---

Commonwealth

My Lords, in joining in the welcome to my noble friend on the Front Bench, perhaps I may say how fortunate we are that her expertise and commitment will now benefit your Lordships’ House as well as the Department for International Development. The Commonwealth is one of our best routes to global conversation. When I used to negotiate for the UK it was a pleasure, and often something of a relief, to find among the host of nations at the UN a group of friends who, crucially, spanned the rich and the poor worlds, and who understood each other better because of the common heritage so eloquently described by the noble Lord, Lord Luce. The Commonwealth has a particular contribution to make to development, because of its ease in sharing expertise through the secretariat and its myriad professional associations. This kind of partnership is all the more important now because development is changing. It has always needed more than aid, but now there is an urgent need for strategies to go wider, on climate change, on fair conditions for trade, on human rights and human security. Aid is still the starting point for basic standards of health and education, so I would like to ask my noble friend first about the leading cause of death of children under five: pneumococcal disease. I declare an interest as vice-president of a new all-party parliamentary group to raise awareness of it. It kills nearly 1 million children, of whom 90 per cent are in developing countries. Those who do not die are often disabled. There is a safe vaccine, but it needs to be developed. UNICEF—of which I am a UK trustee—and DfID are aware of the problem, and with the advance markets commitment system, an innovation which my noble friend has had a great deal to do with, DfID has undertaken to get results. Can she also arrange for this underknown dread disease to be given more prominence in DfID's public thinking on health? In the excellent document Working Together for Better Health, the goal of reducing child mortality mentions only measles immunisation, which would do this by two-thirds. Successful pneumococcal disease vaccination would probably achieve the millennium development goal on child mortality by itself. How will this be considered in DfID's biennial review of its health strategy? In education, the UK has worked within the Commonwealth to ensure that more children, especially girls, go to primary school. In Tanzania, where I was last summer, abolishing school fees increased enrolment from 4.4 million to 8 million, about half of whom were girls. Now there is more need to support local capacity for training teachers; and it is in the area of training and professional education that we can work with the Commonwealth to most advantage.