International Development: Budget

Lord Bates Excerpts

Tuesday 11th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Empey, and I pay tribute to him for securing this timely debate. Noble Lords on all sides of the House, irrespective of their point of view, will look forward to hearing the answers to the questions he posed, which should be in the public domain.

Essentially, he reminded us that there is a choice about how we spend our budget, and whether we devote it to overseas development assistance or whether we spend it on military interventions. On that subject, I will underline some important facts that are sometimes overlooked in the current debate—understandably, because these are incredibly tough fiscal times for the country and times of great hardship at home. Therefore, people are asking questions about how we are spending our money overseas. For every £1 we pay in taxes, just over 1p is spent on aid. For every £1 we spend on aid, we spend £6 on defence. Clearly we need to look at that situation and keep it constantly under review. I was impressed by some figures that came out of the weekend summit to which the noble Lord referred—and it is wonderful to see Northern Ireland in the spotlight this week, in the lead-up to the G8 summit in Lough Erne, Enniskillen. Therefore it is timely that we should focus on that in particular.

Save the Children sent me some figures which pointed out that, in 1990, 12 million children under the age of five died from preventable diseases. They then showed that, in 2011, that figure had fallen dramatically to 6.9 million. Aid has played a crucial part in that; so has trade. The noble Lord, Lord Empey, was a distinguished Minister of Enterprise, Trade and Investment in Northern Ireland and knows the importance of trade in lifting people out of poverty. None the less, 5.1 million fewer deaths of under-fives per year is an incredible return that the British people and others are getting on their investment in the poorest in the world.

It is always very difficult when these things happen because, when we see need around the world, a hue and cry goes up that “something must be done”. We are finding this at the moment in Syria. There is no doubt that, if you are in a ministerial office—at the Foreign Office, in the Ministry of Defence or in No. 10—the pressure to show immediate responses is immense, and military action is an immediate response. It has impact, it is visual and it shows a degree of leadership. To invest in aid, training people in how to develop crops, drilling wells, improving sanitation and educating the child takes longer. In a sense, they are less immediate, but the long-term return is vastly more.

We need to look at this very carefully and I read the Prime Minister’s speech about it with care. It could have been interpreted as leading to some potential change in the way that we allocate aid. Yet, the Prime Minister has nailed his colours to the mast on this to a greater extent than probably any leader in recent times. He has been inextricably associated with arguing the case for aid, not least last weekend. Within the Conservative Party, which is part of the coalition, he vigorously makes the point about the value of our aid spend in the world. That is very significant. We are just reaching the point of achieving our goal of 0.7%. We are seeing the returns: 5.1 million fewer lives lost. We are being told by the UN that the eradication of poverty for under-fives by 2030 is a real possibility, and that a further 1.7 million lives per year could therefore be saved. When we are on the brink of that incredible breakthrough, it would be unthinkable to look at blurring the edges between two very distinct types of spend. They are two very necessary types of spend in their correct context but we must not blur the edges. There are international agreements as to what overseas development assistance means and they come together in the Conflict Pool, the work of which I applaud. It has been a great innovation in bringing together the Ministry of Defence, DfID and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, getting them to work together in control of a single budget to tackle prevention, rather than by intervention.

When the Prime Minister launched this, he said, in another place, that,

“we must get better at treating the causes of instability, not just dealing with the consequences. When we fail to prevent conflict and have to resort to military intervention, the costs are always far higher”.—[Official Report, Commons, 19/10/10; col. 798.]

We know the impact of that through our intervention in Iraq and our continued presence in Afghanistan. That intervention is critically important. We know that more than 1.5 billion people live in fragile or conflict-affected states and it is no surprise that none of these has achieved a single millennium development goal. There is a link there.

I understand the argument that you need the military solution to create the security on the ground to allow trade, education and assistance with governance to develop, but I profoundly disagree with it. When people are without income, without hope, they have nothing to lose or to live for and that is then a catalyst for violence, rather than something which abates it. We need to remember that as we consider all the options open to us.