Global Poverty

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Thursday 1st July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Tony Baldry]

I had hoped that we might hear a slightly more consensual speech. I appreciate that the right hon. Gentleman was campaign manager for the late Prime Minister, but perhaps he could now focus on the international development brief. He cannot have it both ways. He cannot say both that the UK is leading by example—and the accountability report published in Canada shows that the UK is way ahead of the other G8 countries on contributions to the 0.7% target at 0.6% for 2010—

[Mr Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

That was the Labour Government!

[Tony Baldry]

But the right hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mr Alexander) cannot have it both ways. He cannot say that we should lead by example, when we are leading by example, and then whinge about how we are doing.

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[Malcolm Bruce (Gordon) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Deputy Speaker, given your role on the International Development Committee in the last Parliament. Indeed, having both Mr Speaker and a Deputy Speaker as ex-members of that Committee, I feel that international development will have the kind eye of the Chair during this Parliament.

I very much welcome my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to his position. I believe that the speech he made—whatever the debating points arising out of it—showed that he is someone with a deep commitment to, and passion for, international development, who has a real desire to make an impact and make a difference.

Although Labour Members are entitled to challenge and criticise, I was a little disappointed with the tone of the speech by the right hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mr Alexander)—not least because I wanted to open my remarks by paying a genuine and warm tribute to the Labour Government and the Labour party. I believe that the establishment of the Department for International Development and the International Development Act 2002 set the basis for reforming the mistakes made in the past. I think we should recognise that they are now a long way in the past, and all parties now acknowledge that that older style of overseas development has gone for ever. In DFID, as the right hon. Gentleman said, we created a Department that has provided world leadership in development, and it has made a huge impact. I give credit to Clare Short, the first Secretary of State of the Department, and to the right hon. Members for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) and for Paisley and Renfrewshire South, who have all made a contribution to that development.

It seems to me that we are trying to accept that we have perhaps the best Development Ministry in the world, but that it has to move forward and that there is scope for change, innovation and development. The new coalition Government will inevitably want to bring its own ideas to bear. It is certainly my hope that we will build on that, develop it and take it forward. I am the Chairman of this cross-party Select Committee, and we will of course monitor progress, ask questions and make periodic reports to the House.

On the exchanges we had about the 0.7% commitment, we should all be grateful that there is complete consensus in the House over the commitment to deliver that by 2013. In an informal conversation I had with the Secretary of State—I hope he will not mind my saying this—we realised that it is not this House that lacks commitment; the problem is the engagement with the wider public, which requires the House to maintain its united commitment and to engage the public to ensure that support remains for achieving this goal.

In that context, the Secretary of State clearly read out—as, indeed, did the shadow Secretary of State—what it says in the coalition agreement about enshrining the 0.7% commitment in law. I do not want to labour the point. I just want to say that the Select Committee took evidence on the draft legislation that came before us under the previous Government—I have to say it came very late in their programme, and the previous Government should acknowledge that—and it raised a number of questions. No one denied the value of having this legislation. If the present Government have the same commitment, I look forward to taking it forward, but some refinement will need to be made, in the light of the evidence our Committee took, if the legislation is to be fit for purpose. I hope that in due course the Secretary of State will give us an indication of how and when that legislation will be brought into law.

As a final point on this issue, the commitment does not require legislation—and neither does the lack of legislation in any way bring the commitment into question. What it does is set and reinforce the example, demonstrating to the public that Parliament is united over this achievement.

The Secretary of State set out a number of priorities that he wants to bring to bear on development in the future. Of course, there are some questions in the development community, and rightly so. He said that his primary aim is for aid to be transparent and accountable and that he wants to set up a new mechanism for achieving that. In due course, further details will no doubt be brought to the House. I appreciate that the Select Committee will have an important role to play in the process.

I agree with the Secretary of State that the more we can demonstrate the outcomes from our investment and aid, the more we can convince people that the programme is effective, that it works and that it does deliver. I add the cautionary note that not every aspect of aid can be so easily measured or monitored, and certainly not in the same time scale. I support the objective, but it is important to recognise that not every aspect of the budget can be subjected to the same objective criteria; we need some other ways to evaluate it. The principle, however, seems to me to be fundamentally sound and right.

There is perhaps also some concern about the definition of official development assistance, how it is applied and how it will be controlled across Departments. The vast majority of overseas development assistance currently goes through DFID, and I hope that that will continue to be the case; but the House needs to be sure that ODA which does not go through DFID meets the same objective criteria.

[Mr Thomas]

Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that transparency of development assistance is not something dramatically new? Does he recall, as Opposition Members do, that when the Conservatives were in opposition they used independent evaluations of DFID programmes to ask perfectly reasonable questions on the Floor of the House? Further measures may be welcome, but the right hon. Gentleman should bear in mind the fact that the last Government also took a series of measures to increase transparency.

[Malcolm Bruce]

I certainly accept that there was not only a lively debate but activity in the Department and the evaluation unit. The Committee visited the unit and met its representatives.

I do not suggest that there was a monopoly on one side of the House in this regard, but a permanent problem with aid and development is establishing what works, how the extent to which it works can be measured, and how people can be reassured that it works. We have all observed it in journalists’ correspondence, and in what is said by people we meet around the place. The bottom line is that people think that billions of pounds of British taxpayers’ money is being put into Swiss bank accounts on behalf of corrupt politicians. We all know that that is not what happens to the vast majority of UK aid—indeed, we hope, to any of it—but we must constantly improve presentation so that we can reassure taxpayers that that is demonstrably not the case, and that the aid really is making a difference. If it is possible to improve the existing mechanism, there is no reason why we should not try to do so.

The summit on the millennium development goals will take place later this year. The current Parliament is due to end in 2015, the year in which the MDGs are set to be delivered. We know that they will not be, but during this Parliament we must determine exactly how much we can prioritise them, and what we must do about those in regard to which we fall farthest behind.

Let me say something about MDGs 4 and 5. The Select Committee paid particular attention to maternal health in the last Parliament, and I was horrified by what we learned during that inquiry about the appalling and needless suffering of so many women in so many parts of the world. As has been said by the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Ann McKechin), whom I welcome back to the Committee, the problem is often the treatment and status of women rather than our inability to deliver services that could meet the needs of women in poor countries. Certain societies do not recognise the importance or necessity of such services.

I was particularly shocked, when the Committee visited northern Nigeria, to be told that the education of girls involved learning the Koran by rote, on the grounds that that was all that they needed to know because they would be married by the time they were 12 and pregnant by the time they were 13—and, in many instances, dead before they were 14.

We should not even think of girls in societies of that kind in the context of girls in our own society, who, at 12 or 13, might be regarded as far too young to give birth, but who might none the less be quite well developed. In countries where nutrition is poor, many girls aged 12 or 13 are not fit to give birth to children, which is why they die. Worse, those who do give birth are expected to deliver their children alone, without any form of attendance or support. I consider that appalling. I welcome the commitment to treating it as a priority, but I think it reasonable to suggest that the health of children up to the age of five should be linked to it. While the welfare of women has a very big impact on children, an awful lot of children die at the age of three, four or five. Unless we consider the two issues together, we may not be able to achieve the results for which we hope.

I was slightly surprised that the Secretary of State did not say more about the role of economic development and the role of the partnership between the public and private sectors, although there was a passage in his speech about it. Unlike the former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South, I am not talking about the role of the private sector in delivering social programmes and the like. I am talking about how we can deliver economic development better in partnership: how DFID’s engagement can create a climate in which businesses, whether indigenous or external, will invest and commit themselves to developing countries, so that those countries can grow their economies and revenue bases and reduce their dependence on aid.

The Secretary of State mentioned CDC in passing. The way in which CDC operates—as a kind of arm’s length “fund of funds”—is very easy to criticise, and Private Eye has had a field day doing so. However, CDC has clearly delivered a substantial amount of investment at no cost to the taxpayer, and has increased our development capacity because of the profitability of the fund. There are question marks over the use of tax havens, although I see the logic of the argument that that releases even more money for investment. I do not particularly want to develop that argument, but I have felt for some time that there is a gap between DFID’s development activity and CDC and the business sector that could be addressed constructively.

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[Tony Baldry]

I certainly join my hon. Friend in paying tribute to my right hon. Friend for what he did with the project in Rwanda. It reinforces one of the three points that I want to make.

I am conscious that others want to speak. What I would like to say in this debate can be summed up by one paragraph in the Prime Minister’s statement to the House earlier this week on the G8 and G20 summits. He said:

“Even at a time when our countries face difficult budget decisions, it is important that we maintain our commitment to helping the poorest in the world. The UK is maintaining its commitment to increase spending on aid to 0.7% of gross national income. That gives us the opportunity to exercise leadership on behalf of the poorest. At the same time, in order to take the public with us, we also need to ensure that every penny will reach those who need it most. That means transparency and accountability along the lines that we are introducing. It also means that the projects we support must be deliverable, practical and measurable, addressing the causes of poverty and not just alleviating the symptoms.”—[Official Report, 28 June 2010; Vol. 512, c. 566.]

My first point is that it is good to see so many Members in the House this afternoon for a debate on international development. We will all have to recognise, as times get difficult when the spending cuts bite, that we continually need to make the argument that spending on international development is valuable and is in our national interest—in terms of stability, security and a sense of common humanity, and, as the Prime Minister made clear yesterday during Prime Minister’s questions, because it enables us to have our voice heard much more clearly in the world. We are also entitled to look for the support of the non-governmental organisations in making that argument.

Secondly, there has, quite rightly, been a lot of talk this afternoon about Britain meeting the 0.7% target by 2013. We are not far off that already. According to the Muskoka accountability report, published at the end of last week’s G8 summit, the Development Assistance Committee estimates that in the 2010 calendar year the UK’s official development assistance spend will be equivalent to $15.5 billion, or 0.6% of GNI. We are far and away the country that is nearest to meeting that 0.7% target. The nearest to us is France, at 0.46%.

Even with a ring-fenced commitment, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, skilled as he is, will not be able to extract from the Treasury during the lifetime of this Parliament any more than 0.7% of GNI for his Department’s budget. That means that if various NGOs or others think that extra money should be spent on a particular policy area, they will have to demonstrate to us all which parts of existing DFID spending should be reduced. DFID is not a bottomless pit, and the situation will become very competitive. If NGOs or pressure groups argue that a particular area of spending should increase, it will be beholden on them to explain to Ministers, and the rest of us, where they think spending should be reduced.

[Mr Thomas]

Is the hon. Gentleman saying that he does not think any further resources should be made available for climate finance, and that if, as a result of the climate negotiations, further resources are asked of the developed world by developing countries, Britain’s contribution should not go beyond the 10% that the last Government said would come from DFID, and that other cuts in other programmes in DFID should take place?

[Tony Baldry]

It is a bit rich for Opposition Front Benchers, who left this Government with absolutely no money at all and in a situation where this country is the most indebted in the world, to have one chorus, which is “more money”. It does not lie in the hon. Gentleman’s mouth to give the impression that DFID and every other Department should receive further funding from the Treasury. The reality is that most ministerial colleagues face substantial cuts in their departmental budgets and spending lines. DFID is fortunate, because its spending is protected, but it must be clear to everyone, including Opposition Front Benchers, that, if they call for extra spending from the DFID budget in one policy area, they are beholden to explain—[Interruption.] I am answering the hon. Gentleman. They are beholden to explain where DFID spending will be reduced. They and some NGOs cannot just come along and suggest that somehow DFID has a blank cheque, and that, if it does not increase spending on their policy area, it is failing. That is intellectually dishonest.

Thirdly, we all agree that between now and 2015 it is important that we meet, in so far as it is humanly possible, the millennium development goals. I hope that as many Members as possible will read the accountability report that was published following the G8 summit, because NGOs such as Oxfam, which the shadow Secretary of State prayed in aid, would do well to start working out how they engage with other G8 countries to ensure that they meet the obligations that the UK has already met. Some of the amounts that are being spent are pitiful. Russia spends just 0.07% of GNI on overseas development, the United States spends 0.19% and even Japan spends only 0.18%. If the other G8 member states spent anything like as much as we in the United Kingdom spend on official development assistance, as agreed by the Development Assistance Committee, the volume of money going into international development would increase substantially.

The Prime Minister reported to the House on Monday, and I hope that the NGO community joins him in making it clear that we need not just accountability and transparency at DFID, which my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has guaranteed, but to ensure that all G8 member states live up to the commitments that they made at Gleneagles. Otherwise, come 2015, we will all be frustrated by the lack of progress. It cannot be made by the United Kingdom on its own, and if people think that it can they will be disappointed. The United Kingdom is effectively at its 0.7% target, and there will be a finite amount of money available to DFID, however committed we all are to international development.

I hope that the NGO community, including organisations such as Bond, and all the various NGOs that subscribe to and are members of Bond, will see that there is a need for them to start focusing outwards and engaging other countries in meeting their 0.7% target. The same could apply equally to climate change. Copenhagen did not fail because of what the UK Government did or did not do; it was a disappointment largely because the international community had not engaged sufficiently with China on that country’s aspirations and concerns.

If we are going to meet the millennium development goals, we will have to ensure that the other countries which promised so much at Gleneagles and have so far delivered so little live up to and deliver on their promises. In that way, I hope that by the time we get to 2015 we will see that as many of the millennium development goals as possible have been met.

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[Mr Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I welcome this early opportunity to debate global poverty, but with the UN’s poverty summit so close, this debate could and should have been on the Second Reading of Labour’s 0.7 % legislation. As I reviewed the speeches of the Secretary of State and the Minister in preparation for this debate, I saw many of the themes and examples that recent Ministers have used, so I certainly warmly welcome many of the concerns highlighted by the Secretary of State. However, recent events and the debate have revealed both the lack of action at a key moment by the coalition Government and a lack of strategy for the Department’s future work. That should alarm hon. Members and those outside the House who see the declaration in 2000 that gave birth to the millennium development goals as a direct challenge to our generation to help the world’s poorest.

We heard three excellent maiden speeches, the first of which was from the hon. Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey). The pupils of class P at Hayfield school can indeed be proud of their work in support of the 1GOAL campaign, and indeed for influencing their Member of Parliament to speak up on their behalf. She rightly raised the continuing plight of 72 million children who are still denied the opportunity of an education.

The hon. Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland) also made an excellent maiden speech. It takes a certain talent to work Led Zeppelin and Robbie Williams into a speech on global poverty, but he did so with some panache. He also raised the important issue of access to medicines and the need for continuing work on that.

My hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk) made a particularly impressive maiden speech, deploying humour about one particular election moment to make a nevertheless important point about the views of many of his and, I suspect, all our constituents. As someone who has the honour to chair the Co-operative party outside this House, and having attended the Co-operative Congress in Plymouth only last weekend, I warmly welcomed my hon. Friend’s reference to the contribution of the Rochdale pioneers to this country. In the context of this debate, I welcomed his reminder about the profound challenges facing the Palestinians, and his call for all of us to do more to help them was particularly timely.

We heard a strong speech from the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford) who, having worked for Oxfam and helped organise the Gleneagles rally five years ago, has real authority on these issues. My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North (Ann McKechin) crucially reminded us of the importance of the decent work agenda and the continuing need to champion labour standards. Together with my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central (Anas Sarwar), whose election to the International Development Committee I welcome, she raised the important need for progress on tax issues, which, as she rightly reminded us, Christian Aid does so much to champion so well.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) reminded us that we all need to continue to buy Fairtrade goods—a point also raised by the hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood). She also referred to the need for democracy and a strong civil society as basic pre-requisites for development progress, making a particularly acute point about the role of trade unions in civil society, which was heard, I noted, in absolute silence by Government Members.

My hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Katy Clark) and the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood) made strong cases for continuing investment in developing countries. In the case of the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon, her argument was spoilt only by two mild reproaches to my right hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mr Alexander), which I suspect were designed more to please those on her Front Bench rather than made because she took them particularly seriously. I was tempted to put a membership form for the Labour party in the post to her, so good was her speech.

The Secretary of State highlighted the particular challenges of unsafe abortion. It would have been helpful if he had mentioned the last US Republican Administration, who bear a particularly heavy responsibility for the fact that more progress was not made more quickly in their eight years to provide proper facilities for women to have an abortion. The previous Government strongly supported investment in health care to tackle this issue directly and funded international bodies such as the United Nations Population Fund and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which remain pivotal to further progress.

I also welcome the Secretary of State’s interest in the broader issue of maternal mortality. We committed to scale up support for maternal and newborn health to help save the lives of 6 million mothers and babies by 2015; so if the right hon. Gentleman intends to continue our work in this area, I certainly welcome that commitment.

I worry about the growing number of aid sceptics in the Conservative party. The honest speech of the hon. Member for Orpington (Joseph Johnson) was an interesting example of that. I wonder whether that is the reason why the Secretary of State will not or cannot announce a timetable for introducing legislation to put the 0.7% contribution goal on our statute book yet.

The Secretary of State made important points about the case for development, which I welcome. There is a moral case for not standing by in countries such as Zimbabwe and Burma, where the Governments are failing to help their peoples, as well as for helping Governments in countries such as Zambia, Malawi and Ghana, who want to do the right thing by their people, to build up their economies, health systems and school systems.

The right hon. Gentleman also made the crucial point that there is a strong self-interest for Britain in championing the needs of developing countries, perhaps most acutely at the moment in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a point touched on by the hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) in the final Back-Bench speech of the debate.

What is now needed is action to back up those fine sentiments from the Secretary of State. The hon. Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) and my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central were right when they made it clear that other countries must meet their commitments on aid. It is for exactly that reason that the failure to fight at the G8 for meaningful language on the Gleneagles commitments is a deeply worrying sign of the extent to which the Government are really willing to champion the needs of the world’s poorest. A supposedly new initiative on maternal health, with no extra money behind it, is frankly a dismal return from the Prime Minister’s first international outing. Indeed, his failure to fight for the world’s poorest does not augur well for any effort the new Government are intending to put in to make a success of the UN review of progress to meet the millennium development goals in September. If the Secretary of State cannot get his own leader, or even No. 10 staff, to press for the world’s poorest at meetings of the richest nations in the world, it suggests that his influence at the heart of Government is not particularly high. Coming so soon after the Gracious Speech, which talks not of legislation on the target of aid being 0.7% of GNI but of a mere parliamentary mention, challenging scrutiny of his performance is what the right hon. Gentleman must now expect from Opposition Members.

[Tony Baldry]

The hon. Gentleman and the right hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mr Alexander) have played on this point. The hon. Gentleman makes assertions about the Prime Minister not doing enough in Canada, but what is his evidence? I can only assume that he was not in the House for the Prime Minister’s statement on Monday, when he made it very clear that he had stressed the importance of transparency and accountability, and of meeting the MDG targets. What my right hon. Friend said to the House bears no relation to the travesty of the facts being put forward by the Opposition today.

[Mr Thomas]

With all due respect to the hon. Gentleman, the fact that this G8 communiqué was the first in five years not to include any mention of the Gleneagles commitments and that organisations as significant as Oxfam—which he has praised in the past—damned the communiqué and the actions of the Government for failing to get such language included should be a gentle reminder to him of why we are concerned about the Government’s performance.

[Malcolm Bruce]

I can understand the Labour party’s desire to protect its record, but has not the problem been that we have had a commitment to the Gleneagles goals in every communiqué from every G8 in the last five years—and absolutely no delivery? Words are no use unless we get delivery.

[Mr Thomas]

I welcome the fact that the right hon. Gentleman has been elected to resume the chairmanship of the Select Committee. The notion that there was no delivery on the Gleneagles commitments in the last five years is simply wrong. I accept that there was not enough delivery, and the hon. Member for Banbury and others are right to say that some countries need to do more. The Secretary of State has yet to prove that his Department is as influential and as central as it was before 6 May.

[Mr Andrew Mitchell]

I am disappointed that the hon. Gentleman, of whom, as he knows, I am a great champion, should descend to this level. What matters about Gleneagles is that those solemn commitments, made, rightly, in front of the whole world community and its press, should be acted on. If, after the debate, he looks at the reports that have come out of the summit, reads the statement made by the Prime Minister and sees what organisations such as ActionAid said about the summit, he will see that our Prime Minister banged the drum for standing by those commitments and made it absolutely clear that Britain’s commitment leads on this point.

[Mr Thomas]

I want to champion the right hon. Gentleman’s career, too, and I suspect that he will need me to, so I say gently to him that the G8 was the international community’s pivotal meeting before the UN’s poverty summit, and not to refer to the Gleneagles commitments in the communiqué sends a powerful signal to the rest of the international community, which, I worry, will be a signal for them not to do what they should do at the UN poverty summit in September. It would be a terrible shame if the Department developed a reputation as the place where the Prime Minister sends not only those he does not want to sack yet, but those he does not want around. I hope that I am wrong, but I fear that the Secretary of State and the Minister are in danger of becoming Parliament’s answer to Jedward: they are both political treasures, and there is plenty of sympathy for them and a strange fascination about what they will do next, but at one performance soon neither will be in their usual place.

As my right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State said, what is striking about the Secretary of State’s speech today and, indeed, his speeches so far outside the House is the lack of any clear strategy for the Department. Under the previous Government, DFID sat at the heart of development thinking. It was sought out by Governments internationally, valued in Europe and respected by development bodies throughout the globe, from UNICEF, which the hon. Member for Castle Point (Rebecca Harris) mentioned, to the Grameen bank, which the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) rightly praised.

Under this Government, the Department should be at the centre of development thinking, but it simply is not yet. It could champion reform of the World Bank, which, despite doing a lot of good, needs to evolve quickly, get its staff out of Washington and into the African countries that it is supposed to help, and continue the reform of its governance. However, there has been nothing from the right hon. Gentleman on that issue yet. Under him, DFID could champion reform of the UN development system in order to help all developing countries, including those with whom we do not have bilateral aid programmes. It could continue to demand a change to how the UN humanitarian system works—or, in the case of Haiti, did not work anything like well enough. The Department could demand that UN agencies work together better in developing countries, but we have heard nothing from the right hon. Gentleman on that topic, either. He could certainly lead the development community on highlighting the finance that is necessary to help developing countries deal with the impact of climate change, but there has been radio silence on that issue, too.

What signal does the right hon. Gentleman think the £10 million loan that he announced today to the Turks and Caicos Islands sends to his Back Benchers, who are desperate to see more impact made in developing countries to help the needs of the world’s poorest? The lack of clarity about the Government’s strategy for the UN’s millennium summit was particularly striking in his speech, because he spoke more about what he will not fund and will not do than about what he will fund. In particular, he said very little about what he plans to do about the principal development event of the year. He wants an action plan to emerge from the summit, but what does he want to see in it, and how will he get it? What conversations has he had with the Deputy Prime Minister, who is due to represent us there, and what are the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister going to do to help secure the outcomes that the Secretary of State desires?

The Department is a great place in which to serve, and I join the right hon. Gentleman in praising the officials who serve there. The Ministers who serve there have a heavy responsibility to champion, challenge and mobilise for the world’s poorest, but the striking thing about what the Government have said and done so far is, first, the lack of any clear strategy on what they will do next in order to help those poorest people, and, secondly, the failure in international meetings to do the heavy lifting that is required in order to keep development at the centre of global political attention. I hope that things will change, but I fear that they will not.