Dame Meg Hillier
MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch · Labour (Co-op) · United Kingdom
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker, I have huge respect for the Minister, but she has said that she will not take any interventions. She is a very good Minister, and I trust that she will answer in detail the points that have been raised in the House today; having discussions with her and the Government after the debate is too late…”
“My hon. Friend talks about who makes our laws, and she has talked in articles that she has written about the primacy of this place. If the Bill goes forward, is she willing to accept amendments?”
“I welcome my right hon. Friend to her place and thank her for that response, which demonstrates the complications of these schemes. I asked the National Audit Office to look into this, and yesterday the Public Accounts Committee published its report on compensation schemes, suggesting that a central body be established.”
“I am pleased by my right hon. Friend’s answer, but she is in a unique position across Government to ensure that we are protecting not only women, but those who are blind or have visual impairments, who really value this technology.”
“I welcome the Chancellor’s clampdown on speculation and leaks ahead of the Budget; it is certainly an important step he has taken. On the issue of certainty, the National Wealth Fund is a critical investor in crowding in private investment around the UK. I noted that he has changed the remit.”
“Further to the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes), it is important that we talk here and that we have diplomacy, but what practical actions are the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence taking to ensure that there is a review of physical defence and security, so that we send a clear message to t…”
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“All Governments have done that, but often during a year or at very short notice funding is withdrawn or drastically changed, and short-term initiatives are given funding designed to bolster a political announcement, which makes it complicated for colleges and providers to deliver and is often detrimental to learners. There could be many examples of how the system is broken, but I do not have time to go into them all. One example is this: the number of ESOL—English for speakers of other languages—students in Hackney would have reduced by 35% but for the £400,000 paid by the Department for Communities and Local Government.”
“Hackney is an exemplar of the latter: the college embraced the needs of the Olympics, when it provided training for the catering—it has an excellent training section—and is embracing the needs of Tech City, where it is pioneering its apprenticeships, working with employers. That has served the needs of local businesses and therefore, crucially, enhanced the employment prospects of students in the local area. Many other colleges up and down the country can and do provide similarly, but flexibility is important. The adult skills budget is the main source of funding for FE colleges, but it is not the only source for adult learning. I believe that a strong, effective FE sector is vital to Britain’s future, but those colleges face a slew of funding changes, and I make a plea to the Minister, who is new in his role, to look at that seriously.”
“That debate can be seen as a proxy for some of the challenges faced by many other learners across the age ranges. Funding has also been catastrophically reduced over the years. Between 2009 and 2015 alone, there is a 35% reduction in the adult skills budget—the core budget for FE—and during a similar period, the number of people aged 19 and over participating in Government-funded training, excluding higher education, has dropped from 3.7 million to 3.28 million, so nearly half a million fewer people are getting their learning and training provided. Will the Minister tell us whether the Government have any plans to introduce more ring-fencing of budgets, or will they allow local colleges and providers to meet local needs?”
“That is particularly important in adult learning, because if the system does not work, learners fall through the gap as well as providers—I will touch on the challenges for providers as well. Tracking funding and ensuring that the provider and the learner can deliver the contract between them is difficult, because Departments focus on their narrow financial interests rather than the whole experience of the learner or the needs of the employers, which are critical. That was stark in a previous Westminster Hall debate, when we discussed how the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills had cut funding for over 18s—we had a different Minister at that time. That debate aroused cross-party concern about both the impact on the viability of education providers and the disproportionate impact on many 18-year-olds.”
“I am aware that many other colleagues want to speak, so I will try to keep my opening remarks as brief as is reasonable. I want to talk about funding, in particular for FE, and about apprenticeships and skills. We all know that funding for over-18s has always been complex because the bureaucracy of Government means that, sadly, funding falls between at least two Departments and sometimes more. The Minister has a challenge in that he represents only one section of the funding for adult education. I appreciate that limitation, but I hope that, in his role, he has the clout to bang heads together for the joined-up government that every party strives for.”
“It is a pleasure as ever to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I am delighted to have secured this debate on an issue vital to the future of the British economy: skilling up our adult work force. I am particularly pleased to stand here and highlight to the Minister the excellent provision we have in Hackney. I am proud to represent Hackney community college, our local further education college, which really is what it says on the tin. It provides education and training to a community of people, many of whom did not have the chance the first time around. Indeed, some may have arrived in the country without the benefit of skills, education and training in the countries they came from. They are ambitious to achieve, ambitious to learn and ambitious to work, and the college provides great support to them.”
“On that point, £340 million has been allocated and has not been drawn down at the right rate. What is going wrong, what is the Minister doing to check on what is happening and how on earth is the situation being monitored to make sure that it is not just backfilling what employers would do anyway and giving money to businesses without them adding more to adult skills education?”
“T4. The Chief Secretary has been keen to trumpet free school meals for six, seven and eight-year-olds. However, this week in Hackney, many of the 47% of children who are living in poverty will turn up at school not having had a square meal for six weeks. They will be fed by the free breakfast clubs that are supported by head teachers and charities. Is it not time that the Government woke up to the reality of poverty? The parents of those children can get only low-paid, part-time work if they are lucky. Is it not time that the Government took action to tackle child poverty?”
“This is not to be hypercritical of the UNCHR, because it was clear that education was being provided up to age 11 and a few older young people had been provided with education in the community, through support from the Rwandan Government. However, with education only up to age 11, a lot of young people are idle, without the skills necessary to integrate into society and without either families or the support and ability to access anything beyond that stage. There is little education and no skills training. We met a couple of articulate young men, who spoke both good French and very good English, we felt, and had the benefit of some education beyond the age of 11. They were desperate to play a role as young men, but felt stuck in the limbo of teenage years.”
“As a constituency MP in Hackney South and Shoreditch, the issues in Rwanda and other parts of Africa are pertinent, day to day. I can stand at bus stops in Hackney and have many conversations about the situation at le petit barrier, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or what is going on in other parts of Africa, particularly west Africa. Partly because of resettlement, which I will come to, these are real, living issues for communities in my constituency and throughout the country. We visited a camp for Congolese nationals in northern Rwanda. As the hon. Lady said, we were both shocked by some of the things we saw there. It was overcrowded and there was a high number of young people, most of whom had nowhere to go and nothing to do.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr Sanders. I congratulate my colleague the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham) on driving forward the desire to have this debate. She and I visited a refugee camp in northern Rwanda and we were both struck by what we saw there. That sparked the idea for this debate. I want to talk about two issues. I am not as expert as the hon. Lady on the situations in camps around the world, but I do want to talk a bit about my experience visiting Rwanda and, perhaps more pertinent to the Minister’s role, about the UK’s role in resettlement and making sure that we play our part, as a nation, to support and tackle the humanitarian crisis around the world.”
“The media coverage locally was positive and it was seen as humanity, not as a burden to the UK.”
“There was a joint resettlement between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, so that there was a critical mass of people from a particular region, which meant that there was language support and the other support necessary for that group. Scotland was also very good at receiving groups of refugees. The idea was that local authorities would bid to take on refugees from the camps, and there was no shortage of willing volunteer local authorities. I was slightly worried that there would be. It is perhaps pertinent for the Minister to take this back to some of her colleagues in Government, but what was heartening was that communities—often, churches and community groups—that knew they would be receiving people who had lived through desperate times would work positively to receive and welcome those people into the community.”
“We need to see that bigger picture across the EU much more. Some EU countries take good numbers of people from UN camps. Others take very small numbers. We need to look at that as part of a wider strategy. It is a sensible strategy for Europe to enable those in great need to resettle in Europe, where appropriate, and have them contribute to the European Union. It sends a message that we are supportive, but it is important that we have immigration controls more generally. On the gateway project, it was a privilege to work with the Home Office officials who work to support resettlement. They visited the camps—I was prevented from doing so at the time by pregnancy—to see for themselves the families that they, working with the UN, felt could be relocated in the UK.”
“Can the Minister tell me what the figures are over the past two or three years, so that we can see what the trajectory is and what the projections are? If not, perhaps she can write to me. We also face pressures—I will come back to the gateway scheme in a moment—within the European Union, where Mediterranean countries continually receive boatloads of desperate and vulnerable people from north Africa. Discussions about burden sharing, as those countries put it, absorb a lot of time at EU Justice and Home Affairs Council meetings. We need to have a greater and wider view on the matter. I sat next to the Maltese Minister for three years. Every time I sat next to him, he asked whether we would take refugees who had arrived in Malta. We were, however, also trying to take refugees from camps around the world.”
“The categories for vulnerable people include “women and girls at risk…survivors of violence and/or torture…refugees with medical needs or disabilities…LGBTI refugees at risk…vulnerable older adults…refugees in need of family reunification and…those who face serious threats to their physical security, especially due to their political opinion or belonging to a minority group.” The first categories are probably more pertinent, day to day, in camps. When the Government talk about reducing immigration from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands, we must not lose sight—I hope the Minister will make clear the Government’s position on this—of our international humanitarian responsibilities in this regard. When I became a Minister, we were accepting 500 people from the camps annually, but we aimed to raise that to 1,000 a year.”
“We can see what happens when people have support; there was a direct contrast. On the UK’s role, I had the privilege when I was a Minister in the previous Government to have some oversight of the gateway scheme, through which the UK Government take refugees from United Nations camps around the world. The Government accept those who meet the UN criteria. For the record it would be useful to remind Members what those are.”
“Gentleman said, if they could be given support to integrate—although perhaps not always in the country where the camp is located—through a proper regional integration and relocation policy. That would not mean that those refugees never had the chance to return, but it would give them the chance to build skills and opportunity, so that, if the happy day came when they were able to return to the DRC, they would be able to contribute massively more. We saw that directly with some of the MPs and Senators who accompanied us on visits around Rwanda. Most of those Rwandans had been refugees who fled Rwanda and worked in other parts of the world. They kept their skills up, had a good education and then came back to lead Rwanda out of the horrors of the genocide of 20 years ago.”
“The girls in the Rwandan camp, as in camps around the world, become mothers while still children themselves, because there is little else for them to do. Becoming a mother is a rational choice for them, because it gives them a purpose in life. However, in overcrowded conditions, where families are all living cheek by jowl and are crowded in, sleeping together, it is no surprise that pregnancy is rife. The camp met with UN requirements—there was no sign that it was badly run—but the challenges in that region mean that camps quickly become overcrowded. This one had been closed to new admissions, but of course the birth rate means that the number of people carries on growing. It was striking that children talked about going home, but for many there could be much better immediate prospects locally, as the hon.”
“The hon. Gentleman hits the nail on the head. It was striking that people still believe that there is a chance of going home. We met young people born in the camp I just mentioned, who believed that there was a chance that they would be able to go back to war-torn, militia-ridden parts of the DRC—we know it is a challenging country—but who are held in limbo. We must have a big discussion as an international community about whether it is sensible to limit education. It is right that education is a basic provision—it is all funded by taxpayers around the globe, not just in the UK—but it cannot benefit our wider international community if cohorts of people misplaced through war and conflict end up in such a state of limbo and then quickly become uneducated parents. I will not repeat the excellent points made by the hon. Lady about girls.”
“We must also ask questions about whether that is desirable in the long term. We should be shifting the boundaries of the debate, helping more of those refugees to resettle, whether that be in the region or elsewhere, and giving them the chance, as the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire put it so eloquently, to normalise their life so that they can adapt, when the opportunity arrives, to life outside of the enclosed and artificial environment of the refugee camp, of which there are many around the world.”
“They are being displaced again.” There are whole areas of the world where people are not settled and do not have the right to a stable home, to education and to get on with their lives. They do not have that opportunity. It is important that as a community, not only in the UK, but in the EU and the other partnerships in which we work, we recognise the instability that that causes to the world. Our Government need to do all they can to support and stabilise what is happening in Syria. It is difficult for one Government to achieve that alone, and that is why we must work with our international partners. We must also ensure that we think about the long-term consequences of having camps that sit, grow and become communities that are almost sub-sections of a society in their own right.”
“The model could boost the numbers by allowing local groups, particularly religious groups—churches and mosques and others—to raise money locally to accept more from a particular community into their area, effectively match-funding some of the Government money going into the project. The model would build on the good will and humanitarian support that is embedded in the British psyche and ensure that we do everything we can to support these groups. On the wider issue of refugee camps, we have to have a bigger debate internationally. We all look at the issues, particularly what is happening in Syria, where many have been displaced. A young man, Chris, who is going to Palestine, came to visit me at my surgery yesterday. He said, “Remember that a lot of the people in those camps have already been displaced once.”
“Absolutely. It is wise for all of us who sit in this House and have the opportunity to speak about these issues to be moderate in our discussion of immigration. I was a Home Office Minister and I partly dealt with immigration issues. I absolutely believe that we should have an immigration policy and criteria, but the rhetoric that sometimes comes out—unfortunately we often saw that coming out very negatively during the European elections—is deeply unhelpful. I am sure the Minister will want to put on record her position and that of the Government on how they want to support people from around the world whose lives have been torn apart by conflict. When I was a Minister, we looked at the Canadian model and it would be interesting to know whether there have been any further developments on that.”
“There is a demonstration today at the Nigerian embassy to ensure that we do not lose sight not just of those schoolgirls, but of the other abductions and atrocities that have taken place in Nigeria as a result of the activities of Boko Haram. As chair of the all-party group on Nigeria, I challenge the Nigerian authorities to ensure that their policing is done on human rights terms, and that there are no abuses from the security services. Not doing so would weaken the support that the international community gives to Nigeria. The state provision should be done properly and we should tackle the terrorists in the right way.”
“As I said to the Prime Minister in the past month, broadband is a national embarrassment. I have often spoken about that but it is a national concern. We are too wedded as a country to one technology. Broadband is too expensive, particularly for small businesses, which need it when they are growing but do not have the money to spend. Business grants of £3,000 have been added in, but that is like a sticking plaster—it is a bit like worrying about the scratch on the patient’s finger when they have a broken leg. We need a comprehensive review of broadband, and plans for infrastructure and roll-out, and for a competitive framework that delivers. My final point is a reminder to the House that it is 100 days today since the abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls in north-eastern Nigeria.”
“Often, we think we are lucky when we get good child care, but it should be there anyway. I am perhaps bolder than those on the Opposition Front Bench. I believe we should have universal free provision of child care. That would have to be funded over time, but the revenue from taxpaying parents would soon cover it. Very few parents I know can afford to work full time because the cost of full-time child care is so great. They would contribute far more to the tax regime if they could. We should see child care as a cross-party issue. The Government are trying things, but they tinker at the edges. They are fiddling around with the tax regime and making it even more complicated for parents when we already have systems in place. Introducing a new system does not solve the problem of supply, which is the serious issue.”
“I do not see why my constituents should lose those services in order to fund services in constituencies such as, to pick random examples, Carshalton and Wallington or Surrey Heath, where the needs are markedly less great. In the short time I have left, I want to talk about child care, an issue I have raised many times. I represent one of the youngest constituencies in the country. More than a fifth of residents are under 16. Therefore, a lot of parents of young children are struggling to make ends meet because of the cost of housing if they are living in the private rented sector or trying to buy, and because of the lottery of child care. We have good child care in Hackney, but finding the right child care when they need it is a challenge for all parents up and down the country.”
“One seventh has been withdrawn because it will be withdrawn over a seven-year period, but perhaps the Deputy Leader of the House could pass this question on to Department of Health Ministers: how much overall will be drawn from the most deprived areas when the minimum practice income guarantee is withdrawn? Some GPs are very much in favour of the withdrawal. If we take away money from some practices and distribute it evenly across the whole, some practices will be net gainers. Many of my constituents have arrived from other parts of the country, and many have had poorer upbringings. All the data show that poor early upbringings have a long-term impact on health. We need GP services to be tuned in to that and ensure that we have the extra provision so that we have properly funded practices.”
“I happened to have a meeting in the next few days with NHS England and another London MP, and NHS England was clear that it was speaking with local GPs to try to find solutions to the issue. What I hear from local GPs, however, is not what I am hearing from those sources, and local GPs were unaware of the discussions that NHS England says it is having with them. Dr Williams told me, in her words, that the MPIG was introduced in 2004 “in perpetuity”, whereas Ministers have said on the record in the House that it was always supposed to be a temporary measure. I am therefore asking for the minimum practice income guarantee withdrawal to be frozen.”
“The Government have withdrawn the minimum practice income guarantee, or MPIG, but that unsexy sounding acronym is a serious issue for my constituents. I represent one of the most deprived areas of the country—although there are huge issues around the price of housing—and many people are living in great poverty and need health care support. Yesterday I met Dr Sarah Williams who leads the campaign across east London to ensure we protect our GP services. Earlier this year I raised with Ministers during Health questions my concerns about how the withdrawal of the MPIG would affect the services that my constituents receive from their GPs, and I was told forcefully by the Minister that NHS England had the matter in hand.”
“She was encouraged to move to a two-bedroom social rented property, but the rent she pays for that is higher than the rent she was paying on the three-bedroom property. Now when she looks for work, she has to look for a job that pays even more to ensure she can cover the rent. That makes her search for work even more challenging. Another example comes from Wenlock Barn estate in Hoxton in my constituency where more than 70 families on one estate are affected by the bedroom tax. They are not moving anywhere because those are their homes, and there are not many options that they can move down to. I challenge the Deputy Leader of the House to make clear in his response his party’s position as a party of government about the future of the bedroom tax. I also want to mention GP services in east London and particularly Hackney.”
“It is easy to say, “Oh, it’s fair because people have an extra bedroom”, but when someone has lived in a home for 30 years, or was born there, or has adult children who come and go, to suddenly be charged £14 for that extra bedroom is not fair or reasonable. Often, people’s household circumstances change periodically. I have many constituents who have fallen out of work through no fault of their own and are looking for work, but in that period they have to pay the extra out of their benefits. They do not want to leave because they are optimistic that they will get a job again. One woman who came to see me had moved from a three-bedroom property to a two-bedroom property because her eldest child had left home, and she has—temporarily, she hopes—fallen out of work.”
“We must look seriously and cross-party—this will take time to implement—at some sort of financial incentive for private landlords who want to be long-term landlords and not just in it for the money to provide longer-term tenancies for families. It may be that they need a tax incentive or some other economic device to encourage them to provide longer-term tenancies with rent guarantees, as part of the mix of social housing more generally. That certainly needs to be part of the solution in London, to help boost the intermediate sector and make private renting a longer-term choice for those who wish to or have to take that option. Finally on housing, we need to abolish the bedroom tax. This is a failed policy.”
“Those rent levels would be unaffordable for many hard-working people in my constituency, and it would hoover up and scoop out loads of people living in inner-London, and change the nature not just of a borough but of a city where people live cheek by jowl, with incomes mattering less than their contribution to the community. Part of the solution must be new longer-term tenancies in the private sector. Labour Front Benchers have called for three-year tenancies in the private sector, which I back. For tenants who want such tenancies that is great and should be offered, but it is not enough for families who need far more stability than a three-year tenancy.”
“According to Land Registry figures, between March 2013 and March 2014, the percentage increase in house prices was 19%, meaning that an average home now costs £525,000—just over half a million pounds— which is up from £441,000 a year ago. The figures that I have are the median rent levels, but many homes are much more expensive. For a typical three-bedroom home, the rent is just shy of £2,000. For a one-bedroom home, it is £1,235. We need more housing in Hackney, in London, and probably in other parts of the country too, and we must challenge the Government’s target of setting social rents at 80% of local private rents for new social housing—something that happily Hackney council continues to resist.”
“I declare an interest in that I am a landlady. There are a large number of private renters in my constituency. We need housing across the board because London and Hackney continue to grow. The price rises are incredible because of the great shortage. More people rent privately than own housing in my constituency, and the number of people who rent social housing in my borough is greater than the number of people who own and rent privately combined. Hackney is one of the top two councils nationally for building new council homes. Even though that is good for Hackney, it is not enough to keep up with demand. I have spoken about house prices and rent levels in my constituency before, but I want to remind the House about them.”
“It is a pleasure to speak in this debate and to follow a number of other hon. Members who have spoken about housing, which is one of the issues that I want to raise. However, unlike the Members for the valleys—the hon. Members for Ribble Valley (Mr Evans) and for Colne Valley (Jason McCartney)—who are against houses being built in their areas, and especially in greenfield areas, I would like to see more houses in my borough of Hackney and in London as a whole. There were 671 new starts in Hackney South and Shoreditch in 2013, which compares with a constituency average in the UK of 185. Clearly, the average is a curious figure because it includes areas where development is more challenging for all sorts of reasons, but it shows that in one small London borough, where there is a will, more homes can be built.”
“We now have a raft of opportunities for young people—traineeships, apprenticeships, sixth-form colleges, further education colleges—[Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] That is not to say that they are all something that Government Members should claim credit for. Does that not underline the importance of good, transparent, independent careers advice from a young age—from 14? Would the Minister be willing to come to speak to constituents of mine who have expressed to me very strongly their desire for access to face-to-face careers advice at an early stage so they can make the right choices in life?”
“On 13 May, the Deputy Prime Minister promised to write to me about it. Two weeks ago, the Prime Minister promised to raise it with the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. Is it not time that the Secretary of State came to the House to talk about broadband and the plans to improve infrastructure, because Members of all parties from up and down the country have concerns about it?”
“I have been absolutely staggered to hear the Secretary of State defending a system that, as I have heard repeatedly at the Public Accounts Committee, has had very poor planning from day one and at subsequent stages. We are glad that there is a plan to get it back on track, but let us get back to the real question. The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the right hon. Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey), came to this House and said that the business case had been signed off. Either she is not on top of her brief or she was misleading this House, neither of which inspires confidence.”
“Hackney council is one of the two largest builders of council housing in the country, yet week in, week out at my surgeries, I see people in desperate situations, unable to access that council housing or to afford the very high rent levels that we now see in my constituency. Is the Secretary of State getting some serious work done to look at how housing benefit can be recycled to make sure that it provides capital for housing, rather than the ongoing revenue support for those very expensive rents?”
“Q7. They have been to breakfast with Boris, to tea at No. 10 and have danced with the Business Secretary, but businesses in Shoreditch and the City still cannot get superfast broadband. This is now a national embarrassment. What is the Prime Minister going to do?”
“I draw Members’ attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to encourage longer-term landlords, such as the former owners of the New Era estate in Hoxton, which has just been sold on? Tenants there are facing huge rent increases. Many people have lived there for over 20 years and felt that they had security, but that is no longer so certain. Does my hon. Friend thus agree that the long-term tenancies are important?”
“This is not a throwback to an old era of problems; it is going back to an old era where there was security for tenants. Leaving aside the proposal of my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds), what are the Government doing to encourage long-term landlords who provide homes that are just for letting, not for future sale, so tenants can have a long-term future and have the security that my hon. Friend is talking about?”
“Does the Minister not recognise that this growth in the number of individual landlords investing in the way that he has just described is one of the reasons why tenants have such insecurity? What are the Government doing—he is in government now—to encourage longer-term institutional investors to invest in properties that are solely for rent long term, so that tenants can get longer-term security?”
“Nowhere is that truer than in my constituency of Hackney South and Shoreditch, where private rents are out of the reach of many people, who are unable to live in the borough. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the resulting higher population churn causes real damage to the strength of our local communities?”
“T5. On the roll-out of smart meters, the in-home display accounts for about £15 of the cost per household, yet in a recent survey six out of 10 customers said that they would prefer to receive information on tablets, personal computers or smartphones. Does not the Secretary of State think that he is wasting money by going down the route of old-fashioned technology, and will he rethink it?”
“Agriculture accounts for 42% of GDP; sadly, however, it is underdeveloped—the majority of Nigeria’s produce is now imported. There is a real opportunity for UK agribusiness—perhaps some of our big supermarkets—to work in Nigeria to help improve food processing.”
“That demonstrated in a very human way the challenges that remain when it comes to educating girls and women in Nigeria. The Nigerian Government recently pledged to educate a million children in northern Nigeria to boost development, but more than 10 million children in the country still do not go to school. Some 60% of six to 17-year-old girls in northern Nigeria are not in school. On the same visit, I went to a school where I met parents who were very ambitious for their daughters—for all their children—but there is a need for support to get the children into school and ensure that they stay there, rather than having to earn money to support their families. I do not have time to go into all the trade issues in Nigeria, but we know that the country is Africa’s largest producer of oil and gas. But other sectors are important, too.”