Department for International Development

Debate between Laurence Robertson and Alec Shelbrooke

Monday 1st July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Robertson]

I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman, to whom I pay tribute for all his work in that respect. I shall come back to that issue in a moment.

Let me turn to the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, which was set up by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell). It has identified some spending by, for example—this is only an example, and it is not the only one—the Newton Fund, which the commission said

“is not promoting the best use of ODA and some projects appear not to be within the ODA definition.”

That is of some concern. The commission lists some of the projects about which it is concerned. Sometimes when one looks into the projects and gets into the details, one finds they actually do help people who need help, but the headlines that they receive do not necessarily suggest that. Nevertheless, we have to be careful, because we all have constituents who want to see that their hard-earned money they pay in taxes goes to the right target.

[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

My hon. Friend has just made an important point. It is absolutely right that we fund multilateral projects, and some of the organisations involved, such as the UN, are huge. In respect of the big multilateral projects it is easy to pick on the tiniest point about where some aid might go and blow that up into a huge headline, and that is what our constituents hear. We are not going to change that in the press—the newspapers will not print a headline that says, “All the planes took off on time yesterday”—but it is the House’s responsibility to emphasise exactly what my hon. Friend is talking about.

[Mr Robertson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention, which enables me to move to another point. Contrary to what is sometimes said, we do not actually finance corrupt dictators in other countries. Another point raised—I have taken so many interventions that I cannot remember who made it—was that it can be difficult to get aid to the people who need it most. For example, people who live in war-torn countries are going to be desperate and will need help of one form or another. The people who live in countries with very poor Governments that have dictatorships need help. It is not the dictator who needs it, but the people who live in those countries certainly do need help. The trick is to get under the radar to help those people, but that should not be confused with the financing of wicked dictators. The two situations are different.