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Lord Fowler: My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, and I congratulate him on his determination in the area that he was speaking about. I would like to concentrate on two parts of the gracious Speech. The first is reform of the health service, in particular, as the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, mentioned, plans for public health set out in the White Paper, although I will not be dealing with precisely the ones with which he dealt. The second relates to the G8 presidency, where the Government set out their priorities—if they are still in power. Even if that is not the case, I think that we can all agree about the priority of Africa set out in the gracious Speech.
Tomorrow is World Aids Day. We will see another attempt to arouse public and political opinion in the West to the appalling catastrophe of HIV/AIDS, which has so far claimed more than 20 million lives. Everyone involved in the campaign knows only too well that in the 12 months since the last World Aids Day, the position has deteriorated further. There have been many more deaths, while the number of men, women and children infected with HIV on a worldwide basis approaches 40 million.
Most ominously of all, the pandemic is spreading globally. No longer can AIDS be pigeon-holed as an African problem, although that is not to deny the appalling problem in sub-Saharan Africa, and the Government are quite right to highlight that. HIV has caused such suffering and economic damage. However, we should also recognise that HIV/AIDS is on the move. The epicentre is moving to Asia. In India certainly 4 million people are already infected, but the figure could be double that. Unless prevention and treatment programmes are substantially increased, the total could increase to 25 million by 2010.
In China, estimates are even more difficult to make, but what is beyond doubt is that the unsafe blood collection practices of the 1990s have left a terrible legacy. UNAIDS says that, unless effective action is taken, 10 million people will be infected by 2010. The truth is that no country is exempt from the threat.
In countries such as Russia, intravenous drug users provide an acute problem with shared needles spreading infection, while in west Europe and the United States there is certainly no room for complacency. In the United Kingdom, the latest figures, published in the past week, show that 53,000 people are living with HIV/AIDS. There were 6,600 new diagnoses over the past 12 months—double the rate of 1998. At the same time, the report from the excellent Health Protection Agency—which I hope is one agency that we will preserve—shows other sexually transmitted diseases increasing sharply and special clinics around the country, especially in London, under enormous pressure.
I am glad that the Government have now recognised the scale of the problem in their White Paper. I note that they look forward to a new campaign, but I also
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note what the Minister said—that the delivery plan will not be with us until the beginning of next year. This planned campaign is very late in the day. The Government have now been in power for almost eight years, and the blunt fact is that they should have acted before. That is not only my view, but the view of practically everyone working in the field.
I also welcome the Government's intent to provide a new drive internationally in the war against HIV/AIDS, but that effort would carry much more authority had the Government done more in the United Kingdom itself. However, I do not deny for a moment the need for a new effort internationally. The bleak fact is that HIV/AIDS is spreading faster than the ability of the world to control it. I should qualify that. We may not have a vaccine and we may not have a cure, but we know what works to prevent HIV and we know what works to prolong the life of those who are infected. So we have the capacity to prevent death and sickness; we just do not have the will to deploy the necessary resources, the imagination to understand the catastrophe that is taking place or the determination to follow the policies that have been shown to be successful.
Today, we have drugs that 20 years ago we could only dream of—such as drugs that prevent mother-to-baby transmission. We know that high-profile prevention campaigns emphasising the use of condoms can have dramatic results. We know that clean needle exchanges can radically reduce the death toll and have done in this country. We learnt some of those lessons in the United Kingdom way back in the late 1980s, when I was working with my noble friend Lord Newton in the health department. I pay tribute to his work at that time. Yet the appalling thing is that too many nations still give the impression that they regard the policy issues as new and presenting them with particular problems not shared by others. There are still nations which, God help us, try to play down the seriousness of the problem, on the basis that it may give the country a bad name.
So what is needed? Certainly, we cannot blame the voluntary organisations for any lack of effort in this area. From the start, their contribution has been utterly heroic. When I first went to the United States in 1987 to discuss the issue, it was the voluntary agencies and the Roman Catholic Church that were taking the lead. Here organisations such as the Terrence Higgins Trust and the National AIDS Trust have consistently worked, year in and year out, not only to highlight the issue but to bring practical solutions. Internationally, there is a range of organisations, too many to name, which have tried to fill the vast gap in care.
I wish I could say that governments had the same proud record. Unless a national government leads from its own borders, any effort will fail. Ministers must be engaged, as they have been in Uganda, for example. The trouble with sexual disease is that, too often, politicians are embarrassed or take the view that such issues are simply not for them. The truth is that only governments have the resources and the authority to explain the facts. Here of course is the rub: the governments of western Europe and the United States
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have the resources to tackle their own national problems, but the governments in Africa and the Indian Government clearly do not.
Unless effective international help can be given, the problems can only get worse. No one can seriously claim that to date our response has matched the unprecedented scale of the crisis. Today, between 5 million and 6 million people need antiretroviral medicines. Unless they receive them, the chances are that they will die, yet only 7 per cent of people in low- and middle-income countries have access to such drugs. That is why it was so fundamentally important that in 2001 the developed countries of the world pledged the initial capital for the creation of the Global Fund to fight AIDS and tuberculosis.
The Global Fund provides not only money but a fresh approach. It does not deliver services but finances the worked-up plans of public and private organisations whose proposals have passed a stringent checking process. The result of those programmes is that over the next few years there will be 1.6 million people on antiretroviral treatment in developing countries—a sixfold increase over today's figure. Fifty-two million people will have been reached by voluntary counselling and testing, and more than 1 million orphans—the most heartbreaking casualties of the crisis—will be supported through medical services, education and community care.
Therefore, if there is one resolution that we should make this year's World AIDS Day, it is that the Global Fund should continue to be supported and, above all, properly financed. Western governments must commit forward and commit more. That is not just a familiar plea to the United States, which is often unfairly criticised. There has been a sea change in Washington since the time of President Reagan and the inaction of the United States then. Not all the American bilateral programmes look like being successful, but President Bush deserves credit for being prepared to devote 10 billion dollars of new money to help with HIV/AIDS overseas.
The challenge is for us in Britain; the challenge is for this Government and the European Union. In Europe, we spend a ludicrous amount of money on the common agricultural policy, when thousands on thousands of people are dying in other countries because of a lack of proper medicine. We need to provide more resources and to show the Global Fund that we are absolutely committed to its success. The alternative is that, year after year, World AIDS Day will be the occasion for reporting even more sickness and death around the world.
The Lord Bishop of Portsmouth: My Lords, I warmly welcome the high priority that the Government continue to attach to education, and the terms in which that priority was mentioned in the third sentence of the gracious Speech, when it refers to,
I should like to contribute to this part of the debate as chairman of the Church of England Board of Education. The motivation which led members of the
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Church of England in 1811 to found the National Society, which I also chair, was then expressed not in exactly the terms of that quotation from the gracious Speech, but in very similar terms. The National Society was the Church's vehicle for promoting a national system of education many decades before the government led by Gladstone in 1870 established universal elementary education. In those days, almost 200 years ago, the purpose of the National Society was expressed as the education of the poor in the principles of the established Church. Today we would put that in a slightly different manner: education for all, or inclusive education, based on distinctive Christian values. That commitment of the National Society remains the commitment of the Church of England.
Among the many and various ways in which the Church serves the wider community and promotes social cohesion, it continues to give high priority to the provision of education. In the Government's January 2004 statistics, published earlier this autumn, the Church's 4,700 schools, 200 of which are secondary schools, were seen to have 930,000 pupils and 44,000 teachers. That is indeed a significant stake, supported in human and financial resources by the Church.
Great numbers of volunteer governors and helpers are supported by full-time Church of England clergy, more than two-thirds of whom are governors of at least one school. The Church of England also has a significant stake in higher education, with some 80,000 students in institutions which were founded mostly in the 19th century for the training of teachers, but which are increasingly taking their place as universities, with a wide-ranging portfolio but retaining their distinctive character and commitment to the public services. A complementary narrative could well be produced about Roman Catholic and Methodist engagement in schools and schools led by other Churches and faiths.
It has sometimes been suggested from these Benches, as from elsewhere in your Lordships' House, that the Government might be straying into a too mechanistic or utilitarian understanding of the purposes of education. An exclusive emphasis on examination results and on strategies for increasing literacy and improving numeracy could be characterised as utilitarian. On the other hand, the alternative is not easily contemplated—namely, of a system that produces adults who are functionally illiterate or innumerate, who will find it difficult to find their rightful place in society, without which it is hard for them to fulfil their potential. We therefore support the drive to raise standards. Even in the early years, the schools founded by the Church taught the three Rs—reading, writing and arithmetic. Church schools overall contribute significantly to high standards to education.
The reference in the gracious Speech to individuals realising their full potential and the country benefiting from their talents offers a welcome new emphasis on underlying principles and on a curriculum not totally bounded by the three Rs. More than 30 years ago, a commission chaired by the then Bishop of Durham
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published a report on religious education whose title was The Fourth R. I welcomed the Secretary of State's commitment to religious education in the school curriculum when the new national framework for RE was launched earlier this autumn. We have supported this development, and I am pleased to be able to report on the improved popularity and importance of the subject in many schools. RE makes a significant contribution to social cohesion, whatever one believes or does not believe, as well as what is sometimes called "values education".
Church schools have always been clear that the education they offer is founded on Christian belief and Christian values, often in a very inclusive and open way. Such a foundation does not make them therefore narrow or exclusive as is sometimes suggested, though there are one or two horror stories here and there. Quite the reverse is the main picture. At their best they act as a reminder that any education that is not clearly founded on acceptable spiritual and moral values will tend to be perverse and even destructive.
My friend—and here is one of those mouthfuls—the most reverend and right honourable Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury has recently referred to what he called,
If individuals are really to fulfil their potential and offer their full talents to the country, they must be educated in an environment which recognises the importance of religion, which values them as individuals, which nurtures them spiritually and morally, which stretches them in a creative way so that they can appreciate better the deep-down motivations of other cultures and other faiths in a complex world, and also which builds up a clear understanding of why many people have, do and will probably continue to reject, whether after careful thought or not, any religious explanation of why we humans are here on this planet in the first place—which is an open code for saying that atheism is an essential part of the theological enterprise.
It is a pleasure to take part in this afternoon's deliberations, particularly with the prospect of three distinguished maiden speeches. There is also much to look forward to in future debates; for example, on the welcome streamlining of school inspections, support for that critical phase of 16 to 19 year-old education, as well as the complexities of funding. The really crucial issue is that proper amounts of money are channelled in the best possible manner to the most appropriate ends.
In that connection, I do not think that I was alone in raising a quizzical eyebrow of muted—or was it half muted?—irony at the mention much later on in the gracious Speech of "reducing bureaucracy", even though that seems to apply to the costs of government. This is a space which every teacher in the land will watch. I did rather whimsically go up to the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, afterwards to suggest that we should offer ourselves as joint chairmen of a Select Committee for the prevention of bureaucracy.
That is all ahead of us. But if the terms of the gracious Speech indicate that the Government are attaching increasing importance to a "sacred geometry"
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in education, as I hope they do, our schools—all our schools, not just those with any connection with a Church—will inevitably become richer, more fruitful, and places of learning experience and personal encounter.
In speaking from these Benches the last impression that I would want to give is that of favouring a narrow, ghetto-like approach to education in general and religious education in particular. I am reminded of a quotation from Rudolf Nureyev, the Russian ballet dancer, which was given to me 30 years ago by the Bishop who ordained me. It concerns freedom, but it could also be applied to education as indeed to much else. He said:
"Far from being fixed, I am striving as hard as I can to find new possibilities to develop new sides of my nature—even to discover what that nature is—this is what I mean by freedom".
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