Official Development Assistance

Lord Collins of Highbury Excerpts

Thursday 15th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, for securing this debate and the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, for his excellent introduction. As my noble friend Lord McConnell said, the Covid pandemic, the global financial crisis, the global energy crisis and the climate emergency show that the world is more interdependent than ever, and our fates more closely intertwined. Development and diplomacy are our best tools in the fight against poverty, conflict and climate change, and being a force for good in the world means always making a stand against injustices, human rights abuses and suffering. It also means putting forward a vision for a more secure and prosperous future, delivering on the UN’s global goals and fulfilling our commitments to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people.

But instead of making multilateralism work, this Government have sometimes seemed intent on breaking our relationships and trashing our reputation. They retreated from Britain’s commitments, cutting our development target from 0.7% to 0.5%, and stripped billions from vital aid programmes in the process. As the right reverend Prelate highlighted, and as the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, said, it was the speed and the indiscriminate nature of these cuts that caused the most damage. The Government undermined delivery, overseeing a bungled merger between DfID and the Foreign Office which has resulted in deprioritising development, sapping morale and pushing out our expertise. As noble Lords have highlighted in this debate, they are now projected to spend £3 billion of the development budget here in the UK, to cover the costs of incoming refugees.

The international development strategy that we saw published takes a transactional approach to aid which risks repeating the worst mistakes of the past—and I pick up the point of the noble Lord, Lord Hannan. The improvement in the UK’s credibility on aid after the horrors of the Pergau Dam was not a matter of chance but of choice: the choice to untie aid and focus on the goal of poverty eradication. Under the leadership of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the UK set its sights on that global target of 0.7%. The UK played a key role in the millennium conference, making global progress on malaria, food, education and health, bringing the world together. One of Labour’s lasting achievements has been to forge a new political consensus around development, and it was in Britain’s interests that it should be rigorous and transparent, focused on effectiveness and value for money. It was something that Britain should be truly proud of.

To their credit, David Cameron and George Osborne sustained that commitment, keeping Britain on the path to 0.7% that Labour had set. It was an important area of broad, cross-party consensus, as highlighted by the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, but I fear that under the numerous Tory Prime Ministers we have had since—Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak—that consensus has broken down. In a world of global challenges and political divides, we need both the long-term transformational agenda of development and the political nous of good diplomacy. Both will be essential as we continue that hard work towards the ambitions of the sustainable development goals and beyond.

We must lead by example, not break our word or our commitments. Our commitment to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable also means spending on the right aid projects. That means supporting multipliers, so that we do get more bang for our buck; multipliers such as nutrition, clean water, education and universal health coverage, all of which have myriad developmental benefits. We must address the twin drivers of climate change and conflict, championing the green energy transition and climate finance, and supporting peacebuilding and conflict prevention.

Sadly, ICAI’s recent review of UK peacebuilding efforts found that chaotic management of the aid budget has set back those efforts. We need to offer an alternative to Chinese physical infrastructure, and link it to British innovation in education, governance and healthcare to support their own development. And yes, we must get Britain back on track to meet its commitment to the UN’s 0.7% development target as soon as the fiscal situation allows. Even at a time of real economic hardship and fiscal constraint, it is in the UK’s national interest to restore our leadership in international development.

I echo the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, by saying that Labour remains committed to a feminist development policy. Away from the world’s gaze, millions of school-age girls across Africa face forced marriage, with all the dangers and humiliations it wreaks. The leaked impact assessments of the 2021 aid spending reductions revealed that the Government were warned that their cuts would disproportionately impact women and girls. I hope that, in the interests of transparency, the Minister will commit today to publish the impact assessments of the pause on non-essential aid this summer.

A Labour Government will campaign for climate change to become a fourth pillar of the UN and will push for a new international law of ecocide to criminalise the wilful and widespread destruction of the environment. To amplify the point made by my noble friend Lord McConnell, Labour will legislate to ensure that Britain’s aid budget makes climate action a priority.

In conclusion, it is time to repair our relationships with our allies around the world, to revitalise our nation’s soft power, influence and impact with a renewed strategy for modernising international development, to restore the influence of multilateral institutions such as the UN, and—once again, I hope—to build a consensus across the House to ensure that we reach the target of 0.7%, because it is the national interest for Britain to be a force for good in our world.