It is a pleasure, as ever, to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Amess. I very much welcome the Bill. The right hon. Member for Gordon said he had no hesitation in supporting it, but the hon. Member for Stone had to assure me that it had nothing to do with Europe before I put my name to it. We have different views on Europe, but on this Bill our views are aligned. I also welcome the Secretary of State’s commitment to development generally and in particular—it is worth putting this on the record—her stewardship of her Department, focusing on women and value for money,  bringing her accountancy skills to bear. Indeed, value for money is important and relates to this Bill, because the better value for money that the Department gets out of its tax pound, the more that can go to help women and girls in developing countries.

I chair the all-party group on Nigeria and, jointly with Lord Crisp in the other place, the all-party group on global health. Both roles have reinforced my view that women are key to improvements. If we can provide women with education and better health—and thereby wealth—and raise awareness of rights more generally among women and the wider population, the Bill can have a generational impact. If we think of women as the first educators of their children, it stands to reason that they should be better educated and supported more generally to make sure their children have a better start in life.

I have visited Nigeria three times. Last year I was in Minna in Niger state, where we saw projects supported by DFID—Save the Children was also involved—to train girls to become teachers. The state authorities and others realised that many girls were not going to school. One of the big reasons, in a Muslim part of Nigeria, was that many parents did not want their girls to be taught by men. There was a shortage of female teachers, so the education college in Minna set up a compound with barbed wire around it, and women were allowed to go—away from their husbands and fathers, and sometimes with their babies in tow—and be trained to be teachers. I was out there with my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah), and we were inspired by their enthusiasm for learning and education.

Interestingly—I flag this up for the Secretary of State, if she ever gets the chance to visit—the girls were being told, “Go back to your village and be yourselves. Don’t be too ambitious,” because there was a fear that if they changed too much, the programme would stop. That is the nub of the challenges we still face. My hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central and I felt a little uncomfortable about that, but we could see the logic—that it would have a more long-term, generational impact if those girls went to their villages and taught in those schools.

On my most recent visit in July, we looked at human rights in particular, and we recently published a report. Although we went to look at human rights, we quickly concluded that women’s rights, if tackled, would solve many of the wider problems, particularly with children’s rights. That underlines the importance of the first part of new clause 1, which deals with development assistance. If people are aware of their rights, that can make a big difference.

We heard terrible stories there of rights being neglected in the justice system and elsewhere. If a child is raped—there is a lot of under-age marriage and girls being forced into inappropriate, under-age sex and childbirth, which can cause them a lot of damage—the perpetrators would often buy off the family for the price of a parking ticket in the UK, because of the shame on the family of having that child unable to marry. Of course, such families will often be quite poor and that money will be useful to them. That was shocking to us and demonstrates the challenges that the Secretary of State and all of us face in those countries. It also underlines the importance of getting it right in gender-specific terms. The more  that young women are educated, the less likely they are to become young mothers and be forced into marriage, which is a real issue.

I have one question. New clause 1(3) refers to humanitarian assistance. The UK typically takes people in from refugee camps, particularly those that are long standing—it was up to 1,000 people, but I am not sure what the current figure is. Those people are welcomed by communities across the UK, from Northern Ireland through the whole of England, Wales and Scotland. Civil servants, mostly from the Home Office, assess who the vulnerable families are in those camps and who needs the support the most. Often when we talk about immigration, people talk about economic migrants and people who have got here under their own steam, but people from refugee camps are some of the most vulnerable people in the world and we should not forget about them.

When we look at these issues—I would be interested to hear the Secretary of State’s update on how this is done—sometimes the priority can be, for example, lone parent households headed by single women, who are most at risk of violence and abuse in the camps, which are often not even shanty towns, but tent towns. Those women are very vulnerable, which would be an issue under new clause 1. However, other valid issues are also taken into account in assessments, and I would not want to undermine those issues or suggest that those women are not deserving. However, the civil servants involved are pretty heroic and have to make difficult judgments about which families they recommend that Ministers give support to, so that they can come to the UK. The UK Government provide funding for the first year and then the local authority in the receiving area picks up the cost. A lot of thought goes into the process, and although there is perhaps no simple answer, I would be interested to hear the Secretary of State’s view on how the new clause would or would not affect the approach taken.