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Urbanisation (Developing Countries)

: I join hon. Members in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble) on having done us all a great service by securing this debate. She has a keen interest in urban matters, which dates back many years. It was evident during her time as a Minister in DFID and I am glad that it continues today. Her interest is shown not least in her having secured what we now learn, having come through those doors, is an historic debate on poverty and urban development. May I say to the hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. Mitchell) that I welcome the fact that there is apparently now quite a large degree of consensus? Had the Conservative party any coat-tails that the rest of us could have hung on to as far as development policy was concerned, we would perhaps have been pleased to do so. Since he provokes me just mildly, I must say that I enormously welcome the fact that the party that managed to cut our development spending as a percentage of our national wealth in half in 18 years has come to recognise that that was a fundamental mistake. I unreservedly welcome the fact that we are now able to debate the challenge of development in the spirit that we do. It demonstrates how development politics has moved from the margins, where it was in some people's minds, to bang in the centre of the big political questions of our age, because it is about the future of our planet. If we do not sort these problems out, we are all in big trouble, as the hon. Gentleman said. The movement of people to cities is as old as humankind. We have all agreed, during the debate, that that is an irreversible process and it is no good wishing that it could be different, because human beings will do as they will. The debate has brought out clearly the variety of reasons that lead people to move, including to find employment and flee conflict, as the hon. Gentleman said. Cities such as Kathmandu, Addis Ababa and Luanda have grown for many reasons. People have moved there because they might be marginally safer when the countries were going through conflict. Women have fled domestic violence. People have tried to escape the stigma and poverty of their caste. People have always come to cities to acquire a new identity. My hon. Friend the Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley) talked about people not having enough food to eat. In the past 20 years, the number of people living in Mumbai has grown by 100 per cent., but the number of squatters has increased by more than 1,000 per cent. That illustrates the scale of the problem. In our country during the 1970s, we thought that there was a bias towards urban areas and that we needed to concentrate on reducing poverty in rural areas, but we now recognise that we need to consider the problem in a much more rounded way. Indeed, there is a lively debate to be had about where urban areas stop and rural areas begin, particularly as technology makes it possible, in some countries, for people to live and work in ways that were not possible in the past. I want briefly to deal with four issues: how to understand better what is happening and what we are grappling with, economic growth, governance, especially local government, and finance. We have heard some of the statistics mentioned forcefully. The truth is that most—almost all—of the population growth in developing countries in the next generation will be in towns and cities. The total urban population in Africa, Asia and Latin America will double to 4 billion by 2035. Africa is the fastest-urbanising continent in the world. Nearly 40 per cent. of Africans currently live in cities. It is particularly striking that in 1960 Johannesburg was the only city in sub-Saharan Africa with a population of more than 1 million, but by 2010 there will be 33 cities in Africa with populations of over 1 million. That tells us all we need to know about the pace of change. One of our tasks is to understand better what is happening and to monitor the trends, because good information is vital if the Governments of developing countries are to make decent decisions about that fundamental change. Target 11 of the MDGs requires us to make a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020. Some countries are making progress and others are off-track and we need to understand why. Having reliable data on slums—the face of urban poverty—is vital. That is why we are working in partnership with UN-Habitat. I take this opportunity to pay tribute to Anna Tibaijuka and UN-Habitat for the work that they are doing and for flying the flag of this debate. UN-Habitat is responsible, as well as the World Bank, for global monitoring to ensure that we get decent data that will assist us. A number of hon. Members have said that cities are the powerhouses of economies. Urbanisation has been central to the sustained economic growth in Asia that has enabled a number of countries in that part of the world to lift many of their citizens out of poverty. Shanghai has just over 1 per cent. of China's population and contributes 12.5 per cent. of its GDP. I went for the first time last year and spent most of the time with my jaw on the floor. It is an astonishing place. To see the pace of change that is occurring there tells us just how important that city's contribution is to China's economy. That is happening not only in Asia. Nairobi comprises 12 per cent. of the population of Kenya. It contributes 30 per cent. of the GDP. That tells us in part about the great wave of migration within countries. We talk much about migration between countries, but that is dwarfed by the movement within countries as people leave the places where they have lived for towns to seek work and a better life. As the debate has demonstrated clearly, such growth comes at a price. Very poor people crowd into spaces that no one else will take. They are around open sewers, perched on the side of embankments along railway lines and live in the intense squalor to which my hon. Friend the Member for City of York referred. Land is the central issue. The poor rarely have tenure on the land that they occupy. It is not always clear who owns the land. We have heard about landlords who make a healthy return on renting their land, but what if there is no clarity about who holds the land? If people are unsure about their future on the land, there is less incentive to invest in improvements. Slum dwellers often have no right to services. In Dhaka in Bangladesh, it is formal policy not to provide them with services. Slum dwelling brings stresses and strains. Mental ill health is a problem. Crime is another problem. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest proportion of urban population living in slums. There is spectacular wealth living alongside intense poverty, and that can bring violence. Indeed, the Commission for Africa said:"““Africa's cities are becoming the powder-keg of political instability and discontent””." We ignore that at our peril. I could not agree more with my hon. Friend the Member for City of York when he talked about crime and ensuring that people are not abandoned because they are poor. Security is indeed the precondition for progress while communities try to deal with the enormous problems that such areas face. As my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North and the hon. Member for Edinburgh, West (John Barrett) said, slum dwellings are also places of inspiring resourcefulness. People make a living. They manage to turn their children out in the way that has been described, despite the shacks in which they live. It is possible to make changes. On my recent visit to Bangladesh, I saw a project that we had helped to fund. For about 25 years, a group of people had been living on the embankment going down to the river and by which the sewage was flowing not very fast. That project has provided clean water and sanitation facilities for members of the community, which played an important part in making that happen. According to their ability to pay, people contribute towards the cost. They keep a list and the community decides who can afford to pay what. The project was a striking example of what can be done. I asked the women, because it was they who led the work, about the impact on diarrhoeal diseases. Drinking dirty water gives children diarrhoeal diseases, which is why 6,000 children die in the developing world each day. They do not have clean water to drink. The women said that they had noticed a reduction. That is an illustration of what can be done to change people's lives for the better. However, above all, jobs are needed. Barriers that prevent people from migrating to towns to work must be removed. People must have the opportunity to set up their own businesses, which goes back to the title to land and property rights, a topic to which I shall return. It is necessary for people to be able to move around the town. Much of the economic life of cities depends on the contribution that is made by the people who live in the slums. They might be working in domestic service or contributing to the manufacture of goods that are exported. As several hon. Members have said, the process reminds us of what we have been through. It is exactly what happened to us at the start of the 19th century. The conditions were just as appalling. Let us draw on some of those lessons and the social reformers who reported on the condition of human kind, and motivated change through the political process in the 19th century, such as the great pioneer of health, John Snow, who finally proved that cholera was associated with dirty water by taking off the handle from the famous pump in Broad street. There were pioneers in local government who got together to decide what to do about the conditions—the problem included, of course, the great stink outside, which encouraged Parliament to take a greater interest. Joseph Bazalgette was responsible for building the sewers and the water supply system that probably did more than anything else in this country to increase life expectancy. That brings me to my next point, which is about Governments. Many countries are thinking more about how to devolve power to local level. We should welcome that unreservedly. The truth is that people know best what they need locally. What is striking about the issue of water—and I want directly to deal with the point that the hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield made—is how often, in many conversations that I have had in towns, villages and urban areas in developing countries, clean water has emerged as people's priority for improving their lives. Yet that priority does not seem, in many developing countries, to be reflected when national priorities are set. That is why, in my speech on world water day, to which the hon. Gentleman referred, I committed us to double our spending on water in Africa. I shall be reflecting on how things have gone—we have been working in slightly different ways in the past year in implementing that commitment—in a speech that I shall give later this month. The private sector has a contribution to make. My view on that score is fairly simple. I am profoundly uninterested in an ideological debate about whether the approach should be this or that. I am interested—and so I think are all hon. Members—in what will work to bring more clean water to the largest number of people. When developing countries and their communities have worked out how to do that, let us have more of it, and faster. That is the task that we face. Property rights are extremely important, but acquiring rights is the first stage. People have to be able to exercise them. I recollect from my first visit to Bangladesh that the landless poor there had rights—but when they tried to exercise them, the police used to come and beat them over the head. It was only through wonderful civil society organisations and their work to help them, which we funded, that those poor people were able to exercise the rights that the law accorded to them. However, the hon. Gentleman makes an important point. Power without money at local level will not do any good. There is a lack of capacity, and building capacity is fundamental to progress. I pay tribute to all the people in local government in the United Kingdom, and in particular the UK Local Government Alliance for International Development, who are working to build links. My hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North referred to some of those. I recollect that in one case—that of Daventry and Iganga town—the link came about through environmental health officers. There was a rubbish problem, and progress was made in dealing with that. Those two towns learned from each other. We make a big mistake if we think that we have all the answers. We do not. In Dhaka in Bangladesh plastic bags have been banned, and the cacophony of two-stroke noise that assaulted me the first time I went was missing on my return in November because all the three-wheelers have been converted to using liquefied natural gas.