Integrated Review: Development Aid

Baroness Jay of Paddington Excerpts

Wednesday 28th April 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jay of Paddington (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I am sure the Minister has registered that this well-attended debate secured by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, is the third time in the past week that your Lordships have raised deep concerns about the cuts to ODA. This is a profoundly serious matter of policy and reputation, and I am very proud that the House is pursuing it so vigorously.

This is also my first opportunity to pay tribute to my friend Lord Judd, whose clear and firm voice on development we miss today. He was always my important mentor when I was chair of the Overseas Development Institute and he was enthusiastically involved in all the NGOs and aid charities that exist. This is a crucial sector in development and I particularly mention the work of VSO, of which Frank Judd was the onetime director.

VSO is now 50 years old and has continuously delivered vital programmes to the world’s poorest people. It has played a constant, central role in making the UK what the integrated review calls “a soft power superpower”. But on 23 April, VSO was told that its funding is to be cut by 45% and will be given for only one year. As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, mentioned, it is now reckoned that 4 million people will lose its services. I have been a short-term VSO volunteer in Africa three times and can vouch wholeheartedly for those services. They chime precisely with the Government’s priorities on girls’ education and health security, especially in the pandemic.

To be successful, these services must have consistent and predictable funding—the “thoughtful investment” that the integrated review has called for. Short-term erratic growth will undermine decades of careful work on projects which cannot be revived instantly if ODA levels are sometimes restored. I fear that this policy will prove as practically short-sighted as it is politically indefensible.