Integrated Review: Development Aid

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Wednesday 28th April 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Hayman (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I declare the interests that I have set out in the register. The devastating human costs of the Government’s decision to renege on their manifesto commitment to maintain ODA spending at 0.7% of GDP have been clearly articulated throughout the week in your Lordships’ House, and already today in this debate. But my noble friend Lord Alton asks us to examine those cuts in relation to the Government’s strategic review and their stated aims. I shall focus on two of those: the aim to be a science superpower and the aim to be “a soft power superpower”.

Covid and global health are the crises of our times. Climate change is the crisis of our age. Yet these cuts threaten our ability to influence either. In particular, the cuts to UKRI from ODA funds are undermining our efforts in both areas. UK research organisations are seeing cuts in the exact areas where spending in previous years built the capacity in Oxford and elsewhere to produce Covid vaccines at speed. The Royal Society said:

“These are programmes, and relationships, that have taken years to build, and such deep cuts send a message that the UK is a not a reliable partner in long-term science advancement”.


The way in which the cuts are focused on bilateral funding means that the sense of our not being a reliable partner will be felt in many countries, including those worst affected by climate change and those we most need to influence to join our efforts to combat climate change in the year in which we host both the G7 and COP 26. As one commentator put it:

“This decision is the single worst self-inflicted injury in this kind of diplomacy … for a very long time.”