Sustainable Development Goals — House of Commons, 2019-06-11
Topic: International Affairs
Roderick James Nugent Stewart (Conservative, Centre-right): That is the right tone in approaching the subject. There is an important fundamental issue: when we think about other people’s countries, we often forget about politics. We often talk as though development in somebody else’s country is simply a matter of experts from the World Bank sitting down with a piece of paper. Yet development in any country is deeply political. People who drive development in other countries are politicians—members of political parties—and there are Oppositions who challenge them. Many of the problems in development—defensiveness, cover-ups, lack of transparency and progress—stem from the fact that we do not understand the politics well enough. The debate is therefore a good way of understanding some of the challenges in, for example, eastern DRC. People might believe that the issue around Ebola is just a technical question of getting the vaccines on the ground, but the basic issue is that the area is controlled by Opposition insurgency groups, which have a big problem with the capital. Politics is at the heart of all that For this country, I will move quickly through the global goals, looking at them essentially through the lens of five Ps—people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnership—and trying in every case to give examples of where we are doing well, where we are doing badly and the strengths that we have to build on. Looking at the UK as a whole is well beyond my brain and that of anyone in the House—and I am well aware that there are many experts in the House who know far more about individual areas of domestic policy than I do. I will attempt to present now what we will present to the United Nations as a way of trying to take a snapshot of Britain in 2019 There have been significant improvements in healthcare even relatively recently. For example, stillbirths in this country have reduced by 18.8% since 2010. However, on the negative side, we need to do a great deal more on particular forms of cancer, on heart attacks and on stroke, where we do not achieve the results of some comparator developed countries. We have a strength to build on—the NHS, which is a truly remarkable organisation. It is very difficult to think of equivalents elsewhere in the world that have that key point of being free at the point of access. There are countries that have done better than us on cancer survival rates where healthcare is bankrupting for a family. It can mean the destruction of a family and the absence of health insurance can drive people to the wall We have reached the extraordinary stage where nearly half our population now goes to university compared with only 3% when my mother went to university. That is a big change since my mother was young. However, we can do much more in education. We are not doing as well as we can on basic numeracy and literacy and technical education compared with some of our comparators. We are also perhaps not thinking hard enough about the effect that robotics and AI will have on the world of work. Hundreds of thousands of people are at risk of losing their jobs to new technologies and we need to have bursaries for people in mid-life to retrain for a new world of work. However, to come back to the basic point of building on strengths, in our country, as hon. Members will have heard again and again from the Dispatch Box, 85% of children are in good or outstanding schools We have heard about equality, on which we have very significant challenges. In addition to the question raised by the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), there are other areas in this country that we do not talk about enough—for example, the elderly poor. This area can genuinely be shocking. I feel that in my constituency if I see an 88-year-old woman looking after a 92-year-old doubly incontinent man, having to wake up every two hours through the night. That is a genuinely shocking thing I sometimes feel, coming back from Nepal or the Congo, that our family and community support structures for the elderly are not necessarily what they are in some other, much poorer developing countries. On the other hand, on the positive side, we can point out that in this country income inequality has, unusually among advanced countries, declined On the planet, there is a balance between three things. Yes, we are very proud that we have gone 300 hours without coal-fired power and that we have reduced our carbon emissions more than many comparable advanced countries, but nobody can get around the fact that we are facing a huge climate planet emergency. There is an enormous amount to do and there is simply no point being complacent or talking about our achievements in the past. There is a huge amount more that Britain can be doing on technology and research and development. For example, to stop China building another 300 gigawatt coal-fired power station, we should be developing solar technology, light spectrum technology and solar film to drive down the marginal costs. That is why, as the Secretary of State for DFID, I want to double the amount we spend within our budget on climate and the environment On prosperity, we are leading the world in certain sectors. We are doing very, very well in financial services and technology—I have been astonished by some of the robotics and AI companies I have seen recently—but we have a big problem with productivity. There is a big challenge in northern England in particular, where we really need to get infrastructure on the ground. We have not yet unleashed the potential that could come from, for example, properly connecting Newcastle, Carlisle and Glasgow, or properly connecting Leeds and Manchester, which is the huge opportunity There are, however, strengths we can build on. The most obvious is that, if one looks at the elections in the 1970s, the great issue in this country was of course unemployment. With all the challenges we have in our country, the achievements on employment have been quite remarkable. In particular, compared with 2015, 700,000 more people with disabilities are now in employment. There has also been a slight reduction—not a big enough reduction, but a slight reduction in that period—in the gender pay gap On peace—the penultimate issue on which we are measuring ourselves—crime has been falling. At the same time, however, we have a serious problem around knife crime. We have an enormous amount to learn from Glasgow’s public health approach to knife crime. We have lost only two soldiers on active service since 2014. We live in a much more peaceful world in relation to Britain’s activities overseas. That would have been almost unimaginable for a Minister to say from this Dispatch Box at any time, probably, in the past millennium—if this Dispatch Box had been around for a millennium Finally, on partnership, this country has an incredible voluntary sector and an astonishing civil society. We all feel that in all of our constituencies—I feel that in my constituency, as all hon. Members will in theirs—but we are still not harnessing it properly. Amazing community schemes on community land trusts, community broadband and community planning are not being properly reinforced and followed up There are a lot of things that we could address. In recent meetings, for example, people have pointed out that if your mother lives in Middlesbrough and you live in London, could we not have a situation whereby somebody whose mother lives in London while they live in Middlesbrough visited your mother while you visited their mother? A lot of people would like to do that sort of thing, but as a society we are simply not good enough at tapping that kind of voluntary energy and bringing it together Given that I am often accused of being too gentle with those on the Opposition Benches, I am going to provoke them by saying that there is an example of partnership from which we can learn. I am going to pick possibly the most unpopular subject for those on the Opposition Benches: the privatised water industry. The extraordinary thing about the privatised water industry since 1980 is that by privatising water we have brought in £78 billion of investment that would not have otherwise come in. Water quality in this country is now at 99.6% and we are five times less likely to have an outage on our water. That is at a cost to the person of £1 a day for your water, in and out—an extraordinary achievement.