International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Lord Cashman Excerpts

Friday 23rd January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cashman (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed, on his excellent introduction to this discussion. I welcome this Bill from the other place and applaud its author. While we are congratulating, I also congratulate the Government on their commitment to 0.7% of GNI as ODA, and successive Labour Governments on their unbroken commitment. This promise to place in law 0.7% of GNI as ODA is long overdue and we should work to ensure that it becomes a reality before the election of May 2015.

Some have argued that they do not believe in this target or that it will create an overflow of funding that will be washed out through the doors of Whitehall. I believe that argument has already been dealt with, but I will return to it later. The fact is that over recent years, since the global economic crisis, programmes have been shortened or cut by other EU countries. Indeed, there have been attempts to recalibrate funding by creating the dubious concept in development terms of “middle-income countries”, where instead of looking at poverty and inequality indicators, the overall GDP of a country is used as a crude basis for funding decisions, often undoing the good that has already been done. As I said in a previous debate, the UK Government are actively pursuing this approach, and it has detrimental effects.

Reductions of programmes and funding hit those in need the hardest—South Africa, a country I know well, springs to mind. But let me repeat a few statistics—oh, how we repeat and use statistics on different sides of the argument. In its 2013-14 programme, DfID provided 43.1 million people with access to clean water—something we take for granted—better sanitation and improved hygiene; supported more than 10 million children, half of them girls, to go to primary and lower secondary school; ensured that 3.6 million births took place safely with the help of nurses, midwives or doctors—something that we take for granted; prevented 19.3 million children under five and pregnant women from going hungry; and reached 11.4 million people with emergency food assistance. The multilateral organisations that DfID supported provided food assistance to more than 80 million people in 75 countries, immunised 48 million children against preventable diseases and detected and treated 1.5 million cases of tuberculosis—I could go on and on with these statistics.

Why do I repeat these statistics? Because some people say that ODA does not work and that to do more would be to throw money away. I say: tell those millions that ODA is not necessary and that ODA does not give value for money; tell the child whose life is saved and whose mother survives childbirth; tell the girl who goes into education and the child soldier given a future; tell the farmer now able to grow and sustain; tell the pregnant mother now able to prevent the transmission of the HIV virus to her unborn child; tell the person whose life is saved by access to medicines and antiretroviral drugs; tell it to the AIDS orphans who now have a future where before there was none; tell it to LGBTI communities and individuals given hope and support in the face of hatred; tell the neediest and the poorest that theirs is not our case—and let civilised societies and individuals give their judgment.

What happens elsewhere in the world does affect us and does matter. It makes sense—as my mum would say, good old common sense—to continue our investment in developing countries. It affects us and protects us, whether our borders, immigration, trafficking, anti-terrorism policies or sense of decency. I will repeat this again and again, as I did in the European Parliament: we are not committing a sum of money; it is a percentage of our gross national income, and if our income goes down, so does the amount of ODA. Therefore, let us do the decent thing and pass this Bill swiftly and with pride.