Sustainable Development Goals — House of Commons, 2019-06-11
Topic: Mixed Topics
Harriett Mary Morison Baldwin (Conservative, Centre-right): This has been a short but perfectly formed debate. We have touched the surface of a range of issues relating to the overarching framework that the whole world has signed up to for our journey towards 2030 as a global population. Today’s debate has been a milestone on that journey, enabling us to talk about not only the UK’s voluntary national review, but the journey on which the rest of the world is embarked. I am proud to stand at the Dispatch Box having been in the Government at the time when we enshrined our contribution of 0.7% of gross national income in statute. We are the first and only country in the world to have done that. Members on both sides of the House have expressed support today for the continuation of that approach; they can count on me to continue to support it, as, indeed, the Secretary of State made clear earlier This is the first time that we have carried out a voluntary national review. There are, of course, 17 goals. I do not know about the rest of the House, but I personally find that 17 is not exactly a catchy number to work with. I noticed that some Members worked that down to five Ps and others to fewer themes, but I find that 17 is a bit unmanageable. Within those 17 goals there are 169 targets and within that 244 separate indicators. Having worked in the private sector for many years before entering politics, I am a strong believer that it is important to measure these things, because what gets measured gets managed. Interestingly, as a result of this first voluntary national review we found that our independent ONS does not measure absolutely every one of those indicators; in fact only about 72% of those global indicators are already on our national reporting platform. That is the first thing we have learned, along with the importance of data around that. We have therefore decided to add to the data we commission We have had an excellent and wide-ranging debate with a range of contributions from the Opposition Benches, including by the hon. Members for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden) and for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill), and the hon. Members for Dundee West (Chris Law) and for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady)—the voices from Scotland, where of course the process has been done by the devolved Administration of the independent Scottish Government—as well as the hon. Members for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) and for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy). We heard a number of times about food insecurity. As a result of the voluntary national review and the discovery that we had statistics for only 72% of the measures, we have commissioned a new data series for the UK, with a measure that will take place in the household surveys around food insecurity. I hope that the whole House will welcome the fact that what gets measured gets managed, as I said earlier, and that we will have a measure for that for the first time A number of points were made in the debate about the consultation process. This has been an ongoing process since the UK played such a pivotal part in developing the goals in the first place. In the run-up to the voluntary national review we have engaged with 350 organisations, we have had 200 different case studies shared with us, we have had 35 different engagement events—this is of course within England—and we have had the opportunity to talk to some of the Select Committees about this process. I welcome engagement from all the groups, and am particularly keen to hear from a wider range of groups as we go into the process of publication this week.