Lords Diary: Baroness Sugg
4 min read
My main focus in the Lords is on international development and foreign affairs. I recently joined the International Affairs and Defence Committee, chaired by the brilliant Baroness Anelay of St Johns.
The work of Lords committees is often unseen but, made up as they are of experts in all fields, they produce insightful and comprehensive reports.
I’ve continued with what was my main area of interest before I resigned as a Foreign Commonwealth & Development Office minister: the work the United Kingdom is doing to promote gender equality around the world. I co-chair the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health, which is made up of parliamentarians supporting access to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR).
I often bring this work into the Chamber, and last week I asked an oral question on whether SRHR will be properly recognised in the upcoming International Development Strategy.
UK investments in SRHR not only promote health across the whole of life; they also lead to improvements in education, gender equality, political stability, economic development and environmental sustainability. It is among the most cost effective of all development investments.
Neither hymenoplasty nor virginity testing has any medical or ethical justification
Sadly SRHR and family planning were subject to disproportionate cuts of around 85 per cent as part of the UK aid cuts. Many long running programmes have been stopped entirely with little notice. Around 9.5 million women and couples have lost access to safe contraception – taking away the ability to make decisions about their own bodies and family size. I often think of the women I met at a health clinic in rural Senegal, who travelled for many hours to receive safe contraception, and the impact that these cuts will have on them for the rest of their lives.
The lack of transparency and detail around the cuts is an ongoing frustration for many parliamentarians. I was pleased to hear the Foreign Secretary announce in November that funding for women and girls will be returned to pre-cuts levels, though I am pushing for detail on this – how and when? I’d like to see the UK re-take our place as a global leader here, and hope that that SRHR will be an explicit priority for advancing gender equality in the strategy and that funding will be returned to previous levels of four to five per cent of Official Development Assistance (ODA).
I’ve increasingly been working on the health and rights of women and girls in this country. I was delighted that after the Lords debate, the government laid an amendment to the Health and Care Bill to criminalise hymenoplasty – the act of creating scar tissue in the vagina to ensure that the women bleeds when she next has sexual intercourse. This followed the great work of Richard Holden in the Commons to criminalise virginity testing – neither practice has any medical or ethical justification. It’s been a privilege to work with incredible campaigners to ensure that no women or girl in the UK can be subjected or coerced into these practices legally once the Bill is passed.
This was long overdue – as is removing a loophole that still allows child marriage in this country. I’m due to take a Private Members’ Bill through the Lords to make all official or religious marriage ceremonies for children under 18 illegal in England and Wales. On Friday, I watched Pauline Latham, who has done incredible work on this issue for years, take the Bill through the Commons. Speaking with the campaigners afterwards it’s clear how much her work means to them. Now I need to get it through the Lords before the end of the session and, with government support for it, I will do my best to make that happen.
Since resigning as a minister, it’s been a learning curve to find ways to be effective and impactful as a backbencher. I will continue to work to find every opportunity being a member of the House of Lords provides me to help improve the lives of women and girls here at home and overseas.
Baroness Sugg is a Conservative peer
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