Integrated Review: Development Aid

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Wednesday 28th April 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB) [V]]

My Lords, we owe a debt of gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for providing the occasion for this overdue and necessary debate about the swingeing cuts Britain is making to its aid budget. It is shameful that we are not holding this debate in government time and on the Floor of the House, although I understand why the Government are in no hurry to defend the indefensible. If these cuts are defensible, is it not a trifle odd that we have now heard from 20 speakers and only one has attempted to defend the Government’s decision?

I will make one critical point to be clear at the outset. What is at issue is not whether to cut Britain’s aid budget at all during the economic contraction caused by the pandemic. The 0.7% commitment, which is in our domestic law, contains a self-correcting mechanism. If our economy shrinks, as it did last year, our 0.7% commitment does too, since it is linked to our GNI. Last year, that automatically cut our aid budget by £2.9 billion or thereabouts. It is the second massive, additional cut, made by switching from 0.7% to 0.5%, that is at issue.

It is too easy to think of these figures as abstract. They are not. These are cuts in food for starving people, cuts in girls’ education, cuts in support for primary healthcare provision and cuts in scientific research programmes, which also bring benefit to our own universities. When will the Government come clean about the detail of the consequences and try to defend them?

The noble Lord, Lord Alton, posed the question of whether the cuts will damage our worldwide influence—that is, our soft power. Frankly, anyone who denies that effect is inviting ridicule. Of course they will. We will lose bilateral influence around the world. It will also show up in loss of support as we compete for multilateral influence in the great aid-giving agencies and in elections at the UN.

I note in their integrated review the Government’s

“commitment to spend 0.7% of gross national income on development when the fiscal situation allows.”

However, that formula is pretty meaningless. Could not the Minister mark this debate by giving one simple undertaking: that Britain will return to full 0.7% compliance in the year following our economy’s return to growth?