Lord Garnier
Main Page: Lord Garnier (Conservative - Life peer)
Lord Garnier (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, for opening this debate, and I agree with every word he said. The 2015 Act to which he refers places the Foreign Secretary under a statutory duty to ensure that the United Kingdom hits the target of 0.7% of gross national income for official development assistance every year. By law, he must make an annual statement to Parliament reporting on the previous year’s performance. If the 0.7% target has been undershot, he must explain why. Until Parliament changes that law, the Government must aim to hit the target of 0.7% of GNI. They cannot deliberately aim off, fire blanks or dissemble. They can say that they intend to amend the law or substitute another target, but, until the statute is amended or repealed, Ministers are subject to that law.
As I told the House of Commons International Development Select Committee earlier this year, Ministers cannot legitimise a failure to hit the target by announcing in advance their intention to fail. The Government of course know this. As the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, pointed out, Ministers in your Lordships’ House and the other place have admitted that they know this. Do the Government not understand that the expenditure defined by 0.7% figure is dependent on the size of the economy? If, as now, the economy shrinks, the absolute number shrinks with it. A politically and intellectually self-confident Government would comply with the law and permit Parliament to vote on any repeal or amendment, rather than ignore the law and Parliament.
I asked the House of Lords Library to provide me with a list of occasions when this Government may have broken either domestic or international law or have been accused of being indifferent to whether they were breaking the law or of being negligent in that regard, or have been accused of being untruthful to Parliament or the wider public. Time does not permit me to read out the lengthy list sent to me, but it is expressly described as “non-exhaustive”. The Conservative Party used to stand for the rule of law. In my view it still should. It is time that this Conservative Government either complied with at least one of the laws the Conversative Party recently voted for and enacted, or placed their policy before Parliament for a vote.