International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Debate between Edward Leigh and Gordon Brown

Friday 12th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[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.