International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Debate between Gavin Shuker and David Nuttall

Friday 5th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Nuttall]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I will not go into all the detail, but other countries have realised this point. If the suggestion of 0.35% were adopted and the Government decided on it—I do not think for one second that they will—it would put us in the pack rather than being second in the list, as we are at the moment. We would not be behind the rest of the world. It is worth looking at the detail of the figures. Anyone who does so will see that, rather bizarrely, for most of the last two or three decades we have spent around 0.35% and that it is only in the past three or four or probably five or six years—and incredibly since the financial crash—that there has been a huge increase at a time when the country can arguably least afford it.

I am conscious of the fact that there are many amendments, so I shall move on quickly to deal with the final two groups. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch has tabled three amendments, one of which is amendment 2. It sets out one of the criteria for evaluation of the policy and provides that it should be

“relevant, sustainable and capable of having a measurable impact.”

I look forward to hearing my hon. Friend’s explanation of the definition of “sustainable”. Perhaps he will convince me that that can be easily assessed. Amendments 8, 9, 10, 11 and 37 were tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset. I should mention in passing that any Member who looked at the Notices of Amendments in the Table Office yesterday should bear it in mind that at that stage amendment 37 appeared as amendment 10. The second “amendment 10” should have been “amendment 37”. I am sure that my hon. Friend will set out in convincing detail his reasons for believing that the amendments should be accepted.

It is right and proper for the Bill to be scrutinised this morning. Millions of people outside the House support this country’s aim and ambition to do all that it can to help those around the world who are starving and need help—no one denies that—but I do not think that giving special status to our aid programme has universal support in this country, and I think it important in a democracy for all sides of the argument to be put.

As I have attempted to say during the last few minutes, the amendments would not wreck the Bill. In fact, they would make it more understandable. If they were implemented, more rather than less money would be available for international development. They would make the Bill more straightforward and transparent, and would increase the funding available for international aid.

[Gavin Shuker (Luton South) (Lab/Co-op)]

I hope that we shall make good progress today, and respond to the concerns of those who have tabled amendments, new clauses and new schedules. Given the number that have been tabled, I shall not speak to each one; instead, I shall address the broad themes into which they can intuitively be grouped.

The first of the themes that I can discern is independent evaluation—the independent oversight of the duties for which the Bill provides. This group includes proposals for the evaluation to be overseen by, variously, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, the Office for Budget Responsibility, and a newly created independent international development office—as well as, confusingly, a proposal that there should be no independent evaluation at all.

The hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) has called for the creation of an independent international development office. The hon. Gentleman’s late conversion to the quangocracy is a surprising development, which is somewhat at odds with his own preference for

“Parliament regulating things rather than handing them out to random bodies.”—[Official Report, 12 July 2013; Vol. 566, c. 720.]

I look forward to hearing his views.

I can reassure Members that

“the independent evaluation of the extent to which ODA provided by the United Kingdom represents value for money”

was debated extensively in Committee—