Sustainable Development Goals

Kate Green Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2016 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development (James Wharton)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gapes. I normally try where I can to speak without the assistance of notes, but we have had such a wide range of valuable contributions from extraordinarily well informed hon. Members that I have taken the time to note down, to the best of my ability, some of the comments; I shall respond in as much detail as I can.

I congratulate the International Development Committee Chair, the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), on his opening remarks and on his part in securing the debate. He gave an effective summary of why sustainable development goals matter, and why the UK, having played a key leading role in developing those important global targets and the structure that will guide development across the world over a 15-year period, must maintain its leading role in driving the agenda forward. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) mentioned the former Prime Minister, David Cameron—I, too, commend him for personally pioneering the UK’s work in the international development space and for being the person who brought in the measure enshrining 0.7% of GNI UK aid budget in law.

The Chair of the Select Committee asked a number of questions that I want to address directly, including on which Department has the lead responsibility for ensuring that the sustainable development goals are delivered across Government in the UK. It is DFID, working alongside the Cabinet Office. As the hon. Gentleman has been informed by the Secretary of State in the letter that he received today, that is done through the single departmental plan process, to ensure that every Department recognises that it needs, in the way it manages its affairs and plans its progress throughout this Parliament and beyond, not just to be mindful of but to deliver on the sustainable development goals and contribute towards that delivery. That will be monitored by the Cabinet Office, with the responsibility falling to DFID.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I am sorry that I was not able to be here for all of the debate, but I am pleased to have heard what I have. May I ask the Minister, in relation to his last remark, to what degree the Department will also encourage other Departments to learn from other countries’ measures to implement the goals? This is not a one-way trade of the UK giving and bestowing aid and advice to developing economies. My experience is that we also have much to learn from both developed and developing economies in the way they apply the goals.

[James Wharton]

The hon. Lady is of course absolutely right. It is a partnership process, particularly in the international aid space. We deliver long-term and lasting improvements by working together with those countries, with the actors in them, with the civil society organisations and with the people who are affected by and, we hope, benefit from the work that we do. We need to ensure that the improvements last for the long term, and it is through those partnerships that we learn both lessons that can be applied here and lessons that can be applied to other countries in which we seek to drive forward development and this agenda. That of course needs to be part of the process for this Government, as it would need to be for any other. We need continually to learn and review the process by which we deliver on our goals and targets. That will be the case and is, through the departmental plans and the process that I have described.

The Chair of the Select Committee asked about Agenda 2030. I do not want to be drawn into speculating too much on things that have yet to be published, but I will say that the views that he expressed about what he expects to see in due course were heard loud and clear here. They will of course be recorded in Hansard and, I am sure, reviewed, one way or the other, as time passes and things are made known, and made public.

Oral Answers to Questions

Kate Green Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Swayne]

We make representations at every level all the time to enable goods and services to be exported into and out of Gaza. There can be no future for Gaza until there is a complete transformation in that process, and for that to proceed, a peace process is required.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

5. What recent progress has been made in negotiations to agree the sustainable development goals.

[The Secretary of State for International Development (Justine Greening)]

Since January, UN member states have discussed all aspects of the post-2015 outcome document for September: the political declaration, goals and targets, means of implementation, and monitoring and review. As the hon. Lady may be aware, we have literally just seen the first zero draft of that document. We are looking through it to assess what the UK’s negotiating stance will be.

[Kate Green]

Last year, I visited Rwanda with Voluntary Service Overseas—I draw Members’ attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests—and I saw for myself the enduring impact that the collapse of its healthcare system 20 years ago has continued to have on levels of disability and poor mental health. Will the Secretary of State tell us what the Government have done to ensure that universal health coverage remains an underpinning principle of the sustainable development goals and the aid agenda?

[Justine Greening]

We have advocated very strongly for universal health coverage that truly makes a difference to people and puts them in a position to be able to play a role in helping to develop their country. I assure the hon. Lady that the UK is a strong advocate of that. She is quite right to point out the dramatic progress that has been made in Rwanda. What it shows is that when we make the investment, development happens.

Sustainable Development Goals

Kate Green Excerpts

Wednesday 28th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for International Development (Justine Greening)]

In 2000, the international community agreed a simple and powerful set of objectives: nobody should live in extreme poverty; all children, including girls, should be in school; and the epidemics of HIV/AIDS and malaria must be tackled. Crucially, part of that was about the desire to work in global partnership to achieve goals by working together. I wish to take this opportunity to thank non-governmental organisations, people in the development community and my staff in DFID, of whom I am exceptionally proud, for all the work that they have done, working together, over the past 15 years.

In those 15 years since the millennium development goals were agreed, we have seen the greatest reduction of poverty in history. The MDGs inspired the international community to achieve amazing results: extreme poverty was cut in half by 2010, five years ahead of target; there have been visible improvements across all health targets; more than nine in every 10 children worldwide now have a primary education; and we are well on our way to tackling hunger and malnutrition. Of course the MDGs were to run for 15 years, so, as this House will know, 2015 is one of the most important years for the international community in recent memory.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State rightly mentions the progress that has been made under the MDGs across a range of outcomes, including children’s participation in education. Does she agree that one of the great challenges for the 2015 sustainable development goals is to ensure that disabled children, who are often registered for school but do not attend, fully participate in education? How does she see her Government helping to secure that?

[Justine Greening]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right about that. If we look at the tranche of children who have still not got into education, we see that they tend to be the children who are disabled or who are in more nomadic tribes and it is harder for them to get into education. We are clear that a core ethos underpinning the next development framework needs to be about leaving nobody behind. My Department is pulling together the first ever DFID strategy on how addressing disability should be part of our development programme. So she is right to raise the issue and I can certainly reassure her that this Government have started to bring that issue into our programming more centrally.

In July, we will convene in Ethiopia to agree a new financing agenda for development. Of course the UK Government have in this Parliament, for the first time ever, finally met their commitment to spend 0.7% of our GNI on international development.

In September, on the 70th anniversary of the United Nations, we will meet in New York to agree the elements of the post-2015 development framework up to 2030. In December, the world will come together in Paris to agree a binding international treaty to tackle the global dangers of climate change. I am proud to be part of a Government who are taking a leading part in all of those negotiations.

Let me briefly discuss the post-2015 agenda. The international community has a duty to produce a set of equally inspiring goals and targets to run up to 2030 that will put us on a sustainable development pathway to eradicate extreme poverty within a generation. The UK has played a leading role in that process, not least demonstrating our commitment to international development by finally meeting the commitment we made to spend 0.7%. Indeed, that is recognised by the fact that the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, personally asked our Prime Minister together with President Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia and the then President Yudhoyono of Indonesia to co-chair the high-level panel of experts who were asked to review these issues and to publish a report about how we should pull together the next sustainable development framework.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kate Green]

Will the hon. Gentleman take the opportunity to note the importance of investing in and supporting mental health services in developing economies?

[Jeremy Lefroy]

That is absolutely critical, and I entirely agree that it must come out in the SDGs.

Goal 4 deals with education, without which people will not be in a position to fill the jobs and create the wealth needed. My constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash), has done sterling work in piloting through his Bill on gender equality. I was delighted to hear the Secretary of State say in Committee today that it looks as though we are spending roughly 50% of the international development budget on women and girls. It would be great to have that confirmed for the record.

Finally, as many Members have said—including the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley), whose work in this area I greatly respect—unless we tackle climate change, it will be impossible to live in a sustainable world and to create the jobs and livelihoods that everybody needs.

The motion calls on the Government

“to show global leadership on tackling the causes of poverty inequality and climate change.”

I am afraid that I cannot support the motion, because I believe that the Government are already showing such leadership under the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister, and with the support of the whole House.

Disability and Development

Kate Green Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2014 Westminster Hall

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I will not speak for long, partly because, unlike every other hon. Member here in the Chamber, I am a complete international development novice, and partly because I am somewhat lacking in voice. However, I am not a novice with respect to disability policy, given that I am shadow Minister with responsibility for domestic disability policy. I particularly wanted to ensure that links between domestic and international policy are firmly on the table, as they are much alike in terms of the issues and challenges we face.

I am a bit less of a novice than I would have been if this debate had taken place six weeks ago, because I have just had the great privilege of visiting Rwanda as a parliamentary intern, under the auspices of Voluntary Service Overseas. I acknowledge the tremendous experience that VSO gave me—I am sure other hon. Members in this Chamber have had similar opportunities—and I place on record my interest, which is recorded in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

I, too, thought that the disability framework produced by DFID in response to the excellent Select Committee report was an impressive piece of work, and I know it has been widely welcomed among disability organisations. It identifies all the right challenges that both international and domestic social policy must get to grips with. Other hon. Members have discussed the link between disability and poverty, which is often driven by worklessness, children missing education as a result of their condition, and thereby being prevented from achieving their full economic potential. Disabled people also experience poorer health outcomes and health service. As other hon. Members have mentioned, disabled people also face stigma, exclusion and isolation.

In addressing these issues, I want to highlight a few of the similarities—the read-across—between domestic and international policy, which I hope the Minister will find of interest. The UK, like many of our international development partner countries, is signed up to the UN convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. That rights-based framework—that lens—for how we develop our policy is important, and I hope he will say a little about how DFID perceives it and what he and his Department mean by giving reality to disabled people’s rights.

For me, an important example of that rights-based approach is people’s right to live independently and to live the life they choose. I am interested to hear how DFID is applying in different cultural contexts what might be perceived as a western cultural norm of independence and living one’s own life. I have come back from that visit understanding the clear importance of the family and family life in all international and domestic settings. It is also pretty clear to me that institutional life is rarely good for people in any international or domestic setting. I would be particularly interested to hear what the Minister has to say about DFID’s attitude to that.

I echo what the Chair of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Gordon (Sir Malcolm Bruce), said about the importance of disaggregated data. He said that there are 1 billion disabled people in the world, which highlights how important it is to improve data collection. When I was in Rwanda, I was told that people with disabilities accounted for some 6% of the population. I am surprised that that number is so low. In this country, where one would expect the incidence to be lower, it is actually higher, some 10% to 12%. Frankly, I suspect that there is massive under-recording, even in respect of the worrying figure given by the right hon. Gentleman. I cannot highlight enough the importance of DFID’s role in supporting effective data gathering, monitoring and validating mechanisms. Without those, we are developing policy and programmes somewhat in the dark.

I am pleased to see in the framework a reference to co-production, an ugly word for an important concept. Can the Minister confirm that co-production will not relate just to programmes specifically dealing with impairment and for persons with disabilities? Bringing disabled people into the development and preparation of every programme funded by DFID would ensure that they have their say in how all DFID programmes develop, so that in every case, every bit of DFID spending reaches everybody, including those with disabilities, even if the programmes are not designed specifically for them.

The other issue in which I take great interest, particularly informed by my history before coming to this House and my few days in Rwanda, is the relationship and engagement with non-governmental organisations and civil society. While I was in Rwanda, I had the privilege of spending most of my time working with civil society organisations through their umbrella organisation, the National Union of Disability Organisations of Rwanda. My experience was that there is quite a lot of work to do to support local civil society organisations.

The Chair of the Select Committee is absolutely right to distinguish between disability organisations, which are often big national and international names, and genuinely grassroots, disabled people-led organisations, which are less random in their approach than simply consulting a few disabled people. They involve an element of representation and organisation, but they offer a much more lived and real experience. That is not to decry the importance of the analytical approach taken by some of the bigger organisations, which is also valid; but we must hear the voices of those with lived experience.

Civil society bodies certainly exist in Rwanda that could provide help, but disabled people’s understanding of the mechanisms by which they could participate in and influence policy and the political process was underdeveloped. I invite DFID to consider how, in supporting building the capacity of NGOs and civil society, it could build effective advocacy capacity that is plugged into the political decision-making process in each of the countries and settings in which DFID delivers programmes.

Like other hon. Members present, I think the 2015 sustainable development goals offer a tremendous opportunity that we missed when preparing the millennium development goals. That opportunity is observably on offer now, as a number of the draft goals being discussed refer to disability. It is important that we ask Ministers to be utterly vigilant in protecting all the references to disability within whatever SDG framework eventually emerges.

We know how effective internationally agreed ambitions can be from the progress made following the millennium development goals on gender issues, and from the progress made on women and girls. I say to the Minister that this is an important line of argument that needs to be sustained on the SDGs, and I hope the Government will take a strong line on ensuring that the emerging framework reflects that.

I welcome the fact that the issue of disability and development has come into the spotlight, and I want to convey, through the Minister, to his Department and its staff that in Rwanda the work of DFID is very well regarded, and we as a country ought to be proud of that. I therefore hope that we will want to build on that strong reputation, and that the UK will continue to be a staunch and vocal champion of the rights of disabled people in developing economies.

I also ask the Minister to tell his ministerial colleagues in other Departments that what we are doing in developing countries is not just something we offer, but something from which we ourselves can learn and develop back here at home. Development is not a one-way trade, and nor is aid. We can learn much from our partner countries as they develop their own domestic strategies, sometimes with the aid of DFID’s support. But believe me, I saw in Rwanda a scale of ambition, commitment and willingness to vocalise and mainstream policy, in order to address the disadvantage and exclusion that disabled people face, that it would be really nice to see in our own country. I hope the Minister will consider how he can learn from other countries to inform our own domestic policies.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Mr Desmond Swayne)]

I begin by dealing with the points raised about prevention. I agree entirely that it is highly appropriate. One principal area not touched on in the debate is the fact that for every birth that results in the death of either the mother or the child, 20 result in disability, so our emphasis on maternal health, and the health of women and girls, is fundamental to this. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) about the importance of dealing with disease. We continue our commitment to eradication of disease, including polio, and our work with Sightsavers. On roads, in Nepal we are putting barriers on to roads to reduce the number of accidents; that is an issue that we are alive to. With regard to conflict—my hon. Friend mentioned Afghanistan—we are putting significant funds into the International Rescue Committee to deal with rehabilitation and prostheses. This is an important part of the agenda.

I join the Committee Chairman, the right hon. Member for Gordon (Sir Malcolm Bruce), in paying tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone). This was a brief that she felt passionately about, and she made a singular contribution to it. She drove forward the issue of data and the ability to disaggregate. Just in October, she chaired a conference jointly with the United Nations on how we drive forward that agenda. My hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) asked about the progress we are making on data; I largely put down the progress we have made to the impetus that my right hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green gave to that.

We are prioritising national data systems. We have just managed to get the Washington Group questions on disability incorporated into our programmes in Burma and Yemen. We are developing new guidance on disaggregating data at programme level, and we have an important new commitment to disaggregating data on humanitarian support and disability. It is true that if disabled people cannot be counted, the temptation is to think that they do not count. We have to be able to count them and disaggregate.

On the issue raised by the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) about the post-2015 millennium development goals, she is absolutely right: we should not lose the gains in the language from the output of the open working group and the debates that surrounded that. I am not convinced that we need a specific goal on disability, although I understand that I may have implied that in an answer to a recent parliamentary question. The reason why we do not necessarily need that specific goal relates to the difference between what constitutes a strategy and what constitutes a framework. The strategy is that no one should be left behind. It is about inclusivity, an end to stigma and all moving forward to the same place. The framework is about how we deliver that. Of course we will have to paddle under the water a lot faster for our disabled people to get them moving forward at the same rate.

The Chair of the Select Committee is absolutely right: it is fundamental that we cannot tackle poverty, including extreme poverty, unless we tackle poverty among disabled people. “No one left behind” is the key strategy behind what we are attempting to do. We have made considerable progress on inclusivity. We have a number of separate programmes that deal specifically with the disabled, but equally we have programmes where we are having to incorporate the needs of disabled people. In 2013, we announced that any schools that we fund have to be accessible. This year, we have new sectoral commitments on water supply and humanitarian programming, but there is no doubt that the International Development Committee set us some challenging goals. We have doubled the number of people working on the team and appointed a new champion, but in my estimation, overwhelmingly the most important thing we have done is produce the framework document.

I am surprised by the criticism levelled at the discussion with and involvement of disabled groups. We work very closely with disabled groups. The Department works with some 400 disability groups. In drawing up the disability framework, discussing it and getting it to the state it is in, we worked with disabled people’s organisations, including organisations of disabled people—not people representing the disabled—in Rwanda and Mozambique. In this country, we worked with disabled people’s organisations, but also—this, I suspect, is where the tension comes in—with the Bond Disability and Development Group. We included both.

[Kate Green]

I want to clarify exactly what I was suggesting. Based on what I was told in Rwanda, I absolutely recognise what the Minister said. Rwanda was one of the consultee countries in preparing the framework, and civil society organisations were able to have input. My point was that that needs to be replicated in how those organisations are facilitated and enabled to work with their national Government. From my observation, that is not happening in Rwanda. DFID has a role in thinking about how it uses the framework to replicate what he says was done in its preparation here.

[Mr Swayne]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. The framework is not only to inform us, but to inform how we work with our partners, be they Governments or multilateral organisations. It is our key response. It was published on 3 December and will be published every year. The Chair of the Committee asked for an annual stocktake. The framework is a living document, and we will change and update it all the time to ensure that it works, but clearly we need an annual review as well. I would have thought that the ideal way to deal with that would be to have an annual session with the Select Committee, in which it interrogates the performance and the progress made.

There are not any targets in the document, as the Chair said, but that is because it is the first one and we are feeling our way, to an extent. It would be wrong to put targets in until we have bedded the thing down and seen the progress that we have made. We will use the document to build understanding of disability into every single member of staff, so that every single member of staff can take responsibility for ensuring that the principle of “No one left behind” is built into every one of our programmes. We will work with our multilateral partners to ensure that, and to make sure that they are taking account of disability. As part of that, we will develop the disaggregation of data.

There will be special provision for the agenda for women and girls who are in double jeopardy as a result of disability and being female, and the stigma that attaches to that. We will continue to prioritise research and evidence on what works in low-resource economies. The Chair of the Select Committee drew specific attention to mental health, and that is an area where we have to raise our game with the agenda. To that end, we have launched a study called the Programme for Improving Mental Health Care, in which we work specifically to see what we can do on mental health issues in low-resource economies.

I believe fundamentally that the framework is one of the most important things on our agenda, and it is vital to drive it forward. I recall having a conversation with a constituent who was disabled. She was giving advice on what was needed for a particular project. She said to me bluntly that people did not want our pity; they wanted our help, not only so that they could be self-sufficient and do what other people do, but so that they could be contributors to their community. The ambition of “No one left behind” has to be that disabled people become an asset to their communities and not a burden on them.

Oral Answers to Questions

Kate Green Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

Q15. Did the Prime Minister ask Lynton Crosby who his big business clients were before he employed him?

[The Prime Minister]

We can run through this one again; let me have another go at explaining. Right, it works like this: the Conservative party gives Lynton Crosby money and he helps us to attack the Labour party, right? The trade unions give money to the Labour party—the other way around—and for that they buy your candidates, they buy your MPs, they buy your policies and they even give you this completely hopeless leader.

UN Women

Kate Green Excerpts

Thursday 10th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I am grateful to have the opportunity to speak in this debate, and I apologise in advance for being unable to be present in the Chamber for all of it, as it coincides with a Westminster Hall debate on the Government’s response to the Select Committee on Work and Pensions report into housing benefit reform. As a member of that Committee, I am also keen to spend some time in that debate.

I agree with those Members who have said how pleased they are that the Backbench Business Committee has made time for this debate this afternoon. I and other Members who were present at some of the Committee’s sittings know how hard its Chair and some Committee members, including the hon. Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison), have worked to achieve that.

It is appropriate that this debate coincides not only with the centenary of international women’s day, but also Fairtrade fortnight and the week of the Second Reading of the Welfare Reform Bill. Each of those individual events speaks to the issue of women’s economic independence, which is what I want to address this afternoon.

As has been pointed out, women constitute a little over half the world’s population, but we are still the poorer by far. As the hon. Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) has just pointed out, 70% of the world’s poor citizens are women. Here in the UK, too, women face a greater risk of poverty as a result of a gender pay gap that still stands at 19.9%, and which is much higher if we look only at part-time work. Men’s median pay is 52% higher than women’s, and only 12% of the occupants of our boardrooms are women. Therefore, when we are asked—this question was raised at the Backbench Business Committee—why a specific debate on women’s issues is necessary, I say that the numbers speak for themselves.

This problem is not inevitable; it is not just the way things are. It is not a reflection of innate gender differences; it is a problem of societal structures, and it requires structural solutions. It matters too: it matters not only for women’s own economic independence, but also because when women prosper economically so too do children. When women have money, they spend it on their kids. Because that spending benefits the wider economy and the community, it promotes general economic and social justice.

It is especially appropriate that international women’s day and Fairtrade fortnight should coincide with the date of our discussion, because the changing economic structures of international trade could serve to offer a model of how economic justice can work for women and, by promoting the position of women, can work on a broader frame. Fairtrade products that empower women economically are important for the environment and for the communities and economies in which they are established, and are an important route both for economic growth and social justice.

[Mr MacShane]

I am following my hon. Friend’s argument closely. This is not just about fair trade. Some 30 years ago, I was working in Malaysia and visited the factories of multinationals including Bosch and Motorola, all of which were full of women making products such as car radios. Actually, those women were being liberated from the patriarchal oppression of village peasant existence, but many of the liberal and left community around the world say, “Oh no, they’re being exploited.” Does my hon. Friend agree with Joan Robinson of the London School of Economics, who said there’s only one thing worse for a woman than being exploited by a multinational, and that is not being exploited by a multinational?

[Kate Green]

I am sure my right hon. Friend would not wish to suggest that there is a continuum of exploitation and a point on that continuum at which women—or, indeed, men—ought to be satisfied to find themselves located. He raises an important issue about the relative roles women perform in paid work and the domestic sphere.

The economic justice questions that we are discussing are not just challenges for developing economies; they are a challenge for us here in the UK too. As we know, here in the UK women struggle to balance caring responsibilities with paid employment. The majority of child care is still undertaken by women, and although many men fulfil caring roles, it is women who are most likely to drop out of paid employment when they start to have caring responsibilities. Many male carers perform their caring responsibility alongside paid work however, and as a result do not suffer the same degree of economic disadvantage.

In recent years, the debate about the appropriate balance and recognition we should give to paid work, domestic responsibilities and caring responsibilities has become distorted, and we need to revisit that. That is not in order to trap women back in the domestic sphere, but to open up a debate about the value we should give to the caring role, and to make sure our societal structures properly recognise that role and offer both women and men a genuine choice about participating in paid work and wanting, and needing, to take time to fulfil domestic responsibilities. That is not an argument that, when I was as a young feminist in the 1980s, I would have believed I would have heard myself making. However, as I have watched that choice for women squeezed out by successive male-led Governments of both the left and the right, I have to say that a gender issue is a choice issue, and choice and economic independence go hand in hand.

[Nicola Blackwood (Oxford West and Abingdon) (Con)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that carers play a central and vital role in our society and that without their playing that role our social care system in this country would entirely collapse?

[Kate Green]

I certainly do and, together with the hon. Member for South Thanet (Laura Sandys), I am very proud to be a parliamentary ambassador for carers week this year. I hope that we will have the opportunity to highlight exactly the sort of contribution that carers make and to which the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood) refers.

I wish to take a moment to talk specifically about the position of lone parents, which was the subject of hot political debate 10 or 15 years ago. It has rather dropped off the political radar but, regrettably, that is not because their battle is entirely won. It is still the case that more than 90% of lone parents are women—lone mothers—but it is very important to recognise that very few women have set out to bring up their children alone. None the less, one in four children in this country will spend some time in a lone parent family, and those children and families face an exceptionally high risk of poverty. Of course it is right that we should do all we can to sustain sustainable relationships, but it is not the mark of a civilised society that we allow those who are growing up in households where relationships have ended to find that they do so in poverty.

[Mrs Laing]

May I thank the hon. Lady for her support in obtaining this debate with the Backbench Business Committee and say that she was most eloquent? Would she like to emphasise the need to break the myth that women who are bringing up children alone have been teenage mothers—the vast majority of these women are not? As she said, they do not choose to be in that position and, of course, all women and men in that position deserve our support.

[Kate Green]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right, because the average age of lone mothers is now 35 and just 3% of them are teenagers. There is a very wide gap between myth and reality, as she rightly said.

In conclusion, we need and must have a debate now on the way in which we secure and sustain the economic independence of women throughout their life course, whatever their family circumstances. That is why I am particularly pleased to support the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart). Women’s lives have changed dramatically, even in my lifetime. However, despite the progress that women such as me—well-educated, professional women in well-paid employment—have enjoyed over the past five decades, it is still women who bear the brunt of poverty in this country. Inequality on pay and, importantly, on pension protection reflects the fact that there is still too much segregated employment, and that we still have a social security system that fails to provide adequate support and an education system that still too often squeezes down girls’ aspirations. This is still the fifth largest economy in the world, and we cannot tolerate a situation in which women continue to live in poverty. It is unnecessary, wasteful and unjust. It is a scandal and we need to ensure that every one of our economic and social policies thinks women and thinks how it can address that injustice. So in this UK Parliament, which is aptly, if sometimes incorrectly, characterised as the “mother of Parliaments”, I say that we must establish the scrutiny body that the amendment proposes. In the week that marks the centenary of international women’s day, I hope that parliamentarians in this House will commit themselves to doing just that.