International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Friday 27th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

It is not intended to be each year of the five years but an average of or a rolling over the five years. That is what I suggest. Of course, we would be open to amending the amendment if my noble friend chooses to give us his support. The confusion which can be caused by the different outcomes of GNI is also recognised under Clause 2(2)(a), where,

“under section 1(4) of the 2006 Act”,

it is possible for the Secretary of State in a subsequent year—this could be years later if it proves that, because of revisions of GDP, the target it was thought had been met had not in fact been met—to make a subsequent statement, which would not refer to the current year but to years gone past. Of course, one might have a whole series of statements where one year it was thought that the target had been met and then the next year it was thought that the target in the previous year had not after all been met. You could go on contradicting yourself year after year because these statistics bob around on a very thin margin which could easily affect the 0.7% one way or another. That is why I say to the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, and others that the idea that the 0.7% gives certainty is somewhat fallacious and not very profound. Those are the external factors.

More importantly in terms of policy and what we are trying to achieve in debates around this issue, there may be factors other than external factors which affect whether the target was not met. These could be that projects were not ready or that there was not enough time to get them ready, However, if we want to place a premium on management, rather than just meeting the target on outcomes rather than input, again I suggest that that would be greater if we looked at this target not in one year but over several years. If we looked at it over several years, it would remove the incentive which came to light in Committee to hand over cash to multilateral institutions simply in order to meet the target. Although, as we learnt in Committee, it would take on average two years before the money handed over to a multilateral institution is spent, for the purpose of meeting the target it counts as though it was spent. Therefore, in any year, if you are not getting near to the 0.7%, there would be a tremendous incentive just to hand the money to a multilateral institution in order to say that the target has been met.

It also seems to me that the way in which the 0.7% works is that there will be a great incentive to spend money rather than to economise or to manage it efficiently. There is no way to claw back money in years in which there is an overspend. If the target is exceeded—if it is 0.8% of GDP—there is no way in which that money can be recouped. Therefore, the fear of the department will never be of overspending, it will always be the risk of underspending and, therefore, it will tend to overspend. For all those reasons, the amendment put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, would be conducive to good management of the budget and thoroughly consistent with the aims of the Bill as put forward by its promoters.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville (Con)]

My Lords, this debate is essentially about flexibility, and this measure is essentially one which has been brought forward by Members of the Liberal Democrats. I wish to say a brief word about my relations with their party. Before anyone accuses me of making a Second Reading speech let me say not only that I could not make a real Second Reading speech at Second Reading but also that my relations with the Liberal Democrats are an essential part of my contributing to this particular amendment.

In the 183 years since the Great Reform Bill—which amounts to six generations, at 30.5 years each—six members of my family, one per generation, have served in the House of Commons, the first four being Liberals and the final two being Tories. The first was Member for the Southern Division of Northumberland. He was said to be the richest commoner in England, and he was presumably a Whig. It was perhaps apposite for what was then essentially an Irish family that the second MP was the MP for Armagh, a niece of his having married into the Brookeses.

The third Member was my great-grand-uncle, the son of the richest commoner in England. He entered Parliament as a Liberal MP for Wakefield.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed]

May I help my noble friend? These amendments consider a rolling average of meeting the target, not a rolling average of former MPs of my noble friend’s family.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

I do not know on what amendment I am going to make this speech if I do not make it on this one. But I do take the point, and I am extremely grateful for the intervention.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps I may just ask noble Lords, if they would not mind, to stick to the amendment in a general sense.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

That is certainly what I am about to do. The third MP was my great-grand-uncle, a son of the richest commoner in England. He entered Parliament as Liberal MP for Wakefield. On reaching the Commons, he decided that he much preferred Mr Disraeli to Mr Gladstone, the latter having, of course, formerly been,

“the rising hope of the stern and unbending Tories”.

But being a member of our family—and thus, I hope, instinctively—he behaved honourably and never considered crossing the Floor, while being sufficiently practical as to advise his constituency association that it would be prudent to start identifying a new prospective candidate for the next election.

The family’s fourth Liberal MP, the MP for Wakefield’s nephew, was a Unitarian minister who had served as a curate to Phillips Brooks, the great carol-writing American bishop, and who became Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow—where I was later a constituent of the noble Baroness, Lady King. I have now finished my references to my Liberal ancestors and forebears and will proceed with the relevance and substance of my speech. The last two Members of Parliament were my late noble kinsman and myself.

The reason for this rather long prolegomenon is that the retirement of my family’s final Liberal MP in the East End almost coincided precisely with the retirement of the last Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, and so their party has certainly not latterly benefitted from any family contribution of advice. This is why I come back to the virtues of flexibility. I spoke only briefly in Committee on 6 February—although I did speak for half a column, at col. 930 of Hansard, that day. I wish to speak to the virtues of flexibility which have been alluded to already. What I did not do at that stage was to describe how we broke the deadlock between the Budget Council and the European Parliament when, for six months, the EU was without a budget at all.

The deadlock that arose, and which was wholly inflexible at the time, was that Parliament had to have the final say in the budget. In this particular instance, and indeed in others, its budget was, in one sense, a house of cards in that it would take 100% up to the maximum that it was allowed to have. This was secured by a great deal of horse-trading between individual Members of the European Parliament. Let us say for the purposes of this example that, in order to secure the Greek vote, a road through Macedonia, paid for by the EU, was the price. Therefore you could not change the budget in any way because the whole house of cards would collapse if you did.

What the British Government did on that occasion, which resolved the matter not only for that occasion but for any future similar one, was to introduce the concept of a negative reserve. As it was never the case that all the money in the budgets was spent, there was always going to be a surplus of some sort, and enough to take care of any overstatement that we went into when the budget was set.

We earned the good will of our colleagues on the Budget Council by a quite separate intervention that we made when the EU asked us all to pay what we would have paid if the budget had been passed. The amounts for which it asked had no legal or statutory cover, but the fact that we alone challenged them and secured victory in the European court meant that we were extremely popular with our colleagues. Thus, when we came in July to hold the presidency, we were able within two days to get a budget which had been unavailable for the previous six months.

I state that simply to say that I fear the absence of flexibility in a Bill which has been, as I said, brought forward primarily by the Liberal Democrats. Flexibility is so important. It is desirable that anything we can introduce to calm it down is to be looked for.