---

Urbanisation (Developing Countries)

: The hon. Gentleman, my neighbour from Kettering, is right that the provision of utilities in slum areas is a major challenge. Access to clean drinking water, one of the targets for the millennium development goals, is essential, particularly for child health. I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will refer to that when he winds up. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that one of the problems that has to be tackled now and in future, as we try to prevent the sprawl of slum areas, is the provision of infrastructure services for people as they move into the cities. He is right to highlight that as a major issue for urbanisation. In addition to the Cities Alliance is the African Ministers conference on housing and urban development. That initiative was introduced by NEPAD and UN-Habitat and is due to hold its second meeting in April. The international community has also made commitments, and the MDGs include the goal of improving the lives of 100 million slum dwellers by 2020. The Commission for Africa also recognised the scale of the problem and made recommendations on finance for slum upgrading and on water and infrastructure. The significance of the problem was reinforced at last year's world summit, which underlined the fact that the future of slums would influence the achievement of all the MDGs. However, the international community's actions and commitments so far will not deliver on the goals that it has set. It is perhaps partly the size of the task that is daunting. There is the sheer number of people involved, and it is expected that there will be 1 billion extra slum dwellers. There is also the complexity of the services that are needed. As the hon. Gentleman said, there is the issue of utilities, water supplies and infrastructure. There is also the sheer cost of it all, particularly given the very statist view of housing in this country. I therefore have three requests to put to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State as regards meeting the needs of the world's slum dwellers and achieving the MDGs. First, the UK Government must give priority to promoting slum dwellers' security of tenure and better urban governance. Without security of tenure, it will be impossible to achieve the rest of our goals. The residents' lack of security is a real barrier to upgrading slums, and slum dwellers can be swept away easily to satisfy a political elite's predilections, to make way for road building or as part of the ethnic cleansing of a capital city. UN-Habitat's excellent study of forced evictions lists a number of such removals, but I shall mention just two. First, there are the clearances in Khartoum, which my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State saw for himself. Southerners were moved to make way for, I think, for road building—at least, that was the excuse; in fact, the move was thought to be political because it involved southerners. Secondly, there are the forced removals in Zimbabwe, which I saw on my recent visit there. It caught not only some of the poorest and most vulnerable people, including HIV orphans, their carers and many more, but half of the Zimbabwean UN staff working in Harare, as well as some of the locally engaged staff from the British embassy in Harare. Secondly, I ask that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State prioritise the development of financial instruments for slum upgrading. If the hon. Member for Kettering (Mr. Hollobone) makes a contribution, I am sure that he will talk about infrastructure and utilities, but I specifically ask for priority to be given to the development of financial instruments for slum upgrading, because this country has particular expertise in financial modelling and services. Prioritising financial instruments in that way would also underline the fact that slum upgrading is an economic project. Slum dwellers pay quite high rents. However awful the housing, and however destitute the people in those shacks in Kibera, they all speak of how much rent they pay and how much they owe in rent arrears. Shacks are good investments in the conventional sense, and it is calculated that a landlord in Nairobi will recoup his investment in a shack within nine months, given the rent that he can charge on it. Thirdly, I urge my right hon. Friend to support the UN-Habitat proposal for a slum upgrade facility of $250 million a year for five years. Without it, there is little chance of meeting the MDG. The facility would provide a combination of short-term loans for housing schemes for poor people, loan mechanisms for grassroots schemes and funds for technical help in designing and setting up projects for slum upgrading. Above all, however, what is required, and what the debate is intended to achieve, is a high priority for urbanisation on the international development agenda. The world summit rightly recognised that we cannot achieve the MDG if we simply react to the terrible and growing poverty of the burgeoning number of slum dwellers. The international community also needs to run ahead of the problem and to prevent slum development, not by stopping urbanisation, but by planning for it and providing the governance, infrastructure and financial capacity to cater for the 1 billion more people who will be living in towns and cities. Last year's world summit specifically recognised that. I hope that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will set out his response to the three particular requests that I have made and, above all, that he will make clear the UK Government's commitment to meeting the challenge of the world's 1 billion slum dwellers.