It is good to serve under your chairmanship in this Committee, Mr Amess. When the hon. Member for Stone approached me to ask whether I would be a sponsor of this Bill, I had absolutely no hesitation whatever in agreeing to do so. I have been the Chair of the International Development Committee for the last eight years or so, and it has been clear to me throughout that period that the empowerment and development of women is the most important issue and the key to development. I have said that many times and on many public platforms.

Let me say to the hon. Member for Luton South that it is absolutely right that men and women should feel free to talk about this issue without any compromise whatever. It is important that it should be seen not as a women’s issue, but as a human issue. It is about how genders can work together for the betterment of society, rather than in conflict.

To reinforce that point, I want to mention one or two examples that bring the matter into focus. As it happens, my Committee would have been debating our report on violence against women and girls in Westminster Hall tomorrow. We agreed to postpone the debate until January only because of the Nelson Mandela event—I wonder whether Nelson Mandela would have approved of our postponing the debate, but we will have it in due course. We identified the fact that gender equality does not exist anywhere in the world and that violence against women exists everywhere. Let us not pretend that this is just a developing country issue—it is an issue in this country as well. However, it is an extreme issue in many of those countries, whose societies are very male-dominated.

The hon. Member for Glasgow North will recall that when we had a meeting with President Karzai, there was a robust exchange—which I do not think he appreciated at all—about the rights of women. At the end, he said, “You have got to recognise that we are a conservative society. You have to respect our values.” One of the male members of the Committee said, “Well, the statistics show that 80% of women in Afghanistan are regularly beaten by their husbands. Are these the traditional values that our soldiers are dying to defend?” The President then retreated into saying, “Of course, the last  leader of Afghanistan who stood up for the rights of women was the king in 1929. He was assassinated, and I do not want to follow his example.” We have therefore confronted these issues in a fairly robust fashion. When the Committee produced our report on the UK’s policy in Afghanistan, we said that the single test that we would apply to see whether our intervention in Afghanistan had beneficially transformed society in the long run would be the status of women, say, five years after our troops had left. That will be the single determinant of whether our intervention has been transformational in a development sense.

The Committee has just returned from Burma, where the same thing applies. As Aung San Suu Kyi herself told us, nobody should be deceived by the fact that the most prominent and respected politician in Burma is a woman. That should not obscure the fact that the vast majority of representatives in Parliament and virtually all the people in government are men. Very few are women.

Of course, this is not just about women in power—I do not want to cast any aspersions, but there are some women in power who have not always used that power to transform the lives of women in their own societies. Rather, it is ordinary women who really need the support, as the hon. Member for Stone was absolutely right to say. That is the point I want to make, and I hope the Secretary of State will respond to it. The focus of the Bill should be on how development policy in the countries that we partner can transform or help to transform the lives of ordinary women and how we ensure that our partners understand that we believe that enhancing the status of women is the key to their development. We cannot tackle issues such as child marriage on our own—we saw a wonderful DFID programme in action in Ethiopia that has really good partners on the ground. With the greatest respect to my colleague the Under-Secretary of State for International Development, who is a great campaigner on these issues, she will not change Ethiopia, but she will champion those in Ethiopia who can change it. That is where our policy interaction matters and where the Bill can make a difference.

I support the Bill, but perhaps the Secretary of State will explain the changes. I agree with the hon. Member for Stone that the wording is slightly softer, but I do not doubt the Secretary of State’s commitment to the issue. Nevertheless, how will she ensure that every time we set up a development programme, the advancement of women is built into it as part of the bricks and the furniture—the sine qua non of underwriting the programme? That is what the Bill is designed to achieve, and if it does, the hon. Gentleman will have provided a transformational service.