14:18 Andrew Stunell (Hazel Grove) (LD)

Before the last general election, I spent an interesting and helpful year on the Select Committee on International Development. I remember a number of reports from that time, but two seem relevant to the report before us. One was “Aid Under Pressure”, which considered the pressures of the worldwide downturn and climate change. That report stated that development needs in the third world are as pressing now as they ever have been and that significant problems must be confronted. The second relevant report was on urbanisation, which documented the fact that we are now at the tipping point where half the world’s population lives in urban areas. We live not in an agricultural world, but an urban one. In many cases, there are far more small-scale enterprises with productive outputs, with the possibility of their raising revenue for public services. The challenges of doing that are immense, because so many of those enterprises are informal and the land that they are on is often held informally. I remember visiting Nigeria and looking at a DFID project to facilitate the registration of land rights. Property cannot be taxed if the owner is not known. A business cannot be made to pay tax on anything if its existence is not known. The report is a logical follow-through on that, considering the next steps that need to happen.

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