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I am surprised by the criticism levelled at the discussion with and involvement of disabled groups. We work very closely with disabled groups. The Department works with some 400 disability groups. In drawing up the disability framework, discussing it and getting it to the state it is in, we worked with disabled people’s organisations, including organisations of disabled people—not people representing the disabled—in Rwanda and Mozambique. In this country, we worked with disabled people’s organisations, but also—this, I suspect, is where the tension comes in—with the Bond Disability and Development Group. We included both.
Kate Green: I want to clarify exactly what I was suggesting. Based on what I was told in Rwanda, I absolutely recognise what the Minister said. Rwanda was one of the consultee countries in preparing the framework, and civil society organisations were able to have input. My point was that that needs to be replicated in how those organisations are facilitated and enabled to work with their national Government. From my observation, that is not happening in Rwanda. DFID has a role in thinking about how it uses the framework to replicate what he says was done in its preparation here.
Mr Swayne: The hon. Lady is absolutely right. The framework is not only to inform us, but to inform how we work with our partners, be they Governments or multilateral organisations. It is our key response. It was published on 3 December and will be published every year. The Chair of the Committee asked for an annual stocktake. The framework is a living document, and we will change and update it all the time to ensure that it works, but clearly we need an annual review as well. I would have thought that the ideal way to deal with that would be to have an annual session with the Select Committee, in which it interrogates the performance and the progress made.
There are not any targets in the document, as the Chair said, but that is because it is the first one and we are feeling our way, to an extent. It would be wrong to put targets in until we have bedded the thing down and seen the progress that we have made. We will use the document to build understanding of disability into every single member of staff, so that every single member of staff can take responsibility for ensuring that the
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principle of “No one left behind” is built into every one of our programmes. We will work with our multilateral partners to ensure that, and to make sure that they are taking account of disability. As part of that, we will develop the disaggregation of data.
There will be special provision for the agenda for women and girls who are in double jeopardy as a result of disability and being female, and the stigma that attaches to that. We will continue to prioritise research and evidence on what works in low-resource economies. The Chair of the Select Committee drew specific attention to mental health, and that is an area where we have to raise our game with the agenda. To that end, we have launched a study called the Programme for Improving Mental Health Care, in which we work specifically to see what we can do on mental health issues in low-resource economies.
I believe fundamentally that the framework is one of the most important things on our agenda, and it is vital to drive it forward. I recall having a conversation with a constituent who was disabled. She was giving advice on what was needed for a particular project. She said to me bluntly that people did not want our pity; they wanted our help, not only so that they could be self-sufficient and do what other people do, but so that they could be contributors to their community. The ambition of “No one left behind” has to be that disabled people become an asset to their communities and not a burden on them.
4.28 pm
Sir Malcolm Bruce: I thank all colleagues from all parts of the House who have taken part in this debate. I said at the beginning that the shortness of the debate does not in any way qualify the importance of this big initiative. I am grateful to the Government for their response, and to the Minister for his response and his tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone). I feel encouraged that we will get real progress. Our Committee’s legacy will be to ensure that our successor Committee comes back next year to monitor that. I believe that we have made a good partnership with the Department and we look forward to seeing real progress.