International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Baroness Primarolo Excerpts

Friday 5th December 2014 Commons Chamber

If I might deviate slightly, Madam Deputy Speaker, I am delighted to see you take your place and I wanted to take this opportunity to apologise to you for my behaviour last week. I spoke to you in a way in which I should not have done, and I said things that I should not have said. I think you realise that I felt aggrieved, but no matter about that. I should not have said what I said, and therefore I hope that you will accept, in a brief deviation, my apology, sincerely and genuinely meant, for what I said to you last week.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)]

Mr Davies, that is very gracious of you. We both made our views clear last week, but today is another day. Of course I accept your apologies, because I know that you would not mean any discourtesy to the House or to whomever was in the Chair. Please continue with your speech in order.

[Philip Davies]

Thank you for graciousness in accepting my apology, Madam Deputy Speaker, which is, I might add, typical of you.

After that brief interlude, amendment 37 would remove clause 6(2), which states that the Act will come into effect in June 2015. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch has tabled a sensible amendment, and I cannot see why anybody should object to it, to the effect that the legislation should come into effect the following January. It is the will of those who promoted and sponsored the Bill, and of those on both Front Benches, that it should be a calendar year operation. I think I have made it clear that it should operate on a financial year basis. Given that they have proposed that the Bill should operate on a calendar year basis, it is quite extraordinary that they have included the provision that it should come into effect in June 2015.

How on earth do we square that circle? How on earth will we determine, at the end of 2015, whether the Government have hit their half-yearly target? If they have overspent in the first bit of 2015 but underspent in the second bit of 2015, will the evaluation state that they have missed their target, even if they have spent 0.7% over the whole year? I am happy to be corrected by anybody who claims to know any better, but it seems to me that if the Bill comes into effect in June 2015, the Government will be required to have spent 0.35% on overseas aid between June and the end of the year, otherwise they will have broken the rules. If the Government had spent, for argument’s sake, 0.4% between January and June, and at the end of the year the international body that is set up to scrutinise how much every country has spent says that we have spent 0.72%, are we going to chastise ourselves because in the second half of the year we did not meet the legal requirement? I genuinely do not understand that. Perhaps the Minister could explain what his obligations will be under the Bill as drafted.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Hunter]

claimed to move the closure (Standing Order No. 36).

Question put forthwith, That the Question be now put.

The House proceeded to a Division.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)]

I ask the Serjeant at Arms to investigate the delay in the No Lobby.