International Development Aid

Lord Tomlinson Excerpts

Monday 7th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, the Government’s strategic defence and security review set out a clear vision of enhanced UK work on upstream conflict prevention. Building on this, DfID, alongside the FCO and MoD, is taking the lead in developing the Government’s new Building Stability Overseas strategy to be published in the spring. This strategy will set out how we will use development, diplomatic and security tools in an integrated approach to tackling conflict and instability overseas. No fragile state has yet achieved a single millennium development goal.

[Lord Tomlinson]

My Lords, is the Minister aware that her statement about getting value for money for every pound spent from the development budget will be very welcome? Can she tell us which precise, ring-fenced developmental objectives were met by the transfer of £1.8 million from the DfID budget to finance the visit of his Holiness the Pope?

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, the money was not taken out of ODA but was a part of DfID’s budget. The work that the Pope and the Catholic Church do overseas is welcomed; they do a lot of work through educational and medical care across the world. It was therefore not ODA money but came out of the DfID budget.

International Aid

Lord Tomlinson Excerpts

Monday 29th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, the noble Countess is right. Some 75 per cent of the developing world’s poor—2 billion people—live in rural areas. The majority depend on agriculture to provide jobs and incomes. Agriculture has a key role to play in helping to meet the millennium development goal of halving the proportion of people in the world suffering from extreme poverty and hunger. Further allocations to agricultural programmes in each country will be determined after the bilateral reviews.

[Lord Tomlinson]

May I invite the noble Baroness to turn again to the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, and stand up and say quite clearly to him that he is wrong?

UNESCO: Equatorial Guinea

Lord Tomlinson Excerpts

Wednesday 7th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tomlinson]

My Lords, on the specific subject of the Question—Equatorial Guinea—where in the pecking order of issues for which we give assistance from our development funds do democracy, human rights and good governance figure? Are they near the top, near the bottom or somewhere in the middle of the list?

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, on the specific point about Equatorial Guinea, I should say that we have no presence there, although the high commissioner to Nigeria, Bob Dewar, visits twice a year. However, we completely agree that there needs to be transparency in what Equatorial Guinea is doing on human rights. That is what we will urge through all the multilateral agencies through which we supply our funds.