Spending Review 2020

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

Thursday 3rd December 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, on 23 October 1984 I, like millions of others, watched Michael Buerk’s harrowing report on the Ethiopian famine. The words and images still reverberate with me today, these in particular:

“This three year-old girl was beyond any help: unable to take food, attached to a drip but too late; the drip was taken away. Only minutes later, while we were filming, she died. Her mother had lost all her four children and her husband.”


I was 14 at the time and there was something about that simple statement that overwhelmed me. It was so relatable and so devastating. That is where my politics began.

This spending review takes us back to those days, because then, just like now, the Government were cutting the share of our wealth that we spend on the poorest of the world—from 0.5% of GNI in 1979 to 0.33% in 1984 and just 0.27% in 1990. The lesson is that, once they start cutting the aid budget, they do not stop.

In later years I worked in a number of countries in Africa and saw the impact of our aid: the suffering it alleviated, the huge progress in raising people out of poverty, and the stunning success in tackling disease. So I was immensely proud to be in the Cabinet meeting when it was confirmed that the coalition had met the Liberal Democrat manifesto commitment to spend 0.7% of GNI on development. However, despite that success, we still had not met the Conservative manifesto pledge, which was to put that commitment into law. So, in 2014, my friend Mike Moore and my noble friend Lord Purvis moved decisively to rescue the Conservatives from this failure by introducing a Private Member’s Bill which became the International Development Act 2015, narrowly saving the Tories from betraying their own manifesto commitment.

My noble friends and I intend to provide that service to the Conservative Party once again, by ensuring that the December 2019 Conservative manifesto commitment is upheld, and the shameful policy of penalising the poorest in the world in their hour of greatest need is rejected.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood.

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, looking across the northern business landscape, as I do, from the perspective of chair of the Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership, the prospect is not cheerful. But the spending review is a start—a real start—on the road to employment and prosperity, which are two sides of the same coin.

Having said that, it is far from a complete solution by itself. Levelling up is hugely important and welcome, and infrastructure projects will play a part—albeit a relatively straightforward and visible part—of a much larger, more complicated and less obviously visible process of dealing with the consequences of Covid-19 and the implications of the end of the Brexit transition period. Whatever the latter may bring, there is agreement across all ranges of opinion that there is going to be real economic turbulence and upheaval, likely in many cases to be exacerbated by the existential implications of Covid having taken focus away from both its problems and its opportunities. As I have said on a number of occasions, if you are in a shipwreck, saving your baggage is low on your list of priorities.

My concern in these remarks, based on my own observations and experience, is the plight of small businesses—one-man bands, family businesses with an employee or two: that part of the economy. They do not have sharp-suited, smooth-talking lobbyists in Whitehall and Westminster. Present initiatives do not appear to be reaching them as hoped. These businesses and families are the bedrock of this country. Many have been ruined or enormously damaged financially; they are frightened by what lies ahead and their morale is low. They need the economic equivalent of what the National Health Service is giving Covid patients; they need genuine, relevant assistance and support, based on actual experience and a pragmatic understanding of the real world, not academia, think tanks or governance and administration—and they need it now. The impact of what is happening will last for years, if not decades, and the survivors of this unprecedented chapter in our history will be the launch pad for the next stage of recovery. The cure for the public finances must not be allowed to kill them, because each and every survivor is part of the future, and we need every one.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

save-line3The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, has withdrawn so I call the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh.