Official Development Assistance and the British Council

Anna McMorrin Excerpts

Wednesday 30th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Champion]

That is absolutely the nub of my speech. At a time when we ought to be able to scrutinise the detail of the spending of taxpayers’ money—particularly at a time when cuts are being made to it—that is not in the gift of this House. It is in the gift only of a very few Ministers, and that should concern us all.

When my Committee received the main estimate from the FCDO this year, we were genuinely shocked. It looked very different, with considerably less detail than last year’s equivalent. Budget lines had been altered, with the majority of spending from the former Department for International Development lumped together under one heading. That obscures the size and distribution of the cuts to aid spending.

It is customary for the Government to consult with relevant Select Committees prior to making such radical changes to the presentation of estimates. Needless to say, that did not happen. Surely, at a time of increased parliamentary interest in aid spending, we should expect more detail, not less. With such little detail and information, Parliament cannot know exactly what is going on and what it is agreeing to. How can we make an informed decision without a basic breakdown of where the FCDO plans to spend in a particular country or on a particular theme?

Sadly, that is entirely consistent with the lack of information and transparency provided by the FCDO throughout last year. Add that to the lack of willingness to engage with my Committee, and Members’ questions being dodged or simply ignored, and Parliament faces a constant uphill struggle for the most basic details that we should be entitled to.

The Government have said that they will return to spending 0.7% of GNI on aid “when fiscal circumstances allow”. My Committee, and I am sure other Members in the House, have lost track of how many times we have asked the Foreign Secretary to define what is meant by that. We are getting no closer to an answer. We have repeatedly asked for a country-by-country breakdown of funding allocations for this financial year. Instead, we got only a worryingly short list of countries where the UK will spend bilaterally this year, with no figures attached. It is simply impossible to perform proper scrutiny without those figures.

My Committee is being stymied in its efforts to scrutinise, Parliament is being blocked from being able to consider the figures, and many of the organisations that are implementing the UK aid programmes, making the difference on the ground, have had to fight for clarity on whether their programmes will even survive these cuts. The haphazard way in which these cuts to aid programmes have been made has also caused considerable financial waste.

Let us take the cuts to global health, one of the FCDO’s priority areas, as just one example. Donated drugs to treat preventable diseases will be wasted, as there is no one available to distribute or administer them following a 90% cut in funding. In Bangladesh, a programme providing essential healthcare to disadvantaged communities, including a response to covid-19, was given less than a week to close. That story plays out across every area of UK aid.

[Anna McMorrin (Cardiff North) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent point on the fact that the more barriers there are to aid, the more difficult it is to deliver. Does she agree therefore that it is a moral and economic imperative that this Government do everything in their diplomatic might to reauthorise and readopt the cross-border crossings in north-east and north-west Syria to relieve the millions of people there at serious risk of loss of life?

[Sarah Champion]

I absolutely support my hon. Friend’s calls for that border crossing to be reopened. It is a time-limited ask, and the International Development Committee wrote to the Foreign Secretary over two weeks ago asking for that very thing—to open those borders and keep them open so that aid can get in to help those desperate people—and we still have not received a reply.

In Vietnam, teams clearing land mines are being made redundant, as there is no funding for their project. In the Central African Republic, a project fighting the worst forms of child labour will be forced to close early. How does it make sense to invest in these transformative projects over years and then cut the funding at the very point they are about to realise their goals? It is a waste for those communities and a waste for the UK taxpayer, who has been funding it.

This debate also considers the role of the British Council, an organisation that has experienced huge challenges as a result of the pandemic. Unable to offer its normal range of paid-for educational services, budgets have been squeezed dramatically, impacting upon other programmes and leading to office closures around the world. Indeed, from next week, the British Council is starting the redundancy process for between 15% and 20% of its jobs.

The British Council is one of the best examples of soft power that I know, and the Government are standing by and letting it crumble. That is set against a growth in cultural institutes from other states—namely China’s Confucius Institutes—that are creeping across the planet. That is not exactly the action of an outward-looking, global-focused Great Britain, is it?

The Government say they are proud of the UK’s aid spending, but hiding figures and failing to respond to my Committee’s questions are not the actions of a Government who are proud. They seem like the actions of a Government who are trying to cover up their shocking reductions in funding and the devastating results: the girls who will not go to school, the children who will not be vaccinated and the families who will not have access to clean water. Once again, I ask the Minister for three things: to publish the individual country allocations for this financial year; to provide immediate clarity to organisations implementing UK aid programmes on their funding allocations for this financial year; and, most fundamental of all, for the Government to detail the steps that they will take to return to spending 0.7% of GNI on ODA.

Finally, I want to say thank you to all the FCDO staff and all the aid workers around the world who do an amazing job in the most difficult of circumstances. We stand with them and will continue fighting for the resources that they need to be able to do their job: tackling poverty and inequality around the world. That is the right thing to do; morally it is the right thing to do, but it is also the right thing to do for Britain’s interests.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Andrew Mitchell (Sutton Coldfield) (Con)]

I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee and, indeed, the International Development Committee, which is so ably led by the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion). It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali), who shadowed me for a period of time when I had responsibility for some of these matters. I want to underline what has already been said about our respect for and gratitude to humanitarian workers and others around the world who put themselves in harm’s way for their fellow members of humanity and also, of course, to our brilliant diplomats, who are the subject of these estimates debates.

The Prime Minister, when responding to me last week, mentioned the possibility of a vote on these estimates. Languidly, that ball was tossed to him by the Leader of the House, but it is worth making clear, not least for those outside this place, that there was never any question of having a vote on the estimates. The Leader of the House was merely teasing the House by suggesting that, because he knows perfectly well that it is neither sensible nor serious to vote in that way. I believe he sleeps with “Erskine May” on his nightstand, and he knows that very well. The estimates have never been rejected by this place. They can either be reduced or rejected, but they cannot be increased. Of course, many of us want to see them increased so that we honour our commitment to 0.7%. If we had accepted my right hon. Friend’s invitation on the estimates, and if we had rejected them, the Foreign Office would have needed to send out redundancy notices on Monday in order to meet its legal obligations, like Liverpool in the days of Derek Hatton and the loony left. And they think that we who stand up for the 0.7% are the irresponsible Members of this House!

Let us be absolutely clear on the estimates. To oppose them would have given my right hon. Friend the Chief Whip all his Christmases in one go. No responsible Opposition would support such a thing. What we seek from this Government, who are rebelling against their own promises and manifesto, is a meaningful vote, not a show of force or something that the Government can ignore, and we do this in accordance with Mr Speaker’s specific instructions to the Government at 3.30 on 14 June, just a couple of weeks ago.

Why do we care so much about this issue? I would like to make just three points, because the House has probably heard enough from me on much of it. These cuts are hurting our reputation and threatening our foreign policy ambitions. My right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), who spoke so eloquently today, made the 0.7% her first commitment in the 2017 election, because she understood the importance of standing by the 0.7% in reinforcing our values and our promises. Much worse, these unprecedented cuts in the heart of a pandemic are damaging hundreds of thousands of people’s lives and leading to many avoidable deaths.

There are three examples that I want to mention quickly. The first is education for girls, which the Prime Minister has spoken about so eloquently, and on which British policy has been driven passionately and effectively by my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin). However, we are cutting that investment by 40%, meaning that 700,000 fewer girls will get into education, and we are also cutting by 60% our grant to UNICEF, the agency that is the very engine of getting girls into school. In 2010, the British Government doubled their UNICEF grant. A third of all girls in secondary schools in Africa drop out because they become pregnant, yet we are cutting by 85% our funding of the work of the United Nations family planning agency across the world. That is not, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead indicated, joined-up government.

[Anna McMorrin]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that it is often women and girls across the world who face the brunt of climate change in their own communities, and that the cutting back of aid within those countries and communities is not only having a devastating effect over there but, given the interconnected nature of climate change, is impacting on us here? In the year of COP, five months away from it, surely we should expect better from this Government.

[Mr Mitchell]

The hon. Lady makes an extremely good point. We cannot understand international development unless we see it through the eyes of girls and women.

My second point, which has already been mentioned, is on the 90% cut in funding for work on neglected tropical diseases. That funding is a huge British taxpayer investment. It is also one of the best investments we can make in global health. The Prime Minister, in a superb video earlier this year, promised strongly to support that work, yet it has now been cut by 90%. That means that 74 million schoolchildren will not receive drugs to prevent parasitic worms. It means that huge numbers will be maimed, blinded, debilitated, disabled and killed. The UK was a world leader in this extraordinarily important area, stimulating public and private sector partnerships. As a result of this cut, hundreds of millions of drugs, vaccines and tablets will be wasted and probably burned.

My third point has been very well made by my hon. Friends the Members for Somerton and Frome (David Warburton) and for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron). It is about the work of the British Council, the Voluntary Service Overseas and the International Citizen Service, which I had the privilege of setting up some 10 years ago. There is no clarity about the future funding of the International Citizen Service, which has sent thousands and thousands of youngsters overseas, many of them not from well-off families but from families that were on free school meals. They have been brilliant ambassadors for our country as well as doing such a good job in international development. The British Council, which I know my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay is going to talk about, is now far more self-sufficient in raising its own money and giving the taxpayer a better deal than ever before, and to let it down in this way is really quite wrong. Is it any wonder that my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead rather movingly made the 0.7% her first pledge in 2017 general election?

I want to draw the House’s attention to the words of the deputy Foreign Secretary—the Minister for the Middle East and North Africa, my right hon. Friend the Member for Braintree (James Cleverly)—who, as little time ago as 9 July last year, said this from the Dispatch Box:

“The Government remain completely committed to the 0.7% of GNI to ODA. That has been called into question a number of times, so I will repeat myself, despite the fact that my time is short: the Government are completely committed to the 0.7% target…That commitment is embedded in law, but we do not spend 0.7% because it is embedded in law—we spend 0.7% because it is the right thing to do.”—[Official Report, 9 July 2020; Vol. 678, c. 1198-1200.]

I end on two points. First, when are the Government going to abide by Mr Speaker’s instruction to the House at 3.30 pm on 14 June to bring forward a meaningful vote? Secondly, post-Brexit, with the emphasis on returning powers to this Parliament, we stand here today on an issue where we all promised—all 650 of us—to stand by the 0.7%. It is an issue on which the Government gave undertakings on the floor of the United Nations General Assembly; that is enshrined in law, with the most senior lawyers in the country warning that the Government have changed the 0.7% and not missed the target; and on which the Government have avoided a vote on the Floor of this House because they know they will lose it. If that is the case, what is the point of the good people of the royal town of Sutton Coldfield sending me here? What has become of the pride we all feel in being Members of this place? If we cannot secure a vote on an issue of life and death, do we not need to look afresh at the balance of power between the Executive—the Government—and the legislature of this House of Commons, in order that we do have powers to vote on something that is so important and to which so many of us have been, for years, so committed?