Safeguarding in the Aid Sector

Earl of Sandwich Excerpts

Tuesday 20th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

My noble friend is absolutely right on this. There is a core problem which we have seen across different organisations. We have had to wrestle with these issues in recent years: the fear of asking the difficult probing questions when they are needed or the failure to be transparent about what has happened. Organisations are doing that—one does not like to say “for understandable reasons”—because they want to protect the reputation of the organisation. If anyone wants to know whether that works, ask Oxfam today when its reputation has been so tarnished and damaged by the failure to take that kind of prompt action and to ask the most difficult and searching questions in these areas at the right time.

[The Earl of Sandwich (CB)]

My Lords, this is a very painful affair for all of us who have been concerned with aid over many years. I have not worked directly with Oxfam, but I have worked alongside it and on this occasion I want to pay tribute to what the noble Lord, Lord Judd, achieved over many years in bringing standards up over that period. We must not forget what has already been done. The Secretary of State is new and it is quite right that she should send a powerful message to the aid agencies, especially those in receipt of public funds. It is obviously a shocking affair. However, the Minister has considerable experience and knows that there are limits on outrage that can be expressed. Does he not think that collectively the Government and the statutory agencies have gone over the top on this? It is not happening on the scale suggested by the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan. As other noble Lords have said, the danger is that it is affecting the work that is going on all the time all over the world. The noble Lord, Lord Collins, made this point, and Andrew Mitchell said it, as did Anna Soubry. The Secretary of State seems to understand this, but only in the last sentence of the Statement.

[Lord Bates]

We need to communicate that, but the noble Earl will recognise that we have had many debates on these things and we are almost always on exactly the same page. The message needs to go out that there is zero tolerance on this. We need to come down very hard to change the culture within the aid sector. That was one of the reasons why the previous Secretary of State took such a strong approach on the allegations against UN peacekeepers and was at the forefront of driving that up the agenda, to the extent that it was at the UN General Assembly and the Secretary-General has taken action on it because it goes to the heart of the problem. People who are there have a duty to protect, not to exploit. As in every type of organisation and institution that faces allegations of this type, the very few people who are doing this are having a devastating effect on the 99% of people who are carrying out that work selflessly and, as my noble friend said earlier, putting their lives at risk to help others, which is in the great tradition. It is in their interests and for them that we ought to be so ruthless in rooting it out.