Sustainable Development Goals

Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts

Wednesday 10th July 2019 Grand Committee

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the fact that in her Written Statement on the VNR the Minister underlined that the goals apply to all people in all countries, including here in the UK, so there is a focus on the domestic in the review. It will perhaps not surprise noble Lords that that will be my focus as well.

Earlier this year, the Environmental Audit Committee identified a doughnut-shaped hole in domestic implementation of the SDGs despite the Government’s fine words, and I am afraid I do not think much has changed since then, the VNR notwithstanding. The committee used SDG 2—zero hunger—as a case study through which to examine the domestic focus. It concluded that the Government continue to see hunger and food insecurity as overseas issues, with DfID the only department to include them in its single departmental plan, and lamented the blind eye to UK hunger. It cited UNICEF data provided by the Food Foundation which indicates that a higher proportion of children live in severely food-insecure households than in any other EU nation. The UK Stakeholders for Sustainable Development rated the UK only amber or red on nutrition-related targets under SDG 2. While the decision to start measuring food insecurity is welcome, it must be only a first step.

Food insecurity is a helpful concept, but it can serve to sanitise the fact that in some cases we are talking about hunger. Let us not forget that the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which was ratified by the UK, places a duty on government to ensure the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger. According to Human Rights Watch, the UK Government are failing in that duty, as its research revealed families of children going hungry in a country with ample resources to make sure that that does not happen. This is borne out by countless other studies.

A particular issue which integrates the domestic and global dimensions of the SDGs concerns migrant families with no recourse to public funds, which was debated yesterday evening. Children go hungry because they are excluded from free school meals because of the rule. Will the Minister undertake to take this up with relevant colleagues in the context of the SDGs?

The implications of hunger for children’s education has been brought home to us by numerous surveys of teachers noted in recent months in this House. Recently, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders reported a conversation he had had with a group of head teachers. When asked what was the biggest issue facing them, the answer was, “Hungry children … It’s shaming”.

The NVR document makes no mention of this shaming hunger. However, it cites investment in a national school breakfast programme as an example of action taken in the UK to deliver food security. This investment is welcome. I met recently with the leaders of the two organisations spearheading the programme and was impressed by what they have achieved in just a year. They are driven by the knowledge that “some children are too hungry to learn”.

In just a year the programme is delivering a nutritious breakfast to an estimated 280,000 children. The benefits reported by schools include improved behaviour, attendance and attainment. The Government’s contribution to the costs, at least half of which are met by schools themselves, is a mere £26 million over two years funded from the soft drinks industry levy, which raised £240 million in just one year. I challenge the Minister to come up with a more cost-effective programme to further the aims of SDG 2 domestically. Its leaders are sick with worry because the Government are refusing to give an assurance that the programme will continue beyond March next year.

A Parliamentary Question eventually elicited the response that,

“decisions about any funding beyond March 2020 will be taken as part of the upcoming Spending Review”.

However, who now knows when that will be, given the current uncertainties? In the meantime it is impossible for them to plan for the future, yet schools need to know what will happen for the new school year. Given that this comes within the purview of the SDGs, I urge the Minister to take this back to the Department for Education and seek an assurance that at the very least a year’s extension will be granted without further delay, leaving longer-term decisions for the spending review. Given that the Government’s contribution is a mere fraction of the soft drinks levy, there is no excuse not to do so.

As the UKSSD report notes,

“poverty and inequalities are major underlying factors in the nutrition targets of SDG2”.

I turn therefore now to SDG 1, “no poverty”. Here the UKSSD’s domestic scores are one green, three amber and one red. It concludes:

“Unless the UK takes a different tack, everyday life for its most financially challenged will continue to become more stressed and the prospect of achieving SDG1—conceived as a national indicator of income poverty—is a remote possibility”.


That is not exactly a vote of confidence. However, it tallies more with the evidence presented by the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, deemed “factually correct” by the lead official, than with the complacent picture painted in the VNR report.

Responsibility for SDG 1 lies with the DWP. According to the VNR report, each UK government department has embedded the goals in its single departmental plan; and each plan outlines how planned activity will support delivery of the goals. I therefore turn now to the DWP plan. The goals are so well embedded they are virtually invisible. There is not a single explicit reference to them in “our objectives”. Indeed, those objectives do not even mention tackling poverty, which I find extraordinary. There are no UK-wide poverty targets as one would expect if SDG 1.1 and 1.2 were genuinely integrated into the plan. The Scottish Government seem to be making a more serious effort to integrate the SDGs in their anti-poverty strategy and have retained the child poverty targets abandoned by the UK Government.

The plan reads as though it were drawn up without reference to the SDGs and then officials went through it, adding in parenthesis where they thought an action could be presented as contributing to them. That is not what I call embedded. Nor is there any evidence of a delivery strategy for SDG 1. The same is true of the DWP annual report, which makes but brief mention of its responsibility for SDG 1 and tells us nothing about progress in meeting it. In a recent analysis of domestic progress on SDG 1 in the journal Poverty, Fran Bennett observes that the contrast with DfID’s departmental plan,

“may suggest the Government is taking its external responsibilities relating to poverty more seriously than the equivalent domestic agenda”.

She notes:

“There has been some recent acknowledgement of the UK government’s less than stellar performance to date … especially target 1.2 relating to poverty at home”.


According to the VNR document, the International Development Secretary has overall leadership and policy oversight for the goals, with the Minister for Implementation in the Cabinet Office helping to ensure a co-ordinated cross-government approach to delivery. The Minister has acknowledged that more needs to be done on co-ordination. What co-ordination has there been between DfID/the Cabinet Office and individual departments in drawing up their single departmental plans? If the DWP’s plan, with its scant reference to the SDGs, has been deemed adequate to the task, does it not support the contention that the Government are not taking the domestic SDG agenda seriously and that the institutional mechanisms for pursuing that agenda need reviewing, as my noble friend Lord McConnell spelled out so clearly?

While target 1.2—reducing poverty in all its dimensions—is key for the UK, it would be wrong to assume that target 1.1 on eradicating extreme poverty is irrelevant. I have already spoken about hunger, which one might consider an indicator of extreme poverty, but more generally there is growing concern about destitution in our midst, to the extent that a Joseph Rowntree Foundation study developed a measure of destitution appropriate for a wealthy country such as the UK, and on that basis estimated that 1.5 million people, including 365,000 children, were destitute at some point during 2017. They could not afford to buy the bare essentials that we all need to eat, stay warm and dry and keep clean.

I fear the numbers will be even worse by now as the benefits freeze and other cuts have taken their toll, pushing many already in poverty further below the poverty line. There are particular concerns in this context about asylum seekers and newly recognised refugees, who are totally invisible in the VNR report, yet refugees have been identified by UN member states as a key group in pursuing the SDGs, as the International Rescue Committee pointed out. Will the Minister take note of the IRC’s call on the UK Government to support the inclusion of refugees in the political declaration at the upcoming high-level political forum? Will she ask colleagues to ensure that they specifically include them in their departmental plans?

Fran Bennett concludes:

“The potential of Goal 1 as a powerful instrument for driving forward positive and co-ordinated action to ensure that by 2030 in the UK extreme poverty (and destitution) (target 1.1) are eradicated, and poverty in all its dimensions (target 1.2) is cut by half, has certainly not been realised to date”.


So, when in his foreword to the VNR report the Secretary of State states,

“We are proud of what we have achieved but humbled by what we haven’t”,


I humbly suggest that the Government have little to be proud of when it comes to their domestic poverty agenda. Instead, the growing evidence of suffering as a consequence of the Government’s own actions—I reference in particular the recent study by the Church of England Child Poverty Action Group, of which I am honorary president, which details the devastating impact of the two-child limit on family life—suggests they are impeding rather than making significant strides towards the achievement of SDG 1 and related SDGs, as claimed by the Secretary of State.