International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Debate between Lord Finkelstein and Lord Forsyth of Drumlean

Friday 6th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

It is true that there are a lot of amendments in the group but they are consequential on the concept of creating a five-year period. The noble Lord, Lord McConnell, and I are old sparring partners and old habits die hard for him. In response to his intervention, and at the risk of being accused of repetition—I note that the noble Countess, Lady Mar, is not present—I stress that the National Audit Office report said that DfID was having to,

“quickly add some activities to its 2013 plans but delay others set for 2014, making it more difficult to achieve value for money”.

What does that mean if not that it was not getting the best bang for the buck? The noble Lord said that 2013 was the first year for meeting the relevant target. He is absolutely right about that. However, the report goes on to say:

“The Department’s plans for delivering the 2015 ODA target require it to rapidly increase its investments, which could be difficult for it to achieve”.

If that is not saying loud and clear that we are unnecessarily putting the department in a straitjacket, I do not know what is. My amendment would prevent that and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, will accept it.

The noble Lord opposite is clearly not persuaded by the National Audit Office report. My noble friend Lord Fowler was very unkind to Margaret Hodge, the chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, who I think in many respects has done a great job in chairing that committee. Indeed, she has said that it appeared that the cash has been “rushed out” to “meet the 0.7% target”.

She added:

“This raises questions about value for money which Parliament will be keen to look into”.

I do not think we can ignore that. Just to show that I am being balanced and fair, Sir Peter Luff, a very distinguished colleague, who many of us in this House remember with great affection, said:

“The committee must grill Dfid very carefully to make sure this money was spent wisely and well. This proves the folly of binding targets which set out how much you have to spend irrespective of need”.

Neither of these parliamentarians is noted for holding extreme views.

However, as the noble Lord is not happy with National Audit Office’s view, I turn to the International Development Committee, which was also concerned about the impact of the 0.7% target on the effectiveness of aid. It stated in its annual report of May 2014:

“2013 was an exceptional year. DFID’s expenditure increased rapidly as UK ODA rose from 0.56% to 0.7% of GNI. Nevertheless, it does seem surprising that DFID should spend over a quarter of its budget in December and almost 40% of its budget in November and December. DFID should provide the reassurance that its expenditure is rational and costeffective and not rushed out at the end of the year, which is the impression that can be given by its spending profile in 2013. We recommend that DFID carefully monitor its ability to meet the 0.7% target given uncertainties about both its own spending and that of other Departments and the GNI figure, which is itself subject to regular revision”.

As regards that latter point on regular revision, to which my noble friend Lord Howell referred, suddenly, it is decided that we need to take account of illegal drugs activity and prostitution and, as a result of that, we have to find an extra several hundred million pounds to spend on the aid budget. Does that make sense? It may be a bonus for the department, but it will certainly not be part of a planned approach.

I feel strongly about this issue as I was a member of the Economic Affairs Committee, under the splendid chairmanship of my noble friend Lord MacGregor, which took evidence on this issue. The evidence is there for people to see. It highlighted the problems, including that of wrongly prioritising the amount that is spent rather than the results that are achieved. Throughout the morning we have talked about how much is spent rather than how to get the best value for money from what is spent, as I said when we discussed the earlier amendment of my noble friend Lord MacGregor. We thought that a single-year target,

“makes the achievement of the spending target more important than the overall effectiveness of the programme”.

That was one of the conclusions of this House’s distinguished committee. We also said that,

“the speed of the planned increase risks reducing the quality, value for money and accountability of the aid programme”.

That is what we concluded a few years ago and that view is supported by the NAO and the International Development Committee.

A further point that has not been touched on this morning is that reaching the target increases the risk that aid will have a corrosive effect on other political systems by creating aid dependency. That, again, points to what DfID is doing very successfully—that is, looking at more targeted and sophisticated ways of providing aid and support and involving the private sector. I sense that the House has probably heard enough of this argument. I beg to move.

[Lord Finkelstein (Con)]

My Lords, unfortunately, I was not able to speak in the Second Reading debate, even though I was present, as I could not be certain that I could attend the whole debate. However, I assure the Committee that I intend to speak briefly and only to the amendment.

I write a football column each week for the Times, and have done for more than a decade. The column is concerned with the quality of football teams and helps readers to distinguish between noise and signal. A team that wins 50% of its games will not do so by regularly winning, then losing, winning then losing; it will do it in clusters. When statisticians assessed those clusters, they discovered that they are randomly distributed. In other words, a team will win a cluster but that may be just because it has a run of random results and then it will win, win, win, draw, draw, lose, lose in that cluster. There is a trophy that is awarded entirely for randomness: it is called the Barclays Manager of the Month. When a team’s cluster of wins coincides with a calendar month, its manager becomes Barclays Manager of the Month. In the following month, when that team loses its games, something occurs that is called regression to the mean, and the manager gets fired. This is a perfectly simple statistical concept that ought to be applied to the Bill.

It is not a very good idea to try to set a target in law, on which Parliament must report, that is attached to a single year’s variable data. It is much better to try to find a period that might represent some sort of significance over a long period of time. A single year cannot do that and five years can attempt to do that. Even five years is quite a short period but it is certainly a great deal better than a single year.

This is a technical objection to the Bill, even though others may think it goes to the heart of the argument for it, but the Bill would certainly be greatly improved if a simple concept of randomness was agreed so that we do not have a law for randomness in the same way that we have a cup for it.

Recall of MPs Bill

Debate between Lord Finkelstein and Lord Forsyth of Drumlean

Wednesday 14th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Finkelstein]

As the noble Lord is well aware, there have not been very many such Members of Parliament and they have resigned, and I suspect that that will happen. That is not an argument to suggest that this power would not be used. From the noble Lord’s own Front Bench, it was correctly stated that it is very much to be hoped that the Bill would not be required to be used very frequently, but cases have often come before the House of Commons where a Member of Parliament has, for instance, used the House of Commons facilities to promote their travel company or employed members of their family in the House of Commons and been given suspensions that would fall under the Bill, which currently the power does not exist to cover. While there may not have been many instances in recent years that are covered in the Bill where people have not resigned, that does not mean that the power would not be valuable.

The issue has been raised of Members of Parliament who are sentenced to jail on issues of conscience and whether it is right that a recall mechanism be available. It may not be right to provide for a situation in which those people are automatically expelled for that act, but it is certainly right to provide the electorate with the limited power to review the conduct of that Member of Parliament in the light of them committing the very serious act as a Member of Parliament of defying the laws that they have created.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

My noble friend is clearly passionate in support of the Bill. Could he deal with the point, which I have made twice previously, that in the real world, in practical terms, where a Member of Parliament found themselves in this position, it would be highly unlikely that the leadership of a party would sign and allow them to stand again as a party candidate? Therefore, there is no opportunity for the electorate to take a view if they wish to be represented by a particular political party as opposed to a particular individual.

[Lord Finkelstein]

I think that this is a misunderstanding. The leader of the party has to sign to allow them to use the party logo in an election, and they may not be permitted to stand for a political party, but that does not prevent them standing in a by-election. I suspect that if Jimmy Maxton had run in that election, he might well have received the signature of the leader of the Labour Party, but in other circumstances it might have been withheld. It does not prevent someone running again in the election; they are not denied this chance; and the electorate are not denied the opportunity to support them. It just means that they will not be allowed under their party act to run as a party candidate.

[Lord Finkelstein]

And he could run as a candidate, if he wished, in an election, and could receive or not receive his party’s support; I am arguing just that the electorate should have the opportunity to decide, in circumstances in which someone has decided to defy the law, whether to continue to support them as a Member of Parliament. This power will not be imposed on Members of Parliament against the wishes of the electorate; it is a power granted to the electorate. What we have to decide as a House is whether it is reasonable that the electorate be given a limited power in certain circumstances that they can use to enforce standards. I believe that that power is reasonable and limited.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

I am sorry to pursue this—perhaps I have just misunderstood the Bill, as the noble Lord suggests—but if someone finds themselves in circumstances where there is a recall and there is going to be a by-election, certainly in the Conservative Party you cannot stand as a Conservative candidate unless you have the signature of the leader of the party. That is how it operates. I do not know about other parties. The Liberal party is a bit looser in its arrangements—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Finkelstein]

No, the noble Lord is not missing anything, but he is failing to add the question of why that would be wrong. If a Member of Parliament is recalled, it may be that their party stands by them because of all the honourable reasons that have been suggested might hypothetically happen; if, however, they have been recalled because they have decided to promote their travel company by using the facilities of the House of Commons, the Conservative Party might not decide to stand by such a candidate. The candidate would still have the right to run by themselves. I do not think that the noble Lord has misunderstood it, but perhaps I have not understood why the noble Lord would regard that as a flaw in the Bill. It seems to me an advantage that has been programmed in, rather than a bug.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

I regard it as a flaw in the Bill because the point that my noble friend has been making throughout this evening is that it should be a matter for the electorate to decide whether or not they are going to take whatever the offence is, or whatever has caused this, as one which would prevent them from re-electing that person as their Member of Parliament. I am saying that in practical terms, if someone has got themselves into that kind of trouble, they are going to be out anyway because the parties are not going to support them. Therefore we are going through a very expensive process which will generate lots of publicity and lots of difficulties, and the end result will be the same as it would be under our existing procedures.

I am not sure what the problem is that we are trying to solve. If someone has fiddled their expenses or run a travel company or whatever, first, the whip is going to be withdrawn and, secondly, they are not going to be able to stand as a candidate for a particular party and they are not going to get re-elected. My noble friend seems to be arguing that we need to have a complex procedure that gives them the second chance to challenge what would have happened anyway.

[Lord Finkelstein]

I actually used those examples for a reason. The whip may have been withdrawn, but those people did not have to resign from Parliament and remained in Parliament until the end of the period, whereas if they had been employed by anybody else they would not have been able to do that. This power exists to enforce that which does not exist at the moment. In other words, I used precisely the examples—in the case of the travel company and the family member—where those Members stayed until the end of the Parliament, and would not be able to unless their electorates were willing to allow them to.