UN International Day of Education

Fleur Anderson Excerpts

Thursday 28th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab) [V]]

I congratulate the hon. Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) on securing this important debate.

Education is essential to eradicating global poverty, achieving every child’s potential and achieving the global goals. Girls’ education is especially neglected, and it too is essential. We can all agree on that, but one crucial element of education is often overlooked. By underfunding that element, not asking whether schools have it and not giving it priority in educational terms, we are letting down another generation and holding back the post-covid opening of schools.

So what is this magic but missing educational ingredient? It is WASH: water, sanitation—toilets—and hygiene education. Cleaning has become a major part of covid control in schools here in the UK, and it is no different around the world, yet I went to many schools before covid that had very few toilets or sinks and very little soap. Teachers are doing a great job of struggling on, but their educational facilities mean that girls miss school every month because they cannot manage their period at school, and many children with disabilities cannot go to school because there are no toilets accessible for them.

Half of all schools globally do not have soap and water available to students, 620 million pupils do not have decent school toilets, and every year, diarrhoea and intestinal infections together kill nearly 140,000 school-age children. Poor WASH in the first years of life is closely linked to chronic malnutrition, leading to stunting, which then leads to long-term effects in the development and learning potential of children.

Opening schools safely when it is covid-safe to do so is an urgent priority, but clean water, toilets and hygiene are essential to enable that. A school without those is not a safe environment. I urge the Government not to cut the 0.7% aid budget, and I urge the Government, the Minister and all Members to keep asking, “What about WASH?” in every discussion about education. This summer, the UK will co-host the Global Partnership for Education funding summit, with Kenya, and there will be a particular focus on getting girls to school. That is very welcome, but we need to have ambitious amounts of money dedicated by the Government—civil society is calling for £600 million—and for ensuring that WASH investment is a part of that as well. Facilities must be inclusive and accessible, and ensure privacy, safety and dignity. So I hope to hear this addressed in the Minister’s response today to this crucial question for global education: what about WASH?

International Development and Gender-based Violence

Fleur Anderson Excerpts

Thursday 26th November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr McCabe. I thank the hon. Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) for all his work as chair of the APPG on the preventing sexual violence in conflict initiative, and I thank him and the hon. Member for Stafford (Theo Clarke) for co-sponsoring this very important debate with me. I am pleased that, despite our party differences, we are firmly united on this issue, particularly on the prevention of sexual violence in conflict, which is what I will focus on in my speech.

The year 2020 was set to be a watershed moment for women’s rights. It has been 25 years since the Beijing declaration and platform for action, and we were hoping to spend this year reaffirming commitments to gender equality that would accelerate progress towards dismantling the barriers that women and girls continue to face. However, in all corners of the world, violence against women remains rife and has increased in many contexts.

Whenever and wherever a crisis hits, violence against women and girls increases. Today is a dark day for two reasons. First, in Ethiopia and Tigray there have been three weeks of fighting: 40,000 Ethiopians have fled to Sudan and thousands are displaced in Tigray. I hope the Minister will tell us what action he is taking on prevention of sexual violence in that conflict. It is a very live issue.

The second issue is the cutting of the 0.7% aid commitment. The Conservative party manifesto gave that commitment and it was promised for many years, with support from people across the country. I was part of the huge demonstrations of support at previous G7 summits. This is the year before we host a G7 summit, and the prospect of having to walk into that room having cut our own aid budget is very depressing. It is harmful to the cause of taking action against gender-based violence.

Women and girls living in war zones and crisis areas are especially at risk of gender-based violence. In his report on conflict-related sexual violence, released back in June, the UN Secretary-General lists a series of truly harrowing verified case studies of sexual violence in current war zones. I will read some of them:

“In the Central African Republic, a mother of six was subjected to sexual violence by ex-Séléka elements who seized control of her village. During a reprisal attack by anti-balaka forces, she was abducted and repeatedly raped…In northern Mali, two sisters of adolescent age were abducted and gang raped by members of the Mouvement national de libération de l’Azawad. Upon their release, the girls received medical treatment, but no complaint was filed with the police, despite the identity of the perpetrators being known to the family, owing to the fear of reprisals.”

That is all too common a story. In Colombia, the National Victims’ Unit recorded 365 victims of conflict-related sexual violence during the armed conflict, saying:

“Women and girls made up 89 per cent of the victims”.

I have sat in a room of a similar size to this one with a group of women from Somalia, who told harrowing stories about their experiences during the continuing war in Somalia. I have seen them crying and they are with me in this important debate. The impact of using rape as a weapon of war lasts a lifetime, and it lasts through generations.

As the Secretary-General saliently points out in his report, we need to bear in mind that for every documented case of sexual violence,

“there are countless other stories that will never be heard.”

We do not know the enormous extent of this issue.

The recent establishment of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office marks a crossroads for UK foreign policy. It will come as no surprise to Members that I fear that it is a mistake. It does, however, offer an opportunity to reset the up-to-now lacklustre support for the prevention of sexual violence in conflict initiative, which was announced with huge fanfare in 2012, and in 2014 we saw the magic of stardust and celebrity, with Angelina Jolie and a former Conservative Foreign Minister. It was proclaimed by the Conservative Government to be top of the leader board of international priorities, but I fear it is now languishing in the lower divisions. I hope the Minister can tell me how that will be changed.

This year’s Independent Commission for Aid Impact report on PSVI gave it the equivalent of an Ofsted rating of red or amber. I sincerely hope that the Minister will tell us how the Government are working differently to bring that back to green. Otherwise, what is the point of the two Departments merging and saying they are going to work better? The merger creates a high risk to the leadership of what was the Department for International Development in uplifting the rights of women and girls around the world.

The International Rescue Committee has written an important report on the need for survivor-centred approaches to tackling PSVI, highlighting the unintended consequences of mandatory reporting, which aimed to bring justice but too often resulted in stigma for survivors. We need to learn from that report. Its important recommendations include the need to listen to survivors, provide safe spaces and give them power and resources to organise themselves and make their own decisions. Those recommendations need to be added to the way in which we work on prevention of sexual violence in conflict.

I support the hon. Member for Totnes and the APPG in calling on the UK to push for a new, expert international body to collect and preserve evidence of conflict-related sexual violence. Evidence is essential to ending this. We need to bring more perpetrators to justice. The armed forces need to change how they act; otherwise, there will be no change at all. But this will be done only through the rigorous collecting of forensic, physical and digital evidence.

Secondly, the Government should ring-fence 1% of the UK’s official development assistance—up from 0.3%—to tackle gender-based violence, including sexual-based violence in conflict. Thirdly, responsibility for that should be restored to the Foreign Secretary. The ICAI report found that shifting responsibility to the level of a junior Minister

“resulted in ministerial attention and funding being redirected elsewhere”

and in our dropping down the league table.

Fourthly, the Government should use their new Magnitsky-style global human rights sanctions regime to target those who commit or encourage conflict-related sexual violence. That would send out strong signals that it is not acceptable. Fifthly, PSVI needs a longer-term approach, with a long-term strategy and funding cycle, not just a one-year funding cycle. This is an endemic problem of human rights and justice. It will take many years to solve it, and it needs many years of action.

I will add my own recommendations. The first is to end the stigma, which for many women is worse than the action itself. When they return, they are rejected by their husbands and communities, and many children are also rejected. We need global leadership to tackle the stigma so that it does not continue. I raised that in questions to the Church Commissioners this morning, and I will continue to raise it wherever and whenever I can. I hope the Minister will do so as well.

Secondly, when will the delayed global summit take place? Let us bring back Angelina Jolie and see who else we can get. We need to get back that global attention. In 2014, we were promised it would take place five years later, which, if my maths serves me correctly, was 2019. It did not happen then—although I can understand why—and it has not happened this year either. It really needs to happen next year. I like the fact that the hon. Member for Totnes has called 2021 the year of conferences—why not add one more? Thirdly, I want our work to focus on measures to document evidence and bring perpetrators to justice, and for us to think creatively about how to do that in this digital age.

In conclusion, as parliamentarians we must never lose sight of the profound and unspeakable suffering experienced by women and men as a result of sexual violence. It is not just women who are affected—men are definitely affected, too—but our focus today has been women. Our British values, of which I am very proud and which unite Members on both sides of the House, compel us to take up the issue, do what we can around the world, fight their corner and ensure that justice is done.

Yemen

Fleur Anderson Excerpts

Thursday 24th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

May I start by saying how glad I am that we are having this debate at long last, and I congratulate the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) on securing it?

Yemen is the world’s gravest humanitarian emergency. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a penholder on Yemen, the UK has a unique leadership role in helping to bring about relief, at last, for millions of suffering Yemenis. The UK Government must step up and use our country’s position and influence in the world to persuade all parties in Yemen to end the fighting and usher in an immediate ceasefire and a lasting peace. The UK’s arms sales to Saudi Arabia must stop. They undermine our peace efforts. We must lead on an international embargo on arms sales, instead of being a country that will not follow others.

I want to focus on a critical aspect lacking in the humanitarian response in particular—water, sanitation and hygiene. Yemen is one of the most water-scarce nations on Earth. According to Oxfam, 20 million people lack reliable access to clean water. Seventy per cent. of Yemenis do not have soap for hand washing and hygiene. Not only does this have dire consequences for poverty levels and public health; it makes disease prevention almost impossible. It is, therefore, absolutely no surprise that there are an estimated 1 million covid-19 cases in the country, alongside a severe outbreak of cholera and increasing malnutrition and incidence of polio.

Public health is almost impossible without access to water, sanitation and hygiene. It is the first line of defence against infectious diseases. It is also a best buy in public health. Hand washing is one of the cheapest and most effective disease-prevention methods. It really is a no-regrets intervention and investment.

Good water, sanitation and hygiene also have benefits beyond public health for the Yemeni people. It is crucial in addressing gender inequality, reaching the most marginalised people and groups, and removing disparities in access to public services. However, according to the World Bank last year, there is a global financing gap of $114 billion for water, sanitation and hygiene. In 2019, the UK spent just 2% of our bilateral aid on water, sanitation and hygiene, and this summer cut the aid budget by £2.9 billion overall.

The Government claim to be one of the largest humanitarian donors to the crisis in Yemen. We should rightly be proud of that, but why did the UK cut its contribution to the Yemen pledging conference by £40 million this year? Overall, international funding at the pledging conference fell £1 billion short of the UN’s target. As a result of these funding shortages, 12 out of 40 major programmes in Yemen have been cut or reduced.

The Labour party warned the Government that a shortfall in aid funding would lead to the humanitarian and health crises spiralling into irreparable disaster. Warnings have become reality in Yemen. The Government must do more. I would welcome an assurance from the Minister that he will support more funding for WaSH, alongside ceasefires to get aid where it is needed, to rebuild water systems.

At the moment, the UK’s primary export to Yemen seems to be bombs delivered by Saudi fighter jets, rather than the clean water and sanitation that Yemenis desperately need. I implore the Government to shoulder the responsibilities conferred on them by the UN and show the leadership needed to open up the humanitarian response to the crisis. The suffering of the Yemeni people has gone on long enough, and the world is looking to us to lead the way.

Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office

Fleur Anderson Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Dominic Raab]

Last week, I was in Jerusalem and in Ramallah on the west bank. I raised this issue of textbooks with the Prime Minister—Prime Minister Shtayyeh, whom I worked for 22 years ago—and there is an EU-related review ongoing. We have made it very clear that we want to see full co-operation and engagement with that. We are looking very carefully at the outcome of it, and of course we will then be able to assess what we do on aid. He is absolutely right to raise the point, and I am hopefully in a position to give him the reassurance he needs.

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

Water, sanitation and hygiene funding is essential for achieving disease control and prevention, poverty reduction and gender equality. I am dismayed that the first act of this new Department—this takeover of DFID by the FCO—has been to cut the UK’s foreign aid budget by £2.9 billion. Will the Secretary of State demonstrate his commitment and prove his commitment to poverty reduction by committing to increase spending on water, sanitation and hygiene projects?

[Dominic Raab]

What I would say first is that of course we would have a review of our aid budget as a result of the impact of the 0.7%; that comes with the target. I think the hon. Member’s own Front-Bench team have accepted that. What I can tell her, though, is that we were very clear not just to salami slice budgets. So when I took the chairmanship of the review that we conducted with Departments across Whitehall, we preserved focus and the funding for the bottom billion—the poverty reduction for the poorest around the world. We preserved and we made sure that we safeguarded the money prioritised for climate change, for girls’ education, for covid-19 and also for a range of the “force for good” campaigns for media freedom and girls’ education, as I have already mentioned, that I discuss, and in that way we have had a strategic approach. So, yes, we have had to review it in line with our commitment to adhere to a 0.7% pledge, but we have done it in a strategic way, and I think when she looks at the detail, she can be reassured.

Official Development Assistance

Fleur Anderson Excerpts

Thursday 9th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) on securing this important debate. I have worked in the international development sector for 25 years—before DFID and during DFID—and I have seen the effects of DFID’s work around the world. I believe this is the wrong action at the wrong time.

I welcome the commitment from those on the Government Benches to the 0.7% support. We must keep the focus on the poorest, who have been campaigned for by people up and down this country for so many years. This is the wrong time because we have not yet seen the peak of the coronavirus in countries around the world. We should be working flat-out with countries, not on accounting changes and organisational charts.

The Government are engaging in organisational navel-gazing instead of taking and shaping our place in the world at this important time. We have COP 26 and the G7 presidency coming up. We should be concerned about these huge issues, not about transforming and merging Departments, which will take two to three years to bed in. We should learn from Norway; at the same time as doing its merger, it increased its aid budget. That contributed to the merger’s success, but also it was not a full merger; it was a light-touch merger. Given the timing of these changes, I think that is what we need.

We should not rely only on more and more multilateral grants, but on local, trusted, adaptive, speedy aid agencies. That is why we have seen over 200 aid agencies complain that this is not the right move. We should listen to them and work with them, especially in response to the pandemic.

We need Cabinet-level representation—a permanent secretary just for this Department. The International Development Committee and ICAI must be maintained. The UK public must see the accountability of this move. They must see that the spending is on the poorest, if there really are to be trade-offs between Zambia and Ukraine. It is in our national interest—our British interest—to eradicate poverty, and we must spend our resources on global changes that we can all be proud of.

Commonwealth in 2020

Fleur Anderson Excerpts

Monday 9th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to be here today on Commonwealth Day and the day of the Commonwealth service, when all 53 flags are flying in Parliament Square—a day when the Birmingham Commonwealth Games Bill was brought before Parliament and the Minister has arranged for us to have a Commonwealth debate.

I think I arranged the first such debate in 2012 as the founding chair of the all-party group on the Commonwealth and, at that stage, Parliamentary Private Secretary to the first of two Ministers for the Commonwealth. It is a great treat to be here with him—the comeback kid of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He puts the “C” firmly back into the FCO: three times returned to the FCO to keep that C flag flying. If he has been to only 18 out of the 19 Commonwealth countries in Africa, surely his officials have an opportunity to arrange a trip to the 19th—we could even have a sweepstake on which one he has not been to.

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford), the living symbol of UK-New Zealand partnership in this Chamber. His speech followed two maiden speeches of great distinction. My hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (James Sunderland) typifies the concept of service before self, having moved seamlessly from the Army to Parliament, where I know he will put his constituents first. I shall return to one of his Commonwealth themes later.

We also heard a passionate speech from the hon. Member for Leicester East (Claudia Webbe). I have no doubt that everyone who lives in the Nevis Islands will celebrate her speech and her presence in the Chamber. She shared with us all a vivid talent for focusing on some of the crimes of the past, while perhaps skating lightly over some of the more recent scandals. We welcome her to the House. The Commonwealth is part of her, but it is also part of me, because I am a child of the Commonwealth. I was brought up in Kenya, and the atrocities in Hola to which she alluded were part of my childhood.

In the Chamber, although many of its Benches are empty at this late stage of the evening, people from all over the Commonwealth are celebrating today and what it means. This is a moment for congratulations, but also for us to reflect, each year, on what the Commonwealth means and how it is progressing. I must say that I do not share the intrinsic gloom of the hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle), who was ashamed of the past, apologetic for the present, and gloomy about the future. That, I am afraid, is my summary of his lengthy speech. He described finding “glimmers of hope” in the Commonwealth, but I think we can do better than that.

Let me give just one example of the symbol of the success of the modern Commonwealth and the countries within it. The whole business of being able to conduct financial transactions over a mobile telephone was not invented in some rich western country, or even by state-sponsored technology innovation programmes in China; it was invented and formed in Kenya. It is possible to travel over large chunks of that most lovely country and find Masai herdsmen nestling a spear in one hand while looking out over their goats and, with the other hand, transacting their business over their mobile telephones, often returning in the evening to their huts where the telephones can be recharged by a miniature solar panel. There is much to be proud of in all parts of the Commonwealth: there is innovation, and much more than “glimmers of hope”.

There has been huge progress on eliminating malaria and reducing blindness, and on the Prime Minister’s campaign in promoting 12 years of education across the Commonwealth and, indeed, across the world, supported by the Department for International Development. I believe that, in future, this country in particular will be able to offer considerable expertise to help other parts of the Commonwealth to thrive. Cyber-security is incredibly important to us all, and, as we know from what happened in the headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa, there are all sorts of reasons why it should be strengthened—not just across that continent, but in other parts of the Commonwealth, including the parts where I spend some of my time nowadays as the Prime Minister’s trade envoy in the far east: Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore, three nations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which are members of the Commonwealth.

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

May I present another offer of hope, and a glimmer of light from the Commonwealth? Will the hon. Gentleman join me in congratulating Rwanda, where the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting will be held? It has made enormous strides in respect of water and sanitation, which is especially impressive because it is such a mountainous country. Many other Commonwealth countries need to go further in those respects to achieve health and wealth: through the Commonwealth and our work with DFID projects, we can achieve that as well. Water and sanitation need to be part of CHOGM, and part of our work with the Commonwealth.

[Richard Graham]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her considerable intervention, which demonstrated her love of Rwanda. No doubt she has spent a great deal of time there. I am occasionally in touch with a former Anglican bishop of Rwanda, who is equally proud of some of the great progress that has been made in that country.

There is a slight warning note about Rwanda, which is a remarkable member of the Commonwealth. Her history is different, as she joined 28 years ago—something like that—and there is a caveat for all of us: not to put its leader on a pedestal. We are all human, and we all have feet of clay. I remember vividly the disappointment felt by many hon. Members when Aung San Suu Kyi became Prime Minister of Burma, but then presided over one of the world’s saddest periods of internal conflict and possible genocide against the Rohingya people. That was a period in which those who had strongly supported her opening the new Labour offices when she visited London had cause to reflect on the fragility of all of us as humans.

I return to two or three things that I should like to ask the Minister. During our time as the chairing office, various initiatives were launched, all of which I supported strongly—for example, the new business Commonwealth standards network, the world trade-based trade facilitation agreement, the Commonwealth clean oceans alliance, and the marine economies programme. All those were good news, and worthy causes. Will the Minister give us a brief update on how they are doing, and whether the progress made during our time in the chair can be continued?

Will the Minister also consider something else, so that we can end on a note of great consensus among Members all parties in the Chamber, including the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady), who made a very good speech on the Commonwealth, wrapped in a more traditional speech about the European Union? The point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell about Commonwealth servicemen and women having to pay considerable amounts of money when applying for the right to remain here after five years’ service is something about which many of us feel strongly. In fact, I attracted 125 signatures to a letter that I wrote to the then Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid), last year. He was sympathetic, as were Ministers in the Ministry of Defence, who said that it was a Home Office decision.

I encourage my hon. Friend the Minister to take careful note of today’s debate and the feelings on this issue. I understand that there are problems—there always are—of precedence and cost. There are lots of different problems, as we want those Commonwealth servicemen to be motivated by the concept of serving in our armed forces rather than purely being attracted to the later possibility of being able to bring their whole family here. I understand all those problems, but my hon. Friend, who is nodding from a sedentary position, would probably agree on something about which many of us feel strongly, as does the British Legion. There must be an opportunity for the new Government to do us all a favour by taking a closer look at what can be done to help Commonwealth servicemen and women on Commonwealth Day, in a debate in which there is much good will across the House to make the Commonwealth prosper.