Overseas Aid: Charities and Faith-based Organisations

Baroness Smith of Basildon Excerpts

Thursday 12th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, on securing what has been an impressive debate. I very much support her choice of subject, as it provides your Lordships’ House with an opportunity to reflect on action, on progress to date and on what else can be done to ensure the best outcomes.

It was also a pleasure to hear the speech of my noble friend Lord McNicol. Not only was it an excellent speech, but the fact that he made his maiden speech in the same week he was introduced to your Lordships’ House indicates that he will waste no time at all in getting to grips with his new role. I look forward to him playing an active and positive role and to his future contributions. I suggest perhaps that he might save his bagpipes for future Labour Lords’ curry nights, which might be more appropriate.

I welcome the fact that the noble Lord, Lord Bates, will be replying to today’s debate, because he has form on this issue. None of us can have forgotten, as we followed him on Twitter around the world how, having taken leave from your Lordships’ House, he marched his way towards Athens—I think it was Athens that he walked to, and I see the noble Lord nodding. It was the highest service he could give. There are two pillars of what charity organisations, faith-based organisations, voluntary organisations and NGOs are about. One is trying to raise funds, and the other is that campaigning role of drawing attention to the issues that you mean you have to raise funds as a way to try to resolve them. The noble Lord is the most appropriate person in government to reply to today’s debate.

My last position in government, so far, was at the Cabinet Office and included being the Minister responsible for charities in the voluntary sector and social enterprises. Like so many in your Lordships’ House, I have been involved in the charity and NGO sectors for a number of years in different ways. Today, we have heard from noble Lords across the House of their involvement, and I suspect that if we spoke to any Member, we would hear very similar stories of their engagement in different kinds of organisations of all shapes and sizes.

One of the things that struck me in my role as a Minister was both how vast and how diverse the sector is, in terms of organisation size, whether they employ staff, have volunteers or a mix of both and the services they deliver and campaigns they run. There is also the role of those who support these organisations. I was struck by how people were so very generous with their time, money and expertise, without which these organisations would be unable to function.

Over decades, across the developing world the UK has maintained a proud tradition of supporting those in need and tackling global challenges head on. The public continue to be generous. Close to 40% of the UK’s aid spending is delivered through multilateral organisations and groups formed by intergovernmental organisations which have a high level of public recognition. However, as we have heard today, there is so much less awareness of the excellent work of smaller charities, NGOs and faith-based organisations in this field.

I am sure that I am not alone in knowing of small organisations that raise funds through their churches and local communities to provide schools, teachers and medical support, for example, in some of the poorest places in the world. By targeting their limited resources, they can contribute to saving and improving lives. Some take on the work themselves through volunteers who commit time and expertise. Others fundraise to support paid professionals to deliver services. The delivery models differ, but the objectives remain the same.

In recent years, the Government have promoted funding initiatives to support the work of charities in delivering aid overseas. The Government must rise to the challenge to ensure that these schemes are accessible and open to charities and organisations of all sizes. At the same time, they need to ensure proper accountability and the effective use of that funding.

The UK Aid Connect initiative requires organisations to construct their own consortiums prior to bidding, but the effect of that is to gear the scheme much more towards larger charities and NGOs that have the resources and experience to form such groups to navigate the process. I remember in my role as Minister talking to some of the organisations that were getting together to form these consortiums. The amount of time, energy and effort it took to bring the organisations together, to get common policies and to fill in the forms could be very difficult. So we should do more to make it a process that does not remove the accountability or the good governance that we need but also does not put onerous barriers in the way that prevent the best, in a sense, becoming the enemy of the good and prevent us getting the right applications when we need them.

Small charities can make an enormous contribution to developmental goals, but UK aid must be genuinely open to them. I echo the point made by my noble friend Lord McNicol. Can the Minister say something about the steps that the Government are taking to help smaller NGOs and charities to apply for UK aid funding, including from UK Aid Connect? That would be quite helpful, as there is this barrier for small organisations.

Similarly, the Small Charities Challenge Fund, which I think other noble Lords mentioned and which forms part of UK Aid Direct, provides grants of up to £50,000 to organisations with an annual income of £250,000 or less. I welcome the fact that the Government have earmarked certain funds specifically for those small charities but, again, can the Minister provide some additional information on this? I fear that it could well be those organisations at the higher end of the scale, while the small organisations who perform low-level but equally valuable projects find it difficult to apply because they do not have the scale in order to do so. Any information on that would be helpful.

If the Government are to be successful, as has been indicated, in engaging with smaller charities, they need to understand and know precisely what proportion of the UK aid budget is spent supporting these smaller organisations and also to identify the outcomes from such organisations. It is not the case that just because an organisation is small, local and maybe more mobile that it is automatically providing better outcomes. The Government need to look at that assessment of outcomes. My noble friend Lord McNicol identified that about 36% of UK aid is delivered through multilateral organisations, but much of this is through the larger NGOs and those much larger intergovernmental organisations. Is there any kind of estimate of what proportion of multilateral aid is delivered through small charities, using that definition that is used by DfID of £250,000?

On the issue of transparency, I want to say something about the £1 billion Conflict, Stability and Security Fund, which I think the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, referred to. The fund is a significant part of the ODA budget, but it has quite a secretive nature and we get little information about how it is spent. Can the Minister say something about the fund, including whether those smaller organisations—charities, NGOs and faith-based organisations—have had access to that fund and been able to secure funding?

The point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, is crucial: for the public to continue their support of charities and the voluntary sector, there has to be trust and confidence. They are only able to undertake the work that they do, which is valuable and often essential, when the public, our Government and the Governments and civic society in the countries they work in have confidence that they are working to the highest possible standards. That means that the strong ethical values and principles that brought them into being has to be the focus of their work and reflected at every level of the organisation and in all they do. What that does not mean—this is a point that the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, very eloquently identified—is that ideological views should in any way override public policy, particularly in the areas of HIV, reproductive health and family planning.

But neither does it mean that everything has to be undertaken by volunteers. Whatever the size of the organisation, it has the same responsibility to its staff as does any organisation. Staff in this sector are entitled to decent wages and working conditions and a safe working environment. That means that there is a role not just for the Charity Commission but for the Government, particularly with regard to the governance and oversight of how such organisations operate.

That responsibility also has some limits. When I was the Charities Minister, I disagreed profoundly with Oliver Letwin MP, who was then drafting the Tory party manifesto on limiting the campaigning role of charities—even to the point that he declared that charities which received funding from government, even for service delivery, should not campaign on policy issues. That is an extraordinary thing to require. I took completely and totally the opposite view. If charities are involved in service delivery, for example, and particularly if they use government money, and they identify how an issue can be better resolved or dealt with, they have an obligation to say so. Whether they receive any government funding or not should be completely and utterly irrelevant. Governments should never use funding as a way of gagging legitimate debate.

If we always want to improve public policy, NGOs and other organisations working in the field have expertise, sending back information and providing information to government. If government is not listening to campaigns for better healthcare—whether it is reproductive health, HIV, safe access to health facilities, or safe food and water—it is right for those organisations to campaign on these issues, and receiving funding for service delivery should not prevent that. To pursue that route would be a bit like putting our head in the sand: “We know best; we are delivering; it does not matter if it can be improved or not”.

Unfortunately, much of that manifesto and that way of thinking found its way into legislation in the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014. I have no difficulty whatever with transparency, but it would be helpful if the Minister could say something about the very legitimate campaigning role of charities. I draw attention to the fact that, when the Minister was marching to Athens—I do not know how many pairs of trainers he got through en route—a key part of that was drawing attention to the issues he was raising funds for.

As I began my speech today, I commented that we should recognise, with some pride, the UK’s role, through decades, as a world leader in aid, whether it is immediate humanitarian aid in the wake of any kind of disaster or rebuilding communities that have been devastated by conflict. We accept responsibility and want to contribute, and I think the public do as well. We should therefore be enormously proud of the UK’s determination to tackle such global injustices, and proud of the British public, who want and expect us to contribute.

Too often, people think of charities as somehow well-meaning amateurs. We are way beyond that. The roles charities large and small play, and the professionalism they bring to the work they offer is exceptional—I see the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, nodding; she has experience here—and it should be recognised as such. However, that does not negate that government also has a role, particularly in governance and oversight.