Official Development Assistance

Baroness Sheehan Excerpts

Thursday 15th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sheehan (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson of Abinger. I agree wholeheartedly with every word she said. I thank my noble friend Lady Northover for initiating this debate and regret the circumstances which prevented her moving the Motion herself. I commend my noble friend Lord Bruce of Bennachie for the way in which he introduced the debate, and for giving us the benefit of his breadth and depth of knowledge in this area.

Let me start by taking, like so many others have in this House, a moment of pride in the country in which we live. I refer of course to the moment in 2015 when the International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act put into law the long-standing call by the UN for donor countries to spend 0.7 % of their GNI on official development assistance. However, in November 2020, despite a commitment in the Conservative Party manifesto—at this point, I just say that I welcome the contribution to the debate of the noble Lord, Lord Hannan. He talked about the democratic process being undermined. A manifesto commitment being cast aside helps make my point that the democratic process is certainly not undermined and that Governments giving commitments should stick very much within them.

The commitment to 0.7% in the manifesto was cast aside and reduced to 0.5%. This happened at a time when the Covid crisis had increased the need for our support for and commitment to the world’s poorest. It has been compounded by the hardship caused by the war in Ukraine in the immediate impact of the food shortages, not least in east Africa, and in other ways that I will come on to later.

While this cut was agreed by the Commons in July 2021, it had in fact started with immediate effect the previous November, in a chaotic and one might say callous manner, which I think the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, referred to and which the then FCDO Secretary of State did so little to mitigate. With very little warning, aid programmes including study grants were terminated midstream. This, at least, with some foresight, thought and compassion, could have been done differently. So much for Conservative compassion.

At this point I will give a little example from my own experience. I am a trustee of the Malaria Consortium and very much agree with all the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg. The Malaria Consortium had a programme in Nigeria, SuNMaP 2, which was terminated immediately on the announcement. This completely undermined about a decade’s work that had put in place, together with the local, regional and central Governments in Nigeria, systems that were really beginning to bear fruit and embed processes in that country. This was all lost at a stroke. It is such a tragedy.

It is welcome that we now have a Minister in charge of development who is respected by the development community. However, unless the fundamentals of aid delivery are recognised and until such a time as openness, transparency and accountability again become core elements of the aid budget, he will be in place but not in control.

This Government’s record of letting down the poorest in the world remains deplorable. Just last month the FCDO announced that the ODA budget had been reduced to £7.6 billion for 2022-23, a £1.7 billion cut compared with the budget the Government started the financial year with. This depletion of the already-reduced aid budget is a direct result of the UK Government increasingly seeking to meet the cost of hosting refugees domestically from the ODA budget. Here, I register my involvement in the Homes for Ukraine scheme, under which I am sponsoring a family. While earmarking ODA to meet the costs of hosting refugees domestically is permitted under the OECD DAC rules, the UK is the only G7 country to fund all the costs of hosting Ukrainian refugees from the aid budget.

To put this in context, in 2021 more than £1 billion, which represents the largest proportion of the bilateral aid budget at 14%, was diverted to the Home Office to meet UK refugee costs. Over the same period, £743 million was lost on humanitarian aid, which dropped by a whopping 51% compared with 2020. While the Government recently committed an additional £2.5 billion over two years to cover the costs of hosting refugees, taking the UK’s ODA budget up to 0.55% of GNI, this will not be enough to cover the shortfall.

Diverting money from the aid budget to in-country refugee spending is morally wrong. The Government are effectively providing a blank cheque to the Home Office in the form of the ODA budget, asking the world’s most vulnerable communities to foot the bill for the UK’s international legal obligation to refugees.

I am going to finish on loss and damage. The UK provides climate financing in the form of grants, which are crucial to ensure that countries such as those in east Africa do not go into debt in putting in place adaptation measures to prevent climate devastation. It is important that this future-proofing continues, not least because it will help to stem refugee flows from those regions.

I welcome the major achievement of COP 27 in establishing for the first time a fund for loss and damage. That is an historic achievement, and it is crucial that it is urgently operationalised so that countries on the front line of the climate crisis can quickly access fair and automatic financial assistance and support in the wake of both immediate climate impacts and slow-onset impacts such as sea-level rise.

I have two questions for the Minister. First, what work have the Government done on how a loss and damage finance facility should function and how contributions should be calculated? Secondly, will the Government consider a debt-swap arrangement such as the one advocated by the Maldives, where the debt of vulnerable countries is cancelled in exchange for commitments to invest in high-quality decarbonisation projects? They would dearly like to do both but cannot afford to. Loss and damage is really important. After all—

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

My Lords, I remind the noble Baroness of the time limit.

[Baroness Sheehan (LD)]

I am just about to finish. The polluter pays principle is well established. Why should it not apply equally to the developing world, which after all did nothing to cause the climate devastation that we see with increasing frequency?