Overseas Development Aid: Budget

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Wednesday 27th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I join in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, for initiating this debate. The fact of the matter is that over the past half-century the state of the world has become successively better. More people are living longer and in better circumstances today than they were 50 years ago. Remembering that is a good starting point because, sometimes, if you listen to people, you imagine that things are going in the opposite direction.

Mention has been made of impact assessment, which I would like to see because in my travels around the world looking at aid projects, I have often come across them and walked away wondering, “Are they doing any good at all, other than to the people in the Land Rovers who are driving people like me to see what they are doing?” We need an impact assessment on quite a lot of the work that is being done.

We also need to rethink the word “aid”. It has become a rather grubby word, because people associate it with charity. Our overseas efforts should be to promote a better world and a better standard of society in it.

It is no achievement if we just move people from living in abject poverty to living in poverty. We have to help build up the countries. I remember talking to David Cameron about this and he said, “The big argument for the aid budget is to make the world worth living in so that all of its citizens don’t want to come and live in the West. We need to make their countries and their societies worth living in.” I totally support that.

We therefore need to look at our aid budget and consider whether an approach not the same as but not dissimilar to the Chinese belt and road initiative would not be a sensible way forward; in other words, we want to use the money that we disburse abroad in such a way that we build up the infrastructure of countries. Too much money disappears. We need to be in a situation where, like the Chinese, we say, “We will provide this”, and we provide it; we do not hand over large dollops of money which often disappear—or some of them disappear. Many years ago, I was the rapporteur in the European Parliament on aid to Bangladesh, which had been a particular difficulty for us. I remember being in an interview with the Minister in Bangladesh who was responsible for the aid budget. When I put it to him that money disappeared, he said to me, “But commission is paid on everything, isn’t it?” I said, “Well, that’s not exactly the idea. You don’t just skim off the money.” He said, “Well, this is the way we do it here.”

I say to the Minister in closing that we need to look at the structure of the aid budget, we need to help with money and expertise, but now is also a very good time to rethink the strategy of what we are spending the money on and how we could spend it to the betterment of both its recipients and the British taxpayer.