Foreign Aid Expenditure

Debate between Joan Ryan and Desmond Swayne

Monday 13th June 2016 Westminster Hall

[Joan Ryan (Enfield North) (Lab)]

Three weeks after Labour won the 1997 general election, we pledged that Britain would meet the UN target to spend 0.7% of our gross national income on international development. That is one of the acts of which I am most proud from our time in office. I do not deny the important role that the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives have played in ensuring that it has become a cross-party national commitment—one that only a handful of countries in the world have met.

However, none of us who support international aid believes we are writing the Department for International Development a blank cheque. We must always ensure that aid meets three tests: it must be effective and transparent, and it must reflect our country’s values. In the case of the aid we give to the Palestinian Authority, we are failing those three tests. Let me give one example: the issue of the PA’s payments to convicted Palestinian terrorists, including, we must assume, Taleb Mehamara, the uncle of the Sarona market murderers, a member of a terror cell that in 2002 targeted Israelis, killing four in a shooting attack. We are not talking about, as one DFID Minister claimed in 2012,

“social assistance programmes to provide welfare payments”.

Instead, by operating a perverse sliding scale where people receive more money the longer their sentence—in some cases as much as five times the average monthly wage in Ramallah—the payments actually incentivise people to commit the most terrible acts of violence. I simply do not see how that advances the cause of a two-state solution. What are the Government doing about it?

Last month, Palestinian Media Watch showed how the PA sought to deceive international donors by shutting the Ministry of Prisoners’ Affairs and claiming that the Palestine Liberation Organisation would assume responsibility for those payments, but that was merely financial sleight of hand.

[Sir Desmond Swayne]

I have had discussions with the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister of the Palestinian Authority and other officials, and I continually make the point that the right hon. Lady rightly makes: if these are welfare payments, they must be made like welfare payments. The reality is that we do not pay them. Our taxpayers’ money goes to build the Palestinian Authority so it is able to morph into the Government of a Palestinian state when that opportunity arises. We pay named civil servants to provide public services.

[Joan Ryan]

I think the Minister understands the point I am making and wilfully will not look at this. In fact, the payments we make enable the Palestinian Authority to make its payments to prisoners.

In 2015, the PA raised its annual transfer to the PLO via the Palestinian National Fund to 481 million shekels—the amount it needed to fund the newly created PLO Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs. That amount was virtually identical to the budget of the old PA Ministry of Prisoners’ Affairs—the point I am making to the Minister. I wrote to Ministers last month demanding that direct aid to the PA be suspended while these serious allegations are investigated. In response, I was told by Ministers that the Palestinian Ministry of Finance has confirmed to DFID—we have heard this again today—that

“prisoner payments are fully administered”

by the PLO. With respect, I urge Ministers to dig a little deeper. They should be asking questions about the source of the money, not who is doling it out.