Official Development Assistance

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe Excerpts

Thursday 15th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, for enabling us to focus on this important subject. In 2020, the Government decided to reduce our ODA spending to 0.5% of GNI, down from the hard-won UN target of 0.7%. This has had a hugely damaging impact on critical aid and development programmes. The outcry at the time was widespread and has not abated. The noble Lord set out the damage vividly. In my view—and I say this with great regret—the Government’s recent approach to international aid and development is shameful. The list of global humanitarian crises continues to grow. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the appalling flooding in Pakistan and the food crisis in the Horn of Africa have all added to existing challenges arising from conflict, climate change and Covid-19. Yet, as the humanitarian need grows, our approach is to cut our funding and take steps back from our global responsibilities—indeed, our global promise—to help the world’s most vulnerable people.

A reduction in our aid spending of £3 billion, 21%, in the space of a year from 2020 to 2021, undermines any aspirations the UK might have had to be a leader in global development. Yesterday, on the “Today” programme, David Miliband of the International Rescue Committee referred to the swingeing budget cuts and quoted Andrew Mitchell, Minister of State for International Development, saying that Britain is no longer an aid superpower, and the price is being paid by the poorest people in the world. Not only is supporting the world’s poorest the right thing to do, but our global standing is boosted by strong leadership in this area. Cutting our aid budget does reputational damage to the UK, diminishes our international standing and, I believe, signals a retreat from the world stage.

In 2020, only Germany spent more than us on aid in both absolute and proportional terms. With the reduction to 0.5%, the UK slipped from sixth in the world in terms of aid as a percentage of GNI to ninth in 2021. It took long years of work to reach the target of 2013, which was proudly supported by the then Chancellor, George Osborne, who called it a historic achievement. But by 2020 our promise to the world’s poorest had been broken, and in 2021, hosting refugees in the UK had become the biggest sector for ODA spending, as the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, said. Last year, more than £1 billion, or 14% of the bilateral aid budget, went on UK refugee costs, in contrast to the £743 million going to humanitarian aid. I understand that using ODA in this way is accepted by the OECD Development Assistance Committee, but no other G7 country is using its aid budget for this purpose. The knock-on effect for other essential programmes funded by the reduced ODA budget is severe. We must, of course, support refugees, but, as Oxfam points out, surely not at the expense of life-saving humanitarian aid or development projects that reduce poverty and help prevent the very crises that can cause forced displacement.

How much further will we fall in our global responsibilities and international standing? I am fearful that this temporary reduction in ODA spending to 0.5% of GNI will become permanent. I am neither an economist nor a fiscal expert, so I have grappled with the detail of the two conditions set out earlier this year that have to be met before the UK will return to the 0.7% target. Can the Minister tell us how often those two conditions have been met in recent years? I fear that we are setting the bar so high that it makes the target impossible to achieve, but is this the intention? Will he expand on what the “sustainable basis” for these conditions might look like? This phrase is surely open to wide interpretation.

I briefly mentioned the impact of the ODA cuts to critical aid and development programmes. What has not been given as much attention is the direct damage the cuts will do to research institutions, scientists and researchers in DAC countries and to the people in low-income countries whom the ODA research funding is intended to benefit. The outcry over the ODA cuts from research institutions and scientific societies acknowledges the damage they will do to progressing life-saving and health-promoting programmes.

For the UK, our reputation as a global funder and major contributor to science and human development is at stake. I have a continued interest as the former CEO of Universities UK when we set up an international unit to help UK universities build sustainable relationships with international institutions, researchers, students and partners. While our universities recognise that ODA funding exists primarily to benefit other countries, ODA funding has become an integral part of university research and global or international strategies. It has helped drive universities’ commitments to meeting the UN sustainable development goals, by embedding them within institutional research strategies. The UUK International report last year said that ODA had

“contributed to the university ecosystem and global reputation, and changed the way international research is conducted.”

The Global Challenges Research Fund and the Newton Fund are both recipients of ODA money, and have enabled UK universities to, for example, play key roles in efforts to develop renewable energy and clean water technology; improve worldwide labour laws; and roll out 5G networks in lower- and middle-income countries. In 2021, ODA-funded projects enabled UK universities to support the national effort against Covid-19, through enhanced virus-detection technology. ODA funding has enabled UK universities to deliver projects that have improved the lives of millions around the world. UUKi has said that cuts to the ODA spend on the scale announced will “severely limit” UK universities’ ability to tackle global challenges and are likely to lead to

“the termination of existing and future research projects, damaging the sector’s international standing and reducing its capacity to drive economic growth and prosperity in the UK.”

In July 2020, the then FCDO Minister in the other place asserted that

“being a global force for good”

was

“at the heart of the UK’s foreign policy”.—[Official Report, Commons, 9/7/20; col. 1200.]

Given the direction of ODA spending, what assurance can the Minister give us that this is still the case?