International Aid: Treasury Update

Bim Afolami Excerpts

Programme motion
Tuesday 13th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Bim Afolami (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

This is a very difficult debate, because all of us, on both sides of the House, know what good UK aid spending does. We are all proud of what we have been able to achieve with our aid spending. It does not just help in and of itself; it also helps the British taxpayer and British people because, by investing in areas like education, vaccination and supporting local economies, we stop some of those problems washing up on British shores.

We understand that but, when we get underneath all this, it is really about competing political necessities and competing political choices. On the one hand, as we come out of the covid pandemic—we know how many hundreds of billions of pounds have been spent—we have a real need, as a responsible Government in fiscal terms, to get our day-to-day spending back in balance and to ensure that our debt ends up falling as a percentage of GDP. That will enable the public spending to support all the vulnerable people in this country—all British taxpayers everywhere—as well as the poorest people in the world through aid spending. At the same time, there is a need to help the poorest people in the world. That is the balance that we are trying to strike, and I believe that the Government have struck the right one.

Some hon. Members have talked about the fiscal tests the Government have set, and they somehow suggest that the tests have been met only once in the past 20 years. I have looked at it, and both tests were met in 2000-01, 2001-02 and 2018-19. If I am right, although the Chancellor may correct me if I am wrong, underlying debt fell for four years in a row before the pandemic, so it is not true that, somehow, these are impossible tests.

Even if hon. Members do not believe me, the key thing, and this is why I respect and accept this compromise position, is that these are transparent and clear criteria. Everybody knows what they are. We can judge them independently, and the OBR, which we all know and trust, is perfectly capable of doing so. Finally, what is important is not just how much money is spent but how we spend it. What I would like to see in our aid budget is more of that money, not just with multinationals, which do a lot of good work, but for smaller charities working on the ground such as Harpenden Spotlight on Africa, which is based in my constituency and does fantastic work in rural Uganda. Having seen the work that it does on the ground, working with bigger multinationals and the Ugandan Government, I know that such charities can do fantastic things, and I would like to see the spend that we have, at 0.5% temporarily, go more towards some of those grassroots organisations so that we can spend our money even more effectively and get more for what we are doing.