International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Friday 12th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Michael Moore]

First, I acknowledge that the hon. Gentleman was one of the earliest supporters of the Bill and that he has supported it consistently throughout the last few months. He raises an important point, to which I will return in due course. I anticipate that there will be a repost from others in the Chamber, as is the nature of this debate.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

Those of us who have concerns about the Bill are, of course, totally committed to humanitarian aid. However, as the right hon. Gentleman said, there are many competing demands on the Government. For instance, does he think that we should enshrine in legislation a commitment to spend 2% of our gross wealth on defence, which is vital to our security?

[Michael Moore]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. I would be happy, over time, to hear him advocate the case for enshrining that commitment in law. That would be a healthy debate to have. However, as I hope will become clear as I advance my arguments, there is an important case to be made for this Bill and I hope that it will have the support of the whole House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Gordon Brown (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (Lab)]

Let me first thank the former Minister, the right hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Michael Moore), for introducing this important Bill. Let me say, too, that all Members deserve thanks for the way this country has met the target of contributing 0.7% of our national income in aid over these last few years. I hope the background to this debate is that we wish to keep the promises we have made for the future.

Anyone who goes to the children’s museum in Rwanda will see a photograph of a young boy called David. Below that photograph, people will see a number of words that summarise the problem that we have and are dealing with. It says only a few things about the life of this young boy: “David, age 10; favourite sport, football; favourite hobby, making people laugh; ambition, to be a doctor.” Then it says: “Death by mutilation; last words, ‘the United Nations are coming to help us’”. That young boy in his innocence and his idealism believed that the international community was coming to his aid. He believed that what we had said about what we would do in a genocide would lead to action. He believed that when we made promises, we in the international community would keep them. It is to our shame that that young boy died, believing that help would come when it never did.

Now it is too late to keep our promises to that young boy David, but what we are talking about today is how we keep the promises we have made as a country and as an international community. What we are talking about is whether the parties that signed pledges during the last few years—the coalition agreement contained those pledges—are prepared to uphold these pledges, which said specifically that the 0.7% target would be legislated for and put on the statute book by this House and by the House of Lords.

We have not even recently kept the promises that we made in another area. “Why have you abandoned us?”—the five words that a young girl from Syria said to me when she was pleading for help for her country and her family, now that she was exiled in Lebanon. That young girl had been forced out of her home in Homs, her family had been forced into exile and her disabled sister had been forced out on to the streets. She was now in a shack in Lebanon. Yes, she wanted food; yes, she wanted shelter; and yes, she wanted medicine for her sister, but she said to me that she also wanted to go to school. She thought she might be able to go to the schools in Lebanon, and she asked us whether we could make international aid available so that she and other exiled refugees could do that.

The Lebanon Government—I appreciate that the Minister of State, the right hon. Member for New Forest West (Mr Swayne) has just been there—offered to help. They said they would do a double-shift system in the schools by opening up the schools in the evenings so that young people from Syria would have the chance of being educated after the Lebanese children had had their own education earlier in the day. We devised a plan that would cost $200 million and would enable nearly 500,000 children to go to school. That is $4 a week per child—a cost-effective way of getting children back into school.

The British Government have put up money—I thank the Secretary of State for International Development, who is in her place today, for that—as have other Governments, but the brute fact is that 300,000 of these 500,000 children who could go to school are not able to do so because the international aid community has refused to put up enough money to make it possible. While we have achieved $100 million of the $200 million target, we have not been able realise the simple matter of providing $4 a week to get a child into education in Lebanon. It is not because there are no schools for them to go; it is not because we are ignorant of the plight; it is not because there are not enough people willing to help and make it possible: it is because there is a need for international aid, and that aid has not yet been met.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a very powerful emotional argument, which we can all understand and support. He will be aware, however, that serious academic studies, not least by the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee and the Centre for Global Development, question the effectiveness of this target. For instance, they say that

“the speed of the planned increase risks reducing the quality, value for money and accountability of the aid programme”,

and

“the right amount of aid for poor countries should not be based on the size of rich economies but on the needs of a particular poor country itself.”

Will the right hon. Gentleman reply to those serious academic arguments?

[Mr Brown]

First of all, I have to say to the hon. Gentleman that his party made a promise, and it is a duty of a party that makes a promise to try to keep it, to do what the party said and to legislate in law. The problem we face with the general public is that we make promises, but the public still do not trust us to keep them. That is why it is important that this debate leads to action and results. As for the cost-effectiveness of aid, let me provide the hon. Gentleman with another example, and then others might like to enter the debate.

I have recently been to Juba, the capital of South Sudan, the newest country in the world, which is trying to move forward. I went to a village school just outside Juba and I asked the women there—young mothers, many of whom had been child brides at the age of 12 or 13—what they wanted most. Of course, as I said about those in Syria and Lebanon, they needed food, protection, shelter and security, as they were in the midst of the threats and violence that come whenever there is a civil war, but they also said that what they wanted was education for their children.

I went to a small village hut school just outside Juba that was serving that village. There were 20 young children in that very small, one-hut school. What I remember seeing was 100 children outside the school looking in through a portal—one small window in this hut of a school—at something that they could not have because there were only 20 places for a village of hundreds of people.

The plan was drawn up for $200 million to be spent on educating the children of South Sudan. Only a third of children are at school and there are only about 60 girls in the final year of secondary education. The plan cost $4 a week—$200 a year—for these children to get education. The problem was not the willingness of the Government to do it or that there were no plans to do it; the problem was that nobody in the international community was able to come up with the extra $100 million—for a cost-effective project that, at $4 a week, nobody could doubt would be worth the money—despite efforts by this Government and others. Nobody in the international community was able to bring together the $200 million that might have brought children to school.

If anybody is in any doubt about other services, let me say this about education. Education unlocks the future. Education unlocks opportunity. The reason why we can cut child mortality and maternal mortality is that the death rate for educated people and educated mothers is half that of others. If anybody is in any doubt about what education has been able to do, there are 400,000 children who have been brought into school as a result of the aid budget of this Government and the previous Governments, in a way that did not happen before 2000.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Mr Desmond Swayne)]

It is a privilege to follow the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown). He speaks with passion—passion that he showed on this subject throughout his years as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister. He speaks with authority, too, as a representative of the international community. I fear I will not be able to match the authority and passion with which he has spoken, but I have seen the photograph of which he spoke in Rwanda, as I have worked there during the summers for a number of years, and yesterday I had the experience of visiting, and speaking to, Syrian refugees as they were registered at the UNHCR registration centre in Beirut. It was a harrowing experience, during which I struggled to maintain my composure, and my thoughts go out to those young people who do back-to-back interviews all day as they register those refugees with the most appalling stories.

So I acknowledge the work the right hon. Gentleman has done, and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will be going to the United Nations General Assembly on the 24th of this month to make sure we drive forward the agenda that there should be no lost generation in education, and she will be focusing particularly on raising funds for those Syrians to be educated, particularly in Jordan and Lebanon. And Her Majesty’s ambassador, the right hon. Gentleman’s former assistant private secretary, Tom Fletcher, made absolutely clear to me yesterday the importance of the role that the right hon. Gentleman has in this matter.

Some weeks ago earlier this summer, during questions to the Department for International Development an hon. Gentleman, in chiding us for spending so much on international development, told the House that charity should begin at home. Well, it should; it would not be charity if it did not, but I rather suspect that those who coined the phrase had precisely the opposite meaning in mind to the one he attributed to it. For them, charity was indivisible—if you are charitable, you are charitable wherever you are—and it was to be a standing challenge to those who, like the Pharisee, rejoiced over their good works in public while treating their family and their servants with meanness.

That was the true meaning of the term, but that hon. Gentleman’s mistake was even more fundamental, because international development aid is not charity. Charity is what we dip our hand into our own pocket and distribute. Taxpayers’ money is taken from our pocket without our leave, with all the coercive power of the law behind it, so it is essential that it is spent in the national interest.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

The Minister and I have stood shoulder to shoulder for the last 25 years in this place arguing as Conservatives that we should be judged not by how much we spend on something, but by the value for money of what we achieve. Is that not a fair Conservative viewpoint? I and those who share my views on this Bill may be in a minority in this Chamber today, but many millions of Conservatives in the country support what we are saying.

[Mr Swayne]

Of course I have stood shoulder to shoulder with my hon. Friend on many occasions, and indeed I stood shoulder to shoulder with him at the last general election on a manifesto commitment to implement exactly what this Bill is implementing now.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Murphy]

The hon. Gentleman is right to make that point: this legislation seeks to enshrine in law what we are doing now, together. It is a proposal we all support across this House, and we are enshrining in law a current policy that Labour Members argued for and that the Government have started to implement—we welcome that warmly. Of course a future Government would not just be able to undo, with a stroke of a pen, so much of the good work done, and would have to seek to repeal the legislation if they wished to undermine and renege on this 0.7% figure. This would not just be about a line through an annual budget.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

Government is about priorities, and we are already achieving this budget. Is the shadow Minister surprised that in giving his wholehearted support to this Bill and ensuring its passage into Committee, the Minister is ensuring that the EU referendum Bill—the Government claim this is a passionate part of our belief that we are determined to bring forward—will never happen?

[Mr Murphy]

I do not have much voice left to talk about referendums, so let us concentrate on one at a time. I thought the Minister made a good, passionate and personal speech. I am more surprised that the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) is intending to vote against the manifesto commitment he stood on at the last general election than I am by anything the Minister said.

Labour Members believe that if the Bill becomes law, it will secure a vital marker in a journey that can be traced back through the establishment of the Department for International Development by the incoming Labour Government in 1997 and the adoption of this target by the Government back in 1974. In supporting the Bill, I wish to make four brief arguments: aid is needed; aid, properly targeted, is effective; fixing this target is correct; and investment must come with safeguards.

First, on the case for aid, for all the dry language of spending targets and goals, or statistics and shortfalls, on a scale of millions and billions, it is important not to forget what official development assistance is really about. As the former Prime Minister my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath has said, we live in an unequal world: 1 million babies a year die on their first and only day of life; one in eight people go to bed hungry each and every night; 1.5 billion people are trapped in the brutality of conflict-affected and fragile states; 58 million children are unable to go to school; and 20,000 under-fives die every year from easily curable diseases.

Impersonal figures, however, mask the human reality. Let me give just two examples. The 3 million-strong refugee crisis in Syria is impossible to appreciate, and although the scale is terrifying, the tragedy is personal. Like other hon. Members from both sides of the House, I have travelled to the countries that border Syria’s war. In the Beka’a valley I met a mother and father from Aleppo who had fled the fighting with their five children. The father was desperate to work and the mother was trying very hard to keep the household together. The children were grateful for the chance to go to school, but they were unable to do what they really wanted, which was to have the chance not to go to school but to go home. They were trapped in their camp, and despite the tremendous will and resilience of its inhabitants, the overriding feature is immense human misery. That is just one family story among the millions, and I would argue that we can never look the other way. I am pleased that the UK Government are investing on the current scale.

My second example comes from my visit to the Philippines following the destruction wrought by Typhoon Haiyan. During my time on Leyte island with the Catholic Fund for Overseas Development, we visited a sports field in Tanauan. The local priest pointed to a patch of disturbed turf no bigger than a penalty box and told us that there was a mass grave, home to 1,000 bodies. It was a vast unmarked grave. As a result of wars, natural disasters and the accidents of geography and parental wealth that leave so many disadvantaged to the point of extreme poverty and the risk of death from the day they are born, there is no question but that there are people all around the world who need our support. On some of the big global challenges, the support of development aid can make a difference.

Mr Speaker, I am advised that if I do not finish my speech by 11 am, I will be interrupted. I am therefore going to curtail my arguments, with your permission, and therefore some of the potential interventions.

My second argument is that British aid works. The support we give saves and changes lives. Today’s debate should be generally free of partisan rancour, and I am sure that all Members in the House will reflect on some of the achievements. In the same way as Labour Members acknowledge the work currently being done by this Government, I hope this Government will acknowledge the achievements of the previous Labour Government in helping to lift 3 million people out of poverty every year, helping some 40 million children into school and helping to fight against AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, as well as forging the millennium development goals.