Aid and Trade

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Monday 28th November 2016 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether the recent statement in Kenya by the Secretary of State for International Development that she envisaged using the aid budget to promote the United Kingdom’s bilateral trade agreements following its departure from the European Union is consistent with the International Development Act 2002.

[The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Lord Bates) (Con)]

My Lords, the Department for International Development will continue to ensure that the assistance we provide complies with the requirements of the International Development Act 2002. An important focus of our work is developing countries’ economic development and prosperity, and their trade capacity. That is the clearest route out of poverty and it is in our national interest so to do. There is no doubt that the UK’s generosity strengthens our global standing as we wish to establish new trading relationships.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that reply, which I interpret as meaning that it is not inconsistent with the 2002 Act to speak about the things that the Secretary of State spoke about in Kenya, but it would be to do them. Will the Minister say whether he and his ministerial colleagues understand the dismay that that statement in Kenya caused to those of us who have been supporting the Government through thick and thin on their commitment to 0.7%? Does he recognise that, if it became our policy to provide aid for countries that gave us good trade agreements, we would be laying ourselves open to blackmail straightaway?

Middle East and North Africa

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Wednesday 16th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, the humanitarian emergency which is engulfing the whole of Europe is a complex and accumulative one—a phenomenon that has been building up for several years. If we have been taken by surprise, it is only because we were unwilling to face up to realities before they broke over our heads. It is a phenomenon which goes much wider than one country, Syria, and the refugees fleeing for their lives from the civil war there. Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Eritreans and Yemenis also meet the criteria for asylum under the UN refugee convention and we have an obligation to be willing in principle to offer them refuge. So our response needs to be as complex as the phenomenon itself. So far that response, like that of some other European countries, has been patchy and inadequate and has fallen well short of the needs of the situation. To use the words of the right reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, it has been thin.

Clearly, there needs to be a stronger, more powerful political response to the factors driving the current emergency: a more robust and better co-ordinated military effort against IS, including, I suggest, an extension of our air strikes into IS-controlled parts of Syria; a revived effort to bring about a UN-sponsored settlement in Libya, which could well require some deployment of UN peacekeepers; stronger support for the Governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan in their fight against their respective Taliban opponents and a readiness to renew the moribund efforts to achieve a political settlement in Syria. None of that activity will produce quick results, but without it we will continue to be like the Dutch boy putting his finger in the holes in a dyke.

On the most immediate and pressing problem of the handling of asylum-seeking refugees, I fear that we have not yet begun to find the right response, even if the Government’s reversal last week of their earlier unwillingness expressed in a debate on 22 July—the last day before the Summer Recess—voluntarily to take in more Syrian refugees is welcome. However, the numbers—20,000 over five years—are still pitifully small and compare poorly with the offers of others such as France and, above all, Germany. Why do we limit the offer to Syrians alone when there are many others such as Afghans and Iraqis persecuted by IS with every bit as strong a claim to our refuge? Why do we insist on extending our offer only to those in camps around Syria’s border and excluding all those who have risked their lives to get to Europe? On that point I share entirely the views of the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown.

The arguments about a pull factor are highly theoretical and are pretty unconvincing in the circumstances that now prevail. I hope that, in replying to the debate, the Minister will say that the Government will look again at all those issues. The Government have expressed pride, and rightly so, in the massive resources we have contributed from the aid budget to the refugees in camps around Syria’s border. The substantial increase in those resources now announced is particularly welcome, but more of those resources need to be devoted to education, health and the creation of economic opportunities for those in the camps—I was glad to hear the Minister recognise that—if the present precarious situation is not to become even more unstable and to feed further flows towards Europe. I hope the Minister can say a little more, when she winds up the debate, on those longer-term issues.

I will say a word about the European Union dimension to all this. Of course the European Union has not covered itself in glory in handling this emergency in recent months. There has been too much dither and prevarication. I remain doubtful that mandatory quotas are either desirable or viable. A much-enhanced voluntary effort is, however, essential, and I hope we will play a larger and more constructive role in that. I also hope that we will increase our contribution to FRONTEX and will be prepared to give asylum to some of those flooding into other European countries. If we want others to respond positively to our positions and our priorities for European policy, we would do well to respond positively to theirs.

In conclusion, this is a rapidly moving humanitarian emergency which still has far to run. We need flexible and humane responses, not ones driven by populist scare stories and xenophobic prompting. I hope that the Government will display that flexibility and will be ready to adjust our responses as the situation develops and demands.

Global Development Goals

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, 2015 is set to be an important year for the UN in what is already proving to be an exceptionally testing period for the organisation. Two major sets of decisions will need to be taken next year: those on the policy framework to succeed the millennium development goals, which we are debating today, and those on climate change. Those two sets of decisions will have crucial implications for all the world’s citizens, whether they live in developed or developing countries. That is what makes today’s debate in the name of the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, so timely, topical and welcome, certainly to me. Inadequate policy prescriptions—or, worse still, failure to agree on anything meaningful at all in either of these negotiations—would have seriously negative consequences for the world’s prosperity and its security for a long period ahead.

When the millennium development goals were set 15 years ago in 2000, many regarded them, with a cynical shrug, as just more warm words from an organisation not short of that commodity. Some still take that view. This morning I read an article in Prospect magazine which suggested that the setting of these goals was a pretty worthless exercise—an article that completely ignored the distinction between the specificity of the millennium development goals of 2000 and the discredited, very general goals set in previous decades.

In any case, I think the millennium development goals have turned out to be a lot more significant than that prognosis. They set a course that has seen many millions of people lifted out of poverty in some of the world’s poorest countries, which have also seen remarkable improvements in education and health. However, those benefits have been too narrowly spread and too heavily concentrated in the rising economies of Asia, leaving what has been called the “bottom billion” of the world’s population—most of them in Africa—largely unaffected. Daily we are reminded by events—by the Ebola epidemic in west Africa and by the chaos and threats of genocide or violence in the Middle East and in parts of Africa—of how far the world still has to go and how fragile any progress made on development issues can prove to be if basic security cannot be addressed. I join those who have underlined that point in numerous contributions.

The case for setting out recalibrated goals for the period ahead seems, to me, unanswerable. For example, the Ebola outbreak has highlighted how important it is not only to conduct high-profile campaigns such as those against malaria, AIDS and tuberculosis, as the previous debate underlined, but to give far more emphasis to general provision of public health facilities.

In other areas that so far have been either neglected or inadequately treated—for example, removing discrimination against the disabled, on which I support every word that my noble friend Lord Low said, and discrimination against women and girls—clear objectives need to be set out. In some cases, which have emerged in prominence only since 2000—for instance, bringing the benefits of the digital economy and the revolutions in communications technology to a wider range of countries and a wider range of social groups within them—the challenge is to define sensible and sustainable goals. Those are the challenges that I see in 2015 and I hope that whichever Government emerge from next May’s general election will measure up to them.

However, we also need to realise that if we cannot respond effectively to the challenges of the climate change conference in Paris at the end of next year, much of what we set out to achieve in the form of development goals will prove to be unrealisable. A world beset by coastal flooding from rising sea levels, desertification and catastrophic climatic events will not be a world capable of achieving sustainable development. A world in which civil and sectarian strife spreads across whole regions, uncontrolled by the rules-based institutions that we have so laboriously built up since the end of the Second World War and the end of the Cold War, will fare no better. So the agenda that we face goes a lot wider than the simple setting of development goals. If a new policy framework of development goals is to be worth while, I suggest that we will need to ensure, in addition, that it does not just consist of words on paper but that the commitments subscribed to in New York in 2015 are implemented and monitored. Surely, there needs to be effective monitoring of the way in which both developed and developing countries, and both donors and recipients, fulfil the commitments they have undertaken.

Our own record in recent years, in particular the action taken by the coalition Government to ensure, even in a period of austerity, that we achieved the target of 0.7% of gross national income for our official development aid, is one of which we should be proud; but it is not unchallenged. No doubt, as the political debate hots up before the election and concentrates on future public spending projections, it will come under threat again. I very much hope that this House will now match the action taken in the other place by passing into law our commitment to the figure of 0.7% and that when she replies the noble Baroness will say that the Government—as they did in the other place—will lend their support to such a measure. I suggest, too, that it would be good if all three main parties in Parliament were to make sticking to that commitment a non-partisan objective in their manifestos. After all, it is a lot easier to sustain the commitment to 0.7% than it ever was to reach it in the first place. If we can do that, we will be well placed to give the lead in the debates over the 2015 development goals that will take place in the European Union, at the G8, at the G20 and, of course, at the United Nations for final decision. I hope that we will be there, giving that lead.

Afghanistan: Quarterly Statement

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Wednesday 14th May 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover]

The noble Viscount talks about it being not over until the end of the year. As the DfID spokesman, I should say that it is not over then either, as we have been emphasising. He can be reassured that the Ministry of Defence is well aware of the need to ensure that those who are still there are well equipped. I see from the figures on redeployment of equipment quite a substantial amount still there. Around 63% of major equipment has been moved back and redeployed, but there is a quite substantial commitment still there. I hope that he will be reassured by that.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, could the Minister address a point not covered in her very welcome Statement, to which I think most Members of the House who have spoken have given strong support—that is, Afghanistan’s neighbours? The history of Afghanistan is full of involvement by its neighbours in destabilising that country and, alas, in the past, also of Afghanistan destabilising its neighbours. Is it not absolutely essential that some very solid undertakings are given, perhaps in some regional grouping, that Afghanistan’s neighbours will co-operate with us and others in maintaining stability in the country after NATO’s withdrawal, and that they will be committed to respecting the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Afghanistan and working for economic co-operation? It is all very well us pouring money in but, if the neighbours are fiddling about, as they have often done in the past, it will not avail very much.

[Baroness Northover]

The noble Lord speaks from a great deal of experience. As he will know, there has been tremendous engagement with the Government of Pakistan and there is a trilateral relationship between Pakistan, Afghanistan and the United Kingdom. Pakistan has made a number of commitments. It is very clear from what is being said by both Afghanistan and Pakistan that they recognise that their long-term prosperity and security depends on the stability in each other’s country. That is also true for India, China and Iran. Stability and prosperity in Afghanistan have a beneficial effect on all the countries around, and we will be engaging with all those countries in that hope.

Human Rights

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 21st November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, the debate we are having today on human rights violations and the Government’s response to them is of critical importance to our relations with a whole range of countries where those abuses have taken, or are taking, place. These are not simple judgments to make and the noble Lord, Lord Alton, who has done much to shine a spotlight of publicity on so many such countries, most particularly North Korea, deserves credit for insisting that we examine the dilemmas posed to our foreign policy.

It is easy enough to caricature the two extremes: a foreign policy based solely on realpolitik, aimed at securing the national interest as narrowly defined; and, on the other hand, what has been called an ethical foreign policy where human rights considerations override all others. However, it is also easy to dismiss either of those extremes. The real dilemmas are to be found in the foreign policy choices that lie between those two extremes, and they have to take account of the separate circumstances of individual countries. There is no single template for policy which can be applied worldwide.

This week the spotlight is very much on Sri Lanka, where the Commonwealth Heads of Government have been meeting, where massive abuses of human rights by both sides took place during the final phases of the civil war, and where the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights recently discerned a drift towards authoritarian rule, with pressure on an independent judiciary and free press. I trust that the Minister will give the House some idea of how the President of Sri Lanka responded to the Prime Minister’s representations. Will she also assure us that the Government will not slacken in their advocacy of an independent inquiry into the events at the end of the war? An inquiry is surely going to have to be international if it is to be truly independent. Will we also keep up the pressure on the need for reconciliation and genuinely even-handed treatment of all ethnic and religious groups in that country if the present very welcome peace there is to be consolidated and sustained?

In considering how Britain should respond to human rights abuses, I suggest that one mistake we need to avoid is looking at the issue principally, or even solely, in the context of our bilateral relationship with the country in question. However, Britain’s influence and leverage are unlikely to be decisive nowadays. All too often we have seen how easy it is for the country in question to punish us for our temerity and play us off against other countries which have been less assertive. We saw that over the Chinese reactions to the Prime Minister receiving the Dalai Lama, and the Russians are past masters at that game. A multilateral approach is not just a soft option and makes it more difficult for the country on the receiving end of the pressure or the sanctions to divide and rule. I give a few examples of where it has been very successful: the Commonwealth sporting boycott of apartheid South Africa; the wide-ranging international sanctions on the military regime in Burma; and the pressure the European Union is bringing to bear on Ukraine in the run-up to the Eastern Partnership summit later this month. This surely points to our making maximum use of the multilateral instruments and forums that exist for handling human rights. How effective are those instruments and what sort of shape are they in? As many other speakers have said, the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights must surely remain the cornerstone of our activity, whether multilateral or bilateral. However, it contains no enforcement machinery and the UN Human Rights Council, established in 2006, has yet to prove itself fully, although its universal periodic review of every member state’s human rights record is an instrument of real value. We need to do what we can to strengthen the hand of the admirable High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ms Pillay, who visited London recently. In that context, I hope that the Minister will say what response the Government gave to Ms Pillay’s plea for an increase in our voluntary contribution to her office’s work to help reverse the recent reduction in resources at her disposal.

Then there is the Council of Europe, the convention and the court of human rights, which is so often intemperately denounced for excessive interference in our affairs. Do those critics ever stop to consider the work the council’s machinery does in a whole range of countries whose human rights record is well short of perfection? Any action we might take which weakens that machinery would inevitably reduce its effectiveness.

I conclude with a simple thought. The 20th century saw probably the most widespread, dramatic and repugnant abuses of human rights in recorded history. The challenge to us is to ensure that in the 21st century the world turns away decisively from that appalling inheritance and that Britain plays a prominent part in bringing that about.

Young People: Democratic Participation

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover]

Indeed, it has had a very positive effect in that regard. As I answered an earlier question, the link between what students will learn in their citizenship classes and their ability then to take that forward to register to vote and to vote is very important. I also note that within citizenship education students will be debating all sorts of political and social issues, and they will be encouraged to debate and make reasoned arguments and so on. I imagine that they are going to be very lively lessons.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, will the Minister and Secretary of State for Education accept my thanks for having acceded to the lobbying by a number of us to include the United Nations in the citizenship curriculum? Can she say whether the department and local authorities will welcome a non-governmental organisation like the United Nations Association, which promotes model UN debates up and down the country and can help the curriculum a good deal?

[Baroness Northover]

I thank the noble Lord and will pass on his tribute to my right honourable friend the Secretary of State. Indeed, looking at the curriculum, I was struck by how international it was. I am sure that the organisations that he referred to will be encouraged to play their part in trying to inform students; that would be extremely welcome. However, the curriculum reaches in all directions. Internationally, it deals with human rights and international law, and it also looks at the diverse national, regional, religious and ethnic identities within the United Kingdom. Therefore, it extends and it is deep.

Foreign Affairs: Global Role, Emerging Powers and New Markets

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 6th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, I very much welcome today’s debate, and the initiative of the noble Lord, Lord Howell, in securing it, not just because it is the first occasion that the House has had to conduct a wide-ranging discussion of foreign policy issues since the debate on the Address in May but because it offers an opportunity for me to continue a dialogue with the noble Lord about some aspects of the Government’s external policies, which was cut short on that occasion through lack of time—even if his own position has changed, to my regret.

I have to say, and I hope that the noble Lord will forgive me, that I will remain completely baffled as to the significance of the phrase “network world”. In the interim, I have reflected a bit and am reminded of the character in the Molière play who said that he had some difficulty in distinguishing between poetry and prose, but who was assured that prose was what he had been talking all his life. I think that I have been doing networks all my life; it is not something that has been discovered in the past three or four years.

If the debate also reminds us of the lacuna that exists as a result of our not having a foreign affairs committee, or an international affairs committee, in this House, which could periodically report to the House on key issues, it will have served a genuinely useful purpose. Before addressing a few general issues, I just wish to say how deeply I regret the Government’s decision to abstain on the UN resolution giving the Palestinians a modestly enhanced status at the UN. It was the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, who in 1980 first persuaded the European Community, followed some years later by the United States, to back a two-state solution. I believe that we should have followed that logic in voting for the resolution, not have pursued some non-negotiable conditions to give ourselves a quasi-alibi for an abstention. It may have seemed ingenious, but it was certainly not principled.

The general criticism that I would make of the Government’s external policies are that they are a little too narrowly focused on the cultivation of bilateral relationships and are a little too mercantilist in their approach to trade policy. The Foreign Secretary’s actions to strengthen and extend our bilateral diplomatic network and, in particular, to build up our representation in the main emerging powers, is to be applauded. However the objective should not be exclusively to promote British exports and inward investment, but every bit as much to influence the policy decisions of countries whose increasing role in the major multilateral organisations will make them essential partners in shaping a rules-based set of solutions to the global challenges that we all face, whether in trade policy, climate change, development, nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation or in nurturing peace and security more generally. That second part of the narrative often seems to be missing.

Then there is the mantra du jour that we are in a “global race”. There is some sense in this as a means of galvanising the energies of business and of bringing home the fact that we live in a highly competitive world where we have fallen some way behind our main competitors, but it misses out totally the concept of international co-operation which is every bit as important a dimension of a world in which Britain, a middle-ranking power which needs partners and allies to achieve its objectives, can hope to thrive. There is a real risk that the aftershocks from the great financial and economic crisis of 2008 will undermine the gains made since the end of the Cold War in international co-operation, and that the major multilateral organisations such as the UN, the IMF, the WTO, the G20, NATO and the EU will lose political backing, be underresourced and decrease in relevance. If that were to happen, I believe Britain would be one of the main losers. So by all means let us pursue strong bilateral relationships but not at the expense of those multilateral, rules-based organisations in which we have hitherto invested so much effort with some considerable success.

Nothing is more difficult than achieving coherence in a Government’s external policies and in one important sector I believe the UK is currently falling far short of that. I do not imagine anyone will dispute that the higher education sector in this country is a world leader and that over recent years it has been a rapidly growing source of invisible exports of great benefit to our universities and to the country as a whole. Incidentally, it is also a hugely growing source of employment in many parts of this country where that is lacking. The potential for even greater benefit in both ways in the years ahead is there but the Government’s own immigration policies are putting all that at risk. Last week we had the Minister for Immigration at the Home Office, Mr Mark Harper, rejoicing at the latest immigration statistics, which showed a sharp drop in net migration, the lion’s share of which was attributable to a substantial reduction in the number of students coming here. These are not people coming to take jobs but people coming with ready cash to purchase services which our colleges and universities can provide, people who in future years, when their studies are completed, will often become a part of that worldwide network of bilateral contacts which the Government are trying so hard to build up. What on earth is going on? What are the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Treasury doing about this truly aberrant state of affairs? I hope that the Minister, whose work in encouraging British exports, both visible and invisible, I very much admire and support will have something to say on this when he replies to the debate.

I have one final point. A debate on this subject would not be complete without a word on the European Union and the European dimension of Britain’s external policies, although we will have an opportunity to discuss that more fully before the Recess. If Britain’s influence in Brussels becomes marginal—even more so if we were to withdraw from the European Union—our influence worldwide in Washington, Beijing, Delhi, Brasilia and elsewhere would suffer too. We should have no illusions about that. Nor would our exports or our inward investment benefit—quite the contrary. It is, after all, not membership of the EU which can explain why our exports to China in recent years have developed so much less buoyantly than those of Germany. So we need to take a more imaginative, constructive approach to that European dimension than we have done recently, and to regard it as an essential and integral part of our external policies, not something that dare not speak its name.

EAC Report: Development Aid

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Monday 22nd October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, in this House we do not get many opportunities to debate the general case for development aid and the place of Britain’s aid programme within it—probably fewer than we should. So I very much welcome the chance to discuss the report on the economic impact and effectiveness of development aid produced by the Economic Affairs Committee and so ably introduced this evening by the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor, even if I disagree quite sharply with some of its recommendations—I am in rather greater sympathy with the Government’s response to them.

Development aid is a crucial part of Britain’s projection of soft power; it is a practical expression of our role in the world as a leading developed nation, able to help others less fortunately placed. Frankly, that is a moral obligation as well as a self-interested one. It is a not insignificant part of an overall effort, under the aegis of the United Nations, to make the world a more equitable and thus a more secure place. It matters and we need to get it right. Broadly speaking, I believe that the coalition Government have done precisely that, particularly by their decision to ring-fence the aid budget from spending cuts. They have taken a large amount of criticism for that decision, mainly from their own supporters, but it was a bold and laudable decision. They got it right.

The report recommends the dismantling of the UN’s 0.7% of GNI target for official development aid. What is the justification for that? Is the quantum excessive? Far from it, I would argue. Developing countries, particularly those whose populations make up what has been called by Professor Collier—who I was delighted to see gave evidence to the committee—the bottom billion of the world’s citizens, have needs in developing agriculture, education, health services, infrastructure and environmentally responsible policies far in excess of their own fiscal capacity, even when that capacity is put together with the sums that would be raised by the UN target, if only the donors actually provided them, which most of them do not. If our own aid budget is currently growing rapidly to meet that target, it is largely because, for many years, we shamefully fell far short of it while continuing, year after year, to sign up to it in any number of UN resolutions. Should that target be dropped? What signal would that send to the world’s poorest people? I suggest a disastrous one. We should not forget that by setting the target in terms of a percentage of the donor’s gross national income, the system already takes account—the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, made this point—of recession or stagnation in those economies.

The report is also rather critical of efforts to focus aid on fragile states. No one would dispute that mounting aid programmes in such countries is fraught with technical, security and political problems, but a situation in which aid to fragile states simply dries up, as was the case some years ago in a number of those countries, drives those states into a downward spiral, leading eventually to state failure, which puts huge costs on the international community to remedy. I believe that the previous Labour Government, who began a shift in our aid policy to give fragile states more prominence, were quite correct, as has been this Government’s decision to continue that effort. Above all, the development work in fragile states requires the most intensive co-operation between DfID and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I very much support the call for that co-operation by my noble friend Lord Jay of Ewelme, and the progress in getting away from the unhealthy dichotomy between the two departments, which tended to be the order of the day under the previous Government. It must not be allowed to return.

Thirdly, I do not entirely agree with the criticism of the European Union aid budget, to which we make a substantial contribution, of not concentrating enough on poverty alleviation in the poorest countries. I note that the new Secretary of State for International Development took up that theme recently in one of her first public pronouncements. I rather regret that. The EU has a whole string of fragile states around its periphery, from the states of the former Soviet Union, through the Caucasus, to the Balkans and north Africa, which are not among the poorest countries in the world but which it is surely in our interest to see emerging as stable democracies and market economies and which need European help, including trade outlets and investment, to do so. We invariably support the EU’s neighbourhood policy when it comes before the EU Council and rightly so, so we should not be sniping at one of its inevitable consequences, which is a substantial aid budget for those fragile states on our periphery.

I have two more positive themes. First, nothing was heard in this report, or naturally enough in the Government’s response, about the desirability of our working closely with the principal emerging powers, such as China, India and Brazil, which are just beginning to become important players in the aid field. Often those countries have really valuable experience of programmes to lift their own populations out of poverty. Should we not be co-operating with them rather than regarding them as competitors? Perhaps the Minister could say something about that in her reply to the debate.

Secondly, there is the future of the United Nations’ millennium development goals after 2015. The Prime Minister is joint chair with the presidents of Indonesia and Liberia of the UN panel set up to prepare the post-2015 phase, which is a welcome tribute to the role that Britain is playing on development issues. Perhaps the Minister could say something about our approach to the MDGs post-2015. How can we get a better focus on the problems of that bottom billion? How can we refine the very broad-brush approach of the present MDGs? How can we ensure better monitoring of the recipients’ performance in using and in matching up to their own targets? She may also take on board that it might be really good if we had a full debate in the House, in government time, before too long on the post-2015 MDGs and the objectives that the Government are pursuing in respect of them.

International Development Policy

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, I warmly congratulate my noble friend Lord Sandwich on obtaining this debate on international development policy. I sometimes feel that we devote too little time to foreign affairs and development as we apply ourselves to our primary task of scrutinising and improving the Government’s legislative proposals. I never felt that more strongly than yesterday, when the Foreign Secretary’s Statement on relations with Iran was not repeated in this House. I have no intention of diverting this debate on to that ground, other than to say that it was a lamentable decision. If we want to be regarded as a mere superfluous appendage to the other place, that is the surest way to go about it.

I should also like to congratulate my noble friend Lord Singh on his extremely graceful maiden speech. Ten years ago I chose to make my maiden speech in a debate on international development, so I cannot but congratulate him on his choice of subject matter.

The coalition Government’s decision to ring-fence our overseas aid from the spending cuts was a courageous one when it was first made and is all the more so now that they are sticking to it in the face of much discouraging economic news. Through all the cacophony of press criticism of that decision, I have yet to hear one respectable argument for making developing countries far poorer than we are suffer because of an economic crisis for which they have absolutely no responsibility. In any case, they are already suffering from the slowing of the global economy.

I am certainly not going to cheer the decision of two days ago to reduce the sums earmarked for aid in the latter part of the current spending period. However we are—and this I do welcome—sticking to our Gleneagles and UN commitments. That 0.7 per cent of our gross national income is going to be a good deal less than was earlier anticipated is, I fear, an ineluctable fact. I hope that the Minister replying to the debate will be able to say what we are doing to hold other developed countries to their Gleneagles and UN commitments, which some of them are missing by a very wide margin indeed. We should not spare their blushes, however much they would like us to do so. What plans do we have to use next year’s G8 and G20 meetings to get those commitments back on track?

I was encouraged to hear that the Secretary of State for International Development had recently been to China to discuss the scope for co-operation between us in helping developing countries. Can the Minister say something about the outcome of that visit? Did the Chinese respond positively? What sort of programmes and projects could we work on together? I hope, too, that we are working on similar trilateral co-operation with countries such as India and Brazil, which are just beginning to mount serious aid programmes. Some time back I suggested that co-operation over aid could be one of the best ways of thickening up our relations with those emerging powers. Are we doing that now in a systematic way? Brazil in particular has many links with African countries, both cultural and economic, and it has devised imaginative and effective programmes for bringing its own poorer citizens out of the abject conditions in which many of them lived, so it would surely be an ideal partner if we could agree to work together. Have we got anywhere down that road?

I return briefly to a question that I put to the Minister recently: namely, the plight of UNESCO following the lamentable US decision to withdraw all its support from that organisation when Palestine was admitted as a member. I hope that we have not concealed our disagreement with that deplorable move. Why on earth should developing countries around the world be punished for giving the Palestinians a status that is no different from that which we all, including the US Administration, believe is our right? That sort of behaviour is a throwback to the worse mistakes of the previous Administration. I know that it is mandated under US law, but that is an explanation not an excuse.

Be that as it may, I hope that when we come to consider our own future support for UNESCO we will take all that into account. I very much support the broad thrust of our policy of holding UN agencies to account for the quality and effectiveness of their development work, but no organisation can take a cut such as UNESCO has had to take overnight without a lot of disruption and some damage to its overall performance. Can the Minister say how we are planning to respond? With some sympathy, I hope.

I am sorry to disappoint my noble friend Lord Craigavon but I am not going to say anything about EU aid. Having taken the afternoon off from the festivities in the Moses Room and chosen to participate in your Lordships' debate on this aid programme, I thought that I might as well go the whole hog. Therefore, I will not refer to the EU’s programme but I will follow my noble friend by drawing attention to the 2015 deadline for achieving the millennium development goals—a deadline that is now well above the horizon.

A lot has been achieved and more certainly will be in the next three years, but it is already clear as daylight that we will fall short, and by a substantial margin. Moreover, too many of the successes have been concentrated in too few of the developing countries, so it is surely high time for us to clear our own minds about what we will aim to achieve after the 2015 deadline. I suggest that we will need a better focused, less broad-brush approach and that it should concentrate on what Professor Paul Collier has so eloquently called the “bottom billion”. I am sorry if the phrase offended my noble friend. Our decision to ring-fence our aid puts us surely in pole position to lead the search for an improved MDG mark 2. I hope that the Minister can tell us that we are already at work with that in mind. If so, can she give us some idea of where we think the main emphasis of those future programmes should be?

One other point I would like to raise is the question of failing or failed states. Last July DfID produced an excellent paper on this tricky subject which I could not fault, partly because it followed so closely the path set out in a number of preceding reports, not least that of the UN reform panel on which I had the honour to serve. Prevention is better than waiting for countries to go over a cliff and then trying to catch them in mid-air or, more often, picking up the pieces in the aftermath of the disaster. It not only costs less but saves many lives that would otherwise be lost.

Is this a proper task for development agencies or should they, as some critics suggest, concentrate exclusively on the alleviation of poverty? I suspect that this is in any case something of a false choice. The poverty of failing or failed states is in many cases dire. One of the characteristics of those states is that for purely political reasons their poverty cannot be alleviated by classic developmental policies. Are we just to let them stew? I would say not. Moreover, it is essential to demonstrate that the international community’s responsibility to protect—R2P, as it is called—is not just a recipe for military intervention but a call in the first instance for strengthened policies of prevention. Therefore, I argue that helping those states to avoid failure is very much a proper object of our development policy. I hope that the Minister will say something about how the department is following up and implementing that first-class paper of last July.

In conclusion, I very much welcome the recent decision by DfID to put more resources into the BBC’s World Service Trust. The fact that much of the World Service’s output has genuine developmental value is surely not in doubt and has been quantified. It is high time to recognise this potential as another facet of our development policy. It should have happened a good time ago, as some of us in this House urged last winter, but better late than never. Back-Benchers are supposed to get more pleasure out of criticism than praise, but I am truly pleased to speak so positively about the coalition Government’s development policies—more positively, I suspect, than some of their supporters in another place would have done. I hope that that will be some small encouragement to the Government to stick to the path they have chosen to follow.

International Development

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Monday 21st November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover]

I realise that the noble Lord has a great interest in Malawi from his work in the Scottish Parliament. I will write to him so that he has the most up-to-date details on that. His question reflects the difficulty, which we all recognise, of working in some of the most complex countries around the world. It is extremely important that we balance the needs of the poorest people in these countries with the difficulty of working through some of their Governments.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, will the Minister confirm that, as the press reports, the Secretary of State for International Development has today, or recently, written warning the FAO and UNESCO for the last time that their aid from us may be at risk? Will she say whether the Secretary of State intends, in the light of the 20 per cent or more cut in UNESCO’s budget, for reasons that have nothing whatever to do with its efficiency, and for reasons that I imagine the Government do not sympathise with, to take that into account when considering that particular case?