Official Development Assistance and the British Council

Debate between Jonathan Edwards and Sarah Champion

Wednesday 30th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allowing us this estimates debate on official development assistance, more commonly known as foreign aid, and the British Council. It is clear how much passion and interest there is across parties on this topic.

Over the last two years, there have been considerable and brutal reductions in overseas development aid at a time of unprecedented global need. When other nations across the globe are stepping up, the UK seems to be walking away, and that is why today’s debate is so important. Public and parliamentary interest in aid has never been greater.

I wanted to spend the debate looking in detail at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s spending plans. I wanted to scrutinise how UK aid, cut drastically to 0.5% of GNI at a time when more aid is needed, is being spent in the most effective way possible. However, the information needed to carefully check that spending simply is not being shared by the FCDO.

The Select Committee on International Development has had to fight tooth and nail to extract whatever information it can from the Government. A pattern of behaviour is emerging that demonstrates this Government’s contempt for parliamentary scrutiny. That cannot be allowed to continue.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (Ind)]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for the comments that she has made so far and for her work on the Select Committee. In the post-Brexit age, we hear a lot from the British Government on sovereignty and being able to make sovereign decisions, but is not the crux of the matter—as this major issue, the cut to international aid, shows—the fact that we are not making decisions on the basis of parliamentary sovereignty, and that the Government really should be paying more attention to the views of this House?

[Sarah Champion]

That is absolutely the nub of my speech. At a time when we ought to be able to scrutinise the detail of the spending of taxpayers’ money—particularly at a time when cuts are being made to it—that is not in the gift of this House. It is in the gift only of a very few Ministers, and that should concern us all.

When my Committee received the main estimate from the FCDO this year, we were genuinely shocked. It looked very different, with considerably less detail than last year’s equivalent. Budget lines had been altered, with the majority of spending from the former Department for International Development lumped together under one heading. That obscures the size and distribution of the cuts to aid spending.

It is customary for the Government to consult with relevant Select Committees prior to making such radical changes to the presentation of estimates. Needless to say, that did not happen. Surely, at a time of increased parliamentary interest in aid spending, we should expect more detail, not less. With such little detail and information, Parliament cannot know exactly what is going on and what it is agreeing to. How can we make an informed decision without a basic breakdown of where the FCDO plans to spend in a particular country or on a particular theme?

Sadly, that is entirely consistent with the lack of information and transparency provided by the FCDO throughout last year. Add that to the lack of willingness to engage with my Committee, and Members’ questions being dodged or simply ignored, and Parliament faces a constant uphill struggle for the most basic details that we should be entitled to.

The Government have said that they will return to spending 0.7% of GNI on aid “when fiscal circumstances allow”. My Committee, and I am sure other Members in the House, have lost track of how many times we have asked the Foreign Secretary to define what is meant by that. We are getting no closer to an answer. We have repeatedly asked for a country-by-country breakdown of funding allocations for this financial year. Instead, we got only a worryingly short list of countries where the UK will spend bilaterally this year, with no figures attached. It is simply impossible to perform proper scrutiny without those figures.

My Committee is being stymied in its efforts to scrutinise, Parliament is being blocked from being able to consider the figures, and many of the organisations that are implementing the UK aid programmes, making the difference on the ground, have had to fight for clarity on whether their programmes will even survive these cuts. The haphazard way in which these cuts to aid programmes have been made has also caused considerable financial waste.

Let us take the cuts to global health, one of the FCDO’s priority areas, as just one example. Donated drugs to treat preventable diseases will be wasted, as there is no one available to distribute or administer them following a 90% cut in funding. In Bangladesh, a programme providing essential healthcare to disadvantaged communities, including a response to covid-19, was given less than a week to close. That story plays out across every area of UK aid.