paper.
We have underlined our commitment with action. Last month I announced that we would give an additional £100 million to the United Nations Population Fund to support its work on maternal health. The Department has long championed girls’ education. Our support for Afghanistan has helped to get 2 million girls in school, where under the Taliban there were none. My Department has been at the forefront of research into microbicides to give women control over their right to safe sex.
My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has said that the world is facing a development emergency that requires emergency action. The terrible figures that I cited earlier underline that assessment. At the beginning of the 21st century, we find ourselves in a world that remains too unsafe, too unequal and too unsustainable, but we also have the technology to tackle disease and the resources to fight hunger and illiteracy. We have seen progress on all those fronts in recent years. The proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has fallen from a third in 1990 to less than a fifth today. Aid increases and debt cancellation have helped to put 40 million more African children into school in just the past seven years. My Department has provided more than 40 million insecticide-treated bed nets since 2001, saving well over 600,000 lives.
It is not inevitable that 1 billion of our neighbours should live in extreme poverty. The era of globalisation has brought international communication, international travel and international trade. We must now strive together for international justice. We must extend opportunity to the world's poorest to be educated, to be healthy and to fulfil their potential. The challenge in doing so is great and cannot be met by Britain alone, but this Government will ensure that Britain continues to lead in the fight against poverty, as we have done for the past decade.
The Secretary of State has made a most interesting speech today and we welcome the debate. Indeed, we believe that there should be more debates in this House on international development, not least to reflect the huge interest among our constituents in these matters.
It is about a year since the House unanimously supported the International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Bill proposed by the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr. Clarke). It was my understanding, and that, I think, of most hon. Members, that we would have a debate each year specifically on the annual report to which the Bill referred. I know that the Secretary of State has said that the report is tagged to the debate, but, for the future, I hope that the Minister will confirm explicitly that we will have an annual debate on his Department’s annual report.
As virtually everyone in Britain accepts, the imperatives of international development are not Labour or Conservative but part of a British agenda to make sure that our generation’s determination to see definitive progress in the eradication of global poverty is fulfilled. I want at the outset to pay tribute to the work of DFID and the dedication of so many who work in this field in taking forward this British agenda and national commitment.
The comprehensive spending review last month rightly outlined a big increase in aid spending. The aid budget will increase from £5.4 billion to nearly £8 billion in 2010-11. As the Select Committee has pointed out, the impact of climate change will be earlier and more severe for poor countries. I saw this most starkly recently in Bangladesh, where a tiny rise in the water level will destroy the homes and livelihoods of millions of people. We see the effects of climate change even in the conflict in Darfur. It would be helpful if the Secretary of State, on another occasion, set out directly and in some detail the steps he is taking with his increased budget to assist with adaptation and mitigation strategies.
The scale of the increase in aid funding is both colossal and welcome, but it throws into even starker relief the key question that confronts all of us who are passionate about international development: how to spend this money as effectively as possible. As fiscal tightness bites in other areas, taxpayers will demand tangible evidence of results of this spending. That is why the Conservative party, making clear our absolute commitment to reaching the 0.7 per cent. target by 2013, has also made it clear that, in government, we will introduce a powerful and independent aid watchdog to ensure that poor people get the maximum benefit from every penny of British aid.
When John Major was Prime Minister I introduced a Bill to ensure that the sole focus of the British aid programme would be poverty reduction. The Conservative party Whips at that time—I seem to remember that the hon. Gentleman was one of them—made sure that that did not became law, until we got a Labour Government. Will the hon. Gentleman give a commitment that if the Conservatives ever get back into office they will never move away from the poverty focus that is now a legal requirement for the aid programme—that they will not, for instance, return to the aid for trade provision?
I can give the hon. Gentleman the undertaking he seeks—and in doing so I am not making any great news, as the leader of my party has consistently and explicitly made that point.
British taxpayers need to know that their money is directly and incontrovertibly delivering the biggest reduction in poverty and suffering around the world. After months of Conservative pressure, the Government announced that they would establish an independent advisory committee on development impact for the Department for International Development, but on close inspection their proposal is a half-hearted and watered-down version of what we propose. It will merely issue polite reflections on how well DFID is evaluating itself. I sense that Sir Humphrey has been on the case. The Secretary of State might have secured some outstanding people to serve on his committee, but it is not the people but the remit with which we are concerned. I urge Ministers to re-examine the issue and establish a powerful and independent aid watchdog along the lines proposed in the Conservative party policy group report.
We have long argued that the Government are over-preoccupied with inputs and insufficiently concerned with outputs—and outcomes—and I was pleased to see that the International Development Committee, on page 3 of its most recent report, states:
“We are concerned that DFID continues to emphasise inputs rather than outcomes”.
The commitment we all share to increase spending must be a means to an end, not an end in itself.
A growing budget means that there is an even greater need for rigorous independent scrutiny and constant active pressure to raise performance. It is in that context that we share the Select Committee’s concern about staff numbers being cut at the very time when the Department’s budget is set to increase so significantly. Spending more money with fewer people means that there is likely to be direct budgetary support and more multilateral spending regardless of their desirability. It is clearly ridiculous that DFID’s staffing requirements should be determined by a general Treasury diktat rather than the specific needs of DFID’s rapidly expanding budget. The level of staffing in DFID should be determined by the job that we require the Department to do, rather than the other way round. The Conservative priority is clear: effectiveness.
It is vital that the Secretary of State’s decisions on how to divide our scarce resources between the myriad different multilateral agencies is based on thorough, empirical analysis of the effectiveness of institutions in reducing poverty. I am therefore rather concerned that the multilateral effectiveness summaries promised for September 2007 have yet to be published. I hope the Minister will be able to tell us in his wind-up speech when these important documents are to be made public.
The Secretary of State will shortly visit Tanzania. The country is something of a darling of the aid industry, as I discovered when I visited it in September. It is the recipient of the largest British direct budget support, with approximately £105 million paid directly into the Government’s coffers this year. That is a colossal sum, and we must receive an absolute assurance that the money is delivering real results and value for money.
When the Secretary of State arrives, he will no doubt see the twin towers of the Bank of Tanzania rising high above the Dar es Salaam skyline. He will hear the allegations of corruption that have been levelled in relation to the construction of those towers and in regard to senior public figures. He will no doubt be aware of the Tanzania radar deal that his decent and honourable predecessor was forced to defend, with palpable embarrassment, in the House earlier this year.
So I hope that in Tanzania, the Secretary of State will examine direct budgetary support with a critical eye. We all know the powerful arguments in favour of such support—the promoting of country ownership and the strengthening of Government systems—but he must satisfy himself that such money is properly spent, that his officials maintain their objectivity, and that they do not become in-country advocates of direct budgetary support while overlooking the problems with that policy.
We did not hear very much in the Secretary of State’s speech about good governance—[Interruption.] Well, we did not. What happened to the New Partnership for Africa’s Development? It seemed to me that part of the deal with African countries was our giving them large amounts of development assistance in exchange for this new economic partnership involving peer review. That does not seem to be happening in places such as Zimbabwe. What are my hon. Friend’s views on that?
My hon. Friend is of course absolutely right. It is precisely in pursuit of those matters that the Secretary of State is visiting Tanzania next week. We will all listen with great interest to what he has discovered when he returns.
When the Secretary of State is in Tanzania, I hope that he will emphasise that Britain will be clear and assertive in demanding real increases in the quantity and quality of Government spending in priority sectors such as health and education. There can be no concession to doubt and uncertainty in this matter. We owe it to the people of Tanzania and to our own taxpayers to secure clear results from this immense sum of money.
Can the hon. Gentleman confirm whether it is the policy of his Government to support—[Interruption.] I meant to say, is it his party’s policy to provide support to Governments in developing countries? It is incredibly important that we build the capacity of those Governments and their scrutiny mechanisms, so that they can spend the money wisely and account for it. That is the clear way forward. Does his party support it?
The hon. Lady referred to my Government, and I am sure that she is wrong merely on a matter of timing. I can assure her that we fully understand the importance of using direct budgetary support where we can—indeed, I was making that very case—and where we can, the next Conservative Government will certainly do so.
I know that the Secretary of State has studied with interest the proposal that I announced at the Conservative party conference to boost the ability of British doctors and health professionals to work, train and teach in developing countries. Our plans have been backed by leading non-governmental organisations, including Voluntary Service Overseas, the Tropical Health and Education Trust, and Merlin. The Secretary of State will know that working abroad is a particularly intensive and demanding form of training for our doctors, but they return with an expanded set of skills and are better doctors for British patients as a result.
Every doctor I have ever met who has worked in a developing country speaks of the huge benefits, personal and professional, that they have gained, but too often doctors and nurses in Britain face serious obstacles to achieving their aim of making a contribution in poor countries. Time spent abroad is often not accredited and does not help doctors to progress in their careers. Sadly, the Government’s modernising medical careers initiative has made things significantly worse. We Conservatives want to reduce the barriers that British health professionals face when they want to work in poor countries. A Conservative Government will establish a new health systems partnership fund—worth £5 million a year to begin with—that would pay for VSO to organise year-long placements for up to 250 British health workers to work in developing countries. It would pay toward the pension contributions of these long-term volunteers, pay for THET to expand its efforts to link British health care institutions with those in developing countries, and match pound for pound money raised by health care institutions to fund international links and visits, up to a maximum of £10,000 per institution. It would also help to fund an electronic health exchange called HealthBay, where requests for help from the developing world would be matched against offers from developed countries. I hope that the Government will make it a priority to introduce proposals in this area in the near future.
I turn to trade, and the role of the private sector in particular. The Government need to work harder to secure a successful outcome to the Doha round. As the Secretary of State acknowledged, this trade round was always meant to be about development, and much more needs to be done. Conservative proposals for a real trade campaign, set out by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition in the Rwandan Parliament in July, called on world leaders to open their markets to goods from poor countries and to invest in aid for trade to help countries, particularly those in Africa, to tap into the potential of the global market. We believe that the proposals command genuine cross-party support and hope that the Government will embrace them.
Will the Secretary of State tell the House what he and his Ministers are doing to rescue the Doha trade round from the deadlock that prevails? Does he agree that a deal was tantalisingly close earlier this year? What steps is he taking to progress this important agenda?
On the specific question that was put, I can confirm that within the past 48 hours I have spoken to the Prime Minister. He had just had a telephone call with President Lula of Brazil. I can assure the hon. Gentleman that whether it is at Heads of Government level or through the Trade Commissioner, such discussions continue.
With the greatest respect to the hon. Gentleman, may I push him on this issue of his so-called real trade campaign? What would be real about a campaign that implicitly acknowledges that the European Union continues to be the body that is competent to represent the United Kingdom’s interest in the World Trade Organisation, but comes from a party that simultaneously seeks to marginalise its own influence within the European Union? How can one be influential if one is out of the room, as opposed to being influential in it?
The right hon. Gentleman is demeaning his position by indulging in such pathetic party political point scoring. We agree about the importance of boosting free and fair trade, so instead of making these rather silly points, he should focus on the case that I am trying to make.
I ask the hon. Gentleman to address the question that the Secretary of State has raised. It is not a demeaning point, because we all recognise that breaking the deadlock in the Doha round can be achieved only if there is a shift in European Union trade policy. How would such a shift be achieved by a party that does not play a major part in Europe and is not one of the major party blocs in the European Union? That question needs to be answered.
I knew that it was a mistake for me to give way to the hon. Gentleman for a second time. First, he knows that there are a number of different blockages on the Doha round; the position of the European Union was a particular difficulty, but it is now much less so. Secondly, he knows that the support for Commissioner Mandelson’s views—the position of all the parties in this House—is considerable. Britain negotiates these matters through the European Union, rather than bilaterally, and the point that the hon. Gentleman makes is, as I suggested to the Secretary of State, a ridiculous one.
I wish to address the important matter of European partnership agreements. As has been stated, the deadline for African, Caribbean and Pacific countries to sign them is rapidly approaching. My hon. Friend the Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown), the shadow Minister for international development and trade, has just returned from a visit to ACP countries, where he met Ministers and senior officials to discuss these important issues. He will have a number of points to raise if he catches your eye later in the debate, Madam Deputy Speaker. I shall be visiting Guyana next week to discuss these matters with Ministers there. It is most important that these agreements open markets and facilitate real benefits to ACP countries, whose determination to lift their people out of poverty must be matched by support and partnership from the wealthy countries of Europe.
Further to the earlier more sensible comments from the hon. Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley) about the private sector, over recent weeks there appears to have been a welcome recognition by Ministers that economic growth needs to move sharply up the development agenda. I have enjoyed reading the speeches of Baroness Vadera. She argues strongly that growth is essential for poverty reduction, saying that
“without growth, sustainable human development is a largely theoretical proposition. We also sometimes lose sight of the fact that the purpose of aid is to no longer require it. Unchanging long term aid dependency should be a measure of our failure.”
That shift of emphasis may well herald a determination by Ministers to inject more private sector DNA into DFID. If so, that would be a good thing.
I draw the Secretary of State’s attention to the stimulating report of the Canadian Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade, published in February, which makes a passionate call for private sector-led development. It argues that Governments must lower the cost of doing business and create environments that are attractive for private sector growth and investment. Those are important arguments. If the Secretary of State’s change of emphasis promotes them, we will strongly support him.
I come now to the subject of agriculture and the support given by DFID. The Secretary of State defended the Department’s record, and that is fair enough, but I also draw his attention to the excellent passage in the report from the Conservative party’s globalisation and global poverty group that deals with productivity and agriculture. Similarly, I draw his attention to the wise comments in the Select Committee on International Development report published today, which argues that DFID has shifted its focus in recent years away from agriculture. The Committee believes that DFID’s thinking needs to be rebalanced in that respect, and so do we.
The final points that I wish to raise relate to resolving conflict and to fragile states. In today’s report, the International Development Committee argues that DFID does not yet have
“the measures in place to achieve its aim of promoting gender equality across its programmes.”
As I said in the debate more than a year ago on the 2006 White Paper, the Government—notwithstanding the defence that the Secretary of State has given today—still fail to address gender inequality. Women bear the greatest cost of poverty and too many girls do not go to school. Women bear the brunt of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and, of course, they most directly bear the brunt of conflict.
We cannot escape the absolute and direct link between poverty on the one hand and conflict on the other, and therefore the prime importance of resolving conflict if international development is to succeed. The Government are making progress in how they address that inevitably cross-departmental issue, just as the UN is beginning to make some very modest progress in promoting its responsibility to protect. In Sudan, we need to see rapid progress on humanitarian relief, progress towards a political solution and an effective African Union-UN hybrid force.
I have suggested previously that there is much more to be done to promote regional security arrangements and the use of NATO air power, not least in the enforcement of a no-fly zone over Darfur. It is no good the world solemnly embracing a responsibility to protect and thereby winning easy plaudits and headlines in New York, which mean precisely nothing in the camps of Darfur and to the displaced people in Zimbabwe and Burma.
On that note, I am particularly surprised that the Government have yet to accept in full the powerfully argued recommendation of the International Development Committee that aid to Burma should be quadrupled by 2013. The Conservatives have been making that argument now for nearly two years. As I said in the debate on Burma on Monday 29 October, we will honour the recommendation in full as soon as we have the opportunity in government. I invite the Secretary of State, who is not unreasonable on the matter, to reflect further on the proposal.
I hope that when the Under-Secretary of State for International Development, the hon. Member for Harrow, West (Mr. Thomas), winds up, he will update us on progress on the international arms trade treaty. That is a proposal that, as he will know, enjoys the full support of the Conservative Party.
I believe that the fight against global poverty, disease and malnutrition is a cause that unites all parties. We are fortunate to be the generations that have both an extraordinary opportunity and the wherewithal to make a huge difference at this time.
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
I was perorating, but I will give way.
The hon. Gentleman knows that there is a lot of work to be done. He will obviously be aware of the international aid scheme that the Scottish Government are currently operating, particularly in Malawi, which has been resolutely opposed by the Conservatives down here, especially the hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Wallace), who has been vociferous in his campaign against the Scottish Government being involved in international aid work. Will the hon. Gentleman support the Scottish Conservatives in welcoming this work and acknowledge that there is enough work to go round for us all to be involved in?
The hon. Gentleman is wrong in saying that the Conservatives at Westminster have opposed the policy that he describes. I speak from the Front Bench for the party, and I assure him that it has not made the statements that he ascribes to us.
I have no doubt that in the years to come we in this House will marvel that for so long the international community has put up with leaders such as General Than Shwe, General Bashir and President Mugabe. These are people unfit to exercise leadership over their countries and their rightful place is behind bars in The Hague.
The commitment of those whom we represent in this place is stronger now than ever before. It is up to all of us to ensure that aid effectiveness, good governance and an end to the era of impunity are turned from ambitious aims and theories into the practical realities and the delivery of international development.
rose—
Order. May I remind all right hon. and hon. Members that Mr. Speaker has imposed a 10-minute limit on all Back-Bench speeches.
I welcome the debate, especially on the eve of the important events tomorrow involving Children in Need. I thank my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for his kind reference at the start of his speech and the hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. Mitchell) for the things he had to say.
For the benefit of clarity, may I say that look forward to a debate on the report in response to the International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Act 2006? I say that because the Government have a very good story to tell. It is important, particularly in the light of the exchanges—if time allows, I will deal with them—between the Front-Bench spokesmen on devoting 0.7 per cent. of national income to overseas aid. It is extremely important that all Governments are monitored—that the Executive are held to account. I hope that I will not be accused of making party points when I say that the steep decline in the 1980s and 1990s in our progress towards achieving 0.7 per cent. of gross national income is another reason for this House to hold all Governments to account on that objective.
I welcome the Select Committee response, published today, to the Department’s annual report. As we have already heard, it made some interesting contributions. I believe that the Department for International Development is one of the finest Departments of Government. The annual report highlights that fact. I welcome the fact that in the past decade the focus in the House on international development and issues that relate to it has improved immensely. We have seen that the public awareness that that has influenced has itself led to a greater focus on the kind of policies that we have debated this afternoon and will continue to discuss, but also on the achievements on the big issues of aid, trade and debt. There are still problems to be addressed, but there are achievements to be noted, and I believe that the British public have played their part.
One example lies in Bangladesh, which has already been discussed. Once famously described by an official in Henry Kissinger’s department as an international basket case, today the country enjoys an annual growth rate of around 5 per cent. Child mortality has fallen from 133 per 1,000 in the early ’90s to about 75 per 1,000 today. Funding provided by DFID has helped to lift more than 500,000 people out of extreme poverty. That represents progress indeed.
I also want to applaud not only DFID’s clear endorsement of the UN target of 0.7 per cent. of GNI, to which the report responds, but Government’s strong commitment—repeated by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, I am delighted to say—to achieving it by 2013. The Government are entitled to be congratulated on where we are, because Britain is the second largest contributor of overseas aid in real terms. Indeed, if the current American trends continue, we will find ourselves in first place.
I hope later to talk about the role of other nations in dealing with world poverty. However—I say this to all parts of the House—I hope that when the target of 0.7 per cent. of GNI is reached, it will be seen not as an end in itself but as a platform upon which the House can collectively build. I hope that the consensus that is emerging, certainly in this debate, will continue. I hope, too, that the Opposition parties—the Conservative party, the Liberal Democrats and others—will take the opportunity to underline what the Government have made clear: namely, that if and when we reach that figure, we will not go back on it. I hope that we will not see the kind of scenario we saw in the past, with reductions in the figure—in this case restored by us in 2006 to 0.52 per cent., which was the rate in 1979.
It is right that there should be that commitment. For example, HIV/AIDS is still a big problem. To look at the broader picture, 270,000 people in Botswana are HIV-positive. That is in a country of just 1.75 million people, meaning an infection rate of 15 per cent. In the UK, where around 70,000 people are currently infected, that would be the equivalent of 9 million people. HIV/AIDS remains a huge problem in sub-Saharan Africa. We know that 60 per cent. of the global problem of HIV/AIDS applies in those countries. Statistics are not readily available, but it is obvious that we will not achieve millennium development goal 6 in that respect. That remains a challenge to us all.
I welcome the positive aspects of the report and what my right hon. Friend has said this afternoon. For example, Nigeria will receive £52 million for reproductive health and other issues. That might be regarded as a bilateral commitment. Multilaterally, £15 million will go to UNITAID, to help poor countries to benefit from new drugs to treat AIDS and other preventable diseases.
We must take seriously the demographic evidence presented in the report—I refer to page 326 in particular—of the impact of HIV/AIDS on young women. A positive approach to maternal health is clearly of the essence. We cannot continue with a programme that means, for example, that we will not achieve millennium development goal 3, as it does, especially if that creates an impediment to reaching other millennium development goals.
The challenges remain. We must ensure that we are addressing health care problems, that we are providing clean water, that we are taking education—particularly the education of girls—as seriously as we should, and that we are seeking to ensure that the wealth of nations is fairly shared.
The Government are on course with regard to addressing effective governance. For example, they have deplored again and again the fact that so much money—about 60 per cent. of the GNI—is being spent in Darfur on armaments and on what amounts to warfare against a country’s own people.
Today of all days, as we sit here on the anniversary of the birth of Aneurin Bevan, we are entitled, on the basis of our own record, to appeal to other countries to join us in challenging the obscene image of world poverty that we see on our television screens. To those who are unconvinced of the relevance of this argument, perhaps we should suggest that enlightened self-interest might have its own appeal.
The Liberal Democrats very much welcome the opportunity presented by today’s debate. I should like to put on record our congratulations to the Department for International Development on the work that it does. I never cease to be amazed by the scope and range of need in this world, and addressing that is a monumental task. DFID does a good job in that regard. I would also like to thank the International Development Committee for its work in scrutinising the Department. I shall try not to cover any ground that has already been covered today.
As we enter the first full parliamentary Session under the new Prime Minister, who has rightly prided himself on his work on debt relief and international aid, this is an opportune moment to consider the wider performance on development, not just within DFID. I suppose that I expected a bit more of a revolution in the Government’s approach to international development with the advent of the new Prime Minister. He has rightly lectured us on redoubling our efforts to make poverty history. Before he became Prime Minister, he promised that Britain would meet its international obligations in full. In New York earlier this year, he sternly wagged his finger at the world and told the United Nations that the pace of progress on the millennium development goals was too slow. The Liberal Democrats agree with him on that.
Poverty was, however, reduced to a single line in the Queen’s Speech:
“Reducing global poverty will be a high priority for my Government, with renewed efforts to achieve the millennium development goals.”
I am sure that Members on both sides of the House will support that laudable sentiment. But let us consider what the Government’s contribution to the millennium development goals could be, and how it could be better. The lack of clarity and consistency in their approach to development not only inhibits development projects but results in the ineffective use of taxpayers’ money, as Conservative Members have already pointed out.
We can do little about some of the natural disasters, such as tsunamis and earthquakes, that befall the world, but we can do something about what I term the three Cs—corruption, conflict and climate change—if there is the political will and, most importantly, joined-up thinking between the Departments. Those are three areas in which the means to bring about change lie close to hand and close to home.
Corruption adds heavily to the cost of development aid. We should not underestimate the extent of local corruption, which needs local solutions. I was pleased that the Government announced more money for the governance programme, but Britain appears far too closely entwined in far too much corruption. I shall not go into the al-Yamamah deal—the billions of pounds of arms sales to Saudi and the money in Swiss bank accounts. For national security reasons, the Serious Fraud Office investigation was dropped although, thankfully, that decision is to be investigated by the High Court, and BAE’s dealings are being investigated in several countries. We should fully support the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development convention against bribery. We should be seen to support it, rather than trying to wriggle out of its strictures when it suits us.
We were comprehensively compromised by dropping that investigation, at the request of the Saudis. How does that square with our efforts on the millennium goal to promote gender equality and the empowerment of women? I noted with concern the Committee’s findings that DFID has problems in practically implementing the gender equality policy, and it is not alone. At what point did the Prime Minister raise the issue of women’s rights with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia? Was it when he apologised for the SFO getting as far as it did with the investigation? Was it when he was touting for business for arms deals? Was it during the King’s state visit—the highest honour that can be bestowed on a country?
I very much appreciate the idea that we should work constructively with countries where there are fundamental human rights failings. Indeed, our role in the west should not be constantly to hector and castigate developing nations. That would be to risk alienation and push them further away from the values that have brought us relative peace and prosperity; but rolling out the red carpet to give the absolute ruler of a country that is so far from achieving gender equality—
Order. I remind the hon. Lady that we are dealing with countries where we are involved in terms of international development, rather than Saudi Arabia.
I apologise if I strayed too far from the track, Madam Deputy Speaker.
Al-Yamamah is not the only problem. I fully concur with the Committee’s support for DFID’s new strategic objectives, especially the promotion of good governance, but I have to return to a consideration of how we operate in the UK. When the Nigerian dictator, General Sani Abacha, was looting billions from Nigeria, $1.3 billion ended up in 23 London banks, making them a profit at the expense of the neediest people in Nigeria. Much that is honourable and good is done in the City, not least the creation of jobs and wealth, but there is a dark, rotten secret—complicity in financial crime and its concealment.
Offshore tax havens play a key role in corruption, and the vast majority are based in countries closely connected with the UK, because they are Crown dependencies or overseas territories. Many of those financial operations are run by the subsidiaries of major international banks operating in the UK. The tax havens may not be within immediate reach of a memo from No. 10, but there is no doubt that the British Prime Minister wields huge influence. The UK Government must do more to put pressure on our companies, our financial systems and our dependencies and overseas territories.
The hon. Lady is right to focus on corruption. May I ask her to read the report, “The other side of the coin”, published by the all-party group on Africa about 18 months ago? We pointed out that although it was important for the UK to do its part in undermining collaboration with the corrupt misuse of money in Africa, the problem is overwhelmingly an African one. If we create excuses for Africans not to improve their governance, the problem will never go away.
I welcome that intervention and I agree. Nevertheless, it is very hard for us to lecture Africa on corruption when we have some issues to clear up ourselves. I wish that the Government would turn their attention to one of the financial methods that has raised its ugly head and appears to be making a mockery of our own efforts on debt relief: the vulture fund. There has been no shortage of warm words on this subject. As far back as 2002, the Prime Minister, the then Chancellor, told the International Monetary Fund in Washington that
“we need radical reform of the contractual arrangements for debt.”
He was right.
Vulture funds do not tell us who they really are or pay our taxes, but they are happy to use British courts to extract money from heavily indebted countries. I am sure that hon. Members will be as horrified as I was to discover, when I finally obtained the figures from the World Bank, that more than £230 million has recently been reclaimed fully or in part through British courts from developing countries by vulture funds.
Surely, British courts, in the same way as they afford rights and responsibilities to consumer debtors, should act to protect the rights of the poorest nations. We should tell those funds that if they want to use British courts they ought to play by our rules, and then we need to make those rules. We can no longer turn a blind eye, and as legislators we should move to outlaw that practice. I ask the Government to explore ways of negotiating an internationally binding agreement—not a voluntary code, because that is not working—to ensure that companies cannot prey on heavily indebted poor countries.
In the interim, because binding international agreements cannot be created overnight, I would love the Government to start looking at how our national laws can be changed to bar vulture funds from using Britain as a tool to milk heavily indebted poor countries. We need to draw a legal line in the sand between legitimate secondary debt and what is happening in those areas. Perhaps sovereign debt could be held in non-tradeable securities. The Government have many legal advisers and I do not have any, so I suggest that the Secretary of State for International Development and the Prime Minister put their great minds to work on this. We cannot go on being a country that purports to have high standards of ethical behaviour while seeming to condone bribery, corruption and greed. That plea for joined-up thinking and action extends across almost all that we do.
If we turn to the International Development Committee’s findings, we find worrying reports that DFID is, as has been mentioned already, often focused on inputs, not on outcomes. That problem is made even worse by conflicting inputs from other Departments. If we consider the millennium development goal to eradicate hunger and extreme poverty, which is the baseline for all the millennium development goals, we see that a worrying global trend has been undermining what we seek to achieve.
Some hon. Members might recall the Mexican tortilla protests in June, following the reported 400 per cent. rise in the price of corn. The rise was linked to the increasing demand for corn from America, as the Americans increase their bioethanol content for vehicle fuel. There is no doubt that biofuel, when it becomes a mature technology, will have a crucial and significant part to play in the urgent fight against climate change. Parties on both sides of the House are making climate change central to the fight for international development. As soon as bioethanol can be made efficiently from non-foodstuffs and is proved to use less carbon dioxide than it takes to make, biofuel will be at the forefront of the next generation of energy supply. However, given the current state of biofuel technology, foodstuffs are being diverted from human consumption to produce biofuel.
We must question the logic of taking food out of the mouths of the poorest communities on our planet, so that Americans can fill up their sports utility vehicles. I am concerned about the Government’s response to that development conundrum. It seems that we are busily signing the UK up to the EU targets on biofuels, without considering the disastrous consequences that those targets might have in driving up food prices. The Government have said that they are committed, quite rightly, to reducing the number of people living on less than a dollar a day, but what is the use of even a dollar a day when it is not enough to feed a family because of astronomical food price rises? So the evidence of the Government being focused on an input without regard for the outcome is rightly identified by the Select Committee.
The second of the three Cs, climate change, is rapidly becoming the greatest threat, not only to us, but to the developing world, as the reports note. The parts of the globe that have done the least to bring about climate change will suffer the most. As the world’s resources become scarcer, energy and water supplies will become the battlegrounds of the future and will give rise to more conflicts. We have to face up to our complicity in hurting the developing world. I concur with the Committee that mitigation is an urgent task, but we should not give up the game on prevention yet. That means radically and drastically cutting our impact on the globe, and it means developing countries playing their part in terms of their own emissions. We need a powerful climate change Bill with real teeth—I am a bit concerned that the one we are getting has dentures.
I come now to education. The Prime Minister is committed to educating the children of the developing world, but more than half of the 77 million children of school age around the world who are not in school are from conflict-affected fragile states. That damage to education will last for generations. The skills and education to recover from the devastation of years of conflict just will not be there. Some 80 per cent. of the 20 poorest countries have endured major conflict in the past 15 years. Conflict completely wrecks development progress—all that work and funding—almost overnight, leaving a terrible, long and painful legacy.
I was pleased when the then Chancellor said that he would support a special teaching emergency force to go into conflict areas to ensure that children whose family, home and life are torn away by war have the interim support of schooling and teachers. Coincidentally, that was almost identical to my idea for an education version of the Red Cross. I can only assume that great minds think alike, because we do not nick policies in this House. But where is that force? Have the Government delivered on that? Perhaps the Secretary of State will be able to confirm the reports I have heard that, one year into a five-year programme, only £2.5 million of the £50 million promised for the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been delivered. That does not seem enough.
It is worth while reflecting that, when we give aid to a country, it has to be able to use the aid properly. The Congo is a very large country with a very low capacity to deliver anything at the moment. I was just reflecting on the effect that the Government have had on Africa as a whole. Does the hon. Lady agree that the Government have played a pivotal role in the universal provision of education in Rwanda, and other central African states such as Uganda?
Yes, of course I do. I have already congratulated the Department on that and on the genuine commitment to education in the developing world. That is absolutely pivotal.
Nevertheless, I would still like the Secretary of State to come back to me on the point I just made. I understand the difficulties of the spend in the Congo, but that is a very small proportion of what was promised. If we divide £50 million by five, we are looking at £10 million a year. Perhaps the Secretary of State can explain whether we are talking about a capacity-building exercise, or what the issue is in relation to that seemingly slow start.
Education aid can directly intervene and raise the fortunes of people in the too many corners of the world that are blighted by poverty. It comes down to a question of cold, hard cash, and how much we give. We would have expected the first full comprehensive spending review from the new Prime Minister to honour, if not exceed, previous commitments on Britain’s overseas development assistance. It is therefore astounding that, according to my reading—I stand ready to be corrected—there seems to be a bit of backtracking on a previous spending commitment. In the 2004 spending review, DFID proudly announced that the United Kingdom would spend 0.47 per cent. more of gross national income on overseas development assistance in the 2007-08 period. However, in the most recent comprehensive spending review, this figure—on the website at least—appears quietly to have dropped to 0.37 per cent. I am happy to give the Secretary of State the links to the Treasury web pages that show that differential of 0.1 per cent.
Does the hon. Lady accept that of course there is variation because of the specific deals on debt relief, for which she praised the Prime Minister? An example is Nigerian debt relief, which is factored into the figures. Does she further accept that with an average annual increase of 11 per cent. in real terms, our budget will rise to £7.9 billion in 2010-11, and, overall, the official development assistance to gross national income ratio will rise to 0.56 per cent. in 2010? That meets our share of our European commitment, meets our Gleneagles commitment, and puts us on a straight line to 0.7 per cent. of gross national income by 2013.
I thank the Secretary of State for that intervention, because I was about to say that if there was a 0.1 per cent. difference—perhaps he can still explain that to me, as the figure appears on the website—it would put things slightly off track. Perhaps we could examine that later.
Liberal Democrat Members would welcome a renewed sense of urgency in the Government on development. The Committee rightly pointed to the urgent work that is needed at the heart of the Department for International Development to drive efficiency, and I agree on that point, but we need to go one step further. Development can no longer be seen as a silo, and as a foreign affairs accessory that can be trotted out, and sometimes used as a fig-leaf to hide some of the Government’s more contradictory actions.
That is outrageous.
The Secretary of State says that that is ridiculous, but I point once again to the selling of a military air traffic control system to Tanzania for about £28 million, while we were giving it aid worth the same amount. That is contradictory.
Will the hon. Lady give way?
I am only two paragraphs from the end of my speech, but I will give way.
I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s generosity. She seems to be suggesting, perhaps inadvertently, that the aid that is provided is tied. It is already a matter of record in this debate that British aid is now untied. It would be unfortunate if the House were left with the impression that she was suggesting that the significant uplift, which should be a cause of celebration on both sides of the House, will be used for anything other than poverty reduction. Will she take the opportunity to congratulate the Prime Minister on honouring the commitments made at Gleneagles, and on ensuring that the money that is committed and available to DFID and other Departments will be spent on poverty reduction?
I accept that. I was simply talking about joined-up thinking, because when issues such as the situation in Tanzania come to light, they seem to fly in the face of the evidence that the Secretary of State just put before me.
Consideration of what is good or bad for the world’s poorest must be at the heart of the Government’s foreign affairs policy if the Prime Minister is to make good his promise that Britain will meet its international obligations in full. We cannot go on saying one thing and doing another—I am talking specifically about corruption, in the terms that I used earlier. For the sake of the hundreds of millions of people for whom the millennium goals are still a faraway dream, I hope that the Prime Minister—the clunking fist—will, without further delay, turn yet further towards the development cause.
I commend the Department for International Development for its work. As a Member of the Select Committee, and having seen its work first-hand on a number of occasions, I feel that we should be proud of the palpable dedication of many of its staff, particularly abroad. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr. Clarke) for his International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Act 2006, because it helps us to focus our attention on our work on international development, and to hold our Government to account for what they do. That is a strong message to send, not only to people in the UK, but to our partners.
As a number of speakers have pointed out, and as the Select Committee stressed in its report, we need to concentrate more on the outcomes of our interventions, and not simply on the inputs. Since the Gleneagles summit in 2005, a false argument has sometimes been put forward on quantity of aid versus its quality. For the world’s poorest it is not an either/or debate: we need both. As the Prime Minister rightly pointed out in his speech to the United Nations on 31 July regarding the millennium development goal targets, the pace of change is
“too slow; our direction too uncertain; our vision at risk.”
I shall focus on a few areas where the pace and direction of our interventions, as a bilateral donor and as part of the wider international donor community, needs to change. The first area is gender. Time and again the Select Committee has returned to the topic in its various reports as a matter of concern, and I am happy to say that that view is shared by all my colleagues on the Committee, all of whom, by coincidence, are male. The reason for concern is blindingly obvious. Over 60 per cent. of those in absolute poverty are women, and many of them are young girls, but too often gender in development is treated as an added-on issue, rather than core to the way in which we tackle poverty. In aspects of development such as security or private sector development, the issue of gender is rarely mentioned and when it is, there is a tendency to tack it on at the end or just to say that it is very difficult.
We need to view gender in the context of basic human rights, rather than merely as an awkward problem. Girls in particular face a raw deal. They face double discrimination due to their gender and their age, and as a result in many societies they remain at the bottom of the social and economic ladder. They face discrimination even before they are born. It is estimated that 100 million girls and women are missing because of the growing practice of female foeticide in some parts of the world. Girls are less likely to be educated, are more likely to suffer malnutrition, and are more at risk of gender-based violence and forced marriages at an early age.
We need to take a whole-of-life perspective if we are to get to grips with the scale of these problems. DFID has rightly focused attention on schooling and health care, but discrimination takes many forms. Lack of formal birth registration processes entrenches girls’ invisibility. Local and national traditions of lower minimum ages of marriage for girls and the use of child domestic workers effectively lock out their voice from the wider community. Lack of equal rights of inheritance and the creation of status offences discriminate against girls in legal systems and entrench their low economic status.
As an international donor we need to support work that challenges the status quo, creates a space for women’s voices to be heard and supports a strong, consistent call for their rights to be upheld. The need for this is never greater than in so-called fragile states. I am aware that my hon. Friend the Member for Falkirk (Mr. Joyce) hopes to speak later on the situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where the UK is the largest bilateral donor, but I, too, want to add my voice to the call for us to redouble our efforts in that region.
Members may have read reports in The Guardian this Monday about the increase in violence in the eastern DRC in recent months and the shocking statistics in relation to women who live there. Médecins sans Frontières was reported as stating that over 75 per cent. of the rape cases that it dealt with worldwide emanated from this region. We can justly claim that in the DRC rape and sexual slavery have reached epidemic proportions. It is the main form of attack. The many, many stories of absolute barbarity are truly shocking. It is perpetrated by all the various military groups in the region and also by civilians, as society has effectively broken down in many areas after years of the most intense conflict witnessed on this planet. It is believed that 4 million people have been killed since 1998. More than any other conflict, this has become a war against women, yet where is their voice in the current discussions about how we achieve peace?
I recently received correspondence from the platform of Congolese women in the UK, outlining their concerns at the current crisis and calling on the Government, together with members of the international community, to implement a national action plan based on Security Council resolution 1325, seek to restore security and effective demilitarisation, and start to address the causes of the conflict to ensure that a dangerous vacuum does not emerge again. Most importantly, we need to end the total impunity that exists for serious violations of national and international humanitarian law. I hope that the voices of Congolese women will be raised by our Government consistently, and I should be grateful if my hon. Friend the Minister would address these points in his closing remarks today.
The issue of security was also uppermost in our discussions when the Committee visited Afghanistan two weeks ago. Again, although there is a recognition that Security Council resolution 1325 is important, there appears to be little practical implementation. The Ministry of Women remains weak and largely ineffective.
It is of deep concern to me that in respect of the women’s prisons of Afghanistan, we found countless references to women being imprisoned because they did not want to marry the person chosen by their family, because they ran away from home or because they had sex outside marriage. That is an issue that we will address further in next year’s report, but I flag it up today as another example of the challenges that DFID needs to face—and face urgently.
As we work in fragile states, we often find a dearth of functioning civic society for ordinary working women. When we speak about the need to bolster governance, we also need to see how women’s voices can be heard not only at parliamentary level, but at grass-roots level. We need to bolster capacity and representation for women in local councils and allow the space for women’s organisations to grow and develop.
The second issue that I want to raise today is that of environment. It has been the subject of a great deal of debate, and the Government’s commitment to the World Bank fund and to the area of research is welcome. Some people airily declare that it is perfectly feasible to plant solar panels and wind turbines in health clinics and schools throughout remote rural communities as a means of combating the problem. However, we need research and policy development to see how to manufacture renewable technology in the regions themselves at sufficiently low cost to be affordable and to have the reliability and easy maintenance required to meet the environments in which they will be located. That is no easy task and, by definition, it means developing a whole range of skills that could be picked up by large numbers of people. I sometimes think that that is more of a challenge than the inventions themselves. We also need to help low-income countries to retain their low-carbon status, while at the same time being able to invest in areas that will achieve greater economic growth. The capacity for such long-term strategic planning is currently low, and I believe that the UK and other major donors can contribute significantly to this field.
There have been concerns that the funding required for adaptation over the next decade will swamp the existing Overseas Development Administration commitments, so we need to consider now the innovative solutions required to bring in this extra finance. In his report, Sir Nicholas Stern estimated that we need an extra 10 per cent. on top of existing estimates for aid requirement. The UK has been a world leader in innovative funding through the international finance facility and UNITAID.
May I take this opportunity to recommend that Ministers look at the report, launched last week, of the all-party group on debt, aid and trade, of which I am the Chair? The report looked into the possibility of having a sterling stamp duty on all sterling foreign exchange transactions. At a rate of only 0.005 per cent. it would generate £2.4 billion a year. I would like the Government to consider that report and undertake research into whether it could be used as part of a new funding mechanism. As I said, it is not just the quality of aid that is important; we also need more on quantity as well.
I greatly welcome the opportunity to engage in this debate. In the short time available, I thought that I would comment on some countries in which we have been engaged recently as well as on the general thrust of today’s report. I should like to place on the record my thanks to the staff of the International Development Committee for ensuring that the report was available today; that required a degree of effort but has added to the value of our debate.
We have been concerned with a number of countries in the past year. The Secretary of State referred in his opening statement to Burma, and we recently published a report on that country. I want to thank the right hon. Gentleman first for his very prompt response in announcing the doubling of aid and secondly for his indication to the House today that that does not limit the aspirations. After all, we can always talk about money, but the ultimate point is always effectiveness. We all agree that there is a greater capacity for more aid to reach poor people in Burma than has been delivered. We greatly welcome the Secretary of State’s commitment to achieve that.
The Committee was concerned, however, although we understood the reasoning, about the basing of the entire Burma DFID staff in Rangoon. Many of the expatriate organisations supporting the Burmese people in a whole variety of ways are perforce operating out of Thailand. The suggestion that a quarterly meeting with those groups is sufficient and that Thailand is only a plane ride away does not fulfil the need for regular contact. I therefore hope that the Secretary of State will think again about whether a permanent DFID presence in Bangkok might still be necessary and justified, as the Committee recommended.
The Committee visited Pakistan some time ago in the wake of the earthquake. Obviously, more recent events in that country are a considerable cause for concern. Will the Under-Secretary say whether consideration is being given to the way in which aid might be delivered in Pakistan in the changed circumstances? Put simply and starkly, it would be wrong for DFID money to go directly to a President who has suspended the democratic process. The people of Pakistan must not, however, be denied the effective aid that is needed to deal with issues of poverty and development.
My colleague the hon. Member for Glasgow, North (Ann McKechin) has alluded to the fact that the Committee returned two weeks ago from a week-long visit to Afghanistan, where we had the opportunity to visit not only Government agencies, NGOs and our representatives in Kabul, but the field around Kabul—part of the Committee went to Helmand and part of it to Mazar-e-Sharif—to get some idea of the scale and diversity of the challenges facing all the agencies in Afghanistan, from the Government to the people and the international community. The Committee will produce a detailed report, but I do not think that I am anticipating that unreasonably by saying that, difficult and challenging as the situation is, we all recognise that we should be in Afghanistan and that it is a long-term commitment. It is a poor country and our objective must be to give it a chance to develop. The balance between military and civil development activity will probably need to be reassessed, but we will write shortly to the Secretary of State with our interim views, and then publish a detailed report in the new year.
The Committee remains somewhat unhappy about the Government’s policy towards the Palestinian occupied territories. Some of that is history, on which it is probably not appropriate to dwell too long. A huge opportunity was missed, however, when there was a Government of national unity, to provide some kind of continuing support. The Palestinian community is now very divided, and the international community has taken sides, supporting one half and isolating the other. Let me make it absolutely clear that I hold no brief whatever for Hamas, but it was elected by the Palestinian people. If we are trying to build a viable Palestinian state, there is a danger of being part of the process of increasing the wedge and division within and among the Palestinian people.
Let me reassure the right hon. Gentleman. As he will be aware, when the Prime Minister spoke on foreign affairs on Monday evening he indicated his intention that I travel to the Palestinian territories and Israel in the coming weeks. Obviously, we are looking ahead to the Annapolis meeting. As was indicated in Prime Minister’s questions, there is a willingness for financial resources to be committed in support not simply of the peace and reconciliation efforts, but of the economic development needs of those communities. I assure the right hon. Gentleman that the matter is receiving urgent attention from the Government and Ministers.
I am grateful for that. Perhaps this is a subject for a another debate, but I remain concerned that, as things stand, the international community has added to, rather than solved, the problems of the people of Palestine.
Having made those specific comments about countries where we have a direct engagement, one positive story was our visit to Vietnam in the summer. The Committee was impressed by DFID’s contribution and the value that it added to the programme there. Given that we are contributing £50 million a year—a substantial amount—to a country in which we do not have a long-standing record, part of the reason for the visit was to determine whether we were adding value that other donors could not provide. We were persuaded that we were doing that. It is worth placing on the record that Vietnam has the look of a success story in development terms: it has every prospect of making the transition from a low-income country to a middle-income country in short order.
That brings me on to the wider issues of how DFID can deliver effectively the 0.7 per cent., to reach the largest number of poor people in the largest number of countries. The right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr. Clarke) rightly made much of our collective aspiration to reach that target. As our report stated, however, simply saying that we will spend more money to achieve an aspiration is, as I am sure that the Secretary of State will acknowledge, unique to his Department. If any other Minister were to talk in such terms, he or she would almost certainly have his or her knuckles rapped by both the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State, saying “What I want to know is not how much money you will spend, but what you are going to achieve—what the outcomes will be.” I am not suggesting that DFID does not concern itself with outcomes, but I think it reasonable to say that in these unique circumstances it is important for us to persuade the British taxpayer not just that we are meeting United Nations aspirations, but that we are determined to ensure that the money is spent as effectively as possible to deliver poverty reduction.
Although the Committee has made it clear that it understands and accepts the staffing constraints, we are concerned about what the implications may be, and there may come a time when we take a different view. Providing budget support, advice and the detailed range of practical measures that is required is people-intensive. In evidence to the Committee, DFID staff have acknowledged that the present constraints may lead to consequences that are not driven by policy: we may be forced to invest more than we would otherwise have invested in multilateral agencies over which we have less direct control, give more to consultants than would otherwise be appropriate, or reduce the number and range of programmes that we commit to and the number of countries in which we operate. If that happened, the Committee would want to think again about whether the Department should be under such constraints.
I am sympathetic to the case that the right hon. Gentleman makes about the need to review staffing levels constantly, but given that—notwithstanding the success that has been enjoyed—DFID accounts for approximately 8 per cent. of global aid flows, is it not reasonable to seek to increase our commitment to the multilateral institutions, not just because they are currently capable of contributing to poverty reduction but because they are the means by which we can secure influence over institutions which themselves have considerable influence over the effectiveness of aid globally?
Absolutely. Indeed, the Committee is heading for Washington in two weeks for detailed discussions with, in particular, the World Bank to try to ensure that that happens. However, we want DFID and the United Kingdom to exert their influence, which is substantial in the World Bank, to ensure that there is congruence between our Government’s policy objectives and those of the international agencies. If we are satisfied of that, it is clearly appropriate for more resources to go in their direction.
I will incur a penalty in terms of time, but I will give way.
I am extremely grateful.
Is it not the case that what the Secretary of State says is absolutely right, as long as he makes the decision because that is the right thing to do rather than because he has not enough staff to do anything else?
Of course that is true. It is partly why I think we should have a full-time director of the World Bank to ensure that Britain’s influence is given full measure. I believe that we should use consultants and multilateral agencies, but for the right reasons. We should do it because it is the best option, not because we are constrained.
Another important issue that the Committee is about to examine in detail is the role of donor co-ordination, which is becoming increasingly critical. There is a proliferation of agencies, both multinational agencies such as the United Nations and those in individual countries, all trying to do their own thing. If there is no co-ordination, it is impossible for the Government of a developing country to deal with receipts of aid and development on such a scale. At a recent seminar, Louis Michael said that in Tanzania there were more than 600 health projects worth less than €1 million, emanating from a variety of organisations in the European Union. He may have his own empire to build, and when he says that he would prefer a single project worth $600 million he probably intends it to be under his direction, but his point is valid. How on earth can Tanzania deal with 600 agencies rather than one? The same applies even to national donors.
We certainly believe that greater co-ordination is necessary. Afghanistan is a clear case in point. The British Government, including DFID, play a very constructive role in trying to promote that degree of co-ordination, and to encourage the development of a simpler and more transparent route for the delivery of aid. I personally commend the Department for doing that and urge it to do more. It may be that as our aid budget rises and our influence and clout as a development provider increases, we have more success. The Committee will explore the extent to which there are potential partners for that kind of co-operation and co-ordination.
I conclude by saying that it is fair to say that the Department for International Development may well turn out to be the greatest achievement of the Labour Government. The untying of aid began in principle under a Conservative Government, but it was certainly not completed. Even if it was not universally agreed at the time, the clear separation into two Departments, with poverty reduction as the overwhelming strategy, is certainly universally accepted now and is the right way forward. It creates tensions and debate as to how we deliver effective aid and whether we can still advise middle-income countries, but it is the right model. It is important to ensure that aid and development are delivered for their own sake, not as an instrument of foreign policy. As long as that is the case, I am sure that it will carry the widespread support of the British people and of their tax budgets.
I want to begin by congratulating the previous and current Secretaries of State for International Development, and indeed the Prime Minister, on the immense progress made on debt relief and poverty eradication through pro-poor policies and increased overseas development assistance.
I especially welcome the additional £100 million for the United Nations Population Fund announced at the recent Women Deliver conference. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr. Clarke) on successfully promoting the International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Act 2006, which makes an important requirement: that the Secretary of State report annually on expenditure and on the breakdown of international aid and, in particular, on the progress towards the target of 0.7 per cent. of gross national income. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, North (Ann McKechin) that that sends a strong message of our commitment, as well as setting a good example.
I am sure that hon. Members on both sides of the House agree that among the major causes of poverty in developing countries are poor maternal and child health, the status of women and HIV/AIDS. It is widely recognised that reproductive illness and unintended pregnancies detract from economic development, whether by weakening or killing adults, by disrupting or cutting short the lives of their children or by placing heavy financial burdens on their families.
Sexual and reproductive health and rights also deal with poverty and development in a much wider context. The ability to exercise the rights and freedoms of choice brings self-determination, which in turn has a direct impact on an individual’s ability to emerge from poverty. Poor reproductive health accounts for over 40 per cent of diseases suffered by women. One in 20 women in Africa die from pregnancy-related causes. Unsafe abortion accounts for 13 per cent. of maternal deaths.
Fertility is highest in the poorest countries as well as among the poorest people in the developing world. It should be no surprise that countries with the highest levels of unmet need for family planning and reproductive health services have not only the highest maternal mortality but the highest population growth. According to the environmental sustainability task force, unmet family planning and sexual and reproductive health needs, together with health education and gender equality issues, must be addressed with policies and programmes that slow population growth and realise synergistic improvements.
At a national level, fertility reduction and improved maternal health may enable accelerated social and economic development. Conversely, the absence of sexual and reproductive health and rights undermines social and economic development. Yet it is well known that if all the available condoms in Africa were evenly distributed, each man in Africa would receive only three or four per year. There is a huge gap between the demand for condoms and other contraceptives and the funding available. The recent report on population growth and its impact on the millennium development goals by the all-party group on population, development and reproductive health concludes that the MDGs are difficult, if not impossible, to achieve with current levels of population growth in the least developed countries and regions.
Gender equality is a great catalyst for development. Empowering people to exercise their rights over fertility and to choose the number of, and spacing between, their children is a powerful tool in the fight to reduce poverty. The gender and education taskforce has identified seven priorities for action to achieve gender equality. One of them is ensuring access to sexual and reproductive health and rights.
One African in two is under the age of 20. More than 40 million of Africa’s children are not in school, and two thirds of those are girls. Families with fewer children spaced further apart can invest much more in each child’s education. Children in large families are likely to have reduced health care, and unwanted children are much more likely to die than wanted ones. When mothers live, their children are much more likely to live. When mothers are healthy, their children have a much better chance of being, and staying, healthy.
I am sure that all Members would agree that the empowerment of women is a development end in itself. Removing the obstacles to women exercising economic and political power is also one of the most important ways to end poverty. Reproductive health is part of an essential package of health care and education. It is a means of attaining the goal of women’s empowerment, but it is also a basic human right.
Our approach to HIV/AIDS should be based on an integrated model of sexual and reproductive health care to reduce maternal mortality and to combat HIV and AIDS. The millennium project’s HIV taskforce has stated:
“The fight against HIV/AIDS, and the broader struggle for reproductive health, should be mutually reinforcing.”
It follows that national Governments should incorporate universal access to reproductive and sexual health services and information as an integral part of their AIDS responses.
Last month, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the text of the new millennium development target on universal access to reproductive health and related indicators under MDG 5. That outcome is a huge success for millions of women, men and young people throughout the world, but we must ensure that the new target is fully integrated into the future implementation and monitoring of the MDGs. I hope the Minister will be able to tell the House how DFID will ensure that recipient Governments incorporate the new target and indicators within their national development plans.
DFID bilateral expenditure on sexual and reproductive health and rights is a little difficult to track. That is, in part, due to budget support and SWAps—sector-wide approaches. In terms of general budget support, DFID estimates that 5 per cent. of the budget will be spent on HIV and AIDS. However, there is no similar sexual and reproductive health estimate. Is DFID planning to make an estimate of what percentage of general budget support will be spent on sexual and reproductive health and rights—and if not, why not?
Details of DFID’s funding to UNFPA and other sexual and reproductive health organisations, such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Marie Stopes International and Interact Worldwide, are readily available, and the additional £100 million over five years to UNFPA will help to prevent many unwanted pregnancies and make childbirth much safer. That money will enable UNFPA to provide support to Governments in Africa and south Asia, and to provide more condoms, contraceptive pills and advice on better sexual health to many poor women, girls and men. I understand that the final stages of the five-year agreement between DFID and the IPPF will be completed this week.
DFID is in the process of updating its HIV/AIDS strategy, which I hope will further strengthen the links between sexual and reproductive health and rights and HIV/AIDS. I am looking for reassurances from the Minister that if a new spending target is agreed for HIV/AIDS, a target for sexual and reproductive health and rights will also be agreed. DFID’s 2006-07 direct bilateral expenditure targeting reproductive health—some £24.1 million—is not insignificant, but it is rather discouraging compared with the direct bilateral expenditure targeting HIV/AIDS, which is £104.2 million. Perhaps a spending target on both HIV/AIDS and sexual and reproductive health and rights would ensure equilibrium and increased support for system strengthening.
In finishing, I want to remind the House that the hardest millennium development goal to reach is MDG 5—
Order. The hon. Lady’s time is up.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Calder Valley (Chris McCafferty), who I am sure would have a lot more to say if time permitted. I was particularly impressed with her comments on millennium development goals 4 and 5, and I look forward to the Minister’s response.
I am passionate about international development largely through an accident of history. I was appointed to a job in Africa in the early 1990s and stayed in several different African countries for a number of years. I also have the privilege of serving on the International Development Committee. Despite an increase in the number of postcard campaigns, the general public still do not connect with international development. I do not want to appear to be trivialising this debate, but recent programmes such as “Long Way Down” with Ewan McGregor present a more human view of Africa. All too often, people think back to the 1980s and to images of a starving, pot-bellied Ethiopian, rather than seeing countries and a continent that are much more entrepreneurial now, and which have a lot stronger future and will develop and grow over time. Aid and the good work that DFID does are really only a precursor to countries standing on their own two feet.
All too often, politicians have to deal with very big numbers and £6 billion is a mind-bogglingly big number, but the figure that focuses my attention is 250,000. This June, I went to Rwanda with Christian Aid and Oxfam. As I looked out across what appeared to be a normal, average African capital city—I do not mean that in a pejorative sense—I was standing on the site of what was a mass grave of 250,000 people. That highlights graphically the need for that £6 billion and for a commitment to the figure of 0.7 per cent. of gross national income, on which there is now a strong cross-party consensus.
Now that we have that consensus, we need to move away from talking about big numbers. As the Select Committee said, we need to go beyond talking about inputs and outputs in the financial sense, and talk about outcomes. I am glad that the Secretary of State talked about inputs in the sense of meeting the Gleneagles targets in Africa, but we need to go beyond that. We need to go beyond visits to other countries by the Select Committee and saying, “Look—this is what DFID money has done; it is has provided this well and this school.” We need to go beyond outputs and to look toward the long-term outcomes for such countries.
I am critical of the fact that DFID and the Foreign Office look at the short and medium term in such countries, rather than at the long term and the generation of growth. I must admit that when Baroness Vadera was appointed to her role, I was a little sceptical, given press reports of her involvement in the transport and rail sectors. However, my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. Mitchell) read out a very interesting quotation that filled me with optimism. If that is the direction that the Government are taking, I have a little more cause for optimism that I did before I entered the Chamber.
I turn to the structure and performance of DFID. The previous Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Leeds, Central (Hilary Benn), was fabulous in the role, and I also have great respect for the Under-Secretary of State for International Development, the hon. Member for Harrow, West (Mr. Thomas). When the new Secretary of State came on board, I was concerned, although I was pleased that he had the Prime Minister’s ear. Now that we have moved beyond the period of a possible general election, DFID is getting the single focus that it needs and deserves from the Secretary of State.
I am pleased to hear that the Secretary of State meets his counterparts in the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence, without civil servants, on a regular basis. That is essential for international development. We cannot go back to the bad old days when the Foreign Office was not even talking to DFID at Secretary of State level. The relationship between those two Departments is essential, as is the relationship with the Ministry of Defence, which the Select Committee saw in Afghanistan.
On the role of business in development, it is essential that aid is seen only as short term, and we need a greater degree of focus. While DFID as an independent Department is right in giving that greater focus, greater integration with other Departments is needed to encourage business. Despite what Ministers have said, I am disappointed about the international progress on economic partnership agreements and the slow progress on the Doha round. This is not the western world saying that it believes in free trade; all too often it is the Americans who do not deliver and who are incredibly protectionist. In fact, some sources indicate that subsidies provided to western farmers cancel out entirely the aid budget from elsewhere around the world. That is a truly shocking comparison. While we say that we care and that we are giving money, we are effectively taking it away with the other hand.
I commend the work of a number of non-governmental organisations, particularly management accounting for non-governmental organisations—MANGO. All too often, we look at NGOs that provide direct support, but sometimes the nitty-gritty of supply-chain management is much more important. It is slightly less sexy than putting a doctor in-country, and does not provide as good a photograph as a retired bank manager or retired accountant working in Malawi or Ethiopia, but it can be incredibly effective.
I shall give way to my hon. Friend, who has had great experience in Rwanda.
I appreciate that comment. Does my hon. Friend recognise the good works of groups such as the Portland Trust, which supports small businesses through microfinance? Does he acknowledge the important role that the voluntary sector plays in such provision to support developing communities?
I fully support that. Indeed, I would extend such an approach and encourage the Secretary of State to examine ways of providing assistance and tax arrangements that make it easier for business people and civil servants to take a career break and spend a year, or slightly longer, volunteering. I am talking not just about the typical periods of volunteering at the beginning and end of people’s careers, but about people sharing their unique experiences in the middle of their careers.
Aid is a widely abused term. It covers the short-term and humanitarian aid, which addresses basic survival, and the medium-term aid of building basic infrastructure and institutions. One area where DFID does not perform well is long-term aid—the hand-holding for democracies and for basic institutions. All too often we say to countries, “Tick your boxes. You have got your elections, and some form of democracy and constitution. You can get on with it now that you have the basic infrastructure to continue developing and growing.” All too often, it is not that simple.
Moreover, we have still not done enough on the Paris declaration on aid. Professor Mick Moore, a fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, has written:
“The average bilateral aid donor gives aid to more than a hundred countries, and therefore distributes it in tiny scattered packets. Would you entrust your business to a lawyer known to be handling a hundred cases in any one week?”
A strong case can be made that we should specialise, so that we can do more with fewer countries. In theory, the EU should be good at that but, in reality, it is probably one of the least co-ordinated or efficient donors. The UK and other international donors are directing more money to poor countries, but the EU, under the auspices of aid, is spending more on middle-income nations. The EU’s aid budget was not signed off this week—again—so the UK, through the good offices of DFID, needs to do more. The Department is widely praised for its expertise in-country, and it is farcical for our Government to impose a manpower restriction on it simply because of a head-count requirement dreamed up by some Treasury bean-counter or politician.
That is wholly inappropriate but, even so, the DFID motto of “doing more with less” is somewhat disingenuous. The Department is trying to do more with more—more outcomes and outputs achieved through more inputs of money, but with fewer staff at head office.
I wonder whether I have spotted an inconsistency in the arguments presented by the hon. Gentleman, and earlier by the hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. Mitchell). The proposition appears to be that a sceptical approach should be adopted to increased expenditure that is not matched by definable outputs and outcomes. I do not disagree, but the argument for more manpower at DFID does not seem to be attached to any particular outcome.
I am grateful to be able to clarify that I am not arguing for extra manpower. I am simply saying that it should be a possibility, given that the overall administrative costs of delivering good outcomes are likely to increase. For instance, Paul Collier has said that our overall administration costs will rise as we put more money into difficult development schemes. I do not want DFID to be constrained unnecessarily by imposing budgetary support requirements or making it resort to multilateral organisations, when it could employ extra people. One option would be to take on staff from other agencies, but I should much prefer European countries to be able to pool resources in-country.
For example, when the Select Committee visited Ethiopia we found that the European agencies represented there could not say how much the EU as a whole was spending on the development of water resources. All the agencies were supposed to share that task, but each one was willing to talk only about its individual responsibilities.
I turn now to the question of conflict. What should happen after conflicts have ended is talked about a lot in development circles, and DFID’s post-conflict resolution unit is top-notch. I have been very impressed with the members of that unit whom I have met, but the unit’s work is rather like locking the stable door after the horse has bolted. How about setting up a pre-conflict unit, and placing greater focus on conflicts as they take place? A pre-conflict unit would make it easier to spot which countries are at risk, and enable assistance to be spread more widely. It would also mean that interventions to try to undo the damage being done would not have to be made while a conflict was ongoing, as has happened with the provincial reconstruction teams in Afghanistan.
I am almost reluctant to give credit to Opposition Members, but those who have contributed to the debate have made some good points.
I want to concentrate on the eastern Congo region. Members of the all-party group on the Great Lakes often visit central Africa, including all parts of the Congo, the Great Lakes, Rwanda, Burundi and northern Uganda. I should like to make a few points about the situation in eastern Congo. The Minister may be able to make a few comments on it, and in particular tell us what comments he may be able to make at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Uganda.
I shall not deliver a history lesson—many hon. Members know more about it than me—but eastern Congo is a crucible of activity that has been affected by what has happened in the surrounding countries, notably the Rwandan genocide in 1994. More recently, we have had an election in eastern Congo. The DRC Government do not have the capacity at this stage—far from it—to ensure that their writ is applied across the Congo. There is a particular difficulty with a general called Laurent Nkunda, who was supposed to have integrated into the DRC army, but has chosen not to. About 360,000 people, by some estimates, have been displaced by the current difficulties in northern Kivu. Charles Murigande, the Rwandan Foreign Minister, has rightly drawn attention to the fact that there are issues for the Tutsis across in the east, and Nkunda sees himself as their guardian angel. There are issues that we should recognise in that department, notwithstanding the importance of recognising the right of the—remarkably, in many ways—democratically elected Government in the DRC to ensure that their writ runs. General Nkunda has chosen for the moment to set himself up as a rival power in the land. He has the kit and the people to enable him to do that. I understand—the Minister may have other news—that there is a possibility that Nkunda might be encouraged to take a sabbatical, if I can put it that way, and go off perhaps to South Africa for a year or two so that his absence could enable a solution to be reached with his followers. That is a major issue.
I know that the Government are not in a position to wave a magic wand and sort this out, but helpful comments can be made by the UK Government. Certainly, the Governments of the region listen. I guess that it is also important to reflect on the relationship between DFID and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Ministry of Defence. That was mentioned earlier. The man in the news at the moment, Lord Malloch-Brown, has been in the news for all sorts of reasons, but he is seized of the issue in eastern Congo. We had a meeting with him just last week. His expertise in international development, as applied through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, is a positive benefit. Indeed, Baroness Vadera was in eastern Congo only last month.
Another issue for eastern Congo security is a chap called Joseph Kony, who runs a brutal, horrid organisation called the Lord’s Resistance Army. His organisation has effectively been displaced from northern Uganda by President Museveni, but it remains a considerable problem. I have met, and many colleagues here no doubt have met, members of the Achole people, who come to the Commons from time to time to lobby. They live in northern Uganda and have benefited from a ceasefire that has applied there for some time. They are the ones who would suffer most if that ceasefire were to cease. It is important that the right messages are sent to President Museveni at CHOGM.
There are things that we can do to move towards resolving the situation, not least dealing with the five International Criminal Court indictees. One is dead and one may recently have died. It seems that Vincent Otti, the second in command of the Lord’s Resistance Army, may have been killed a couple of weeks ago. There is some dispute. Joseph Kony is certainly disputing it. Perhaps that is one way to solve the problem of the indictees. They are perhaps down to three; perhaps they could sort the problem out for themselves.
In the meantime, the fact is that the writ of the ICC has to run. There can be no question of cancelling indictments, but it may well be that some local justice solution within Uganda, which President Museveni is keener to find now, can be arrived at. Of course it has to be up to the local parties, but there is a desperate need to sort the situation out. It overspills into eastern Congo.
On security, my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, North (Ann McKechin) mentioned gender and violence against women in the eastern Congo, which is of course the most hideous thing—more hideous than anyone can really imagine without experiencing it. DFID funds a hospital called the Panzi hospital, which many hon. Members have visited, which exclusively treats the female victims of violence in the eastern Congo. It is a marvellous institution and a good example of an outcome on the ground that is the result of considerable investment by DFID, and the people there certainly benefit enormously from it.
The one other issue that I want to mention briefly is transparency. I am an enormous fan of any country that wants to put many billions into African economies, particularly into what we might call more viable economies, such as Rwanda’s—the hon. Member for Rochford and Southend, East (James Duddridge) mentioned Kigali, and he has more expertise then me—which is beginning to develop industries such as the communications industry. One can imagine investment going into those industries and delivering returns in due course, which must be the ultimate objective of aid. The Chinese Government are investing in a big way throughout the African continent. They are giving a loan of $5 billion to the Congolese Government, which is very welcome. Right hon. and hon. Members will know that some of that aid will return to China, because the recipients will use Chinese labour and Chinese materials, but that is a moot point. We should see the glass as half full rather than half empty.
I have been in contact with a number of mining and other companies over the past few years that do a lot of business in Africa, although not necessarily in the DRC at this stage, because of the security situation. Large international corporations increasingly have a responsible approach to dealing with countries in Africa, not least because if they did not have sensible corporate social responsibility strategies, they would suffer in public affairs terms, they would not do as much business and their share prices would fall.
However, although I welcome without hesitation the large investment that the Chinese Government are making—I understand that the UK Government are in close liaison with them about the good work that they are doing in Africa—a concern remains, justifiably or otherwise, that some of China’s large-scale investment is not of the most transparent nature. Hon. Members have talked today about DFID’s correct instinct to examine outcomes and measure outputs, but we can see the effects that we are having. We have a considerable number of devices to ensure that we achieve a fair degree of transparency and that the money does not go to all the wrong places, as it used to. Presidents Kabila and Kagame are a new breed; they are not the same as the Mobutus of old. At the same time, if there is a lack of transparency in the large-scale aid packages going to developing countries such as the DRC, the whole system is naturally brought into question in the public mind.
To conclude, although we all recognise a considerable commitment among our constituents to development aid, it seems to me—I could well be wrong; I am wrong on lots of things—that the reality is that there is no enormous political benefit to be had from ramping up DFID expenditure. We do it, and we are supported by the Opposition, because we think that it is the right thing to do. Broadly speaking, my constituents support it, but they will also say that charity begins at home. It is therefore important that ramping up DFID expenditure to at least 0.7 per cent. is seen as exactly the right thing to do, regardless of who is in power.
I begin by paying tribute to the numerous groups in my constituency that regularly beat a path to my surgery door to impress upon me the need to go further and faster in matters of international development. It is a source of pride to me that the largest town in my constituency, Leighton Buzzard, recently became a Fairtrade town. I am pleased to have played a small part in helping to achieve that status. I should also like to pay tribute to groups such as Dunstable Churches Together and the St. Mary’s justice and peace group, who have come to see me about these issues on a regular basis in recent years. I have not always agreed with their every policy proposal, but I am in complete agreement on the objective that we all share, namely the reduction of global poverty.
This afternoon, I want to be quite laser-like in focusing on the worldwide cotton industry. I want to do that because 99 per cent. of the world’s cotton farmers are smallholders based in the countryside in the poor, developing world. Cotton still provides about half of the world’s fibre requirements, and it is an enormous pity that the United States last year provided some $4 billion in subsidies to its own cotton producers, the result of which was severely to restrict access to the US market for cotton growers in the developing world and significantly to push down the global price of cotton. This has had a devastating impact on cotton growers in those countries.
There are other, more serious, issues that I want to draw to the attention of the House today. The next one is that of forced child labour in the production of cotton. It is particularly poignant that we should focus on that subject today, given that this year we are celebrating the 200th anniversary of Wilberforce’s abolition of the African slave trade. In Andhra Pradesh in India, about 100,000 children are documented as having been forced to work for up to 13 hours a day for no more than 50 US cents a day. In west Africa, where 40 per cent. of the value of the exports relates to cotton, there is evidence of considerable child trafficking in relation to the picking of cotton.
In Uzbekistan, about which I am particularly concerned, there are reports that between 200,000 and 450,000 children, many as young as seven, are being forcibly taken out of schools, bussed into the cotton growing areas, made to sleep on mattresses, often at the side of the road, and forced to pick cotton, for which they are paid no more than 2p a kilo. I am not making this up; I have seen evidence of it with my own eyes. Hon. Members might have watched the BBC “Newsnight” report on 30 October. I pay tribute to the courageous journalist who went into Uzbekistan under cover. I am not sure whether the Under-Secretary saw it.
He will have seen the pictures of soldiers with rifles standing by the children getting on to buses outside empty schools. What has this got to do with us? Quite a lot, really, because Uzbekistan is the world’s second largest exporter of cotton, and about one in four garments in the United Kingdom will have some Uzbek cotton in them. So we are probably all involved in some way.
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we need to find a way of protecting the traditional weaving and spinning industries that have been severely damaged by the international trade agreements on cotton? Those agreements are another aspect of the issue that he is describing.
The hon. Lady is right, and I will come on to that in a moment.
In Uzbekistan, there is also evidence that teachers have been forcibly taken from the schools to pick cotton. There is even evidence that this has happened to doctors.
What can we do about this? The European Union buys one third of the entire Uzbek cotton crop. It is not good enough for the European Union, the British Government or anyone else to say that the Uzbek Government have signed the International Labour Organisation’s forced labour conventions Nos. 29 and 105. What is the EU-Uzbekistan human rights dialogue doing about that situation? Is the EU just accepting the word of the Uzbek Government? I probably do not need to remind Members that as recently as May 2005 that Government brutally butchered large numbers of their people, including women and children, when they went out on the streets to protest. It is no good the EU having the power as a trading bloc to negotiate on our behalf if it does not take up such serious issues, and when the Minister replies I would be grateful if he would address that point. If we are doing such a large amount of trade in cotton produced by the forced labour of children taken out of school it is a subject that I and other Members will take very seriously indeed.
I think I am correct in saying that technically Uzbekistan is a middle-income country. There is an increasingly large number of very poor people in middle-income countries—indeed, soon many of the poorest will be in such countries—but because we have pro-poor budget policies we do not always engage much in development programmes in those areas. Does my hon. Friend think there is an issue about how we connect with poor people in countries whose commodities and minerals mean that they are technically middle-income countries?
I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend, who has raised a valid point that I hope will not be lost on DFID. In international development, I hope we are concerned with poor people all over the world, whatever their situation; just because there are some extremely rich people in the Uzbek Government, due to their oil assets, we should not lose sight of the rural poor and the children who are forced to pick cotton, as I described earlier.
The solution lies not just in the trading policies of Governments, or with the EU or the United Nations; it lies with us as individuals, too. I was delighted when a little while ago my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. Mitchell) wrote to every Conservative Member encouraging us to use fair trade products, such as tea and coffee, in our offices. I already do so in my offices in my constituency and the Commons and in my home.
We tend to think of fair trade only in terms of products such as tea, coffee, bananas and chocolate, but there is an embryonic market in fair trade cotton. It is less than 1 per cent. of the entire UK cotton market at present, but the fair trade organisation is optimistic because the figure is rising fast. I understand that fair trade coffee is 7 per cent. of the total UK market, so there is clearly more that can be done.
If people were fully aware of the way that cotton is produced and of the consequences for those who pick it, there would be more concern to put pressure on suppliers. Overall, the consumer is king, so it would be a powerful way to do something about the appalling conditions that I described.
In international development terms, it is true that a sustainable environmental policy is key to sustainable economic development. As I said in an intervention earlier, cotton is an extremely thirsty crop, and the cotton industry in Uzbekistan has brought about one of the world’s greatest environmental disasters—the virtual drying up of the Aral sea, which is only 15 per cent. of its former size. That has had a devastating impact on people and industries in the surrounding area. We need the turquoise revolution to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) referred in his report; we should use harvested rainwater and drip-fed irrigation to grow more drought-resistant and faster-maturing crop varieties that are suitable for semi-arid areas.
All over the world, a tremendous amount of pesticide is required to grow cotton. That matters; figures show that about 20,000 people in the developing world die every year from the $2 billion-worth of pesticide used to grow cotton. About 1 million people require hospitalisation as a result of pesticide use, and there are perhaps up to 5 million cases of people’s health being adversely affected.
I have seen a small piece of good news in the International Development Committee’s report, which says that DFID was involved in a project in India that halved the amount of pesticide use, while leading to an increase in production—so there is some hope there. However, some of the chemicals used are extremely strong. Aldicarb is the second most common cotton pesticide. It is, in fact, a powerful nerve agent and a teaspoonful would be enough to kill an adult. In 1995, in Alabama, endosulfan was responsible for killing about 250,000 fish when it got into the local freshwater supply.
The use of chemicals does not stop there. Coming back to the point made by the hon. Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble) in her intervention on me, there is an issue with the further use of chemicals in the rotor spinning machines that are used to turn cotton into yarn that can be used for material. Many extra chemicals, such as formaldehyde, are used to turn cotton into a soft enough material, and the organic cotton campaign is keen to do something about that issue.
I should be grateful to the Minister if he particularly addressed in his response what the UK Government intend to do in respect of our trading relationships in the EU and the action that the ILO and the UN are taking to ensure that we are not all complicit in the use of child labour in the clothes that we wear.
I rise to speak in this debate immensely proud of the record of this Labour Government in international development. As a new Member, my political philosophy and political motivation have always been to fight against injustice and poverty wherever they are found throughout the world. I therefore feel a very personal commitment to support the work of DFID and the Government in this respect. Having been born in and lived my early life in India, I know first hand the challenges that poverty and the lack of economic development bring.
I want to take this opportunity to thank and congratulate the Government on their achievements over the past 10 years. They have taken the lead in international efforts to tackle global poverty, with the historic aid package agreed at Gleneagles being of huge significance, following the high-profile Make Poverty History campaign. The setting up of the international finance facility for immunisation, which could help save 10 million lives by 2015, is another tangible achievement. The recent comprehensive spending review demonstrated that the Labour Government are delivering on their overseas aid promises and that we are on course to deliver the UN gold standard of 0.7 per cent. of gross national income to be spent on overseas development assistance by 2013. By 2010, this Labour Government will have trebled the aid budget in real terms since 1997, by increasing aid from £2.1 billion in 1997 to £7.93 billion in 2010.
DFID is internationally recognised as the world’s leading development organisation and has played a key role in progress on the millennium development goals. It has assisted in writing off 100 per cent. of the debt owed by the world’s most heavily indebted countries, and DFID’s programmes have contributed to significant results on the ground, by lifting 3 million people permanently out of poverty each year.
I should also like to congratulate the Government on their work in Africa, which the Secretary of State mentioned in his opening remarks. Through its global leadership, the UK has put the issue of Africa centre stage. Under the UK’s presidency, the G8 agreed an increase in aid of $50 billion a year by 2010, 100 per cent. debt cancellation, and free education for all. Obviously, the challenge now is for all G8 partners to fulfil those commitments and get Africa back on track to meet the millennium development goals. The UK has now prioritised Africa in its development aid and DFID aid to Africa is significant and growing. That is the right decision, and I welcome it.
As a Member who represents a constituency in which about 50 per cent. of the constituents were either born in the Indian subcontinent, or have parents or grandparents from there, I—like my constituents—am particularly interested in the DFID work in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Again, I congratulate the Secretary of State and the Department on the fantastic work that has been done in the last decade in these areas.
In Bangladesh, DFID’s aid contributes to more than 1,300 people escaping from poverty every day. The £100 million committed to the Bangladesh primary education programme will give 17 million children a year a good quality primary schooling. DFID is also providing clean water to 7.5 million people in Bangladesh and almost 2 million people in India. In health spending, DFID is financing more than 20 per cent.—£100 million—of the Indian national polio vaccination campaign. In India, the UK is helping girls go to school through support for a midday meal scheme, free textbooks, free notebooks and pencils, and, more recently, free school uniforms for girls.
Following the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, which killed 73,500 people, many of whom—because of poorly constructed schools—were children, the UK committed 10 per cent. of the £53 million humanitarian response budget to longer-term disaster risk reduction, which has helped to strengthen early warning systems and to support Governments in establishing and monitoring effective building codes. I applaud all those efforts and initiatives—and others that I have not mentioned.
I would like to make a couple of cautionary points, which I know the Government are aware of and working on. First, on human rights, it is vital that recipient Governments are under no illusions about the need to meet their responsibilities in relation to the human rights and good governance criteria that are part of development agreements with the UK. I am referring to Pakistan and Burma. The balance is tough to get right—in terms of withdrawing development assistance from recipient Governments who transgress in this regard, without removing support and thus harming the very poorest people in those countries—but I know that the Government are very sensitive to these challenges.
Secondly, it is vital that all development projects look to the long term and endeavour to support independence and self-sufficiency in the recipient nations, Governments and people.
Finally, from my own experience, I would like to comment on the targeting of aid. In India, there are some areas that are perceived as being affluent, but which still contain severe pockets of deprivation. In my own state of Punjab, there are still areas where significant work needs to be done to provide clean water, improved education and agricultural reforms. I hope that the Secretary of State and the Department will look into this matter and I commit myself to work closely with the Department, using my personal knowledge and contacts to assist in targeting resources to the poor areas.
It is important that DFID has close working relationships with groups and people in the UK who are originally from the Indian subcontinent, so that it can engage their support and knowledge, and so that we can all fight together against the evils of society on the subcontinent. There is economic growth there, but we need to consider the social aspects of society, particularly in India. My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, North (Ann McKechin) mentioned gender problems; there are the issues of child labour, forced marriages and poor education for women to consider. It is our responsibility to look into those issues, to support projects, and to work closely with groups in this country that are working independently from the Indian subcontinent. We must work together to eliminate those problems. Finally, I commend the work of the Secretary of State and the Department to the House, and pledge my wholehearted support to their efforts to eradicate injustice and poverty throughout the world.
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr. Sharma). His predecessor, Piara Khabra, was a member of the Select Committee on International Development in the last Parliament. Piara was always one of the most assiduous members of the Committee, and often asked the most pertinent questions when we travelled overseas.
The hon. Gentleman made an interesting point about India; it will soon be a middle-income country, but as we all know from travelling through India, there are huge areas of deep poverty. The issue of how best to respond to India in the coming years will be quite a challenge for DFID and other donors. At the moment, DFID supports four development programmes in four states. It will be interesting to see how we all respond to an ever growing number of very poor people in what are technically middle-income countries.
It is DFID’s 10th anniversary; I am not sure whether there has been a party to which we were not invited. It is worth taking stock. DFID and the Government deserve to be congratulated on what DFID has achieved in the past 10 years. If one reads Alastair Campbell’s diaries—compulsive bedtime reading for most of us—it is clear that it was thought reasonably risky to set up DFID, and to make the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Clare Short) the first Secretary of State. Actually, those of us who worked with her think that she did incredibly well, and it is a pity that although she is still a member of the House, she rarely contributes to our debates. She managed to get DFID respected in Whitehall as a lead, main Department, pari passu with other Departments in Whitewall.
It is much to Tony Blair’s credit that he achieved so much in the build up to, and at, Gleneagles. It is to the current Prime Minister’s credit that, following the comprehensive spending review, DFID is projected to spend almost £8 billion annually in the developing world—a phenomenal achievement. There is now consensus in the House on 0.7 per cent. of gross domestic income going toward development assistance, and on the timetable for that; that, too, is a great achievement.
Frustrations in the past 10 years include the failure on trade policy. The World Trade Organisation negotiations failed at Hong Kong. In fact, they failed so badly that no WTO ministerial conference has been convened on Doha since 2005, notwithstanding the obligation to hold a ministerial conference every two years. The achievements in the past 10 years are therefore tempered by some frustration.
There are several reasons why the commitments made at Gleneagles may be squandered. The first two are the responsibility of developing countries, especially in Africa. The first is good governance, a theme to which we keep returning. It slightly does one’s head in, really. We have gone through various initiatives such as the New Partnership for Africa’s Development. The whole point of NEPAD was that there should be peer pressure to try to encourage countries to have good governance. But while Zimbabwe continues to disintegrate into an abyss of misery and chaos, with countries around Zimbabwe standing silent, it is difficult to see what impact NEPAD is having. We must continue to champion the need for good governance, particularly in Africa.
With reference to Zimbabwe, I am interested to know what my hon. Friend thinks would be the appropriate response from the United Nations in terms of the responsibility to protect.
There is a whole speech to be made on what we do about the responsibility to protect. As we have seen in the case of Darfur, it often comes down to the difficulty of finding peacekeepers, peace monitors, lift capacity and so on. It is frustrating that we are no further forward on Darfur than we were a year ago. Indeed, things are getting worse.
Under the NEPAD agreement, there is a responsibility on African countries to bring peer pressure. That was part of the deal, and we would give greater development assistance. However, the problems are not just in Africa. There are real concerns about what is happening in Pakistan.
We in Banbury are building a secondary school in the earthquake-stricken area of Kashmir, and not long ago I went with leading members of the Kashmiri community in Banbury to meet the head of the education department in Islamabad. We were talking about madrassahs, and he made the point that because so many parents in Pakistan are so poor and cannot get their children to school because the schools do not exist, sending them to madrassahs is better than nothing.
If we do not invest in literacy in countries such as Pakistan, we will obviously create problems for the future, but if Pakistan continues to undermine democracy there is no incentive for foreign direct investment in Pakistan. Sorting out conflict is therefore as important as sorting out good governance.
Another set of threats to delivery of the Gleneagles aims are failures on the part of donors—not the UK Government, but on aid commitments Italy, for example, is woefully off target. Since 2005 overall overseas development aid through the DAC—Development Assistance Committee—system, has marginally but astonishingly gone down. We should ensure that countries that make great commitments at summits such as Gleneagles deliver on them.
There is a consensus about the need to secure a genuine pro-poor trade deal at the World Trade Organisation. As I have repeatedly said during the debate, we need to think about what to do about middle- income countries. The benefits of reducing tariffs and liberalising rules of origin would be phenomenal. According to Oxfam, just a 1 per cent. increase in Africa’s share of world trade would generate the equivalent of seven times the aid that Africa receives.
We must make sure that in the aid system there is accountability to both taxpayers and developing countries. This annual debate is bound to include discussion about the machinery of government. In the debate on Burma a little while ago, I raised with the Secretary of State the issue of budget support. The committee that the Secretary of State announced today is fine. It is an interesting step in the right direction, but it is slightly circular to have a committee to evaluate whether DFID’s evaluation of its own aid programme is of value. What is needed is some process whereby the outcomes of DFID’s programmes are measured and evaluated.
The time limit in the debate does not allow me to set that out, but I am happy to write to the Secretary of State. Since his castigation of me during the Burma speech, I have been doing quite a lot of research, and I could bore the House to tears with comments by the former Secretary of State and so on. When it came to offering direct budget support to countries such as Uganda and Ethiopia, all that happened was that DFID officials had to monitor the Government’s concern for how the money was spent. If, however, one is to spend money through multilateral agencies or project support, one needs a completely different mix of officials within DFID. All the officials I ever met in DFID were very high calibre: the Department probably has more fast-stream officials in Whitehall than practically any other Department, which is very good news, but one requires a different mix of them.
The constituency of people contributing to debate in the House is a constituency within Parliament as a whole. Colleagues in Westminster and the wider world in our constituencies are important in persuading the country and our constituents that investing in overseas development is worth doing. It must be possible to reach some consensus about how outcomes of DFID programmes can be measured and evaluated. If DFID could achieve that, we would not run into difficulties down the line, with people saying that money was wasted on this or that development programme, as we could have demonstrated that aid and assisting people works.
My final point is that we need to place more emphasis on jobs and enterprise in developing countries. Whenever one goes overseas—I know that members of the Select Committee, chaired by the right hon. Member for Gordon (Malcolm Bruce), often go overseas—the question is always where the jobs are going to come from. As the Secretary of State said, we need to think about how we can help with enterprise and development business. He told us about the Department’s agricultural initiatives, which are crucial and worthwhile.
On DFID’s 10th anniversary—I hope that at some stage we will have the opportunity to present the Department with a birthday cake, which it deserves—there remain some areas of concern, not least how we are going to measure outcomes in the future.
I agree with those who think that the ending of world poverty depends on economic growth. However, there is a difference between economic growth and development. The problem with the growth approach is that, without proper mechanisms for redistribution, the trickle-down effect simply does not reach some people. We acknowledge that in this country, which is why we have child benefit, school meals programmes, fruit in school programmes and school milk programmes.
The people not reached by pure economic growth are always the same people—especially vulnerable children—and it will come as no surprise to the Under-Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, West (Mr. Thomas), when I say that that is the group I want to talk about, particularly in the context of DFID developing its HIV/AIDS strategy. Does the Department recognise the need for a strategy for HIV/AIDS orphans? In particular, will the Minister commit to ensuring that funds continue to be earmarked for those children? Unless we do that, all the economic growth in the world will not result in any improved conditions or circumstances for those children.
I want to raise a couple of points, the first of which is about scale. In this country, we do not remotely recognise the scale of the problem of orphans and vulnerable children resulting from the HIV/AIDS epidemic. We are talking about 14 million children, almost all in sub-Saharan Africa. Just think about what that means in some countries. In Zimbabwe, the population is now down to about 11 or 12 million. I know from discussions with UNICEF people that estimates range from between 900,000 to 1.25 million orphans and vulnerable children in that country. That means that roughly one in eight Zimbabweans is now an orphan, which is a staggering problem for such a failed state to cope with. Once there is a change of regime there, the world will have to pick up that problem, because those orphans and vulnerable children will still need support.
The services needed by those children involve major complexity. They need food. We hear a lot of talk about sustainable development, and about feeding programmes having to be sustainable from within the community, but children are not sustainable unless they are fed. I have been to many projects whose store rooms have had no food in them. For one reason or another, they cannot get it from the World Food Programme, and they have to scratch around for bits of money. I have told my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of instances when I have paid their grocery bills and so on with my small change, because they simply did not have food. I have seen that in country after country.
Such children need maintained shelter, social care and legal rights—if a group of orphans are left after the parents have died, the family will come and take the hut from them, and sometimes simply leave them. They need school fees and bus fares paid, if there are buses, and the cost of uniforms, pencils and so on paid for. They need protection, particularly if they are street children. And they need antiretrovirals, which is a whole other issue.
By and large, the departments that deal with children’s issues in most developing countries are quite weak—they are across and down from the centre of power, much as they were in this country before children’s issues were properly recognised in the Department for Children, Schools and Families. A dedicated strategy and earmarked funds are therefore needed. If money goes into the general kitty, it will disappear into spending on those parts of government that make the biggest demands—usually the big institutions.
As my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary knows, over the past four years I have built up a small charity that provides support for orphans and vulnerable children in Zimbabwe, Kenya and Tanzania. That has given me some insight into what happens to those children when they do not get care.
Let me briefly recite one story of a little girl called Beatrice. In the year I first saw her, her mother had just had a little baby. She also had an older sister and brother. The mother was HIV-positive, but they were all on antiretrovirals and all managing. The next year, the mother had died; the baby had died; the eldest girl, who was not HIV-positive, had been taken away by relatives up-country; and the boy, who was HIV-positive but quite well, had been taken into an orphanage. I saw the little girl in an emergency shelter in Nairobi, with no organisation that had funds to protect her. I visited the orphanage where the little boy was, and it did not even have the bed nets that DFID has sent all around Kenya. I know that the bed nets were delivered to that area, but they did not reach the orphanage. They had gone to the district commissioners, and goodness knows where after that. Unless we do careful work on tracking and have the determination to help those children, they will not be helped.
What is needed? I point my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary to the excellent work coming from the working group on orphans and vulnerable children of the UK Consortium on Aids and International Development. Earmarked money for orphans and vulnerable children is needed—10 per cent. of the money spent on HIV/AIDS. More work on tracking is also needed. There have been difficulties, and while some of the money is starting to come through, unless the funding stream is maintained and given a bigger push, those children will suffer. More work is needed on prevention of mother-to-child transmission, on diagnostics and particularly on the infant formula.
We sometimes do not realise this, because perhaps we do not see people on ARVs, but they have a transformative effect. I remember going to Zimbabwe and seeing a little child who appeared to be at death’s door. When I went back a year later I asked what had happened to her, expecting to be told when she had died. The man who ran the orphanage said “Blessing? There she is, over there”—and there was the little girl, running around. They had managed to put her on antiretrovirals, and although for some unknown reason she was left with some disability in her legs, she was healthy and, as long as she remained on antiretrovirals, would have a reasonable life. However, more infant formulas are needed so that people who have built up resistance to one can go on to another.
The money must go to where the children are. It needs to go to the organisations that are working with them most closely, especially the community-based organisations that provide networking and care in the community at the most basic level. I urge my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and my hon. Friend the Minister, when considering DFID’s strategy for HIV and AIDS, to pay serious attention to the orphans and vulnerable children whom many describe as the “third wave” of the epidemic. The first wave is the infection, the second is death, and the third is those orphans and vulnerable children.
Even after the new infections stop—and in some countries, fortunately, the rate is falling—the people who are infected will die and the orphans and vulnerable children will remain. They will need protections and safeguards for generations to come, particularly in Zimbabwe and other countries that are emerging from collapse, conflict and chaos. Once the curtain has rolled back in Zimbabwe, we will see the terrible toll of HIV and AIDS. We will see a whole generation of children who have been voiceless in what has happened, who have suffered some of the cruellest losses, and whose shattered lives will need to be rebuilt—but we can only do that if we have the committed 10 per cent. of funds, along with tracking mechanisms to ensure that it reaches the children.
It is a huge privilege to wind up the debate for the Opposition. It has been a sober and highly constructive debate. I think it a great pity that the public do not see more such examples of the House’s work, rather than the more flamboyant occasions.
We have heard 13 excellent speeches, and I hope that Members will show me some forbearance if I do not mention them all. The Secretary of State gave us two particularly good pieces of news in what was a very good speech. First, he confirmed that his Department was giving an extra £100 million to the United Nations Population Fund, which I am sure the hon. Member for Calder Valley (Chris McCafferty) was very pleased to hear. As the hon. Lady will know but others may not recall, I am going back to my roots: I used to be chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on population, development and reproductive health—a position in which she succeeded me. She mentioned her excellent report, and the devastating effect of problems of this kind on women in Africa, producing the horrific statistic that one woman in 20 dies from maternity-related problems. The group dealt with precisely the same issues when I was its chairman, and it is sad that there has been so little improvement in the intervening period.
The other good news in the Secretary of State’s speech was the additional £20 million for the Governance and Transparency Fund. Many Members have mentioned the desperate need to find a way of improving governance, particularly in the countries of Africa. I shall return to that subject if I have time.
I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr. Clarke)—if I do not mention all the people in his constituency, they will be upset—who always makes a very sound speech. He must be congratulated on producing what is now an Act. As he said, this should become an annual debate, and I hope that the Secretary of State has taken that on board. He also made the very good point that we need to encourage all other nations that signed up to Gleneagles commitments to meet the target of 0.7 per cent. of gross national income. It is now a widely accepted United Nations target, but in the last speech or two we heard that one or two countries are falling short, and we must do all that we can to encourage them to meet their commitments. As the right hon. Gentleman said, the 0.7 per cent target is not the end of the matter. We hope that our GNI will continue to grow considerably so the budget will not be set in absolute terms but will grow in real terms as well. We hope that other countries’ budgets for international development will grow in the same way. I agree with what the right hon. Gentleman said about the relationship between aid, trade and debt. I will come back to that issue if I have time.
We heard an excellent speech from the right hon. Member for Gordon (Malcolm Bruce), the Chairman of the Select Committee; in fact we heard excellent speeches from several members of the Committee. I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman and his staff on producing the report for the debate today. As he said, the report has added hugely to the quality of the debate. I congratulate him also on what his Committee is doing in going to some of the most difficult troublespots in the world. I, too, have visited Afghanistan and it is a very difficult country to get around in. It is not safe and I congratulate the Committee on going there, as one of the biggest jobs in the world is in Afghanistan. Will the Secretary of State consider having a powerful international co-ordinator so that all agencies—including USAID, which has a tendency to go round the country doing its own thing—are tied in together, along with all military efforts from NATO and the Americans?
I shall give the House an example of where that is not happening at the moment. USAID suddenly announced that it wanted to spend many billions of dollars on the Kajaki dam project to produce hydroelectricity without first checking that the security situation would be good enough to get the heavy rotary pumps into place by road.
I commend the proposal in the globalisation and poverty report produced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) for demonstrating how keenly important trade is to ensuring that we sustainably lift out of poverty some of the countries of the world. My hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) said that we needed to make sure that aid was seen as a tool for getting middle-income countries out of poverty and towards developed country status.
I have just come back from looking at economic partnership agreements in Uganda, as well as in the Caribbean and Pacific. Many of those Caribbean countries that are currently middle-income countries, with a little extra help, could be turned into developed countries and would not need any aid at all.
Will the Minister be very kind and answer one or two questions about one of the most pressing issues of the day, economic partnership agreements? There is an absolute deadline of 31 December because of the EU’s requirement to be WTO-compatible. In view of the Cotonou agreement, will he let the House know the current progress? Are we likely to have any or all of the six agreements signed by 31 December? I know that there is a critical meeting of the Commission and Ministers next week, so it may be slightly premature to ask the question. However, when I was in the Caribbean last week, the issue was very much in the balance and I met several Trade Ministers who were very unhappy. I hope that an agreement can be made that is satisfactory to all parties.
The Cotonou agreement envisaged that if an EPA were signed, there would be a satisfactory package of development aid. The Trade Ministers were unhappy that at present—the Minister may be able to update us—no such package of aid has been agreed to help what in some of the smaller islands will be a difficult and painful transition.
Let me give an example of the sort of thing that could happen under these economic partnership agreements. I recently met some Seychelles MPs. The Seychelles has a population of about 88,000. One major industry is tuna canning, which employs several hundred people, and the MPs were fearful that if the EPA goes through in its current form that entire industry would go to Thailand as it would not be cost-competitive. That would be a difficult transition, and we must bear such situations in mind. Is the Minister satisfied that sufficient impact assessments have been conducted in respect of such countries so that we know what effect the EPAs will have in the short to medium term?
My final question in terms of the EPAs is on the interpretation of the WTO rules. One important element is the interpretation of what counts as the substantial opening up of markets. It has in the past been perceived that that would mean that the EU would open up 100 per cent. of its markets to some of the smaller African, Caribbean and Pacific countries, but in return they would open up 80 per cent. of their markets. It seems, however, that the ground has shifted in the past week or two—that the 80 per cent. figure has increased to 90 per cent. That would make a huge difference, and if the ground has shifted we must look carefully at whether the EU is operating double standards. It was asking for at least 8 per cent. of sensitive industries, mainly agriculture, to be excluded from the WTO arrangements—which is one of the reasons why the Hong Kong round has so far not succeeded—but on the other hand it seems to be pushing the ACP countries down from 20 per cent. to below 8 per cent. That would have an even more difficult effect on such countries. The EU cannot have it both ways.
Many other issues have been raised. I agreed so much with most of what my hon. Friend the Member for Rochford and Southend, East (James Duddridge) said that I was almost leaping up at every moment to intervene. He made some very important points. I know from a former role of mine how important it is for the different Departments to co-operate—for example, the Foreign Office, DFID, the Ministry of Defence and the new Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. That is especially the case in terms of some of the most difficult human rights issues in the world—those in Darfur and Zimbabwe, for example. The international community must try to put in place packages so that we can stop such countries collapsing into absolute chaos and causing extreme misery to their populations. Last week, I met Zimbabwean representatives of an excellent charity called ZANE. It is doing very good work in Zimbabwe, but it was harrowing to learn that because of the regime’s measures forcing goods to be sold at the same price as two years ago there are no goods in most of the shops and children in particular are beginning to get into a very parlous state. We in the international community must find a mechanism whereby we can stop countries getting into such difficulties and causing such misery to their people.
In an intervention on my hon. Friend’s speech, my hon. Friend the Member for Braintree (Mr. Newmark) mentioned the Portland Trust and microfinance. I travelled to Nigeria last year and witnessed one of DFID’s microfinance projects. It was wonderful to see how some of the poorest people in the world in Kano were being encouraged to make rugs and thereby provide a little bit of money for themselves and their children. It is amazing how very small sums of money—guaranteed loans or even grants from DFID—can make such a huge difference.
My hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire was right to say that we need to look at some of the farming practices in the third world and the developed world—I say that coming from my background as a farmer, which I declare now. My hon. Friend is right that we must make sure that the developed world is not adopting practices that put some of the poorest farmers on the planet out of business. That is, of course, one of the reasons why the WTO round has so far failed. He mentioned the US subsidy to cotton of $4 billion, which is one of the principal reasons why it has failed to date.
My hon. Friend was right about other things, too. I support the Fairtrade initiatives. While I was in the Caribbean I heard of the considerable effect in St. Lucia of the banana Fairtrade initiative. Sainsbury’s now stocks only organic bananas, principally from St. Lucia, which has had a hugely beneficial effect on that country.
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
As the hon. Lady was one of the last to speak I might not quite get to her contribution, so I will happily give way when I have finished this point. The Fairtrade initiative’s time is coming, and one or two of the supermarkets are beginning to adopt a fair trade regime for cotton, which is extremely welcome. My hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire referred to the 300,000 to 400,000 children who are seized and taken out of school to work in the cotton fields in Uzbekistan for a matter of 2p a kilogram. That is an absolute disgrace and as he said, the BBC did a fantastic job in exposing that under extremely dangerous conditions. I will now happily give way to the hon. Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble).
I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. On farming, is he aware that our clampdown on tobacco products has resulted in a 15 per cent. drop in the tobacco harvest in Malawi? Does he think that wealthy countries such as ours that institute such bans should provide support for Malawian farmers and others, so that they can grow alternative crops and are not pitched into poverty?
I entirely agree. We saw in Afghanistan the great difficulty in persuading farmers not to grow narcotics and to grow alternative crops. The hon. Lady is absolutely right: we should help farmers in Malawi and in many other countries to diversify into crops that are more environmentally friendly, or more human-friendly.
I have just two minutes left and in that time, I want again to congratulate the Government on moving towards the 2013 UN target of 0.7 per cent. of gross national income. However, in moving towards it they need to consider two critical things, the first of which is the level of staffing. If they reduce the staff dealing with such projects in-country, they will inevitably have to direct more of their budget to the direct budget funding of the individual country concerned, or through multilateral agencies. Those are both good things in themselves, but as the hon. Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr. Sharma) rightly said, DFID has the best reputation in the world as an aid and international development provider, and we want to make sure that that is maintained. We should bask in its glory and congratulate all its staff on what they do, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. Mitchell) rightly said, we need to ensure that that money is being spent wisely. I suspect that the Government’s independent watchdog will become merely a puppet of the Department, and I urge the Secretary of State to ensure that it is more independent. If it is critical in one or two areas, it is doing a thoroughly good job.
I come back to the theme that the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill started, and which the hon. Member for Northampton, North finished with. Many of our constituents might be critical of the huge amount of money going into international development. I say to them that if they had come with me to Haiti last week, they would have seen the abject squalor and filth, the absolute poverty and the number of children just wandering around the streets with no education, and no education available to them. There are many other countries like that. A country such as ours, which has so much, should be well and truly prepared to provide its full share to those who have so little, and it should expect other countries to live up to their Gleneagles commitments and do the same.
I join the hon. Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown) in welcoming this extremely interesting debate. As he rightly said, there have been some very thoughtful contributions from Members in all parts of the House. I echo the comments of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and of the shadow Secretary of State in paying tribute to the work of my right hon. Friend the Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr. Clarke) in taking the International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Bill through the House last year. As the Minister in the Department for International Development who had the pleasure of responding to debates on his Bill, I should tell the House that he was ferociously polite, always assiduous in pressing his case and extremely careful to take into account opinions from all parts of the House. I know that he consulted civil society thoroughly during the passage of the Bill, and its enactment continues to be a tribute to his skill in navigating the complexities of this House.
One area that my right hon. Friend particularly focused on throughout his contributions in the House, and in all the private discussions that we had, was his insistence that the Bill must ensure that there was year-on-year reporting on our progress to meet the UN goal of 0.7 per cent. of national income being spent on development assistance. I therefore welcome his comments about the outcome of the comprehensive spending review. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State made clear, the Government will provide more than £9 billion of overseas aid a year by 2010, keeping us on track to meet the Prime Minister’s commitment to achieve the 0.7 per cent. target by 2013.
The hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. Mitchell) made a number of comments and asked a series of questions, to which I shall return. I welcome his opening general praise, and the comments of several other hon. Members praising the Department and those who work outside it in the area of development. There are many highly committed people in civil society, in international institutions and in our Department, who often work in very dangerous places, and I join the House in paying tribute to their courage and passion.
My hon. Friends the Members for Glasgow, North (Ann McKechin) and for Calder Valley (Chris McCafferty) asked a series of questions. Before I come to some of the specifics that they raised, may I take the opportunity to pay tribute to their work as the respective chairs of the all-party group on debt, aid and trade and the all-party group on population, development and reproductive health?
My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, North, asked, among other things, about the need for further innovative sources of finance to help tackle both international poverty and the adaptation needs flowing from the climate change challenges that we face. I reassure her that we are looking at exactly that issue, in part because of the run-up to the Bali considerations, and we will, of course, carefully examine what her all-party group has just published.
The all-party group that my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley chairs has been a bright and shining star in the fight to get safe abortion facilities and the access to the sexual and reproductive health commodities that women across the developing world deserve. I hope that she will recognise and continue to champion my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State’s announcement of £100 million of further assistance to the United Nations Population Fund as an example of this Government’s continuing commitment in the area of interest to her all-party group.
I say gently to the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone) that I cannot echo such positive comments in respect of her speech. I thought that it was disappointing. If she mentioned the millennium development goals at all, I for one missed it. Her speech certainly did not dwell on the plight of the 1 billion people who live on less than $1 a day or on the possible solutions to help tackle that poverty.
I want to correct the hon. Gentleman. I mentioned three of the MDGs specifically: those on gender equality, climate change and poverty.
I say to the hon. Lady that merely mentioning those MDGs is simply not good enough. Her speech seemed to be more about Saudi Arabia than about development. I suspect that that reflects, with some notable exceptions, the lack of priority that her party has given international development. In the time that I have been a Minister in the Department for International Development, the Liberal Democrats have changed their international development spokespeople on an almost annual basis.
The mention of Saudi Arabia was with regard to corruption and asking: how can we lecture the Africans? In fact, the hon. Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley) has just given me a very good report, “The Other Side of the Coin”, which goes into how much corruption robs from development aid. That was the point that I was making. How can we lecture Africa?
I am glad that the hon. Lady has been given help by others in the House: on the basis of her speech, I think that she needs it.
A number of hon. Members, including the hon. Member for Rochford and Southend, East (James Duddridge), entirely fairly highlighted the need to step up work on developing the private sector. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and Baroness Vadera are exploring the scope for further work by the Department in that area. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will join me in welcoming the Prime Minister’s commitment to spend some £750 million on aid for trade, which I will air next week at the first ever global meeting on aid for trade, convened by the World Trade Organisation. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will see that as a particularly positive development.
My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr. Sharma) and the hon. Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) mentioned the importance of India in achieving the millennium development goals. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his long-standing interest in India and poverty there. He was right to draw attention to the fact that some 350 million poor people in India still live on less than $1 a day—more than the number of poor people who live in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. I assure my hon. Friend that we will continue to work for a reduction in poverty in India.
My hon. Friend the Member for Falkirk (Mr. Joyce) highlighted the huge tensions in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. We continue to press for a political solution rather than a military one, for reasons that the House will understand. He and my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, North highlighted the terrible suffering of women in the DRC. In the time available, I cannot do justice to the scale of their suffering or to the full range of our response, but let me highlight one small example of the way in which we are trying to help. Through our aid for reproductive health care, some 500,000 women in the DRC are benefiting from much better access to such health care. I hope that that gives the House some reassurance about our continuing focus on that matter.
My hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble) praised the contribution of a series of NGOs that work to support orphans and vulnerable children. In turn, I praise her long-standing interest in that subject, her continuing questioning and her appetite to ensure that the Department makes more progress. Our commitment of 10 per cent. of our funding for aid spending on orphans and vulnerable children three years ago was designed to galvanise interest in the matter across the international donor spectrum and, crucially, in developing countries too. More donors have become interested and taken action, and more developing countries are prioritising and responding to the needs of orphans and vulnerable children. We will continue to keep the matter in view.
I turn now to the particular questions asked by the hon. Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown) that relate to my ministerial responsibilities. As he said, considerable attention is paid in civil society and in the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries to economic partnership agreements. Although his questions were entirely understandable, he was right, I am afraid, that they are a little premature in light of the General Affairs and External Relations Council that will take place next week, at which the Trade Commissioner will report back on progress. The hon. Gentleman will perhaps not be surprised to hear that there has been considerable progress in those negotiations—more than we have seen before—in the past three weeks. The process is fluid, and a series of further negotiating meetings have taken place this week.
A debate is due to take place in this House purely on the subject of economic partnership agreements, and it will enable us to delve into the detail of where progress has been made. Let me reassure the hon. Gentleman that we will continue to focus on the development dimension of economic partnership agreements. That is one reason why—from as far back as March 2005, when my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State was Trade Minister—we have championed the offer of 100 per cent. duty and quota-free access to the European Union for developing countries. We were delighted when, as a result of our pressure and the Trade Commissioner’s appetite for the idea, a 100 per cent. duty and quota-free access offer was proposed back in April, albeit with transitional periods for just two products. I will of course continue to keep the House updated.
I should be grateful if the Minister would refer to the subject of forced child labour. It may not be his specific responsibility, but perhaps he could give me some assurance that he will speak to his colleagues in other Departments if he thinks that they are more directly concerned with that matter.
I was going to come to the hon. Gentleman’s point, but let me do so now. He referred to the excellent investigation by “Newsnight” journalists. He may have had the chance to see the whole piece, in which he will have seen me make a commitment to talk to EU colleagues. We will continue to do so, as I indicated on the programme. I should, however, add one thing. He is right to say that there is more that we can do here in the UK. We do not have to rely on the EU. We have asked a series of retailers to look at their supply chains in even more detail. It is one of the reasons why we want those firms that are not part of the ethical trading initiative to sign up. The experience in Uzbekistan should be a powerful demonstration of the need for all British retailers, and indeed European retailers, to look to their supply chains.
The hon. Member for Banbury has followed the Doha round of talks particularly closely, given his past role. Indeed, I know that all Members of the House are interested in it. We are at a critical moment. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State alluded to the work that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has been doing. Indeed, a series of Ministers across Government have been using meetings with interlocutors not only in the EU but in the US, India, Brazil and other developing countries, including crucially the least developed countries, which ultimately have most to gain from a successful conclusion to the Doha round.
The G4 will need to show more flexibility. We in the EU will need to show more flexibility. I believe that the Trade Commissioner is willing to do that. We will also need our allies in America to show more flexibility and we will need India and Brazil to show flexibility in the areas where they can do so. That will continue to be a priority for the House.
The hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield and the one bright spot of the speech of the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green, as well as, indeed, the report of the International Development Committee, referred to the importance of climate change. It is certainly not a low priority for the Department for International Development. The last White Paper identified tackling climate change as one of the top priorities for the Department going forward, and that was reflected in March this year when the then Chancellor, now the Prime Minister, announced a joint DFID-DEFRA £800 million environmental transformation fund, which will provide aid for clean energy, avoided deforestation and adaptation.
We are taking forward the implementation of that fund through the World Bank, working with a range of other organisations. We are seeking to secure other donors to put similar sums into a World Bank trust fund to help us take forward work on adaptation in the way that I have described. Crucially, we are also working with colleagues across Government to ensure a globally just post-2012 agreement. We are building analysis on what a fair outcome would mean and what the contribution of developing countries should be. We are also steadily increasing our work on climate change in our focal countries. I give the House just one example. We have committed to spend some £50 million to help improve the livelihoods of 32,000 families in Bangladesh by raising their homes above the one-in-100-years flood level. We are also spending £5 million on improving climate change information in Africa.
I acknowledge the Select Committee’s point that there is much more that we need to do in this area. There has been a significant scaling up of staff in DFID working on it; there will be more to come. I was disappointed by the shadow Secretary of State’s rather low-key reaction to the appointment of the excellent David Peretz as chair of the new independent advisory committee on development impact. Once again, the shadow Secretary of State failed to acknowledge not only the talents of Mr. Peretz, but the plethora of other bodies that already monitor our spending directly or indirectly. There was no mention in the hon. Gentleman’s speech of the powerful role that the National Audit Office plays in monitoring our spending, or of the Public Accounts Committee.
Just to nail that point, the people whom the Secretary of State has managed to collect for the committee are of the highest possible calibre and I recognise the important contribution that they can make. However, the remit of the toothless watchdog that has come forth from the Department needs to be massively beefed up to make it effective, for the reasons that many hon. Members have set out. Will the Minister and his colleagues have another look to see how they can make the body more effective?
The hon. Gentleman rightly identified the considerable talents of the people who have been approached to serve on the committee, but I say gently to him that he should give credit to them by recognising that they would not want to serve on such a committee if they did not think that they had a powerful role to play.
I have to say to the hon. Gentleman, again gently, that some may wonder whether he keeps raising questions about aid effectiveness in order to draw a veil over his party’s dismal record on the issue. The House has debated before the Pergau dam affair under the previous Government, which left a terrible legacy for this country’s reputation in developing countries. It was an entirely preventable fiasco, completely opposed by those in the development community and utterly illegal. The Pergau dam affair also exposed a broader record when the Opposition were in government of aid money being used for all sorts of purposes other than poverty reduction. Under the hon. Gentleman’s party, aid money was used to pay for helicopters, for example, to be sent to India—helicopters that it was never clear the Indians wanted. The hon. Gentleman has also still not acknowledged his party’s terrible failure in development funding, with steady cuts to the 0.5 per cent. of national income going to development in 1979, which was down to 0.26 per cent. by the time his party left office in 1997.
The hon. Gentleman perhaps began to lose his characteristic joie de vivre when my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State intervened on him to highlight his party’s lack of engagement in Europe. I say to the hon. Gentleman, again gently, that one cannot be both pro-trade and anti-Europe. He and his party cannot hope to have influence over any aspect of trade while they remain as virulently anti-European as they are.
The right hon. Member for Gordon (Malcolm Bruce) gave a much more considered commentary on the inputs-outputs debate. He acknowledged that the level of spending is important, but I of course accept that we should focus further on outputs. I accept that we can do more to demonstrate the effectiveness of our work, but I should like to draw his and the whole House’s attention to our work on education in India, for example, where more than 10 million children are now in primary school, in part as a result of our aid. In Malawi our aid has helped to reverse the haemorrhaging of nurses from the Malwian health service.
The right hon. Gentleman and others raised a series of other questions. Time does not allow me to answer all of them, so I end by answering his point about Pakistan. Of course I understand the concerns of the whole House about the situation in Pakistan and about our aid programme to that country. I welcome President Musharraf’s recent comments about the timing of elections. Of course there are concerns about how those elections will be conducted, and those concerns are being taken forward by my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary. We are giving urgent attention to how our aid programme should go forward.
I have tried to answer as many of the comments and interventions made by hon. Members in all parts of the House as I can. I welcome this opportunity to debate these issues again, and I hope that the whole House will welcome the comprehensive spending review outcome for the Department for International Development. I look forward to having the opportunity to debate these issues again shortly.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That the House has considered the matter of international development.
CROSSRAIL BILL
Ordered,
That the Crossrail Bill Committee shall have leave to sit twice on the first day on which it shall meet.—[Mr. Watson.]
Daedalus Airfield
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Watson.]
I know that my constituents share my appreciation of the fact that I have this opportunity to raise in the House the issue of the future of the Daedalus airfield in my constituency. Part of the airfield falls within the borough of Fareham, and I am delighted my hon. Friend the Member for Fareham (Mr. Hoban) is here this evening, as I know that he shares my interest in this matter.
The Government care about general aviation, which is most simply defined as all aviation of a civil nature other than scheduled air flights. I know that they care about it, because Ministers have said so. The hon. Member for Lincoln (Gillian Merron), the predecessor of the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Poplar and Canning Town (Jim Fitzpatrick), who will respond to this debate, is on record as having said at a conference on general aviation in November 2006:
“Government have in the past failed to understand general aviation and its role in the community…It is vital that the interests of the general aviation sector are not ignored…We understand the value of the network, and we are looking at a policy statement on a national network of airfields…We recognise that we must strengthen general aviation as a vital asset with benefits for all of us.”
I hope that those sentiments will be continued. I see that the Minister is acquiescing.
There is no more important issue for general aviation than the establishment and retention of suitable airfields, and the Daedalus site in Lee-on-the-Solent is just that. It entered service with the Royal Naval Air Service in 1917 and continued as a naval air station until 1996. Some of my earliest memories are of visiting the Daedalus station and watching the Fireflies, the Sea Furies, the Wyverns and the Gannets. They formed the basis of my enthusiasm for flying, which I later followed as a pilot in the Royal Air Force.
The Daedalus site is an important part of the local community. In March 2006, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency and the South East England Development Agency acquired the site for about £20 million. The Maritime Coastguard Agency took runway 0523, a blister hangar and the control tower, and the SEEDA operation took the rest of the site. The Maritime and Coastguard Agency celebrated initially by spending between £500,000 and £1 million on building a rather unsightly new fence round its estate. I wonder whether the Minister can confirm the cost of that fence.
Now I want to move forward and to consider the future of the Daedalus site. I should like to put this in its context. On the Gosport peninsula, there are about 40,000 working people, but only 19,000 jobs. The result is a tidal flow of people out of the peninsula and back each day. The paramount need is therefore for jobs in and around the peninsula. There is strong support for the development of Daedalus as a business park with an aviation and maritime engineering theme. Indeed, the SEEDA consultation has revealed that some 57 per cent. of the local population consulted would like to see aviation activity continue on the site, and some 60 per cent. would like to see jobs being developed there. The concept of a business park—of which I have some previous experience as a Minister—would fit well with the retention of the Daedalus site and its use for aviation and marine engineering. I hope that it will be possible to continue the aviation link, and to provide a forward link to the business park that so many of us would like to see.
At the moment, the Daedalus site is being used by the police, whose Britten-Norman Defender fixed-wing, high-wing aircraft operate from runway 0323. The site is also being used by the air-sea rescue helicopter operated by Bristow on behalf of the coastguard. The Portsmouth Naval Gliding Club operates from Daedalus; many of my friends glide from Daedalus, as I do, and I am delighted that they have been able to make a longer-term lease arrangement to retain their interests there.
Finally, the site is used by general aviation and 30 aircraft operate from Daedalus—there were many more. I am putting forward the general aviation interest this evening.
It being Six o’clock, the motion for the Adjournment of the House lapsed, without Question put.
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Watson.]
That intervention will no doubt confuse anyone who may be watching our debate.
The interests of general aviation are under threat because operators have been told that they must vacate the premises by Saturday 17 November, so I very much hope that even at this late stage the Minister can give us some hope for the future of general aviation at Daedalus.
I am delighted that my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Mr. Howarth) has now joined us in the Chamber. He has taken a key interest in the issue and I am grateful to him for attending the debate.
SEEDA’s consultation led to the revelation that 63 per cent. of those consulted hoped that the site would be used to create job opportunities, 53 per cent. hoped that it would be linked to marine activity and 57 per cent. hoped that it would be involved with aviation, but only 7 per cent. felt that the site should be used for housing. When SEEDA decided on a study, it chose Erinaceous—a public listed company—to carry it out. I have four points about the study.
First, there are some doubts as to the credibility of Erinaceous; the company has breached its banking covenants, shares are down from 389p in January to about 20p and the founders have been put on gardening leave, so there are some problems. Secondly, the main people involved at Daedalus—the general aviation interest—found it difficult to obtain a copy of the Erinaceous report. It was produced in July 2007 but not made available to the general aviation interest until 18 October, the date on which operators were given a month to vacate the site.
Thirdly, paragraph 1.7 of the report states:
“We confirm we know of no conflict of interest”—
between the company and users of the site, yet one of the authors of the report is manager of Shoreham airport, which is owned by Erinaceous and is a competitor airfield on the south coast. Finally, the report merely offers alternatives and does not come to a firm conclusion.
I am grateful to the individuals at SEEDA to whom I have spoken, including the chairman, for their support for general aviation at Daedalus, but ultimately it is not their judgment that applies. Others will decide about the future of general aviation, and although individuals at SEEDA are supportive they are not capable of overruling a decision.
I have spoken to the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, which is directly involved as owner of part of the site and through the operation from the site, on its behalf, of the coastguard helicopter. The agency is indirectly involved through the lease to the police force. As was made clear to me recently, the MCA is not involved in management; it has delegated that responsibility to the police.
Among the dramatis personae is the Lee Flying Association—the group representing the general aviation interest. The association is profoundly concerned; it offered to control movements and run the airfield on a voluntary basis but the offer was rejected. Others involved include the Hampshire Microlight Flying Club, from which I received a letter today, pointing out:
“The airfield at Lee has the potential to represent all that is good in a community based airfield. Until recently the field was home to a wide range of machines including gliders, helicopters, fixed wing and flexwing aircraft.”
The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association has been particularly assiduous in putting forward well-informed debate and argument on the issue. I have meetings and discussions with the association, and it states in a letter to me dated 12 November that the Maritime and Coastguard Agency and the Hampshire police air support unit
“inherited a complete operational aerodrome with all the necessary equipment to provide the basic air traffic service of an air/ground radio service. Both concerns would appear to have at Lee, staff able to provide an air/ground service, subject to an appropriate radio frequency being allocated and the operators being trained and certified as competent in accordance with CAA procedures. The cost of providing such a service at Lee is negligible.”
The association has been forceful in arguing in favour of the retention of general aviation.
The Portsmouth Naval Gliding Club is strongly supportive of general aviation, and it is now fortunately secured in its position through the intervention of the Second Sea Lord, who has arranged for the lease to be prepared in its favour. The executive leader of Fareham borough council, Councillor Seán Woodward, has written a forceful letter to the chief constable of Hampshire constabulary, in which he advises that the
“matter was considered at a Council meeting on 18 October, and it was agreed that I should write to you expressing our dismay and deep alarm at the way this decision has not only been taken, but also the communicated to the general aviation businesses at Daedalus.”
My hon. Friend is making a cogent argument for the retention of general aviation at Daedalus, Lee-on-the-Solent. I have also received a number of representations from my constituents who use the airfield and who are also concerned about the way in which this matter has been handled and the lack of notice that has been given to general aviation businesses on the use of the site. Will he ensure that their representations are also made known to the police and the Maritime and Coastguard Agency in support of his campaign?
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, and his comments show that the concern is widespread. There is a very special ethos in south Hampshire, deriving from the link between the area and the Royal Navy in particular. There is a strong services tradition and a strong tradition of aviation and maritime engineering. Many of the companies in the area employ people who have been trained at some point by the Navy or by companies associated with the Navy. As has been pointed out by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, there is much stronger support for aviation use at Daedalus than it has discovered at any other location in the United Kingdom, and my hon. Friend’s comments reflect that.
The Hampshire police air support unit is the body that, under the lease between the Maritime and Coastguard Agency and the police, has become the airfield manager, perhaps rather reluctantly. Perhaps the police did not set out as a mission statement to become an airfield manager, but that is what they have become. Effectively, the airfield manager is the manager of the police flight, Bob Ruprecht, whose attitude has been passed on to the Maritime and Coastguard Agency.
The Minister wrote to me in a letter dated 5 July to say that “safety must remain paramount.” Of course, it must. I am a trained pilot, and anyone who flies knows that safety comes first—it is the first thing that anyone involved in aviation thinks about—but I have to submit that this is not about safety; it is about liability. By becoming the airfield manager, the police have accepted liability for the operations that take place there, and no one has suggested that safety has suddenly deteriorated. There has not been a mixed-flying accident in 57 years of gliding operations at Daedalus, for instance. So the record is extremely good and nothing has changed. This is not about safety deteriorating at all; it is about the police authority realising and being advised by its lawyers that it has liability if anything goes wrong at Daedalus. On that basis, the decision has been taken to discontinue flying.
The manager of the police unit explains in an e-mail:
“In the medium to long term there maybe a future for Business and other Aviation as part of the development process, and I believe that SEEDA have that in mind to explore.”
The e-mail continues, however, saying that it is not the core role of the Hampshire police air support unit or the Maritime and Coastguard Agency
“to provide the infrastructure and investment”
to operate general aviation in the meantime. No one could disagree with that—it is not the core role of the police or the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. However, I submit that the Minister—following the enthusiasm his predecessor showed for general aviation—does have a responsibility and a role to play in encouraging general aviation. It is his role to knock heads together to try to make sure that a satisfactory solution emerges.
I have discussed procedures with those responsible. Daedalus is a Government aerodrome. Some people seem to have woken up to that fairly recently. The Air Navigation Order 2005 definition of a Government aerodrome is one that is
“in the occupation of any Government Department or visiting force”.
Government strategy for Government aerodromes is as follows:
“It is the policy of the MoD to encourage the use of active Government aerodromes by UK civil aircraft on inland flights, provided this is consistent with defence requirements and local interests”.
What is the Minister doing to encourage the use of this Government aerodrome by civil aviation interests?
As my hon. Friend knows, as a currently practising aviator I fully support his campaign. The chief constable of Hampshire has told me that there are absolutely no security issues involved at all. There are no objections on security grounds to general aviation occupying the site. What my hon. Friend has just said about encouraging the use of Government-owned airfields is apposite, because there is no security consideration involved at all; it just seems to be a question of cost.
Indeed. Many of the people involved in Daedalus do not see it as their particular task to encourage civil aviation, but it is the Minister’s task. He is the person responsible for ensuring that somebody accepts responsibility, and for identifying that person and the procedure to follow that through.
As for the history of flying at Daedalus, the air traffic zone of Daedalus overlaps with that of royal naval aircraft yard Fleetlands, which operates aircraft that have been repaired or serviced. Fleetlands has a regulator—that is specifically and carefully defined in law. The regulator of Fleetlands is Colin Smith, who works for the test and evaluation support division of the Ministry of Defence—the section responsible for air traffic control, airfields and hangers. I have his authority to quote him:
“If the Department of Transport were to ask him to undertake the regulation of Daedalus he would be perfectly happy to do so.”
He went on to say:
“I would require the airfield to meet certain standards. If then having met those standards there is…no reason why general aviation should not continue, providing that the activities are properly risk assessed and appropriate safety management processes were put in place.”
He has talked to the Maritime and Coastguard Agency about a review and overall appraisal. In his role as regulator, he would call that “a gross error study”. It would be an overall study, checking for serious risks and ensuring that there is a “deconfliction of different interests” at Daedalus.
There is no valid reason why flying should not continue at Daedalus. Nothing has suddenly made it more dangerous. Everybody in sight is on the public payroll—most of the people in sight are responsible directly or indirectly to the Minister—except the poor general aviation interests. Those people are either operating their own aircraft privately or they have commercial interests. Their interests have been prejudiced by the decision to discontinue general aviation as of tomorrow night.
There is no reason why the Minister should not say that he has spoken, or will speak, to all those concerned, and that flying can continue for a limited period of, say, a month while an arrangement for the longer term is hammered out. I wrote to him asking specifically whether he would say that tonight. If he cannot say that, will he at least spell out the programme that will enable us to ensure that general aviation returns to Daedalus, as is the wish of the local community?
I congratulate the hon. Member for Gosport (Peter Viggers) on securing this debate, which gives me the opportunity to explain to the House the facts about aviation at the former HMS Daedalus site at Lee-on-the-Solent. I acknowledge the significance and importance of the issue to his constituents, as well as his own interest, and his distinguished service to his country, in aviation and in other fields.
I know that hon. Members will join me in paying tribute to the excellent work performed by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, and specifically by Her Majesty’s coastguard. Each year the coastguard receives about 18,000 calls for assistance via the 999 system or through very high frequency radio. Every year, across the United Kingdom, the coastguard co-ordinates rescues that help about 25,000 people to safety. Our search-and-rescue helicopter capability is a mixture of military and civilian aircraft. The Ministry of Defence provides RAF and Royal Navy helicopters from eight bases around the UK.
The Maritime and Coastguard Agency operates civilian-crewed helicopters from four bases: two in Scotland at Stornoway and at Sumburgh on Shetland, and two along the south coast of England at Portland and at Lee-on-the-Solent. It is one of those civilian search-and-rescue helicopter bases that is of concern to the hon. Gentleman, and it might help the House if I outline some of the history and background to the issue. As the hon. Gentleman said, HMS Daedalus opened in 1916 as a Royal Navy air station. It remained the Navy’s leading flying training base, and provided military search-and-rescue helicopters, until 1988. It was formally decommissioned in March 1996, and until 2004 the future of the site was unclear. Since 1988, the MCA and its predecessor organisations have operated Her Majesty’s coastguard search-and-rescue helicopters from the site through a commercial contract. Typically, the helicopters at Lee-on-the-Solent deal with about 200 search-and-rescue incidents each year.
In June 2004, Defence Estates, part of the Ministry of Defence, formally declared the whole HMS Daedalus site surplus to requirements. After consultation with Hampshire constabulary, which managed the airfield on behalf of Defence Estates and operated a fixed-winged aircraft from the site, the MCA submitted an expression of interest in acquiring 71 hectares of the land to safeguard its ability to operate helicopters as part of the Government’s continuing commitment to providing a 24-hour maritime search-and-rescue service and the necessary infrastructure. The area of interest to the MCA represented about two thirds of the existing airfield. The South East England Development Agency was interested in acquiring the remainder of the site.
The MCA acquired part of the Daedalus airfield from Defence Estates in March 2006, protecting the operation of the search-and-rescue helicopter facility. The remainder of the site was purchased by SEEDA. In answer to the hon. Gentleman’s first question, I can confirm that the cost of fencing under the arrangement was approximately £750,000. The MCA’s part of the airfield continued to be managed on a tenancy basis by Hampshire police authority. As the airfield operator responsible for safety, Hampshire police decided to close the airfield to general aviation on safety grounds. I hear what the hon. Gentleman says on that point, but those are the words in front of me, and that is the explanation that I have to give to the House tonight.
The Government know that general aviation is an important, integral part of the UK aviation sector, recognising that it makes up about 8 per cent. of the economic size of commercial air transport, and that it makes a significant contribution to the UK economy, both in terms of direct economic value and the number of people it employs. Following the recommendations in the Civil Aviation Authority’s strategic review of UK general aviation, the Government are considering whether to make a policy statement on the value of maintaining a viable network of general aviation airfields across the UK.
I am aware that Fareham and Gosport borough councils issued a joint planning statement for Daedalus in April last year. One of the aspirations of that planning statement was that future development of the site should seek to maximise the benefit of the existing runway for general and private aviation use. But the current decision to close the airfield to general aviation has been taken on the grounds of safety, not planning or general policy, and as such it is a matter for Hampshire police as the operator of the airfield, not for the MCA or for the Government generally.
The hon. Gentleman asked whether there might be a stay of execution of Hampshire police’s decision so as to give operators a chance to agree a safe and sustainable future flying regime. However, as I pointed out, the decision to close Daedalus to general aviation was taken by the airfield operator on safety grounds, and it would therefore be for Hampshire police to consider whether general aviation might safely be continued while further discussions take place, and if so under what conditions. Safety is and, I assume, must remain the primary consideration.
SEEDA has said that the potential long-term future of general aviation at the Daedalus site may be worthy of further consideration and will continue to explore options as part of its ongoing development work.
Let me summarise the position from the Government’s perspective. The Government’s primary concern is to safeguard the Maritime and Coastguard Agency’s ability to respond effectively to maritime emergencies. The Daedalus facility is an important element in that infrastructure and the MCA must ensure the continued availability of its search-and-rescue helicopters. It was to protect that position that the MCA acquired the land when it was declared surplus to requirements. The Government remain fully committed to providing maritime search-and-rescue facilities in that busy area for commercial shipping, leisure sailing and the use of our coasts and beaches for recreation.
The House will recall that the Maritime and Coastguard Agency recently let a new contract for the provision of faster helicopters with greater endurance. Those to be based at Lee-on-the-Solent will be in position in the new year. I am confident that hon. Members would not want anything to jeopardise the continuation of the excellent emergency response service that Her Majesty’s coastguard provides for the south coast of England.
The Maritime and Coastguard Agency cannot have acquired the Daedalus site in order, as the Minister said, to allow the helicopter to continue, because the helicopter does not require a long metalled runway to take off. Runway 0523 was acquired by the MCA and leased to the police, who require it for fixed-wing aircraft. The airfield cannot have been acquired specifically for the helicopter.
I entirely accept the point that the hon. Gentleman makes. My assumption—it can only be an assumption at this point, as I do not have the definitive reasons—is that the MCA acquired the site to protect the continuance of search-and-rescue helicopter operations from the site. The size of the site and the future lease of other aspects of the aerodrome would have been part of its business considerations in assessing what the MCA could get back from the Hampshire police authority, in order to justify public expenditure to provide the services that we expect. I have no further information on that.
I know that this sounds as though we are absolving ourselves of responsibility but, sadly, we are not the decision makers in this case. That lies firmly at the door of the Hampshire police authority and Hampshire constabulary, and the whole tenor of my response to the hon. Gentleman’s very effective explanation, if I may say so, of the importance of Daedalus to the local community, which we fully support and understand, is that it is Hampshire constabulary’s decision to say that the runway is no longer available. That is where the matter rests.
I can reassure the House and the hon. Gentleman that the MCA’s operation has not been affected by the decision to close the airfield to general aviation. I hope that he and the House will accept that the decision taken by the police is their decision.
The Minister referred to the review of light aviation airfields around the country. Does he accept that if this airfield were to close, one fewer facility would be available for the network that he is anxious to create throughout the country? Secondly, will he tell us what safety facilities would need to be in place to satisfy the Hampshire authority?
In response to the first point, as I mentioned earlier, following the Civil Aviation Authority’s review, we are in the course of reflecting on whether we should publish the specific policy statement in support of general aviation. If we are minded to go down that path, it is likely to occur some time next year.
On the second question, my understanding is that the decision to close the airfield to general aviation requires the managers of the airfield, Hampshire constabulary, to conduct a risk assessment. It is very much a matter for them to determine, on the basis of that assessment, whether operations can continue. That is why I have stressed that this is very much their decision. I would expect them to be able to supply the appropriate documentation to interested parties.
We are committed to general aviation and we certainly recognise and acknowledge the role that general aviation plays in the UK economy. Indeed, I articulated that a few moments ago in the course of my remarks. The outcome is disappointing, and I hear what the hon. Member for Gosport says about the shortage of notice, which just adds to the frustration people feel when they have not had an opportunity to put their case as fairly and squarely as they would otherwise have done. One cannot tell whether that would have assuaged them in some way.
I fully understand and expect that the campaign will not stop here. This evening’s debate has at least put down another marker. I would be very surprised if those who are centrally involved in this matter do not pay attention to the comments of the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues or, indeed, to my response for the Government. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will have some further success, following his success in securing this debate. I fully acknowledge, as I say, that this is not going to be the end of the matter, but from the Government’s point of view, we are not the ones who took the decision and we do not have the locus to determine any change to it. I apologise, but I cannot assist the hon. Gentleman in the way that he hoped I would when he tabled this debate.
Question put and agreed to.
Adjourned accordingly at twenty-seven minutes past Six o’clock.