International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts

Friday 6th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I appreciate what the noble Countess is saying but the point is central regardless of which “the” the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, intended to remove. This is the sensible debate we should to have.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)]

My Lords, I have been listening very carefully but I have yet to hear any justification for the actual amendment that is on the Marshalled List.

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

We are trying to have, I hope, a sensible, analytical debate in your Lordships’ House on how we can strengthen this Bill and make it more effective. I have tried to speak to the amendment and I am sorry that the noble Baroness feels that she does not want to hear what I have got to say. However, I do have some important things to say on this matter.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton]

I understood the mover of the amendment to accept that it was not what he intended to achieve. He was corrected by the noble Lord who moved this part of the Bill. It is therefore wrong for people to speak to what they wished the amendment to say rather than what it does say.

[Lord Skelmersdale (Con)]

I wonder whether the noble Baroness was listening when the Lord Speaker put the question. She put it very clearly that what we are discussing is the second “the” and not the first.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

The noble Countess says no. I could go through the whole of the report strengthening the point about targets. I am picking up only headline points. For example:

“The Department added activities at short notice in 2013 which constrained choice … The activities the Department added in 2013 reduced its available budget at the start of 2014, and contributed to the delay of some of its planned activities”.

What that means is that the fact that it had been given a statutory target meant that some people in desperate need around the world had their projects cancelled because of the financial management difficulties imposed by having a target.

The NAO also found:

“The limited flexibility in the target led to the Department rescheduling payments in 2013, first to increase outturn, and then to reduce it … The Department phased its contributions to 2 key multilateral organisations to increase 2013 ODA”.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton]

My Lords, I am now puzzled. Usually, I can follow the logic of the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth. The obvious logic, the House may feel, would have been to group together a whole lot of amendments, because that would have led to clarity about what we were discussing.

However, in my experience over the years, all departments and all Governments have set a financial limit for the year. I do not recognise the world that the noble Lord is speaking of, in which projects are not deferred because the department is coming to the end of the financial year without money. I well remember the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, as Secretary of State, allowing youth services to spend money providing that they committed to it within a week. An officer in Lancashire had to follow me down the railway station platform so that I could sign the application. This is managing budgets. The noble Lord must accept that all budgets are fixed and that there are management difficulties at the end of the year with that. I wish that noble Lords who are confusing the issue of how the budget is set—

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

I apologise to the noble Baroness, but I think that she is making a Second Reading speech with that intervention. I have to ask her whether she has read the report.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton]

I have.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

No, she has not, because if she had read the report she would not have made that intervention. The problem arises because the target of 0.7% is over a calendar year, so from January to December it is necessary to reach 0.7%, but the department’s budget period runs from April. Therefore, it is trying to manage programmes in respect of one financial year against a target set over a different financial year. The reason for that is because the Government are trying to set an example to other countries by meeting what they believe to be the UN target, which is measured over the calendar year in order to get equivalence.

The effect of that is that the unfortunate civil servants in DfID find themselves having to organise the budget with those two financial years. Even then, it is further complicated by the fact that only 82% of that budget is within the control of the department, because another bit of the budget is spent on environmental measures and another is spent by the Foreign Office, over which it has no control, so the civil servants have to find out what is happening in those other departments. The effect is that they end up shuffling money or writing cheques to multilateral organisations to meet the target when they should be concentrating on using the available resources efficiently and effectively to do the best for people in abject poverty around the world.

I know that the noble Baroness and others think that this is some kind of exercise to try to stop the Bill. I do not wish to stop the Bill, but I wish it to operate in a way that ensures value for money for the taxpayer and that projects around the globe are properly supported, not subject to some last-minute financial juggling in order to meet a ridiculous, but no doubt well intentioned, target in the Bill.

The amendment which my noble friend Lord Lawson was trying to move—the House was very discourteous to him over that—draws attention to that. The very same point was made two years ago by the Economic Affairs Committee unanimously, with all-party support—