DfID Economic Development Strategy

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Monday 27th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, I am also very grateful to my noble friend for introducing this debate about economic development. Because the CDC is mentioned quite frequently in the development strategy, I thought it appropriate that I should say a few words and concentrate on it.

The CDC was founded 70 years ago, and I was fortunate enough to work for it at the beginning of its second half, so I am already history. My noble friend is very closely connected with the CDC. Her father-in-law was the man who developed the idea, within the Colonial Office, for the beginnings of what was then the Colonial Development Corporation. Its purpose was to look for economic opportunities in the colonies, develop them and do so in a way that meant that, taking one year with another, the institution broke even. There was also a subline, which was that the United Kingdom was pretty short of food, so if it concentrated on agriculture, everybody would be very happy. Sir Michael Caine of Booker—justifiably famous for the Booker prize—was the vice-chairman of the CDC during my time. Apart from being very good at many things, he knew a great deal about the growing of sugar cane.

It seems to me that no institution can ever escape from its beginnings, and I am not sure that any institution should try. The CDC was founded in the context of economic development, and that is where it still is today. It is classified as a development finance institution, and as the noble Lord, Lord Desai, said, every now and again, you run into an awkward OECD rule, even if you are a publicly owned development finance institution.

As such, the CDC is 100% publicly owned; it works only in the private sector and primarily by the provision of equity finance. It derives some great advantages from its public ownership. One is that it has no need to distribute, as its shareholder does not call for dividends. Another is that it is not a profit maximiser since it does not have shareholders looking for the maximum return. This enables it to work in places and sectors where the fully private sector either does not want to work or is not yet ready to. So a development finance institution is a very useful gap-filler. Perhaps it enters into partnership with people who are already interested in an economic opportunity, or perhaps it starts one entirely of its own volition—the CDC has a long record of doing both. It is also able, with a proportion of its portfolio, to be innovative and take greater risks than the private sector might be willing to. In doing this, it has one huge advantage of being publicly owned: it has the backing of Her Majesty’s Government’s posts all round the world. That can be extremely useful if you are in a country where, as my noble friend says, there is rather a lot of corruption. It is a pretty good help to have someone who knows who is who and tells you with whom you should and should not work.

I say in parenthesis that in the 10 years that I was involved with the CDC I was never offered a bribe, nor was it once suggested to me that I should provide one. The CDC was known as incorruptible, and I assure noble Lords that when people on the other side of the fence know there is no game that they can play, they do not play it. That is an important lesson that might be more widely learned.

In searching for economic opportunities we hope to find something that will give both a financial and an economic rate of return. I apologise for my language being slightly out of date; the DfID strategy describes these matters in much more depth and detail than there was ever any need for in my time. If you find such economic opportunities and you succeed, that is a great help. I will give three examples. First, long ago my predecessor invested in a £700,000 convertible loan to complete a project in Hong Kong. It is strange to think of Hong Kong being eligible for OECD aid, but it was at the time. Some 25 years later, that £700,000 turned into £48 million. When we accepted the £48 million cheque, we said to the Chinese who had bought the property, “You may be surprised to learn that we’re going to invest this money in Africa”. I merely make the point that if you succeed, it gives you opportunities in places where things are more difficult and where you are more badly needed.

Secondly, I would cite mobile telephones. The CDC was one of the very first investors in mobile telephones south of the Sahara. That has been a huge benefit to the continent of Africa, which in fact will never need hard-wiring in the same way as we have been hard-wired. Indeed, some of my children and grandchildren do not have a fixed-line telephone any more, and they live in this country.

Thirdly, I would cite the property, which had belonged to the Japanese, that was given to the CDC in its earliest days by the enemy alien property division of the Colonial Office. There we worked, and at the beginning we had 24 people from this country working on the project but by the end only one remained. We sold the property to a Singaporean firm for £100 million —again, a huge opportunity to redeploy the money in other, more needful places.

From time to time, a development finance institution investing and making a return has been questioned: is it aid? The most famous debates about the subject were in your Lordships’ House many years ago between two economists, both Hungarian: Lord Bauer and Lord Balogh. Lord Bauer was a man who believed entirely in private-sector economic development. He said, “We got development in the United Kingdom that way; why are we different from everybody else?”. He also made the point made this afternoon about Governments not necessarily being the best people to decide what should be done next. He was up against Lord Balogh, who was an adviser to Harold Wilson and very socialist. He believed that everything should be done through Governments. That debate has gone on, one way and another, ever since. My view is that it is time we stopped it, because obviously there is a critical place for aid in all sorts of humanitarian circumstances— refugee camps have been mentioned. There cannot be any argument that there should not be aid, but there also cannot be any argument that there should not be economic development.

I illustrate that with a little story. I was at lunch in Accra with 12 businessmen, half of them Ghanaian and half from various parts of Europe—a Conrad-type mixture of people. They asked me about Malaya: “John, tell us: why is it? We have about the same population, economic opportunities, level of mineral wealth—although ours is gold, in Malaya it is tin. We had the same colonial administration, education policy, approach to the human rights of the people in the country, and rule of law, although that did not always make us very happy. How does it come about that they are several times as rich per head as we are?”. That has continued. Today, the per capita income in Ghana, which is a wonderful country with huge opportunities and a charming people, is $4,000 per capita, but in Malaysia, it is $27,000. That takes some explaining by anyone involved in economic development and trying to do the best they can around the world for the per capita income of the people.

Finally, I pick up a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Desai, about the Crown colonies and dependencies. It is a great pity that the CDC is no longer empowered to work in those countries. There was a time when the Foreign Office came to us and said, “Will you do something in Anguilla?”. It wanted the restoration of good behaviour in the power-generating company there. It seemed interesting, and we knew a lot about power generation and distribution, so we went and restored the Anguillan’s power company.

That was not done with any focus on poverty. If you are in economic development, that is not the right place to start. We started by saying, “We need a general manager”. We found a mixed-race Caribbean man who lived in Toronto—a lot of very able people from the Caribbean live in Toronto. He became the general manager and—surprise surprise—one day someone came into the office in London and said that he would like to see me. He turned out to be a maintenance engineer working on a British power station, but came originally from Anguilla. He had heard of the CDC and said, “If you are going to this company there, I will go home and become one of your maintenance engineers”. He did so, and that was a great success. We were not there for very long because, once we had put it right, we let it move on.

I quite understand and fully agree that we are trying to alleviate and remove, if possible, poverty from as many people in the world as possible. But if you have a finance development institution which invests successfully, it could do a lot more if it was allowed to work in places that are not so poor. There may be more economic opportunities, and if it makes a return it will go on to the balance sheet.

There is some concern in this House and elsewhere about the potential increase in the CDC’s capital. If it succeeds in making a reasonable return, it will be many years before it draws down all that capital. Indeed, in my time at the CDC, we did not draw any money net out of the aid programme at all. One of its objectives should be that it minimises its call on 0.7%.

Brexit: Least Developed Countries

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Thursday 16th November 2017 Grand Committee

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, I should remind myself and the Committee that I was in development for a long time, working for the Commonwealth Development Corporation. I am historical because I became its chief executive about 30 years ago. Subsequently, of course, my noble friend Lady Chalker was my boss, so I had to pay very careful attention. If I may make a personal remark, I much preferred it then. It would be better today if DfID were part of the Foreign Office; making it a separate department was a mistake, and remains so.

I will duck Brexit because I do not have the slightest idea what will happen after it, and in the life of CDC, it will not make any significant difference, whatever the agreement or whichever way it goes. We are in long-term economic development. We will have investments at the time and will be making more, so I do not think it will make any difference. Co-operation with our European and United States partners, such as the IFC, DEG in Germany and FMO in Holland, goes on all the time and will undoubtedly continue. We will have joint investments and so we will have to talk to each other in a quiet and friendly way, otherwise things will not go well.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Hughes, that for the 70 years of its history, CDC has been investing in power stations and electricity distribution, using hydroelectric as well as conventional electricity. It is still doing that; at the moment, it is working very hard in Sierra Leone on power generation and distribution. Of course that is tremendously important. You cannot have economic development and you cannot increase trade unless you have things to sell—and you do not have things to sell unless you create the companies to produce things that people want to buy. In the long term, it is economic development that tells the story.

I want to illustrate that point by talking about three countries. The Comoros have 800,000 people who are Sunni Muslim and $1,500 of income per capita. They were French—there are three islands and the French kept the fourth one, presumably because it was the best—and 300,000 Comorans live in France. How do you do long-term development for those islands? They export vanilla, which you can synthesise—but still, they export natural vanilla—and they have a tourist trade, with very good snorkelling. They also have political instability.

Then we go to the other end of the scale and the countries that are the least developed. Ethiopia has $1,900 dollars per capita and 105 million people. It has a difficult history, but it is the country from which coffee came. Coffee has not been mentioned specifically, but the way in which the European Union behaves about coffee is scandalous. It debars the least developed countries effectively from processing their own coffee; it tells them, “You can send us beans”. So there are things that might get better after Brexit. In Ethiopia, 45% of the population are Ethiopian orthodox Christians—rather different from 98% Sunni. In the middle, you have Tanzania with 50 million people. It was German but then it became British.

When you are thinking about aid, trade and economic development, it is incredibly important to understand the complexity of what you are engaged in and the amount of information that you have to collect. The banners that are put up to say that we are going to do the same thing everywhere just do not work.

It is incredibly important that we continue with a development finance institution such as the CDC, which puts people on the ground and has technology, electricity generation and distribution, and mobile telephones, for example. It used to have—and I hope it will have again—a lot of sophisticated agricultural technology, and will continue with the business of long-term economic development. Please may we cease to argue about the relative benefits of aid, trade and economic development? They all have their place but, if you want to solve the problems, it is economic development that will do it.

Commonwealth Development Corporation Bill

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 9th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, I worked for the CDC from 1981 to 1994. As the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said, for nine of those years, I was its chief executive. There is one other coincidence: my noble friend Lord Flight now lives in a house in which I lived for a while and in which Lord Reith, who was a most successful chairman of the CDC in the 1950s and 1960s, had also lived. I do not know whether there is any message in that coincidence, but it is interesting.

I would like to concentrate on the period from 2010, on which the debate is concentrating. My period is irrelevant, except that I endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said about technology transfer and capacity building. A development finance institution such as CDC does not have a role unless it is involved in both technology transfer and capacity building and, therefore, the creation of greater human capacity for people to do things that they did not know how to do before. I could tell your Lordships many stories about how CDC has achieved that in the past, but I would like to concentrate on the period from 2010.

Before doing that, I want to refer to some comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, about the period before 2010. We are all talking about CDC, but that is inaccurate. It is, in fact, the CDC Group. In 1997, the decision was made in the manifesto that a Bill would be put before Parliament which would have the purpose of changing CDC from being a loan-financed public corporation to becoming an institution with share capital which would then become 75% private and 25% continuing to be owned by the Government.

That is the 1999 Act that we are talking about amending today. It set up the possibility of CDC, then renamed the CDC Group with a shareholding, becoming 75% private owned and 25% retained by the Government. That did not happen. I will not go into the story of why it did not happen, although I am pretty familiar with it. I will just say that I believe that the 1999 Bill was a mistake and that there should never have been a campaign to take any part of the CDC out of public ownership. It should always have remained in public ownership. Although I sit on this side of the House, I can assure your Lordships that, when I was chief executive of CDC in the days of Margaret Thatcher, I was completely consistent with my board that it would be wrong for CDC to seek to be privatised; it should stay in public ownership.

That is where CDC is today and that is why what has happened since 2010 is of very great interest to Parliament. It is a great pleasure to find that Parliament is again debating CDC. Although years ago, CDC was quite frequently debated in Parliament, there was a big gap from about 2004 until 2010 when, frankly, the general opinion was, “Sweep it under the carpet and don’t talk about it”.

From 2010, under the Secretary of State, Andrew Mitchell, a decision was made by the coalition Government to see if they could put CDC back on track. It had become, as I think a noble Lord mentioned, a fund of funds. As a fund of funds it was no longer a development finance institution. The chain of accountability to Parliament was broken by CDC becoming a fund of funds and that needed to be restored. That was spotted by the coalition Government and, as has been said, they made arrangements to appoint a new chief executive, Diana Noble, who has done an extremely fine job, and a chairman, Graham Wrigley, who, in my opinion, has also done an extremely fine job. They have been getting the CDC back on track.

While the Bill is extremely welcome, we need to keep close attention on the business plans of CDC. It is a very important duty not only of DfID but also of Parliament to understand where CDC is going. As your Lordships will understand, it takes a very long time for the things that have been brought into CDC’s portfolio to work out. The usual time before a CDC investment is realised may be about 10 years. We are still living with a great deal of what CDC invested in as a fund of funds before 2010, which is going to take quite a long time to work its way out.

In the strategic future, the question which has been raised by many noble Lords is what proportion of the CDC portfolio is going to be directly invested. Only a direct investor can encompass innovation and going to places where the private sector will not naturally go. Several of those places have been mentioned, including northern Nigeria and the Congo. We can all think of many places in Africa where the fully private sector will hesitate to go. These are the places into which CDC in—it is true—70 years has always been willing to go and had the capacity to go without making serious mistakes.

With a small exception in the period between 1999 and 2010, CDC always made a surplus of income over expenditure throughout the years. When we authorise this increase in capital, we should not worry that CDC will lose that money. If it is true to its past, it will not. It will keep that money and use it as a revolving fund which will enable it to do more and more economic development.

As a condition of that economic development, I come back to the transfer of the knowledge of technologies such as from—I do not know—a generic pill manufacturer. That would be a very beneficial thing to be happening to a greater extent in Africa. However, anyone investing in that would need to know about pharmaceuticals and how to set up and manage a factory. It is very important that, when a strategic plan comes, we can see that CDC has proprietary technology of its own. It has always had some and still has—power generation and mobile telephones are two examples of where CDC has had technology and has deployed it.

The people in CDC are also very important. The staff has been built up recently from, I think, 50 when it was just a finance house to about 250 today. Within the capacity of staff employed by CDC, we need people who understand businesses and how to set up and manage them, as well as people who know how to finance them.

I welcome the Bill and believe very strongly in economic development, not only in financial rates of return but also in what I would call, not development impact, but economic rates of return, in which the social as well as other effects are measured. CDC going forward in that way, rebuilding itself as it has already done with very considerable success, will get even more into the forefront of being out there, doing things that the fully private sector is not in a position or not ready to do. As it goes forward, it will leverage in money from less certain people, because they know that if they come in alongside CDC, it is likely to work and to work well.

International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 18th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, the Bill is about reporting. As the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, said, you can on occasion get involved in disbursing rather more rapidly than you first intended. You can also be caught by delays created by circumstances and not be able to disburse. It is the unexpected effects on DfID’s cash flow and its accountability with which the Bill seeks to deal.

It is a pleasure for me to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hollick. The Commonwealth Development Corporation has of course behaved in entirely the way he was describing and has been doing so for nearly 70 years, having been formed in 1948 as the Colonial Development Corporation, subsequently becoming the Commonwealth Development Corporation and finally, in order to be modern, CDC Group—like “UK Aid” rather than DfID. It has been 100% owned by the British taxpayer throughout its life. It was a public corporation and technically still is. It is doing well, and I commend it to your Lordships as being an interesting institution to study when one is thinking about international development and aid.

International development and aid is a very complex subject. We have heard about some of that complexity this morning in some passionately delivered speeches. Measuring outcomes is very difficult. I was in a sense a colleague of the noble Lord, Lord Judd, for many years; he was at an NGO and I was at CDC as an economic development operator. I entirely agree with his conclusion that the whole business of knowing whether or not you are achieving a good outcome is very humbling. You cannot be at all certain that you know what you have actually achieved, and you might have to wait for your grandchildren to tell you.

International development and aid is also very controversial, which has also been illustrated this morning. I commend to your Lordships the great days of Lord Bauer and Lord Balogh debating the subject of aid in the 1960s as an interesting study. The literature that has followed over the years is very controversial, different in its views and passionately expressed. This is therefore a very difficult subject. When we consider it, it is probably as well to remember that we did not achieve our own development with anyone providing an aid programme, unless you include the Marshall Plan. There was no equivalent in the days when we were becoming developed.

The history, and what is being done, makes DfID’s task highly complex and difficult to evaluate as a whole. I come back to thinking in some detail about part of what DfID is doing, and trying to evaluate the whole. The reporting is also very complicated. The question then arises: is the system of accountability satisfactory? That is what I would like to spend the rest of my time on. The 2006 Act is pretty complete, setting out as it does accountability very well and in great detail. My question is: do the amendments to that accountability chain created by the 2015 Act actually stand up? Were they needed and, if so, why?

We should also remember that in 2011 the independent evaluator of DfID’s programme, ICAI, was also created. It is very busy looking in depth and detail at what DfID does and reporting to the Select Committee down the corridor. My argument is that, before deciding on the Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, and what he is attempting to do, we should consider the accountability chain that affects DfID.

DfID’s latest report, published in July, is 156 pages long. It does not have a single photograph; it is absolutely not a glossy. Well done DfID. I challenge your Lordships to find any other report that has more words on a page than that DfID report; it is very dense. I draw the House’s attention to an interesting paragraph about the remaining need to deal with matters that arose in the recapitalisation of my old employer, CDC, in 2004; Private Eye spent quite a lot of time in 2004 addressing some of the issues contained in it. It would make the most amazing subject for a PhD, and it would probably engage the Select Committee down the corridor for a full day, if it wanted to spend that time. That is only one paragraph; there are dozens of similar ones in the report. I draw attention to a particular line in it that says the Asian Development Bank supported 166,000 households to get water. I thought, “166,000 households in a world population of however many billion? It doesn’t sound like very much to me”. It would be very interesting to have another day just quizzing DfID on how it accounts for the money it disburses to this multilateral called the Asian Development Bank, and whether it thinks it is getting value for money. There is a legion of questions that we could ask arising from the DfID report. We should be very careful before we say that the burden we put on the department with the 2015 Act is okay.

Reporting to the OECD has been mentioned. The Development Assistance Committee has 35 members. It lists countries in four categories up to incomes of $13,000 a year. The money going has to be 25% concessional, using a 10% discount rate. Those reports, which are not easy to make, have to be in by 31 December. The recipe from the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, does not actually simplify DfID’s job because there is no way we can escape the 31 December date for the OECD, nor would we want to. We will always have two year-ends, one on 31 December and the other on 31 March. That is the way it is and it would be a mistake to try to change it.

It is also true that DfID has so far achieved the 0.7%—and well done DfID—but the risks are still great. Suppose a delay is caused by an unexpected war or the shutting of a border. It only has to miss the target by £250 million, which is not a big sum in its life, to be on 0.69% or thereabouts, not 0.7%, and trigger the statutory requirement under the 2015 Act, if I read it correctly.

We should consider briefly the obligation under the 2015 Act. The Secretary of State’s statement is required to cover the economic and fiscal circumstances here and,

“circumstances arising outside the United Kingdom”.

That could lead to another 156-page report. It is an open door to a huge system of reporting. Do we really need it? Surely the present system of accountability under the 2006 Act means that Section 2 of the 2015 Act is not needed. My noble friends on the Front Bench are very good at explaining to the House when they consider something to be unnecessary, and that is my argument. We should not change the reality of what is being reported or what is being done, but we should look at whether we are putting an additional contingent liability on DfID with Section 2 of the 2015 Act. I think we are, and I look forward to further stages of the Bill in order to return to this subject.

International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Friday 27th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)]

My Lords, I have no interest to declare save that some of my best friends are in the Treasury. The argument has been made about a signal. I think that it is an important signal to the developing world and to other countries, which are manifestly failing in respect of the moneys that they spend. It would certainly give us a greater lever to use with regard to that, although I am not so convinced by that argument.

However, I notice—and I will be very brief—that the argument used, very powerfully, by those who have spoken in favour of the amendment is rigour and accountability. They speak as if no accountability is likely. There are a number of accountability mechanisms, one of which is of course the Select Committee. The Select Committee is able to throw a searchlight on mistakes that are made by any government department so that any middle-ranking civil servant or higher civil servant who made the decision knows that at any stage they may be hauled before the committee and asked to justify their action or lack of action, which can be extremely embarrassing. Of course, the proposal then is retrospective, but it has relevance for any future decisions. It is also certainly a corrective for anyone particularly in a ministry such as this, which is more than most subject to pressure groups and non-governmental organisations from outside, and it gives them a degree of rigour.

Equally, of course, one has the NAO. That very powerful report—and I have not heard DfID give a very convincing reply to this—showed the extent to which there was a readiness to spend almost for the sake of spending. All of us, and perhaps most of us, have been in such positions. I recall once having an entertainment allowance; as I had only spent 50% of it by the end of the year, I ensured that I used up the rest of the money very quickly in the last few weeks—so there is that temptation.

Those noble Lords who have spoken thus far seem to ignore the relevant clause, Clause 5, where again there is a mechanism for accountability. There is accountability, and the danger is that if we were to accept this amendment, it would be rather like the French “en principe”. Yes, of course we are all in favour of aid and of 0.7% of GNI in principle, but if this amendment were to be accepted it would effectively drive a coach and horses through the Bill.

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, I speak as somebody who was part of the aid programme for a number of years with the Commonwealth Development Corporation and who was subjected to Treasury discipline. At the time, in today’s money we were responsible for about £3 billion of assets. Under the statutory arrangements of the day, we were partly responsible to the Foreign Office and partly to the ODA. The ODA arranged the monitoring meetings at which we would account for how we were getting on with the income and expenditure related to £3 billion of assets. In the run-up to the meeting, the discussions we had within CDC were all about what the Treasury official would ask us in the meeting which followed. From our point of view, in formal terms, the Treasury official had no right to be there, but of course the Treasury has a way of being where it wants to be.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

My Lords, this amendment, like the last one, is about more than public expenditure control, important though that is. It is, as my noble friend has just emphasised, about flexibility. Why is there an essential need for flexibility? Because the fundamental views about the relationship between ODA, development and the eradication of poverty are changing fundamentally all the time—and certainly will change radically over a five-year period.

The worry of many of us who have worked for years in development and overseas aid issues—almost half a century in my case—is that the promotion and thinking behind this Bill, and behind the reluctance to have more flexibility, is blind to the entirely new thinking that has been developed in the OECD and other areas about the way in which development assistance should be contributed by the richer countries of the world. The concept of what is called “country programmable aid” has now been introduced. This is generally recognised to be a far more effective measure and a real contribution to aid from richer to poorer countries than the old ODA definition. The other very powerful new tool that has come along is impact investment, which would not be included under ODA at all because there is no grant element in it, and it would have to have a grant element to be ODA.

It is sad that we should be ignoring flexibility and insisting on a rigidity that will exclude development of the most effective new instruments for the eradication of poverty and for helping poor people and development processes throughout the world. That is why this amendment, like the last one, would give flexibility and help in our aid efforts and not hinder them.

[Viscount Eccles]

My Lords, Clause 3(2) states:

“Accordingly, the fact that the duty in section 1 has not been, or will or may not be, complied with does not affect the lawfulness of anything done, or omitted to be done, by any person”.

It seems to me that this means that the promoter of the Bill recognises that there has to be some flexibility. If this clause does not provide flexibility, I am not sure what it is for. I would be grateful if I could be told how I am expected to explain this in the bar of the Black Bull, if I am asked, without the other members in the bar of the Black Bull saying, “Oh well, that is typical political behaviour. Now you see it, now you don’t. Now you’re going to do it, now you’re not. All you do is put a provision in a Bill and then in an Act of Parliament which lets you completely off the hook”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Eccles]

My noble friend mentioned my name. I hope he will accept the clarification that he did not answer my question. The thrust of my question was why the promoter of the Bill thought it necessary to introduce a flexibility that allows the Secretary of State off the legal hook. That is the question that my friends in the public are going to ask me. They are going to say, “Legislation is about passing law, and that law needs to be enforceable. You have included a clause which means it is not”.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed]

I was going to come back and clear up that point. However, I will finish this element first. The Bill provides for the very form of independent evaluation that can take into consideration external factors that may have been at play if the target has not been met. That independent evaluation then reports to Parliament.

I am glad that the noble Viscount intervened because he pre-empted exactly how I was going to conclude. Ultimately, the framework provided by the Bill allows for Parliament to have the powers to do its job and hold the Government to account when they make a promise. I hope that that would be sufficient not only for those people in the Black Bull but for Parliament. There is important evaluation and monitoring of these programmes. I hope that the explanation from the Permanent Secretary of DfID showing the deficiency of moving to the programme that the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, has argued for is sufficient for the noble Lord to withdraw the amendment. I am not in a position to accept it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Butler of Brockwell]

My Lords, the House will be relieved to know that I can move this amendment very briefly because the point is a very simple one. The Bill does not apply to the present Government; its only purpose, as I said earlier, is to bind future Governments. It will be noted that the Bill comes into effect on 1 June, and that date will not be lost on the House. The point of the amendment is that it seems wrong that a future Government should not have the chance to decide whether they wish to implement the Bill. I am not saying that it is constitutionally wrong—any Parliament can of course pass a law that binds the next Government—but I am saying that, so close to the election, to move a Bill that binds the next Government without giving them a chance to say whether they want to accept and implement it is wrong.

I noted that the Minister ducked a question earlier about whether the next Government would continue the 2% pledge by saying that the new Government will take a decision. If the new Government can take a decision on that, surely they ought to have the right to take a decision on this. It may be said, “That’s all right because the Labour Party supports this too so, whichever Government are in power, they support the Bill”. Frankly, the polls tell us that we do not know quite what the nature of the next Government will be or what situation they may face. The purpose of this amendment is to ensure that the Bill does not come into effect on 1 June but at such time after that date as the new Government should decide and to bring it into effect by regulation. I beg to move.

[Viscount Eccles]

My Lords, I strongly support the amendment. If we are getting into gesture politics now that we are running up to an election—we have varying views as to what the public will think and indeed possibly varying views as to how many votes some candidate might garner as a result of the Bill—it is completely wrong to set it on a date before the next Government have a chance to consider the outcome of the election, their own position and their attitude towards the Bill.

International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Friday 6th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to make one observation, which alas may be deemed to be going for the man rather than the ball on the eve of a rather important rugby game. I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, proudly setting out his credentials as an advocate of aid. Had he been in his place at Second Reading, he would have heard the noble Baroness, Lady Chalker, for whom I have immense admiration, stating that, to her shame, during his time as Chancellor the proportion of our aid contribution fell to 0.28% of GNI. Perhaps that is something we should bear in mind when he sets out his credentials so proudly.

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps I could make a very brief intervention. My noble friend referred to the Colonial Development Corporation. In my time it was the Commonwealth Development Corporation—now called CDC. It may come as some surprise to your Lordships that it is still 100% owned by the taxpayer, but that is now a well kept secret. When I was fortunate enough to be its chief executive, we were much interested in income as well as in expenditure. One of the difficulties and the need for flexibility in this target is that if you are interested in income as well as expenditure, you cannot very well set the figure before the beginning of the year with any great accuracy. You need some flexibility.

That leads me on to a thought that is also a very strong reason for there being flexibility, as the noble Lord, Lord Butler, said. Life moves on. Things change very rapidly. Without the flexibility to adjust to those changes, you can be in great trouble. It has always seemed strange to me that, ever since the great days of Lord Bauer and Lord Balogh debating aid seriously in this House, in the 15 years that I have been in this House I have not yet heard a really serious debate about third world, second world or whatever world development—not one. In those days, there were serious debates on the subject and they got down into the depths of it, as indeed my noble friend Lord Howell was trying to indicate—much, I think, to the disappointment of the House.

I end by saying that I hope your Lordships will not regard the whole business of overseas development as a shut subject: “There is nothing more to say about it, we all know the answers and so we set this fixed, rigid target”. Finally, I think the structure when ODA came under a Minister of State within the Foreign Office was a much better structure than the one we have today.

[Lord MacGregor of Pulham Market (Con)]

My Lords, I was not able to attend Second Reading because of long-term commitments in Norfolk. The noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, who has his name on some of the amendments today, is unable to attend because of other commitments, and asked me to give his apologies.

I would like to say at the outset that there are two themes in the amendments that we have put forward. One is the issue that the noble Lord, Lord Butler, raised, which I entirely agree with, and this amendment is relevant to that. The other is to do with making sure that aid is effective and that it deals with corruption and things of that sort. Those are the two themes. If we are to have this argument about this amendment, we shall go on all day. I want to make my point on this amendment in relation to the first theme and I do not want to repeat it afterwards, so that we can go swiftly through the remainder of the amendments. But if we are not even able to do that on this amendment, I have to say that I do not think that this House is performing its function of scrutinising legislation in detail. I say to those who fear a filibuster—and there is not; we have a number of objections for a number of purposes—that I intend to make most of my arguments on this amendment so that I do not have to repeat them. But if I am not allowed to do so, I have to ask: who is preventing this Bill going forward?

We all know that there is a tight timetable. It should have been a government Bill but it is a Private Member’s Bill, which adds to the difficulties, and we all know we are coming right up to the end of the Parliament. I want to try to make the Bill more effective, as I believe this House should do, and I hope I will be allowed to develop my argument on this amendment; otherwise, I shall have to repeat it on all the other amendments. Let me make my position on that clear.

I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed, on his very impressive speech at Second Reading—of course, I have read the whole debate—and his recognition of some of the concerns we have. I am in total agreement with him about the importance of development aid and I am proud of the contribution this Government make and the lead they give internationally. But I have some concerns about the Bill. The first set is all about the points that the noble Lord, Lord Butler, made. I hope I do not have to repeat them on the later amendments.

Global Development Goals

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, I am sure that everybody in the House is truly grateful to the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, for introducing this subject. We do not have enough debates—at least not in my view—about development, aid and the best way of going about these connected, but different, activities. I am grateful to him for his synoptic view of the scene. I confess that I approach the subject with a certain humility—and that perhaps makes me not the best possible person to follow the noble Lord—because I am a retired practitioner. I have to remember that I was a practitioner in the 1980s and 1990s and that the world has moved on, but in those days I was deeply involved with aid and economic development.

My interest in the subject arose a long time ago. There were two economists, Tom Bauer and Thomas Balogh: they were both immigrants—which is interesting —and both became Members of your Lordships’ House. They used to debate the philosophy of aid and development passionately on the Floor of this House, in a way that I have not seen us debating lately. Bauer was a market man. He believed in economic opportunities —a seizing of opportunities to trade and invest achieving a satisfactory return. His philosophy has been demonstrated to work in certain places, such as Malaysia and Brazil. His conclusion was that there was no reason to suppose that development could not be achieved all over the world in much the same way as it was achieved in western Europe and in the United Kingdom during the industrial revolution.

Balogh was much more a top-down Government-to-Government aid supporter. He was an adviser for a number of years to Harold Wilson. The aid orthodoxy of today is much more on the Balogh theme than the Bauer theme. As I said before, we do not have that much debate about it; we seem to hold similar views about the orthodoxy, which is probably something that makes me unsuitable to follow, because I am a Bauer man, not a Balogh man, and therefore in a minority—a quite familiar position.

My second interest in the subject arises because 30 years ago, I started about a dozen years with what was then the Commonwealth Development Corporation. At that time, it was a classic development finance institution: state owned and funded by Treasury capital, funding private sector economic opportunities and making modest profits that were liable to corporation tax. What it did was, in general, unattractive to fully market players, either because of the political risk or the risk of low returns. Therefore, what the CDC was doing then was filling gaps—doing things that other people did not quite want to do. That is my definition of a development finance institution: for it to be a DFI, it has to be prepared to do things that the market is not prepared to do—and of course to do them successfully.

My third interest, which is much smaller, is with the Hospital for Tropical Diseases—this relates back to the previous debate. CDC had some 250 people in 65 different locations, many of them tropical, and we needed the services of HTD. After retirement, I did quite a lot of work for HTD, including fundraising in order to move the hospital into more satisfactory premises.

I was, therefore, a bottom-up player in both senses. I respected and knew about millennium goals, in the sense that although I was pre-millennium, we were still aiming at much the same things that were codified in 2000. The problem is that bottom-up players cannot cope with millennium goals: they simply do not have the time. They are too big, too abstract and too distant from their lives. Take mobile phones in Ghana, tea in Malawi or marine offloading facilities in Papua New Guinea: while you are carrying out those projects and making sure that they are sustainable and generate returns, it is difficult to take time to think about the great, wide issues of the millennium goals.

With our experience as front-line operators, how should we think about the millennium goals and the aid programme? For my part, I think about striking a better balance in our aid programme between aid and economic development, as well as the contributions to the development goals. I will illustrate that briefly by taking the example of tea. The Commonwealth Development Corporation was responsible for starting the Kenya Tea Development Agency, which now has more than half a million growers and 64 tea factories. It has definitely been a sustainable enterprise and Kenya is now the third largest producer of tea in the world. But after that we went elsewhere.

I shall also mention Malawi, which is not a word-for-word accurate experience, but a good illustration. Malawi with its 17 million people is not abounding in economic potential. It is a difficult place with no access to the sea, and market players find it difficult to achieve returns there. So we started a tea property. We did our due diligence and saw that we had land with good soil, that water was available and that the climate was right—all of which would allow tea to be grown successfully. Tea needs a medium-term capital input. Tea plants are trees, but they are allowed to grow to only 30 inches high. However, they need time to develop, so you cannot pluck the leaves for tea for some years. You also need to build a tea processing factory, and therefore you must have capital. However, capital in Malawi was then and still is in very short supply.

We set up a nursery for the tea plants and for woodlots—because without timber for fuel, you cannot operate a tea factory. Immediately, we were creating jobs. We needed to make a road because you can bet your life that a lorry cannot get in and out of a remote place easily. Again, that is economic development and it creates jobs. Then there was the matter of housing and gardens for the people working on the plantation, as well as the school and the clinic, both of which we would build. We needed communications in the form of mobile telephones to contact the market in Mombasa and sell the tea. Lastly, women are very important in tea plantations because they are much better at plucking the leaves than men will ever be.

I should like to say in conclusion that this kind of activity is a way of fulfilling from the bottom up the millennium development goals. If I had to choose between aid and economic development, I judge that the contribution of economic development is the greater.

Children and Families Bill

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Monday 18th November 2013 Grand Committee

My final point about these two notes, and in support of a number of the amendments, is that they are just notes: they do not, as far as I know, have any status. It may be that the Government will adhere to these notes, but they do not have to, and no future Government would be bound by them. They have no status, which is an argument for the Government accepting at least some of the amendments we are considering today, so that some of the requirements that the notes say the Government will implement, in part at least, are included in the Bill.

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, I will be leading on another group of amendments and will try not to duplicate anything, but it is very urgent that the Government clarify what they believe the position of the Children’s Commissioner to have been and what they believe it is going to be. In principle, nothing is changed by the Bill in front of us—there is an extension of words but nothing is changed. The Children’s Commissioner is a corporation sole, which is quite a strange type of institution and not necessarily much beloved by the Treasury, but there you are, that is what the Children’s Commissioner is. The Children’s Commissioner has, I think, 27 staff and a budget of just over £2 million, or under £2.5 million. The office is one-tenth the size of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which has just been reduced in size by quite a large amount but remains 10 times the size of the Office of the Children’s Commissioner. That is a nationally accredited human rights institution. There is a question as to whether we want two, which I will raise in more detail in the next group of amendments.

The fact of the matter is that the Children’s Commissioner has been really rather successful. It is a thorn in the flesh, to quote the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss. It has freewheeled pretty well on a very small platform and produced some very interesting work. It can produce only recommendations: it has no power to make anybody do anything except write back to it under the 2004 Act to tell it, “Thank you for telling us what you told us and this is what we are going to do about it”. It has no executive authority at all. Do the Government intend that it should have any executive authority? I cannot see any in the Bill. It seems to me that some of the comment on what might or might not happen has got rather ahead of the Government’s game, and we are looking for clarity from the Government as to what they intend and what they expect.

The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, raised a very interesting point about raising expectations and then disappointing them. That is one of the reasons why the electorate are being turned off election after election: the Westminster system has a brilliant way of raising expectations and then disappointing them. I hope that this will not be another example, because it is not a good idea that it should be. There are some very serious questions here about resources, about what the role is and about what the Government expect of the Children’s Commissioner. I do not think that we have had answers as yet to those questions. I hope to hear them from my noble friend on the Front Bench.

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, Amendments 245, 255A and 257 through to 262 deal with issues related to the Children’s Commissioner’s independence. The independence of the commissioner is an important point of principle—and it is helpful to have this discussion, so that I may provide noble Lords with some assurances. I am grateful to all noble Lords involved in raising these issues, especially the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, my noble friend Lord Lester and the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, for speaking on his behalf—all of whom I know have long been passionate champions in relation to children’s rights.

John Dunford identified that a “perceived” lack of independence from government had affected the Children’s Commissioner’s credibility and, following his review, he made various recommendations to counter those perceptions. The Government have acted on his recommendations in full. We have removed the provisions that allowed the Secretary of State to direct the commissioner and the requirement for the commissioner to consult the Secretary of State. We are changing the terms of appointment to a single, six-year term, to remove the potential for political influence through the reappointment process. We have also made provision for direct contact between the commissioner and Parliament, including the laying of the annual report directly before Parliament and the ability of the commissioner to raise matters directly with Parliament.

I thank noble Lords who have spoken to Amendment 245 and give assurances that the Bill already provides that the commissioner has complete freedom in deciding his or her activities, timetables and priorities; under the primary function, it is made explicit that the commissioner has a free hand to investigate any matter relating to the rights or interests of children. Having carried out an investigation, the commissioner is free to make any recommendation that he or she deems appropriate.

It is true that as a non-departmental public body, the OCC is subject to some controls in relation to its spending. These controls apply to all NDPBs and are designed to ensure value for money for the taxpayer and to avoid unnecessary public spending at a time when the Government are seeking to reduce the budget deficit. Extremely important though the role of Children’s Commissioner is, I do not think that she should be completely exempt from these controls. However, where the commissioner has sought an exemption or relaxation from these arrangements and has demonstrated that they could compromise his or her independence, those requests have been granted. This arrangement seems to be working well and we see no need to change it.

The Government agree that the Children’s Commissioner should be accountable to Parliament through his or her annual report and are therefore grateful that the Joint Committee on Human Rights has made a commitment to hold an annual evidence session to scrutinise the commissioner’s work. I share the noble Lord’s concerns about overburdening the commissioner with reports to parliamentary committees but it is important for his or her independence that the commissioner is not accountable to the Secretary of State or another Minister. That is why we have welcomed the offer from the JCHR to hold an annual debate. This will be an opportunity for Parliament to ask questions and raise issues with the commissioner and, in turn, the committee will be able to raise matters with all the relevant Secretaries of State.

Amendments 257, 258, 259, 260 and 261 in this group concern the appointment of the commissioner, any dismissal of the commissioner and the involvement of Parliament in these processes. The role of the Children’s Commissioner is an important one and I fully accept that the appointment and dismissal procedures need to be fair and transparent. However, I do not think that it is necessary or appropriate to define the conditions for either process further than is already done in the legislation.

We have provided a note in the other place on how the appointment process is expected to work. That note explains that the appointment of the commissioner would be in accordance with the Office of the Commissioner for Public Appointments’ code of practice. This ensures that candidates are appointed on merit, following a fair and open recruitment process.

The note also clarifies that children will be involved in the recruitment process and that we would expect Parliament, through one of its committees, to have a role in agreeing the job description and carrying out a pre-appointment hearing. However, the OCPA code of practice is clear that the parliamentary committee undertaking the pre-appointment hearing should not have a right of veto on the appointment. To pick up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, about the Secretary of State explaining publicly if he disagrees with the Select Committee, I do not think it appropriate for such a public debate to take place about the suitability of candidates.

In addition, I do not consider that legislation is the right place to set out the personal qualities needed for the role. These will be determined by the panel that is established to lead the appointment process, which is chaired by an independent assessor appointed by OCPA, and subject to quality assurance by Parliament. I hope that this provides the necessary assurances.

On dismissal, the existing provisions represent a high threshold. A dismissal could potentially be subject to judicial review and overturned if it was found to have been made inappropriately. The courts provide ample protection against the commissioner being dismissed on arbitrary grounds. I would expect the Secretary of State to want to consult the chair of a relevant parliamentary committee before taking such a drastic action. However, there may well be reasons why such matters would need to be treated in confidence. I hope that noble Lords are reassured that both the appointments and dismissal processes currently in place are fair and transparent without the need for further prescription in legislation.

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Moved by

[Viscount Eccles]

249A: Clause 79, page 52, line 11, leave out from “promoting” to second “the” in line 13

[Viscount Eccles]

My Lords, I would like to continue to probe the question: what is the Government’s true opinion of the Children’s Commissioner as a corporation sole? I hope that my Government are not exclusively depending on John Dunford. His report was published three years ago. That is a third of the life of the Office of the Children’s Commissioner so I suppose that something must have happened over the past three years; I do not think that things will be exactly the same and I would like to know how they have developed.

On another occasion, maybe on Report, I will want to have a longer discussion about independence. I will confine myself to saying that arm’s-length relationships between public bodies and the Government are twisted arm’s-length relationships, and if you are funded by public money there is no such thing as independence in the true meaning of the word. If you consider the American War of Independence, which resulted in the United States of America, you can completely forget that as a meaning of the word when it is applied to a public body.

Three years on, I will just make the comment that John Dunford did his report on his own, in five months; he is a very able man. He did not have any peer group review; I think it was mentioned earlier that sometimes it is a good thing to have some peer group review. I hope that the Government are not just taking cover behind John Dunford because by now they should have an opinion of their own.

I have two background thoughts when I raise these issues. One is the size of the superstructure that we have built in recent years on top of what is, to me, the front line, which has been very frequently mentioned during our debates. This is a very big superstructure, starting with the United Nations—190 signatories, not including the United States of America; some 70 of them have a national human rights institution. The expert committee in Geneva gets a report every five years. We last sent ours in 2008. The next one is going in 2014, which seems to be six years, not five, and there may be some message in that. That draft report is 200 pages long. It is sponsored by the department present here today, which has to get evidence from the whole of the rest of government, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, mentioned.

My second amendment is also a probing amendment. I just wanted to remind myself that everybody is concerned with the human rights of children. There is no exception—apart from, perhaps, one or two people living on a beach in western Scotland who have completely dropped out into a hut. However, I do not think that there is anybody who is not concerned. There are parents and there are teachers; many people have two roles.

If one third of children under 18 are not represented by an adult, by whom are they going to be represented? We have to remember the huge scope of the subject we are discussing, and sometimes a degree of unreality comes into it. For example, the Explanatory Notes say that this Bill is “strengthening” the Children’s Commissioner. In what way is it strengthening the Children’s Commissioner? It does not appear from my noble friend’s answer to the previous debate that the commissioner is going to get any more money. They are given more duties; they are even given a direction by Parliament to look into advocacy, while the rest of the Explanatory Notes say that we are not going to tell them what to do, we are going to leave them entirely free to decide what to do for themselves—but apparently not in the matter of advocacy.

The Children’s Commissioner also has a duty in the Bill to,

“consider the potential effect on the rights of children of government policy proposals and government proposals for legislation”.

You could employ 27 people on doing only that and they would have plenty to do. The Government need to be much clearer with us on what they mean by strengthening. If you add to the duties of an organisation but do not add to its resources, you could argue that you weaken it.

Where has the Children’s Commissioner stood in relation to the size of the task? I think that the commissioners have done rather well. They have done research, co-operated with a lot of other bodies, produced interesting reports, been a thorn in the flesh and rather successful lobbyists. Whom have they lobbied? They have lobbied the Government in general. You can argue about whether you want a lobbyist 100% funded by public money, or whether you would rather it was Amnesty International or some other rather looser and less controlled body that you want to do your lobbying, but it seems to have worked rather well.

The question I end with is: what is going to change? How is this Bill going to change the capability of the Children’s Commissioner? Or is it going to continue with business as usual? I really would like an answer to that question. I beg to move.

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I have some amendments in this group, but before I speak to them, I will say a word about the amendment of the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles. I do not support it because it would take out what is the most significant improvement in the powers and duties of the Children’s Commissioner: namely, the duty to promote and protect the rights of children in England. This is making our commissioner a rights-based commissioner for the first time and I very much welcome that. I hope that the Bill makes a difference and that the Government are not, in the words of the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, “playing a game”.

I will speak to Amendments 250, 254, 255 and 256 in this group. Before I do, I will mention my support for Amendment 252 on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and Amendment 266A about a duty on public bodies to respect children’s rights and give proper regard to their views, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey. However, in order to save the Committee’s time, I will leave both noble Baronesses to speak for me on those amendments.

Before I go into the detail of my amendments, I will pay tribute to the coalition Government and the current Ministers, and particularly to the former Children’s Minister, my colleague Sarah Teather MP, for bringing the Children’s Commissioner for England much closer to the Paris principles and making the office a much better national human rights institution, as it should have been from the start.

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[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 252 in a group of amendments that are largely designed to strengthen the role of the Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, whom I thank for her support on this amendment, my starting point is to applaud the ways in which the Bill already strengthens the role of the Children’s Commissioner, in particular through the incorporation of an explicit children’s rights-based remit. I therefore have to part company with the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, on that—although I very much agree with him on his point about resources.

[Viscount Eccles]

Nothing in the 2004 Act would prevent the commissioner saying anything that she wants to say, or investigating anything that she wants to investigate, in the area of rights. My point about it being stated in the Bill is that it is a move towards creating another national human rights institution. The question to the Government is: is that what they are going to do? If they are not, there is nothing wrong with the 2004 Act.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

But because it was not an explicitly children’s rights-based institution, it did not have the status internationally that other children’s commissioners have. So this is a step forward and I am glad to be able to support the Government. In fact, I was one of those who criticised my own Government for failing to write in an explicit children’s rights-based remit.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights, of which I am a member, welcomed the reforms as,

“constituting a significant human rights enhancing measure”.

However, we believe that the reforms do not go quite far enough and therefore proposed this amendment. The intention is that the Bill should expressly define the rights of children in England to include the rights in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child for the purposes of defining the commissioner’s primary function. At present, the Bill simply requires the commissioner to “have regard” to these rights. I am sure noble Lords will agree that that is a much weaker formulation.

The recommendation that the commissioner’s primary purpose should be defined explicitly with reference to the UN convention should not be construed as just the icing on the cake, for it is about the ingredients of the cake itself. This was recognised in the Dunford report commissioned by the incoming coalition Government. It recommended that the new role of the Children’s Commissioner should include,

“promoting and protecting the rights of children under the UNCRC”,

so I am afraid that the Minister was not totally accurate when he said that the Government had taken on board all the recommendations of the Dunford report.

The UNICEF global study of independent human rights institutions for children underlined that:

“There is one non-negotiable attribute of all independent human rights institutions for children: a mandate rooted in the Convention on the Rights of the Child”.

However, the JCHR’s “negotiations” or dialogue with the Government on just such a mandate came to naught and the Bill retains this weak requirement simply to have regard to the convention. The Government’s original objection that the UNCRC has not been directly incorporated into UK law was met by our carefully worded amendment, which does not imply incorporation, as the Government now acknowledge. They then fell back on two arguments. The first was that,

“the UNCRC contains a broad mix of rights and aspirations, rather than a more classic formulation of rights such as those in the ECHR”.

Secondly, they argued that some UNCRC articles are broader than children’s rights as such and include, for example, parents’ rights or the state’s responsibility to create an environment in which children’s rights can be realised.

The committee was not persuaded by those arguments and responded:

“It is a matter of common consensus that the UNCRC contains some very important children’s rights. The fact that some of its provisions are couched in aspirational terms, or impose responsibilities and obligations on the State, does not detract from this fact”.

Indeed, these aspects of the convention are surely true of human rights treaties generally and have not deterred other states from incorporating the full convention into domestic law. In any event, the amendment is carefully worded with this possible objection in mind: it defines the rights of children to include, not the UNCRC itself, but “the rights in” the UNCRC.

As Carolyne Willow, a long-standing children’s rights expert, has argued, the suggestion that the reference to parents,

“somehow diminishes children’s rights, is muddled. Article 18(2) of the treaty sets out the basis for states supporting parents—in order to guarantee and promote the rights of children. This is no different from recognising and assisting carers in order to uphold the rights of disabled people, or guaranteeing support to adoptive parents as a means of securing the child’s right to a family life”.

The JCHR believes that the Children’s Commissioner,

“should be entrusted to interpret the UNCRC and to take a sensible and properly advised approach about the children’s rights that it protects”.

The Government’s refusal to accept our recommendation suggests that they do not trust the commissioner to do so. The arguments put up by the Government are weak and leave me puzzled as to why they are so resistant to embedding the commissioner’s welcome children’s rights-based remit in what the Alliance for Reform of the Children’s Commissioner describes as, “the authoritative international legal statute for children’s human rights”. I hope that the Minister will take this away and think again.

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[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 251. It would allow the Children’s Commissioner to conduct an investigation into the case of an individual child in specific circumstances which enable the commissioner to fulfil his or her primary purpose, which is defined as his or her strategic role. This principle, which underpins the existence of the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, is accepted by everyone. This amendment seeks not to undermine it, but to aid the Children’s Commissioner in its pursuit.

We believe that the current proposed wording serves to undermine the ability of the commissioner to work strategically. Five years ago, Meltem Avcil, a 14 year-old girl, slashed her wrists when her bail application was turned down when she was detained at Yarl’s Wood detention centre. After self-harming, the child was handcuffed to a hospital bed. The then Children’s Commissioner for England, Al Aynsley-Green, investigated her case of self-harm. His report concluded that detaining the child for 80 days had amounted to inhuman treatment and recommended public policy changes to avoid such events occurring in the future. This is just one example of where the ability to investigate an individual case has advanced the strategic work of the Children’s Commissioner.

Another example is from Wales, where an investigation into specific cases of school exclusion led to the discovery that children were routinely informally excluded for prolonged periods in a manner that was against their interests. When this was debated in the Commons, the Minister, Edward Timpson, responded that the injunction on such investigations was to prevent the commissioner,

“becoming bogged down in individual casework at the expense of the OCC’s strategic role”.

That is an unsatisfactory response; it is clear that specific investigations can serve to aid a strategic approach.

Our amendment does not allow the commissioner carte blanche to engage in investigations or, indeed, make the commissioner feel under an obligation to investigate all individual cases which he or she receives. Instead, it is highly limiting and restricts investigations to when it is judged that they can genuinely advance the commissioner’s strategic role. Furthermore, the wording of our amendment also serves as a rebuttal to the suggestion that it would create a presumption that casework was part of the commissioner’s role and that it offered an alternate point of appeal to existing channels.

There also appears to be an element of confusion among Ministers. Mr Timpson said that it is “simply not possible” for the commissioner to investigate individual cases,

“without the commissioner’s strategic role being compromised”.

Nevertheless, in further discussion, he proceeded to point to other provisions in the Bill which allow the commissioner to,

“initiate a formal inquiry into the case of an individual child where he or she considers that it raises issues of public policy that are relevant to the other children under the separate inquiry function”.—[Official Report, Commons, Children and Families Bill Committee, 23/4/13; cols. 681-82.]

That is an apparent tacit admission that it is possible for the commissioner to investigate individual cases without compromising his strategic role. Unfortunately, the Bill makes it clear that that simply will not be possible in future. All of us accept the fundamental importance of the strategic role of the Office of the Children’s Commissioner yet it also seems obvious that this can be properly pursued only if the commissioner has the freedom fully to investigate individual cases in very specific instances. Our amendment seeks to find the appropriate wording to ensure that this can occur. I hope that the Minister will feel able to support our proposal, if not the exact wording of our amendment.

[Viscount Eccles]

My Lords, I have a third amendment in this group, to Schedule 6 and on a very different subject. It is proposed that the Children’s Rights Director, who is part of Ofsted, is to be transferred to the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, taking the duties and powers of the office with him. Is that already happening? If it is, will the resources that are transferred balance with the duties and the costs of carrying out those duties in such a way as to make no material difference to the Office of the Children’s Commissioner in respect of resources?

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 249A to 256, 266A and 266AZZA.

Amendment 249A was tabled by my noble friend Lord Eccles, who asked how we are strengthening the commissioner’s function. We believe that amending the commissioner’s primary function to one of promoting and protecting children’s rights is, as my noble friend Lady Walmsley and the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, said, an important step forward in establishing the OCC as a credible organisation that meets the key requirements expected of human rights institutions. There is much support for our proposals. For example, in its report following pre-legislative scrutiny, the Joint Committee on Human Rights described the proposed new remit of the commissioner as,

“a significant strengthening of the Commissioner’s mandate, and is an important step in the transformation of the office into a fully fledged human rights institution for children”.

The way in which the primary function is described matters. The lack of a statutory rights-based remit is the main reason why the Children’s Commissioner has, to date, only been accepted as an associate, rather than full, member of the European Network of Commissioners.

I turn now to Amendment 250, which was tabled by my noble friend Lady Walmsley, to whom I pay tribute for her effective and long-standing work on children’s rights. I agree with her that part of the commissioner’s role should be to raise awareness of children’s rights. However, in determining what activities to set out in the Bill, our approach has been to avoid including activities that are already implicit within the commissioner’s primary function, and we believe that raising public awareness of children’s rights is an inherent part of the commissioner’s new primary function of promoting and protecting children’s rights.

The commissioner can intervene in legal cases where he or she has a sufficient interest in the matter before the courts. Indeed, the commissioner has used her current powers to intervene in a number of legal cases in the past. However, the effect of the proposed amendment could be to create an expectation that the commissioner would respond to every request to intervene in legal matters that he or she receives. I do not believe that this would be helpful. In his review, John Dunford gave an example of another commissioner who had instigated legal proceedings to take a particular children’s rights issue to the courts which were unsuccessful and costly. This is not something we would want to encourage.

Turning to Amendment 251, I assure noble Lords that there is nothing in the Bill that prevents the commissioner talking to individual children or using evidence drawn from the cases of individual children to inform the primary function. In fact, it is hard to imagine that the commissioner could investigate a matter strategically without using evidence from individual cases to support his or her findings.

As noble Lords will be aware, where the commissioner makes recommendations under the primary function, he or she can require a written response setting out how those recommendations will be addressed. Amendment 253, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, seeks to make similar provision in respect of the separate advice and assistance function. This role is currently provided by the Children’s Rights Director to the children within his remit and is intended to be an informal, light-touch service. It may involve as little as a telephone call to the DCS in a local authority, and the amendment therefore runs the risk of overformalising what is working well as an informal process.

I fully recognise that other groups of children are vulnerable and in need of extra support, including those mentioned in Amendment 256. However, I do not believe that this means that we should include them in the definition set out in Clause 86—the purpose of which is to provide a definition of the children who currently fall within the Children’s Rights Director’s remit—so that other provisions in the Bill can be applied specifically to that group of children. Clause 86 is not an attempt to define vulnerable children for the purposes of the commissioner’s primary function and there is therefore no reason to include other groups of vulnerable children within it, as the Bill makes clear through the provision in Clause 79. When determining how best to discharge the primary function, the commissioner must have particular regard to,

“other groups of children who the Commissioner considers to be at particular risk of having their rights infringed”.

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, for highlighting in Amendment 252 the importance of the UNCRC to the commissioner’s primary function. Our view is that, in exercising his or her primary function, the commissioner would be expected to take account of all children’s rights that are relevant. This would include the UNCRC and its optional protocols that the UK has ratified, rights set out in other international treaties and rights within domestic law. However, we also recognise that the UNCRC is central to the children’s rights arena and so make an explicit reference to the UNCRC in the Bill. We believe that this represents the best formulation.

Turning to Amendment 252A, it is our clear intention that the commissioner’s work should be informed by the views and interests of children. As well as the overarching requirement to involve children as set out in new Section 2B(1) of the Children Act, the Bill includes requirements on the commissioner to: make children aware of his or her role and how they can contact him or her; consult children on the commissioner’s forward plans, before finalising his or her business plan for the year ahead; and to report on the action he or she has taken to involve children in his or her annual report.

In meeting all these requirements, the commissioner will be required to take particular steps to involve children whom he or she considers have fewer opportunities to make their views known. I am sure that noble Lords will therefore agree that the Bill includes ample provision for children to be involved in the commissioner’s activities and to influence his or her agenda. We agree that this should include a wide range of children’s views but we do not think it is feasible to include a requirement to involve all children, which Amendment 252A seeks to do.

With respect to reporting on the extent to which children enjoy the rights set out in the UNCRC, I note that in response to a recommendation by the Joint Committee on Human Rights, we have made it clear that monitoring implementation of the UNCRC is within the scope of the commissioner’s remit. Amendment 254 goes further than this, however, and creates an expectation that the commissioner would conduct an annual review of UNCRC implementation. This would be a significant undertaking and place a burden on the commissioner’s office that would inevitably divert resources away from other priorities. We have no objection to the commissioner carrying out an annual review but do not think that he or she should be required to do so.

I agree it is important that the Children’s Commissioner should not just consult children but take their views into consideration, but I am not persuaded that Amendment 255 is necessary. The commissioner’s primary function includes promoting awareness of the views and interests of children, and it is difficult to imagine how a commissioner could carry out that function without taking account of those views. Reporting on how he or she has done so is a matter of good practice and therefore it is expected that this would happen without having the requirement to that effect in the Bill.

Amendment 266AZZZA relates to provision in the Bill that enables the Secretary of State to make a staff transfer scheme. This will allow staff working for the Office of the Children’s Rights Director, currently located in Ofsted, to transfer to the Office of the Children’s Commissioner and will ensure that those staff are protected in terms of, for example, their continuity of employment and pension entitlements.

I would like to assure my noble friend Lord Eccles that these arrangements are already well in hand and that Roger Morgan, the current Children’s Rights Director, has been closely involved in the design and development of these provisions and continues to be part of the working group which is overseeing the transition to the new arrangements.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Nash]

I will write to the noble Lord on this matter.

[Viscount Eccles]

My Lords, I am grateful to all those who took part and to the Minister for his reply. At the risk of repeating myself, you can strengthen a mandate, but that is not the same as strengthening the organisation which has to carry the mandate out. If I remember rightly, John Dunford joined in the disappointment with the way that the Children’s Commissioner operated until 2010. I think that disappointment, if it is shared, will continue because the Government’s answers are that business will continue as usual. I make no negative or positive comment on that. I just wish I knew whether that was the correct interpretation in the view of the Government. In particular, the relationship of the Children’s Commissioner with the Equality and Human Rights Commission is very important. If they are going to co-operate, work together and do things jointly, there is a strong case for leaving the Children’s Commissioner pretty open, pretty freewheeling and able to look at whatever the commissioner thinks should be looked at and to make recommendations as a result of that work, which is what has been happening and, in my view, has happened rather successfully. I do not want to stand in criticism; I just wish I knew what the Government really expect so that we could understand what they expect and out there the public could understand what they could really expect. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 249A withdrawn.

Economy: Culture and the Arts

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Finsbury. Way back in 1998, when County Durham was in trouble with the Bowes Museum, the then Secretary of State commissioned a report. It was a very good report, and after he received it he said that he would think about the Bowes Museum every day in his bath. I hope that he still has a bath every day.

If noble Lords will forgive me, I will take the contribution to the economy for granted. I am much more concerned about the effect on society, the educational potential and social mobility, which I find much more difficult and more interesting subjects. Briefly, I will talk about the relationship between the state—central and local government—and arts and cultural institutions. I hope that noble Lords will find that as I go along, I will at least show that I have been in the front line of that quite often.

It does not seem to me that the arts can flourish without a high degree of independence. If they are not independent, then they have problems. I do not see how they achieve inclusion without that degree of independence. That, of course, takes one straightaway to money because it is a question of resources, and that has engaged your Lordships quite a lot during this debate. However, if one agrees that a degree of independence is a necessary condition for the arts to flourish, then one has to look and see about the state.

The state is basically uncomfortable with the arts, and so are local authorities. This makes the job of the public servants in the Arts Council, as my noble friend Lord Brooke said, and in other of the institutions such as the Heritage Lottery Fund, quite tricky. As noble Lords will have seen, there are spats between the Arts Council and government. This is not a political speech; it does not matter who the government were or are. There are spats between the Lottery Fund and government, and changes in position. I think this is because, while the state is comfortable with and understands expenditure, it does not understand income. It gets its own income by a form of legalised confiscation.

Furthermore, the state and local authorities are not happy with risks. They are not comfortable with experimentation and they worry about the electorate’s responses to things which neither they nor their civil servants really know about or understand. We have to remember that 35% of the electorate do not vote, and a lot of other members of the electorate are not too switched on by the arts. So why is the independence valuable?

I will refer briefly to Kew Gardens. I was fortunate enough after the Heritage Act 1983 to be the first chairman of Kew when it came under trustees. There was no “Friends of Kew” at that time; the Ministry would not have thought of it. We now have more than 70,000; it is a lot later, but that has happened. We have had enormously successful exhibitions of, for example, Chihuly’s glass and Henry Moore’s sculptures.

Many other things have happened at Kew; I think it relates much more to what the public like to go and see than it used to. Many of these things would not have happened if it had remained under Defra. Take, for example, the £110 million for the millennium seed bank raised by Kew. Does anybody really think that that would have happened if Kew had still been run directly by the department? There is a serious issue about independence and, with it, a serious issue about why an independent body deserves so much public money. That is a question that we all have to answer.

I will finish, briefly, with the Bowes Museum. In 1998, County Durham had a problem with the Bowes and proposed to shut it for 18 weeks over the winter. The argument was, “We haven’t got a lot of money, we’re subject to constraints”—goodness me, they are subject to more constraints now even than they were then—“we have villages down the coast where there used to be pits, and those villages have community centres and libraries but not much income, so what are we to do? Are we to give the money to the Bowes and Barnard Castle, next to Raby Castle, or are we to give it in grant form to the pit villages?”. One can understand their dilemma; it was perfectly genuine. They were not disregarding the contribution of the Bowes or Barnard Castle to County Durham; they had a problem. Therefore, we negotiated to take the Bowes back to being an independent trust. Since then, we have raised money to mend the roof and we have reorganised the collections. We now have contemporary art exhibitions, and we have had selling exhibitions of crafts. The café is also a great deal better than it used to be. All these things have been done and can continue to be done.

Of course, the basis for them all is an ability to raise money. That is how I will finish. When you go to raise money, people are very good at telling you, “I would have given you money yesterday, and possibly I will give you money tomorrow, but unfortunately I haven’t got any money today”. You have to look at them, give them a villainous smile and say, “I will not leave until I have the cheque”. We need to get a great deal better at raising our own money in order to support our independence, carry out the work of inclusion and solve many of our financial problems ourselves.

Queen’s Speech

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Wednesday 15th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles]

My Lords, having worked in international development for the best working years of my life, I can only admire the admirable simplicity of the approach of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames, to this subject. However, as I will demonstrate, I do not think that compassion is enough. I also regret that the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, is not in his place. I worked for an organisation that had equity investments in three seed companies in Africa. It worked very closely with the largest privately owned American seed company. It brought clonal tea to Zimbabwe and Tanzania and bred elite oil palms for the Far East. In fact, it did everything that the noble Lord suggested should be done now, and I was part of the British aid programme at the time.

International development and aid has in fact always been controversial. It has never been a simple subject. Indeed, if your Lordships were to read the 238 pages of DfID’s annual report—perhaps noble Lords do not read those 238 pages—you may end up, like me, completely confused. I say that advisedly. I am not sure, but I think that DfID is driven by the millennium development goals, yet those are not working. It is true to say that the countries that will be able to achieve the millennium development goals would have achieved them anyway and that those that cannot achieve them would never have done so anyway. There are countries going in and out of the green, amber and red definitions of the millennium goals, which certainly need to be thoroughly revised in 2015.

Our own House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee wrote a very good report about the effectiveness of aid, which noble Lords will no doubt have read. Reading that report, you see that there is deep controversy in the evidence given to that committee about the effectiveness of aid. Whatever might be said about my noble friend Lord Ashcroft’s blogs, he knew and knows about Zimbabwe from when he was young, and about Belize. Those are two quite difficult countries and in his blogs there are very interesting views.

There used to be great debate in this House about development and aid. Lord Balogh and Lord Bauer used to go head to head. Lord Balogh was an adviser on official development assistance, while Lord Bauer would say that economic growth and development were what was needed and that aid interrupted the progress towards economic growth and the elimination or amelioration of poverty. We now have consensus, which the noble Lord, Lord Collins referred to, so we cease to debate the matter as we are all agreed. All that does, if I may say so, is open the door to Mr Nigel Farage—not a very welcome development—because, as he says, if all three Front Benches agree there must be something wrong. On that proposition, I agree with him, even if his attitude to aid is completely mistaken.

I suggest a way of thinking about economic development and international development. There are four strands to it. First, there is economic growth, which leads one on to poverty. I think everybody agrees—the Secretary of State has said it—that economic growth is the most important means of reducing poverty. The House of Lords committee said that economic growth is essential if poverty is to be reduced, which is of course absolutely right. Secondly, the millennium development goals talk about the eradication of poverty but then refer to the eradication of extreme poverty. However, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says that we have poverty in the United Kingdom. Thirdly, we have corruption. Nothing should be done if it leads to corruption and we must do everything to avoid it, but we have corruption here. We have not lost it; there is still some about. Fourthly, there is disaster relief, which I would like to leave out, but of course if Cockermouth gets flooded we give its people relief.

We need economic growth now in the United Kingdom. I have heard economic growth mentioned several times tonight in connection with the eurozone and Europe. We have not eliminated poverty and we never will. We have corruption. The Charity Commission is looking at the moment at a charity that appears to have behaved very badly. Is anybody suggesting that we should get rid of the serious fraud squad? We do disaster relief, too, so when thinking about international development we should stop thinking about achieving things and about targets or exits and endings. It is not that at all but a continuous process, which has gone on here and in the whole of the developed world and will go on everywhere else. When it goes on successfully, of course we will build much more interesting relationships of the kind my noble friend Lady Nicholson mentioned with Iraq, because that is all part of how you come out of problems of one sort or another and create positive relationships. We can make sense of the debate about international development only when we realise that none of the four strands which I have mentioned go away. They all persist.

I have quickly to declare an interest. I used to work for a thing that was called the Commonwealth Development Corporation. It was a classic development finance institution. We used to look for economic opportunities, carrying our own technology and management capability with us. We were prepared to lead and to be in consortia. We took risks and went where other people—the pure private sector—were not quite prepared to go. We did things that were quite risky and exciting and on the whole very successful. However, the previous Administration wanted rid of it. They thought that there was no place for such a gap-filling development finance institution, so they tried to sell it to the private sector. They modelled it on that private sector and left it in limbo.

The Secretary of State now says, “We work with the CDC”, although she qualifies that by describing it as the “revitalised” CDC. I wonder what that means and whether my noble friend on the Front Bench will tell us, if not now then later, when we have a Statement on CDC. I hope that we might get a trailer tonight because we still need a classically designed development finance institution that is not aid per se, or a profit maximiser, but a central economic development institution.