Development Aid Budget

Baroness Verma Excerpts

Monday 3rd July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma (Con)]

My Lords, I join all noble Lords in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, on securing the debate. It is a great honour to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Truro. I agree with him that this is not just about measuring aid in financial terms. However, most of the data we collect have to have an output somewhere—and, as often as not, it is measured in financial terms.

I had the privilege of serving as a Minister in DfID. I reassure noble Lords that the Government I served in were mindful of the way the media reported on how aid from the UK was spent. I can tell noble Lords that under Justine Greening—and, I am sure, under the current Secretary of State—there was a real pressure on all of us to justify how we funded programmes. However, it is important that we also acknowledge that, unless we collect data and then have the ability to measure outcomes, it will always service those people who have a negative or less favourable view on the impact of aid.

We talk about development aid as we used to talk about it 30 or 40 years ago. The world has changed dramatically in terms of the countries that we now support or the countries that support us in helping others. Our approach and narrative need to change with it. I refer noble Lords to my own interests as declared in the House of Lords register. I support a platform that encourages working with the UN on collecting data through blockchain to measure how the private sector works with Governments and the third sector, and to see how money put in is spent and what outcomes can be measured. For far too long, we have allowed the third sector and the corporate sector to operate on their own. We need to encourage work across all three parts of the equation, so that government, the third sector and the corporate sector are accountable to the people whom we all desperately want to help.

We also need to ensure that the agencies that we support reform and work better together. I had the task of looking at the agencies in the UN and the EU. Often, they did not talk to one another. If we look at the SDGs and focus just on women and girls, we see that they have multiple challenges. It is not that they have challenges in respect of just one SDG; the SDGs have an impact on them across an age spectrum, an ability/disability spectrum as well as all the other challenges that women and girls face. We need to make sure that the department continues to press hard and that the agencies that we fund deliver to the standards that we expect of them. However, there must also be transparency and they must show that they are not working completely in silos.

I want to encourage those of us who make a difference to the third sector to ask those in it to work better together so that their data are gathered collectively and we can have much more of an ecosystem response to the impact of what third sector agencies do. Agencies themselves often operate in silos. It is important that they come together and demonstrate that they can work collectively across multiple facets that have an impact on individuals in developing countries.

I am really pleased that the department is making available funds for smaller organisations, because it is the grass-roots, face-to-face impact of smaller organisations, particularly those which innovate within the development space, that we do not always manage to measure from some of our big organisations.

I encourage my noble friend to look at the whole ecosystem of how we deliver aid and not to look at it as a stop-start process. We often forget that, throughout the cycle, many challenges face older people within developing nations. I was horrified to find that all data collection for women stops at the age of 49. I hope that that is being challenged and that, as aid works and as people live longer in developing countries, we are able to measure beyond the age of 49. I hope that we are able to support the United Nations convention on older people.

I worked incredibly hard within the department to look at inclusive societies. While some countries still sit outside a number of areas that this country is proud to support, I hope that we will not stop with our gentle, soft diplomacy as well as some of the hard conversations that other departments can have. I hope that we will not take our foot off the pedal on making sure that we continue to work on our mission of inclusive societies.

I come back to the measurement of data. It is critical and crucial that, when we get negative stories, they are countered quickly. A lot of our departments deliver aid—the Foreign Office, the Department of Health and the Ministry of Defence—and it is absolutely critical that those departments have the same measurements and transparency tools that we had, which I saw and that the Minister is absolutely aware of in DfID. Unless we have that consistency across all departments, we will continue to firefight some of these rather ridiculous stories that come out in the press now and then.

We should be incredibly proud of the fact that we are a country committed to the poorest people on the planet. That does not mean that we should not also fight hard to stop the discriminating tariffs that prevent these countries from developing economically on their own. It is really important that we help them economically build up their own marketplace and infrastructure in their own countries. As the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, said, in doing that we should also focus on capacity building. The reason we have a lot of issues around young people in developing countries is because they have a dividend of young people. It is a great advantage to have those young people if they can be engaged in meaningful education and employment in their countries.

If anything, we should really try to work harder on this—not only ourselves but other countries, too. That is not just like-minded countries; I worked incredibly hard with unlike-minded countries. At the end of the day, they have a very different vision of what they see as aid. They were looking to the UK for support in delivering their aid programmes. So it is about looking at new partners and old, but not forgetting that we have been a world leader. Our narrative needs to remain that we are a world leader. Sometimes, we need to stand up even more firmly to those who try to change the goalposts simply because it is politically astute to do so in their home countries.