Bilateral Relations with Caribbean Countries

Baroness Northover Excerpts

Thursday 28th April 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

The noble Lord makes an important point about ODA. In the current system, the unique vulnerability of small island developing states to issues such as climate change and shocks such as Covid is not recognised. It was made very clear over the last couple of years that they are uniquely vulnerable, and consequently their economic ranking can change very quickly. That is not reflected in the system of recognition, which means that you have countries which, for all intents and purposes, should be ODA-eligible but are not according to the current rules. This is an issue which we are raising robustly in the OECD. I hope that we can see some changes there. Additionally, the UK is working with Fiji and other countries on a global taskforce on access to finance. One of the problems is that it is incredibly complicated accessing finance from the multilateral institutions. They are bureaucratic, time-consuming and so on. We are working very hard on that too, and that is recognised by the small island developing states in question.

[Baroness Northover (LD)]

My Lords, rightly, the Minister has just mentioned the significance of climate change in the Caribbean. The hurricanes in the region are much more extreme and frequent than they used to be, but can be tracked across the Atlantic. The United Kingdom was behind the curve when it came to Hurricane Irma, for example, not holding a COBRA meeting until several days after it had hit. Can the Minister reassure us that the Government are far better prepared to help the overseas territories if and when they are hit by similar hurricanes?