Sustainable Development Goals

Caroline Spelman Excerpts

Wednesday 28th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh]

Not in the slightest. I will set out in detail tomorrow, on a visit to the Institute of Development Studies in Brighton, our plans to expand what we want to do, particularly in the area of universal health coverage. Perhaps I will bump into the hon. Lady on the pier down there.

There are three vital areas that Labour would prioritise to tackle inequality: universal health coverage, human rights and climate change. I will say more on those issues in a moment, but first I would like to look at this Government’s approach. We regret that the Government failed to bring forward legislation to enshrine in law both parties’ manifesto commitment to spend 0.7% of gross national income on international aid. It fell to Labour MPs and the good offices of my right hon. Friend the Member for Tynemouth (Mr Campbell) to ensure that the landmark Bill that would do so was passed in this House.

[Mrs Caroline Spelman (Meriden) (Con)]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way, but does she accept that trying to set out the dividing lines between the parties on the subject of international development breaks a consensus that has existed for a long time? I think the outside world looking in would fail to understand that it is this Government, whom she seeks to criticise, who have met the 0.7% target.

[Mary Creagh]

I have the greatest respect for the right hon. Lady, but she too led an Opposition day debate on trade justice in 2002—I read the report of it in Hansard only last night—so I shall take no lessons on having Opposition day debates on this matter from her.

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[Mary Creagh]

That is very kind. Unlike many Government Members who discovered a new-found interest in development as soon as they were appointed to their roles, I have a long-standing interest in the subject. Let us start with my volunteering for Oxfam in Sri Lanka for two months in 1990. Let us move on to my visit to Rwanda and eastern DRC—

[Mrs Spelman]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. The title of the debate is “Sustainable Development Goals”, and Members have come into the Chamber to discuss sustainable development goals. We have heard from the hon. Lady for 15 minutes, with no discussion of them. A document produced by the Select Committee of which I am a member is tagged to the motion. It is entitled “Agreeing ambitious Sustainable Development Goals in 2015”. Surely, Madam Deputy Speaker, if the hon. Lady had wanted a DFID score card, that is what it should have been called.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

I appreciate the right hon. Lady’s frustration, but that was what Mr Speaker would call “not a point of order, but a point of frustration”. The content of the hon. Lady’s speech is not a matter for me, apart from the fact that she must stick to the title of the debate, which, so far, she has done.

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[Mary Creagh]

The Secretary of State will have her chance when she makes her speech.

We want girls to enjoy their education free from the threat of child or forced marriage. However, Tory MEPs voted against the European Parliament’s report on sustainable development goals and on the section on women’s sexual and reproductive rights. We want to tackle the economic conditions and supply chains that tolerate the obscenity of 168 million child workers. We want to ensure that children affected by conflict have the psycho-social services that they need and the right to go to school. We want members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities to be free to love and marry whomever they wish. We want the disabled to participate fully in society, and we want protection for indigenous peoples.

We want workers to enjoy decent work, decent pay and rest breaks, and to have the freedom to join a trade union. We must not have a repeat of the terrible Rana Plaza disaster. We will therefore reverse this Government’s ideological decision to stop funding for the International Labour Organisation.

[Mrs Spelman]

Will the hon. Lady acknowledge that Members on both sides of the House came together and succeeded in putting into the Modern Slavery Bill—which this Government have enacted—a clause on transparency in supply chains, precisely to deal with the exploitation she describes? Labour Members also supported that measure.

[Mary Creagh]

Absolutely, and I pay tribute to Members on both sides of the House for that. I believe that that was a Labour amendment, but it had cross-party support and we welcomed that.

Eradicating poverty will be possible only if we tackle climate change. If we do not keep temperature rises to below 2º C, millions will fall back into poverty. The Prime Minister says very little about his wind turbine these days. He is a prisoner of his divided party, which is split over whether climate change even exists. For Labour, climate change will be at the centre of our foreign policy and integral to our plan to change Britain.

There is a real opportunity to address climate change this year. The United States, the EU and, most importantly, China, are all showing a willingness to act. At the Paris summit in December, a Labour Government would push for global targets for reducing carbon emissions, with regular reviews towards the long-term goal of what the science now tells us is necessary: zero net global emissions in the latter half of this century. In addition, we must ensure that the sustainable development goals have a specific goal on climate change—something that the Secretary of State has repeatedly failed to back.

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[Justine Greening]

I will make some progress. I will go back to the high-level panel report that the Prime Minister was asked to co-chair by Ban Ki-moon, that was published in May 2013. We all recognise that it played a key role in shaping the broader debate around the sustainable development goals. I am talking about the discussions that it outlined and some of the objectives and challenges that it set out for the new post-2015 framework.

[Mrs Spelman]

The UK was one of the first countries to identify sustainable development goals as the best idea around for the outcome of the Rio+20 summit. The presence of our Prime Minister on the high-level panel on sustainability and the vision of the UN Secretary-General brought the millennium development goals and the universal sustainable development goals into one entity.

[Justine Greening]

My right hon. Friend is right, and she speaks from a position of authority. Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Mr O'Brien), she is well respected, both for her service as a Cabinet Minister and for her tireless work with charities such as Tearfund. She is absolutely right: we were one of the key players that recognised the need to fuse the two agendas, of sustainability and climate change and of tackling poverty, successfully if we were to achieve the goal that my Department works faithfully to achieve of eradicating absolute—