Sir Desmond Swayne
MP for New Forest West · Conservative · United Kingdom
“Just how confident is the Minister that this was not a cyber-attack? How confident is he of the resilience of the system in the event of such an attack, and how confident is he in the willingness and ability of the Government to retaliate in the event of such an attack, as the best form of deterrence?”
“I join that long list of UK Ministers who have raised, at the very highest level in Israel, the most egregious practices in the west bank, designed specifically to prevent a two-state solution, only for Israeli policy to double down. Accordingly, I congratulate the Secretary of State.”
“I am delighted by the reprieve—the New Forest was to be split, and part of it swallowed by Southampton. Will the Secretary of State accept my representation that we want the integrity of the New Forest to remain, and the last thing we want is for it all to be swallowed by Southampton?”
“To address one of the points made by my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings, that takes account of the fact that there may be different levels of need in different areas.”
“Yes, essentially today we are putting these services on a statutory footing. Of course subsequent Governments can change statutes, but this Bill makes it an explicit decision of this House and Parliament, rather than a fiat by Government decision.”
“I will address exactly that point shortly. If a child is not developing properly and is not sleeping, feeding or communicating, parents need to know that they have somewhere to turn.”
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“Rather than wait, I can give the figures now. Thirty NHS staff flew to Sierra Leone on 22 November. A second wave of 25 arrived on Sunday 7 December. They will work on a rotation pattern of four to six weeks; then they will be replaced by others. Many more volunteered, but after negotiations with NHS trusts and others, the actual numbers travelling are somewhat lower. That is the picture so far.”
“I accept entirely what the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) said. It is a very difficult issue, because some countries export health workers and draw remittances from them as a positive in their balance of trade, or certainly their balance of payments. However, I recognise that difficulty and I shall surprise the hon. Member for York Central: we are commissioning a review of NHS use of foreign workers in exactly the way that he challenged me to.”
“We have put 850 military personnel on the ground, in addition to the NHS workers whom I have already mentioned, to support 750 beds, of which 282 are for treatment and 468 are the key, important beds for isolation. We have isolation centres in which people can be isolated while we determine whether they have Ebola. Seven out of eight patients will go home after what was just a bout of fever, for example; the others will go on to receive treatment for Ebola. It is a remarkable operation, costing £230 million, of which we have already disbursed £125 million, and people should not be critical of it. In Kerry Town, we already have 52 operational beds.”
“It is a pleasure to follow such a well informed, if interrogative, speech from my opposite number, the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Anas Sarwar). I thank hon. Members for their constructive, measured, informed and, if I may say so, welcome criticisms. They stand in some contrast to those made in other proceedings that have taken place at Westminster today—although this debate is not about Ebola, it is certainly stalked by and informed by Ebola. I am glad that the Chairman of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Gordon (Sir Malcolm Bruce), referred to the flags being out in Freetown, because I believe we have a record of which we can justifiably be proud. We have launched an operation with military precision.”
“I hope the hon. Gentleman will convey the Department’s thanks to Strensall for the magnificent work it has done in providing build-up training to for many personnel before they deploy to Sierra Leone.”
“Owing to Ebola, I anticipate that that figure will inevitably fall next year—I suspect by about 30%—as a consequence of being unable to spend on the programmes we had identified. Of course, that will be completely augmented by the £230 million we are spending on Ebola. I hope that 90% of our programmed spend on health will continue, but there will be instances where we will be unable to distribute bed nets in the way my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) described. There will be an effect on our programmes, but we will seek to minimise that.”
“Then, we moved swiftly on to rescuing people from Mount Sinjar, and all the time we had the ongoing crisis in Sudan. It has been a busy playing field for humanitarian organisations and workers to deal with. Starting from where we are now, we certainly have a proud record. Clearly, there are lessons to be learnt, but, having looked at both the reports we are considering, there is no doubt that both Sierra Leone and Liberia are among the poorest countries in the world and that they were so even before they were struck by this disaster. Our aid reflects that: Sierra Leone remains one of the largest per capita beneficiaries of UK aid. In 2010-11 it received £51 million in bilateral aid, and £68 million in 2013-14.”
“Actually, in January DFID had already begun refocusing our effort in Sierra Leone to deal with the emerging problem. In July and August we started to pump in more money to deal with that. I was making telephone calls, I think in the latter part of July, to the chief officers of UNICEF, the Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the World Health Organisation to try to ginger up their response. Many of those organisations are in need of reform. I have some sympathy for the World Health Organisation, which does not have at its centre the levers of power to bring about immediate change in the regions and countries in which it operates. Equally, we must remember what was happening in the humanitarian community at the time. First, we were distracted by the terrible events in Gaza.”
“As I said, there are 468 key isolation beds. We are supporting more than 100 burial teams—both the logistics and training, and their fleet. That has had a remarkable impact on the incidence of the disease. As I said in an earlier debate, people are almost most infective once they are dead. Removing bodies and dealing with local burial customs has been one of the main drivers of the disease. In the western part of Sierra Leone, in which a third of the population lives, we are achieving 100% burial within 24 hours, which will make a key difference. Of course, the criticism will be made that we acted too late; that we should have spotted the problem earlier. Hindsight is the most exact of sciences, but when the Committee went to Sierra Leone in June, it was not obvious that the problem was going to be of the scale we have now discovered.”
“Absolutely, I give my hon. Friend that reassurance. We have already established the post-Ebola team to take that work forward once we have got on top of Ebola. Of course, it will have to consider how we develop the programme on jobs and employment opportunities. I was as surprised as the Committee, and indeed the former Under-Secretary, at the lack of a programme for female genital mutilation, as highlighted in the report. It is not within my bailiwick to commit to such a programme, but I accept that the Department has placed great importance on that issue, as our girls’ summit earlier this year demonstrates.”
“I agree entirely and take on board exactly what my right hon. Friend says about the secret societies and the role that senior females—the “cutters”—have in them. Given the priority that the Secretary of State has attached to gender and the role of women and girls, it is vital that we do not shy away from this challenge and put it in the “too difficult” box. We must deal with it.”
“I would be very surprised if it has been met, but I cannot answer that question now. Given what has happened, it is unlikely to be met, but it remains vital that we continue our work on employment, which should be taken forward by the post-Ebola team; however, much of that work has undoubtedly been disrupted by Ebola.”
“What happened in Sierra Leone and Liberia was a powerful illustration of what happens when a country does not have robust health systems. That leads to a question, as well as a criticism: we are the largest bilateral donor, and have been working for many years in Sierra Leone and spending a significant amount of money on health—so why were the systems so lacking in robustness and so quickly overwhelmed by the crisis? We have been investing in important health care options in Sierra Leone. We have been training staff, providing for drugs and spending money on infrastructure, but we have also spent a lot of money on a programme to deal with malaria. We should remember that many more people in the region will die of malaria this year than will die of Ebola.”
“I understand the problems, but clearly we must be able to address those, so that we know and I can say with confidence “Yes, we may have reduced the bilateral budget to Sierra Leone, but actually we are spending more there because I am confident that with what we have put into a multilateral programme we will be spending a clear and understood amount in the country.” So things are changing. We have already begun a system of mapping expenditure from the multilateral organisations back to the country, so that we can have a clear idea of what has been spent. I understand that that is a largely administrative, manual process. We are looking for a much better solution to the problem towards the end of next year, but it strikes me as vital to address that.”
“I retain my prejudice for acting bilaterally, but if we are going to involve multilaterals we must have that intimate connection with the programmes. I was as shocked as the Committee was disappointed when I discovered that it is not immediately obvious how much money is being spent in a particular country. When I asked those questions, about countries for which I am responsible, I found it hard to understand that a straight, easy answer could not be given. Having now looked at the problem I can understand that to an extent we are at the mercy of the time-lag reporting of large multilateral organisations, or of the fact that it is not entirely clear how much of the administrative, scientific and research costs of a large multilateral programme are allocated to each country, or how that is done.”
“Equally, there will be times when it is desirable to take account of international expertise that might not be available bilaterally, or to use economies of scale, through working through a large global or regional organisation. They clearly have a place, and in my view it is for the country teams to work out what is the best fit. I entirely agree with the Committee that it is completely unacceptable that the country team should almost be left out of the equation, and not know under precisely what terms the bilateral aid is being delivered, or what the projects are. So we are introducing a new protocol, to ensure that the country team will be involved in the specification, design and monitoring of any multilateral programme that affects their country. I believe that is fundamental.”
“The country team, within the context it faces, examines exactly what is required and what our programmes are to be, and then goes shopping to find the best fit. That best fit might be a bilateral programme. I made clear then—I stick by what I said—that my prejudice is in favour of bilateral programmes and bilateral aid, not least because I want to see it badged with the logo: “UK aid from the British people.” That is important to me and, I submit, to our constituents. However, it is clear that, in some cases, international organisations must have a role. If we are dealing with malaria, for example, which takes no cognisance of international borders, we will have more leverage if we deal with a large organisation that is dedicated to dealing with such problems.”
“What I said—I hope I was not misunderstood—was that I expect the spend to fall next year, simply as a consequence of Ebola preventing us from fulfilling our planned programmes. Of course, we will be spending much more in Sierra Leone as a consequence of our commitment to dealing with Ebola, but I will come on to how we spend our money, whether bilaterally or multilaterally, shortly. First, I want to deal with the questions the report raised about centrally managed programmes and how we co-ordinate with bilateral and multilateral programmes. The approach should work precisely as I described to the Committee a fortnight ago, when we discussed parliamentary strengthening: it must be context-driven.”
“I believe that, ideally, it is a free one. The hon. Member for Glasgow Central challenged me and asked what we were doing about advocacy for universal free health care. I am glad to tell him, in case he was not aware, that tomorrow is universal health coverage day. We are making a presentation and speaking at an important event tomorrow—when I say “we” I do not mean myself personally, but DFID—promoting exactly that.”
“None of us should accept that. We must be vigilant to prevent that from happening to our focus on important long-term development issues, and I will certainly make it my business to prevent it. The investment that we have put into Sierra Leone has, I believe, made a significant difference; but we started from a very low base. The figures given to us—the statistics on doctors and nurses per head of population—are very low, and well below the regional average. I think the figure is 1.7 nurses to every 10,000 of population—I do not have it to hand; that is from memory—against a regional figure of 12. It is a very low base, and, frankly, it would have been a lot worse had we not done the work we did. Building robust health care systems is vital; but what does success look like? What is a strong health care system?”
“The hon. Gentleman is very kind; but quite right. Clearly, it is important that health care, if not free, should be affordable—it should not impoverish the recipient—and available within a reasonable distance. When people arrive for treatment there should be someone there who will treat them and is trained to do so and able to deliver health care, whether by means of drugs or equipment, or anything else. That implies a level of funding to cover trained people who can distribute the drugs, of which there should be a guaranteed supply, and the availability of equipment. Also, taking up that health care should not make someone worse than they were when they sought the treatment. That implies sanitation, a water supply and electricity.”
“I agree that we must work harder at making our own experience and expertise count in the councils of the world. We are shy, to an extent, as the Committee has pointed out, and we need to take more of a lead. We will explore with the Department of Health new ways of making better use of what the UK has to offer. I have already dealt with the point about recruitment in an intervention. We must not allow the agenda of health care strengthening to slip backwards; it is fundamental that we drive it forward. I accept the Committee’s challenge on providing global leadership. To that end, I accept the recommendations that we have accepted. Most importantly, we will develop a framework to support health care strengthening, to tie all those things together and drive the agenda forward.”
“I understand that criticism, and I think there are elements of truth in it. I am less persuaded by the argument that because the targets and deliverables of the large vertical funds are so much more measurable, deliverable and reportable, we skew our budgets away from fundamental health care strengthening and into vertical funds. There must be an element of synergy. I was interested to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford draw attention to the fact that bed nets were delivered by large international organisations through existing health care systems. The same thing can happen with immunisation. We must do better at negotiating with the funds to ensure that is the case, but we must recognise that that is not their primary objective and that they have a significant input into world health.”
“We are funding high-quality studies and research to come up with ways to chart improvement in health care. The hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) drew attention to the QALY measure, which is used by DFID, NICE and NICE International. Clearly, there has to be much greater knowledge about what works, particularly in low-resource economies. We have invested, and continue to invest, considerable resources into such study. Health care strengthening requires a number of partners, and I acknowledge that that involves a tension, to which the Committee has drawn attention and which has been evident in the debate. One accusation levelled at large vertical funds, such as Gavi and the Global Fund, is that they do little or nothing to strengthen underlying fundamental health care systems.”
“We have been negotiating with respect to the post-2015 agenda. We are, I think, by virtue of the fact that we have the largest free, universally provided health care system in the world, among the lead players. However, we have been in this business now for more than 30 years. We spend a quarter of our development budget on providing such health care, and it is vital that we drive forward that agenda. How do we do that? It is horses for courses. Every country is different. When we create strong health care systems, we must recognise that countries require different kinds of support, depending on the state they are in. The Committee was right to say that we do not have effective measures to chart our success. We are leading funders in the field to identify such measures.”
“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.”
““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 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 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.”
“The amendments in this category also seek to provide for a referendum, a sunset clause or some other such impediment to implementing the Bill. The amendments in the fourth category are those that are, frankly, trivial. Those who have tabled them would have us argue today about the meaning of commonly understood terms such as “value for money” and “reasonably practical”. It is my estimate that none of the new clauses or amendments would improve the Bill. Indeed, they all seek to undermine it. I call on those hon. Members to withdraw them and, if they do not do so, I call on the House to reject them.”
“I, as a Minister, would find a couple of those amendments quite convenient, but I do not believe that it is the purpose of this House to make Ministers’ lives more convenient. As the hon. Member for Luton South (Gavin Shuker) has said, these matters are defined internationally. The purpose of the Bill is to meet an international commitment, and to mess about with the calculation would be to undermine the fundamental purpose of the Bill. The amendments in the third category are those that are mischievous—namely, those that would seek to reduce the salaries of Ministers if we were to fail to meet the commitment. We know, however, that those who have tabled those amendments would be glad that Ministers had not met the commitment—indeed, they would probably wish to pay them more for not having met it.”
“The Bill places a simple duty on a Minister to report to this House. The amendments fall into four categories. The first is those that seek to negate or reduce that reporting duty, or indeed place the burden of that reporting duty on somebody else—a new body or the OBR, or, indeed, make it subject to judicial review. I, however, prefer the simplicity and the authority of reporting to this House. The amendments in the second category seek to change the means of calculation on which the report is based, either by changing from a calendar year to a financial year, by adopting a figure of 0.35%, by using the preceding year’s gross national income or by including other payments, such as those made to the EU.”
“This is an excellent and timely Bill, and I hope it will be passed today.”
“Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield did something else as well. I believe we have improved this Bill since it came to us on Second Reading. In Committee we took out what was the old clause 5, and now the Bill requires the Secretary of State to report to this House. It underlines the primacy of this House. She is under a requirement to show how she has established that the calculation of whether we have reached the 0.7% commitment is independently verified. His singular contribution in creating the Independent Commission for Aid Impact put in place this independent mechanism that measures our aid, scrutinises it and ensures that it is of the highest standard. That will also be the body that will establish the independently verified figures, so I twice commend him on what he has done.”
“The Government support the Bill, and I believe that, in the face of an enormous humanitarian crisis across the world, it is a very timely Bill, and a Bill that meets our long-term commitments and the commitments we made at the last general election. I want to pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Michael Moore) for his dedication and his co-operation in Committee, but I also want to pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), because I do not believe that I as a Minister in this Government would be at this Dispatch Box giving support to this Bill if it were not for the work he did, principally in opposition but then in the Government as Secretary of State. We owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude for the work he did. My right hon.”
“The last opinion poll I saw showed that when people were asked what they thought we were giving in international aid, they said 15%. So perhaps there will be dancing in the streets of Rochester when the hon. Gentleman returns and tells his constituents that we have cut it to 0.7%.”
“I am glad that we made our announcement in 2013, and I share her disappointment that that is an agenda that we have got on to only lately, but it is right that we pursue it. It right that we pursue accessibility not just when dealing with schools, but when dealing with water and sanitation, so that disabled people have access. We are working closely with the Global Partnership for Education, UNICEF and others to ensure that when we are taking forward the education agenda disabled people and their needs and special needs are included, so that they can be identified and assisted.”
“For example, in Mozambique, there are resource centres for 24,000 children with special needs, and in Ethiopia, Braille products are being produced for 10,000 children between the ages of four and 17. Our funding to the International Committee of the Red Cross in 2012 allowed it to provide 240,000 people with prostheses, orthoses, wheelchairs and physiotherapy. Thirdly, having developed programmes specifically for the disabled, we must tailor all our programmes for everyone, so that they take account of the needs of the disabled. The hon. Lady was particularly strong in her remarks about what we need to do in education. I take her point. Accessibility for schools is vital.”
“Maternal care and sexual reproductive health is a vital ingredient of the agenda, as is the prevention of disease. One of my first meetings after assuming my present role was to meet Bill Gates to discuss the GAVI—the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation—programme to which we are the largest contributor. In 2012-13, we put £139 million into work on preventable disease. It is our objective that from 2011 to 2015 we will have vaccinated 80 million children against preventable diseases and the 2014 report shows that that objective is on track. Secondly, we must design programmes aimed specifically at disabled people—I make no apology for that—that fit within our overall strategy.”
“I was once told quite forcefully and bluntly by a constituent who was severely disabled but nevertheless was organising a community project that she did not want my pity; she wanted help. She wanted help not just so that disabled people could fend for themselves, but so that they could contribute to the community. Our ambition must be that disabled people are not a burden but are an asset to our communities. That gives rise to four implications for policy. First, prevention remains important. If we can prevent people from becoming disabled, we will be able to concentrate more resources on those who are disabled. The hon. Lady drew attention to the vital issue of maternal health. For every mother who dies in childbirth, 30 will suffer severe disablement.”
“We have been the driving force for that agenda. Let us assume we have a goal and that we have developed the data to pursue it. What should be the motor? I believe it must be inclusion. Inclusion must be our guide at all times. For too long, disabled people have suffered from a stigma and that must be eradicated. That inclusion, as the hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton said, must include consultation with disabled people on the formulation of the very policies in which they will be included. It is absolutely right that we work with the advocacy groups, and we have done so. “Nothing about us without us” must be the principle for consultation. I am glad that the Department works with the Disability Rights Fund, ADD International and some 400 disability groups.”
“We cannot tackle extreme poverty, or even poverty, without tackling disability. That will be the guiding principle. Let us assume that we now have a goal to pursue. We will not be able to pursue that goal effectively unless we have data to measure our progress. The hon. Lady pointed out that we only recently had an internationally agreed definition of disability. We are seriously short of data to disaggregate the figure, which we must do to see how people of different ethnicities, in different geographical regions, with disabilities or of different genders are affected. That must be measurable and the singular contribution of my right hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green was driving forward that data revolution. Last month, she co-hosted the UN a conference here in London on that subject.”
“Indeed, the thrust seems to be in the opposite direction, and with increasing disasters, more violence, particularly targeting civilians, and ageing populations, we need to take more cognisance of the needs of the disabled. The hon. Lady was right to say that an opportunity was missed with the millennium development goals and that we must not miss that opportunity again when we review the post-2015 development agenda. I am glad that when the Prime Minister chaired the UN working group on that agenda, it came up with the essential principle that we can eradicate poverty within a generation if, and only if, no one is left behind in respect of their ethnicity, their gender, where they live or their disability. That must be the key principle driving us forward. No one must be left behind.”
“I pay tribute to the Minister for Crime Prevention, my right hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone) who, when she held this brief, was a real champion for disabled people. She has much to be proud of in her record. The hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton is right. Of the world’s 1 billion disabled people, 80% live in developing countries. One in seven of the world’s poorest people are disabled. She quoted the figure from Sightsavers for extreme poverty, which is one in five, although I am not sure whether the figure is even higher. The unemployment figure for Burma is 3.5% among the population at large, but 80% of disabled people have no means of providing for themselves. I do not believe that there is any prospect of a reduction in the number of disabled people.”