UN Sustainable Development Goals

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Thursday 19th October 2023 Westminster Hall

[Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

It is a privilege, Ms Bardell, to serve under your chairship for the first time; I am sure it will not be the last. I thank the right hon. Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford) for securing this debate. She has a vast knowledge and real passion for these issues, which she has raised so effectively.

The UK had a key role in formulating the sustainable development goals, so I think it is fair to say that we have a special responsibility to support their achievement at home and certainly internationally. We are now more than halfway to the 2030 deadline. As we have heard, unless we see a real injection of energy, ambition, co-operation and leadership, we are so unlikely to meet most of our global commitments. Progress on many targets has stalled or even reversed: last year, more young women were not in education, employment or training than in 2015; we have seen a massive drop in international finance to support developing countries’ clean energy research and production; and, worst of all, we are back at global hunger levels not seen since 2005.

Last month, when the Deputy Prime Minister talked about getting the SDGs back on track, there was a bit of a relief—even just from having development back on the Government’s agenda somewhere. I am genuinely looking forward to seeing the Government’s international development White Paper, which I hope will contain clear detail on how the Government will support the achievement of the global goals, particularly on extreme poverty and on climate change. I hope that it speeds up the transformation that we so need so that partnerships can work together hand in hand to strengthen local development leadership.

But how can that transformation happen when the Government are, I fear, stepping back from leadership on essential issues like climate change? In July, the Minister rightly said that the White Paper will

“will set out how the UK will lead the charge against extreme poverty and climate change”—[Official Report, 18 July 2023; Vol. 736, c. 61WS.]

That is very welcome. The impacts of climate heating, alongside covid and rising violence, are already proving a huge barrier to progress. But frankly, we are open to a charge of hypocrisy, because only last month the Prime Minister U-turned on crucial climate action here in the UK, backtracking on supporting the rapid shift we need and that British businesses want towards electrification of both car transport and home heating. The Prime Minister also doubled down on his refusal to stop new oil and gas developments in the North sea, massively undermining our climate diplomacy. It would be really useful to hear from the Minister how he thinks this helps the UK to be seen as a credible partner at COP28.

The reason I have pushed on that point today is that so many SDGs will be impacted by climate change. We will not see resilient food systems or meet our global goal of ending hunger unless we scale up climate mitigation and adaptation, and we will not see an end to conflict fuelled by increasingly scarce water and land resource. We have already seen the humanitarian catastrophes created by the combination of climate heating and conflict for vulnerable communities. The Minister knows that in east Africa, 65 million people face acute food insecurity. There is terrible hunger already in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria, to name but a few. As we speak, huge numbers of people are at risk of death by dehydration and starvation in Gaza because of the conflict. To quote my boss, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy):

“There will not be a just and lasting peace until Israel is secure, Palestine is a sovereign state, and both Israelis and Palestinians enjoy security, dignity and human rights…we will not surrender the hope of two states living side by side in peace.”

Globally, it is not just about conflict, food and climate change. I honestly think the UK Government are failing to take a prevention-first approach to the problems that the world faces. We still base our activities on an outdated idea of handouts—crumbs from the table of the rich to the poor. We need a different approach. Sudan surely taught us that we need to work with our partners to monitor and sanction those fuelling violence. We have not learned enough lessons from Sudan, because we have not even mirrored all the US sanctions on actors fuelling the bloodshed, and I honestly do not know why. Why have we not sanctioned all those responsible for funnelling gold to Russia? I say this because our development approach should not be just about our spending; it has to be about how our partnerships can support Governments in low-income countries with their own investments, aims and ambitions to meet the SDGs. There is much more we can do.

I have raised the issue of unsustainable sovereign debt before, so I will say just this today. If a country is spending debilitating amounts of money paying off high-interest loans, how can it possibly build resilience to climate change and develop desperately needed public services, because its hands are tied behind its back? The City of London has an almost unique importance in relation to sovereign bond finance. We need to build on these strengths, take a leadership role and take serious action to tackle the debt crisis.

I will make one last point. We need to look at the Government’s approach to sustainable development in health. The global maternal mortality ratio has barely declined since 2015; it went from 227 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2015 to 223 deaths in 2020. That is obviously not good enough. In 2021, 5 million children died before reaching their fifth birthday; the figure was down from 6.1 million in 2015. It is difficult to celebrate that reduction when we know that we could have done so much more and that 10 children under the age of five die every minute.

Our progress to end HIV, tuberculosis and malaria is off track. In 2021, there were 1.5 million new HIV infections worldwide. There were 1.6 million deaths from TB and 600,000 malaria-related deaths. We can do better: we have world-leading universities and the expertise to work with partners around the world to strengthen global health security and defeat these epidemics once and for all. Our communities, and so many people around the world, need a Government that will give us our future back.

Let us remember: the world came together and discussed what it wanted the future to look like. In a joyful moment of co-operation and ambition, a global programme and goals were agreed. What a tragedy it is that we are sitting here, just a few years away from when those goals were supposed to be achieved, with so much to do. We really need a genuine commitment from our Government to do so much better.