International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 18th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, for giving us this wonderful opportunity in your Lordships’ House to have such a full and important debate today. I have to admit that I am very attracted and drawn to the idea of giving the Department for International Development a bit more time to manage its expenditure. However, I am not a budget person—indeed, I do not think this is a suitable House of Lords topic—so I stand to be corrected either way. None the less, this opportunity is too good to miss and I thank the noble Lord immensely.

I congratulate my noble friend Lord Bates on his appointment as Minister. This is my first opportunity to do so, and to say what full support I am sure he has from the whole House in this important task. As many Members have already said, Britain is just about the largest aid donor in the globe. The poverty is acute and the difficulties are enormous; our aid is therefore utterly vital.

I think I am correct in saying that the bulk of our aid is, and has been for some time, used for soft power. My comments will therefore look at that soft power and I may make one or two suggestions which I will be glad if the Minister will take away, think about and comment on another time. Soft power is vital at the top. It has enabled the United Kingdom to sit at the topmost table when discussing conflict resolution, peacebuilding, the rights of women and girls, which my noble friend Lady Hodgson focuses on, and other aspects that noble Lords have touched on. There is also an opportunity for soft power at the other end of the scale, and I have one or two thoughts on how we might increase our influence at the far end of the line where aid is being delivered.

When we look at the top of the soft power possibilities for the United Kingdom, are the Minister, the Secretary of State and the department as a whole able to report the ways in which that soft power is exercised? I regularly visit places where people are in great difficulty in conflict zones. I came back from Iraq on Tuesday. There are one or two rather important things that have not been brought to the Minister’s attention with sufficient strength. For example, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most powerful of all conventions, was drafted in this Chamber and in the other place and put forward by the United Kingdom. It was pushed very hard and worked on by the United Kingdom, and as a consequence it was adopted, signed and ratified by almost every nation on the globe. Somalia is a little difficult, and the United States has signed it but has not yet ratified it. None the less, if you look at that convention, you will see that it covers the entirety of what a child needs. In that context, a child is someone up to the age of 18 and, if the person is in particular difficulty, up to 20 years of age. Given the low life expectancy in some of the nations which need overseas aid, such as Yemen, where life expectancy is 47, we are talking about nearly half of a person’s life.

I see a point here which the Minister might wish to address long term. As he and his department are aware, internally displaced people have no rights at all. They have no United Nations convention protecting them in any shape or form. Those nations that never signed the 1951 Geneva Convention on refugees also fall down a gap in terms of UN protection because it is extremely difficult to claim that anyone on their territory qualifies under UN rules as a refugee, but I return to IDPs. With probably about 40% of any refugee population or IDP population being under the age of 18 and therefore qualifying as children, those children have no protection of any sort. They are not given any special attention, there may be no registration system and they may not be reunited with their families. If you look at the figures, you will see that those children are the most vulnerable for human trafficking, sexual slavery and all sorts of awful futures. For example—I cannot check these figures, but they seem correct in terms of those who are quoting them—after the earthquake in Nepal 20,000 children disappeared. Indeed, this week on my return to the UK I saw in the papers that we have lost several thousand children. Children are very difficult to track unless you have a proper identification system and absolute clarity about who is responsible for what in terms of protecting them.

The point I wish to put in front of the Minister is that internally displaced children have no rights of any sort. When they are in camps, they are the most vulnerable to being trafficked, forcibly married and otherwise abused. They may have no opportunity to see their parents or any remaining members of their family again. Perhaps the Minister will consider using our soft power by demanding that the United Nations adopts an optional protocol on internally displaced children, thus allowing them the same level of protection accorded to refugees under international law. He might also consider pushing the United Nations to create a mechanism so that as soon as internally displaced children reach camps, whether run by the local Government or the UN, their identity is preserved to prevent their further abuse through rape, trafficking and forced marriage, and to reunite them with their family, which forms the heart of child protection mechanisms through the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Those recommendations are part of the set of recommendations that have come from a big conference I chaired in September at St George’s, Windsor, under the AMAR Foundation, LDS Charities and Cumberland Lodge. There are a number of recommendations, which I will leave with the Minister. On the soft power point, I particularly raise internally displaced children and their complete lack of protection. That is one way in which I would like to see the United Kingdom use a portion of its soft power at the top.

Another possible scenario the Minister might consider is that here in the UK we spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about a very small fraction of global refugees and internally displaced people and whether we will grant them a safe haven in the United Kingdom. When you look at the figures, you will see that nearly every displaced person or refugee wants to go back home. They just want a safer home. They do not want to be assaulted again. I am talking mainly about conflict countries, of which there are all too many. Yet the United Nations, which is a principal conduit of British overseas aid expenditure, understandably focuses on giving support to camps. I believe that once a person arrives in a camp, every possible effort should be made to help them get back home as soon as possible, if only because life in camps is terrible. There is almost nothing there. Very often, they do not even have the basics of life. I have recently visited camps which do not even have human sewage disposal and therefore people are sick all the time. Apart from that, the average length of stay in a camp is nine years, or 11 years, in some cases, and 24 years for squatters. Yet the UN, the World Food Programme and all other organisations focus on people in camps. Would it not be possible to think a little differently and push the UN to think about getting people back home again, which is what about 98% of people want to do? Of course this means rebuilding the health centre, the school, the roads and everything that has been destroyed, but all that is feasible. Speaking for half a moment as trade envoy for Iraq, I would like to see British companies being invited to do that because we are among the best in the globe and can do the work best, quickest and most efficiently.

In my capacity as chairman of the AMAR Foundation, I have just visited a number of camps and hospitals right on the front line very near to Mosul. I had the opportunity to give a whole load of medical equipment; it was very satisfying. It was a wonderful opportunity paid for by the Hunt Oil Company. I had another opportunity in a nearby new camp which was waiting to receive the refugees from the liberation of Mosul, just as the hospital was. I had the opportunity to open a health centre for the AMAR Foundation funded entirely by the Vitol Foundation—another very happy moment. None the less, when I looked around, I was gravely concerned at the level of implementation of British expenditure on the ground by, say, UNICEF, UNHCR or UNDP. I wonder whether some monitoring could be brought in. It is not very good for me to say something, as I am merely a stray visitor, but there should be some monitoring of the way in which the UN, in particular, uses British aid.

More than that, the final thought to leave with the Minister is about how British soft power could become visible on the ground. Everyone—by which I mean the various mayors and governors who I met and so on—said to me, “Where is British aid?”. I would say, “We have given this, this and this. We have just dedicated that, that and that. I have the correct figures in my head, which are enormous; we are far and away the largest donor”. But this is invisible aid. It comes through the UN and of course comes down through various subcontracts, which at the end of the day very probably mean that the funding spent is relatively small.

But irrespective of the size of the funding, my point is that I want Britain to shine. I want our aid to be known about, not just at the top table in Geneva or in New York, but so that the people on the ground understand that Britain cares for them. I want the local Governments to know that Britain is strong and powerful and is doing everything we can to fight the enemy, not just by supporting military efforts but by our huge amount of overseas aid. I have taken up too much time. I thank the Minister for listening, and I leave those thoughts with him, as I again thank the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, for giving us this opportunity.