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Conflict Prevention

I apologise to you, Mr Turner, and to the Minister, because I will have to leave at 10.30. The group of MPs who represent constituencies around Heathrow airport have secured a ministerial meeting about night flights. Heathrow is in my constituency and it has taken us a long time to set up the meeting, so I will have to attend it. I apologise for that. I mean no discourtesy to the Minister, and I will read his response in Hansard. I want to follow on from the contribution of my right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes). I call him my right hon. Friend because we have worked together on this issue for a number of years. That does not mean that we have done so on an almost fortnightly basis—I do not send him stroppy letters saying that I will never speak to him again if he votes for a Government proposal—but we have worked closely on this issue over the years. Part of the genesis of this debate was a ten-minute rule Bill on establishing a ministry of peace that we sponsored some time ago—[Interruption.] I do not know why my phone is going off. I apologise, Mr Turner. I cannot turn the thing off. Sorry about that. The song is Bruno Mars, ““I'd Catch a Grenade for You,”” which is bizarrely appropriate. My phone is now switched off. As I was saying, the genesis of this debate was a ten-minute rule Bill that we sponsored that called for a ministry of peace. The objective was to secure a debate on how we can make conflict prevention and resolution more central to Government policy making. My hon. Friends and I had a range of debates in this Chamber about different examples of conflict prevention around the world in southern Africa, Northern Ireland and elsewhere. We basically picked the brains of people who had worked on the ground. Kai Brand-Jacobsen from the Peace Action, Training and Research Institute of Romania is a good example of that, but there were others as well. As I said, we heard from people from southern Africa and people from Northern Ireland from all sides. Following on from that, we formed the all-party group on conflict issues, which has worked successfully on an all-party basis and has brought in a range of expertise. The stimulus for this debate is the Government's expected publication of policy papers on the development of conflict prevention. We want to influence the longer-term decisions about investment in this field. My right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark said that the debate is more like a seminar. I suggest to the Minister that it would be extremely helpful if we had a ministerial seminar to which we invited all-party group members and other stakeholders from interested parties and organisations that have helped to brief us for the debate. If necessary, that debate could be held according to Chatham House rules. That does not matter, as long as we can have a free and flowing discussion about where we go from here on this important subject. When we had the original debate, we set out a number of key factors that needed to be put in place if we were to make conflict prevention and resolution an integral part of Government policy making. The first factor is obviously political will. The atmosphere has changed dramatically as a result of our experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya. There is much more of a political will desperately to seek conflict prevention solutions and resolution at the earliest opportunity. As my right hon. Friend said, during the original debate we argued that such an approach is a cost-effective mechanism of intervening. We have proved that point time and again. Therefore, there is political will on all sides to develop conflict prevention as an integral part of Government policy. The second element is the need for structure within Government. Under the previous Government, we had a major breakthrough with the establishment of a conflict pool. Departments such as the Treasury, DFID, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Ministry of Defence were brought together to work with each other on not just the disbursement of resources, but the development of expertise in Government and the investment of resources in concrete projects. There is a need to consider the structure of Government again. I am pleased that the Stabilisation Unit is in existence and will continue, but I note that Richard Teuten, the head of the Stabilisation Unit, and Daniel Korski, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and former deputy head of the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit, which evolved into the Stabilisation Unit, are recommending that we bring elements dealt with by the FCO within the remit of the Stabilisation Unit. They also recommend that we review the structure within Government, so that it is strengthened and there is a more direct and authoritative lead within Government policy making. I also welcome the suggestion that we have a named Minister dealing with the issue. I do not in any way wish to make the post grandiose but, of course, the Minister would be accountable to Parliament and would play a key role in co-ordinating other Departments. It is important symbolically to state that we are about conflict prevention and resolution, and that we give the matter such import that a ministerial title is given to such work. The other ingredients are obviously expertise and engagement, which have been mentioned. My right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark raised the issue of ensuring that we learn from experience elsewhere. We have argued for some time that there should be open and transparent access to such information within Government, and that we should establish a database of the experiences of conflict prevention and resolution across the world. That would feed into the ongoing debate about what works, what does not work and how we can learn those lessons. We have been briefed in advance of this debate about the global peace-building strategies that are taking place, particularly in relation to 14P. That initiative ensures that civil society fully participates in the peace-building initiatives within countries and works with Government across the world. We have given examples of the conferences that are planned in Ghana, Kenya and elsewhere. The Government may well want to consider the practices that are taking place as a result of that initiative and how the Government can add their weight and support to such programmes. One of the other ingredients that we have suggested, which has come from the practices that have been demonstrably successful elsewhere, is the need to ensure that we have some structure for stakeholder engagement within this country. There should be some form of stakeholder panel through which we can draw in external expertise and advocates for peace within our society.