It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Amess. This is an important moment for the UK and for our Government’s approach to international development. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stone on introducing this private Member’s Bill on gender equality in international development. In fact, all the organisations I know supported him as he prepared it.

As MPs, we all know that we may spend many parliamentary sessions putting our names into the private Member’s Bill ballot without them ever being pulled out. The fact that my hon. Friend has had that opportunity  and chose to use it on such an important subject is a real tribute and testament to his many years’ work in the House. It is thanks to his dedication and tenacity that the Bill reached Committee stage with cross-party consensus behind it. It is a real achievement.

I take this opportunity to thank my officials in the Department for International Development. They have worked very hard, not only helping to support the Bill as it passes through the House, but more broadly on issues that affect women and girls—preparing the business cases, but also making sure that programmes get carried out on the ground every single day of the week.

The Government supported the Bill when it was given its Second Reading without debate on 13 September, as the Committee heard. Jointly with my hon. Friend the Member for Stone, we now propose to introduce a number of amendments. They do not affect the policy intent, which we of course support; instead, they are designed to improve the technical drafting of the Bill. I assure colleagues on the Committee that the changes we are making strengthen the Bill.

As my hon. Friend said, our Parliament and this Bill really can be a beacon for the work on women and girls which is happening around the world and, as the hon. Member for Luton South said, for the important role that men and boys also play in this agenda. I can assure the hon. Gentleman that many of the programmes we have under way have elements that refer to the role of men and boys in the pursuit of the agenda for women and girls.

As many of the members of the Committee know, I am personally very committed to passing the Bill. Indeed, since becoming Secretary of State for International Development, I have made improving the lives of women and girls a top priority for my Department in every single area of our work. We know that, aside from it being the right thing to do, it makes sense and it is a good investment. We know that when a girl in the developing world gets educated, she will marry later and have fewer children, who will be healthier and more likely to be educated themselves. Aside from the fact that it is one of the best investments we can make in international development, as Hillary Clinton said, women’s rights are ultimately about human rights. They are the rights of women and girls to lead a life free of violence, to have an education, to have a voice in their community, to be able to choose who to marry and when, and to have control over their bodies.

The UK is helping women around the world to get access to education, financial services, and contraception and family planning. We are helping to improve women’s land rights and helping women to access security and justice. We are determined to work across the board, not just within the Department for International Development but with the Foreign Secretary and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to focus particularly on achieving an end to violence against women and girls. Last month, I launched an international call to action on violence against women and girls in emergencies and humanitarian situations. As a result, Governments and aid agencies signed up to a groundbreaking commitment to make the safety and protection of women and girls a life-saving priority in our response to emergencies—not something that happens after we have looked at other things, but one of the core priorities that is worked on from the word go.

I will respond quickly to some of the questions. On the perfectly sensible point made by the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch, the Bill very much reflects the approach we have taken on public sector equality duty, which is the legislation that refers to spending here in the UK. The Bill provides a similar lens for gender equality and applies it to the investment that we make outside the UK, so it very much sits alongside that existing piece of legislation, which covers the issues she talked about.

I assure the hon. Lady that I work hand in hand with the Home Office on human trafficking. Much can be achieved by my Department and the Home Office working together to help many of the vulnerable people who are affected by trafficking. For example, an element of the work happening in the Philippines right now is explicitly designed to try to reduce the risk to women in that sort of situation of becoming victims of trafficking.

On the point made by the hon. Member for Luton South on the post-2015 agenda and what comes after the millennium development goals, this Government are certainly arguing for a stand-alone goal on gender, as well as mainstreaming through the rest of the new development framework. We will take that case to the Commission on the Status of Women in March 2014. The hon. Gentleman will be aware that on the high-level panel the Prime Minister co-chaired, the group of experts had a stand-alone goal on gender and gender equality. I was particularly pleased to see one of the sub-targets on ending child marriage, which is incredibly important.

My hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth talked about the work we need to do internationally. She is quite right. Over time, we are developing a very effective working relationship with UN Women, which is particularly interested in the role of men and boys in this area, and with the World Bank, where I am privileged to sit as a member of the gender advisory council.

To answer the question raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford, after the Bill is passed, we will ensure that we go through the process of influencing where we can and applying the provisions to our multilateral spend as well as to our bilateral spend. Having this Bill in place greatly strengthens our ability to ensure that we have our priorities focused in our multilateral spend as well as in our bilateral spend.

I was asked how we in the Department will work to ensure that we deliver on the intent of the Bill. I assure the Committee that gender equality is hard-coded into how we develop our business cases and is a particularly important part of what we look at. It is absolutely part of how our Department works.

Finally, I come to the points made by the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill, with which I very much agree. He has been a tireless advocate of this agenda in the House, and I pay tribute to him for that. I believe that where half the population is locked out of a country, prevented from being productive and pursuing opportunities, there is no sustainable path to development. It is very straightforward. In the week that we mourn the passing of Nelson Mandela and all that he achieved in ending race-based apartheid in South Africa, today’s Bill is about showing that the UK will never forget what is essentially gender apartheid for women in the societies of which we are all part.

We have to find better ways—and this Bill is one of them—to ensure we never let up our foot from the pedal of trying to achieve progress on the rights of women and girls, wherever they are in the world. They should have not only rights but opportunities. We urgently need irreversible gains in the rights of women and girls, and of course an end to violence against them. I believe that the ongoing, persistent lack of rights for women and girls in the world is probably the greatest unmet human challenge of the 21st century.

The Bill enshrines our commitment to reducing gender inequality in law. It also introduces a reporting duty to ensure that we will be held to account for delivering on this agenda. That is absolutely right. I finish by paying tribute again to my hon. Friend the Member for Stone and by saying that the Government are glad to support the Bill.