International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Baroness Manzoor Excerpts

Friday 6th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lawson of Blaby]

I am speaking to the amendment. It is a very modest amendment: it just introduces the word “a”. The purpose of the amendment is to give the Secretary of State slightly greater flexibility which can be used in the light of changing circumstances as they evolve in the future. That is clearly desirable.

It is one of a number of amendments and I must explain to the noble Countess why it is necessary to look more broadly. A large number of amendments are down on the Marshalled List, which noble Lords will have recognised. None of them is a wrecking amendment. They are all designed to make the Bill somewhat less bad. I hope that that is a proper exercise for this Committee to be engaged in.

Noble Lords will have noticed that pretty much all the signatories to the amendments on the Marshalled List were members of the Economic Affairs Committee of this House under the excellent chairmanship of my noble friend Lord MacGregor when we produced our report in 2012 on the economic effectiveness of development aid. We produced a unanimous, all-party report based entirely on the evidence, which was overwhelming. I reassure the noble Countess that I am not going to make this speech on each of the amendments, but this is the first one and it is necessary to explain why we have put down all these different amendments to try to make the Bill slightly less bad.

The Economic Affairs Committee report had a number of findings. First, it found that the 0.7% target should not be a plank, let alone the main plank, of British aid policy. Secondly, it found that the,

“Government should therefore drop its commitment”,

to establish in law the requirement to spend 0.7% of GNI on aid. Thirdly, it found that,

“the evidence that aid makes a contribution to growth in recipient countries is inconclusive”.

But aid certainly makes a great contribution to corruption in recipient countries. This is a major problem which comes up time and again and was most recently identified in the report of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee earlier this week.

Since this is a Liberal Democrat Bill, if the Committee will allow me, I will quote from a letter written to me by—

[Baroness Manzoor (LD)]

My Lords, this Bill has cross-party support.

[Lord Lawson of Blaby]

We will see about the support. I am sure my noble friend is right that there different views in different parts of the Committee, but it is significant—and I repeat this since perhaps she did not hear—that the Economic Affairs Committee of this House, which took extensive evidence on this, produced a unanimous all-party report with the conclusions that I summarised a moment ago.