Annual General Meeting 2024 summary and new officers
29 February 2024
Written By APPG Secretariat
The APPG held its Annual General Meeting on 27 February 2024 in Parliament, where we had the opportunity to elect our 2024 Office Bearers, review our activity over the past year, and set out our plans for the rest of 2024.
Following the new rules about APPGs, officers are now limited to only four, including the co-chairs. We therefore elected to continue with Lord McConnell and Theo Clarke MP as co-chairs, along with Patrick Grady MP and Baroness Northover as co-chairs. With officers from four different political parties, we are pleased the APPG will continue to provide a cross-party forum for the SDG agenda in Parliament.
A report was presented summarising the APPG’s activities throughout 2023, which included a meeting in Parliament in June between APPG members and UN Assistant Secretary-General and Director of UNDP Bureau of External Relations, Ulrika Modéer, and a ‘Business and the SDGs’ conference in the Attlee Suite in Parliament in July, in partnership with the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), the Coalition for Global Prosperity (CGP) and the UN Global Compact, which was attended by Minister for International Development Andrew Mitchell.
In September, to coincide with the UN SDG Summit in New York, the APPG also hosted an event called “Halfway to 2020: What next for the UN Global Goals?” in the Churchill Room, with speeches from Minister Andrew Mitchell, as well as departing Shadow International Development Minister Preet Gill and civil society representatives.
With Labour appointing a new Shadow Minister for International Development in Lisa Nandy, the APPG also made contact with her to continue championing the importance of the SDGs in the UK’s foreign policy work, and held a roundtable with representatives from all the development-related APPGs with Minister Andrew Mitchell, giving Parliamentarians the opportunity to feed into the policy development of the White Paper via engagement with the Minister and the FCDO Policy Team. Lastly, in October, we mobilised MPs to speak on a Westminster Hall debate on the Sustainable Development Goals, with contributions from Vicky Ford MP and Virendra Sharma MP, Fiona Bruce MP and others. Finally, the SDG agenda was well-represented across the party conference season, with events taking place at Lib Dem, Labour and Conservative party conferences focused on the importance of the SDGs, with the involvement of Bond and APPG members.
The AGM was attended by Virendra Sharma MP, Lord Hannay, Patrick Grady MP, Theo Clarke MP and Lord McConnell, and we were also delighted to welcome a new member in Andrew Western MP, meaning we now have over 120 Parliamentarians who are members of the APPG, as well as many representatives from business and civil society. A full list of members can be found here.