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Urbanisation (Developing Countries)

: I could not agree more. Such problems in urban areas need to be solved from the bottom up. Of course, they need help, support and funding from the top down; small organisations will not fund themselves. With support from DFID and from multilateral agencies, local grass-roots initiatives and small-scale projects—including twinning projects between organisations in the UK and those in developing countries, about which I shall say more later—can make a real and much-needed difference. My hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North spoke about the 2003 UN-Habitat report, ““The Challenge of Slums,”” which reported that, of people living in urban areas, 72 per cent. in Africa, 58 per cent. on the Indian subcontinent and 32 per cent. in Latin America and the Caribbean live in slum conditions. If we go back through our own country's social history, we see that there were similar conditions here not so long ago. In 1901, Seebohm Rowntree wrote a book called ““Poverty: A Study of Town Life,”” which was the first ever door-to-door survey or census of poverty in one city—the city of York, my constituency. The survey revealed that at the turn of the last century, a quarter of people in the city of York were living in poverty. Charles Booth did similar studies in London, of course.