International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Friday 23rd January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, to be speaker No. 33 on a day such as this, when we have had the privilege of listening to so many outstanding speeches, is a tough call. It would be invidious to highlight too many individual speeches, but I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Purvis of Tweed for the way in which he introduced the debate and to my noble friend Lord Fox. Making a maiden speech in a Chamber full of noble Lords as knowledgeable as your Lordships is never easy and I thought he carried that off with great aplomb.

I return to the one speech from today that really went to the heart of our debate: the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey. It will horrify the noble Lord that, not for the first time, he and I have been thinking upon the same lines. He posed the question, “Why put this target into law?”, and drew the analogy with our domestic commitments to health and social care in spending on the NHS. I had been thinking upon exactly the same lines. He is right in his analogy. If one goes back and looks at the debates held in another place, some of those speeches might seem slightly reckless. They were full of the rather populist statement, “Why should we put international aid spending into law? Why not put a percentage into defence spending?”. It is exactly the same argument.

International aid is a very difficult and complex subject to explain domestically. It deals with issues that are largely endemic and have often been considered intractable in countries that are far away, issues which often disproportionately affect those parts of the population most demonised and marginalised. The mechanisms for resolving those issues are really complex. It is a Sun headline-writer’s dream. That is the very reason we should be bold and say we are willing to make this commitment today. We know and understand that the issues with which we are dealing are international issues.

As noble Lords know, I come from a health background. Public health is now an international matter. Tackling HIV and AIDS, malaria and resistance to TB and antibiotics can no longer be done on a country-by-country basis. The noble Lord, Lord Fowler, and I attended a dinner a few weeks ago where a British research scientist, whose work is underpinned by international aid, sat and told us without any hesitation whatever that we will not conquer these diseases unless we do research in those countries abroad. The funding for that research will not come entirely from the private sector. It will come from partnerships between Governments, international funds and the private sector. We have a record in the past 10 to 15 years of driving the efficiency and effectiveness of those bodies in furthering that research—a record of which we should be proud, but for which we get very little recognition.

Another point has been made which has not yet been answered. It has been asked whether we will tie the hands of future Governments. No, we will not, but we will require of a future Government that, if they wish to overturn this legislation, they will have to make their case in a manifesto and come to Parliament to explain it, just as we have been putting forward our case today. I think that that would be no bad thing. As other speakers have alluded to, in times of austerity it is extremely easy to become very narrowly focused and to make very cheap and obvious points. This is a hard sell for an investment which is difficult and may take many years to come to fruition, but it is an investment which matters as much to the generation of people whom I care about in this country—the young people whom I know and meet every day—as it does to those most marginalised people in some of the poorest countries on earth.

What we are doing today is not popular—it is certainly not populist—but it is the wise and right thing to do, and we should do it without delay.