UK Foreign Aid Programme

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 1st July 2021 Lords Chamber

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

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Fowler is providing a necessary opportunity to review the issues at stake when the Government decided to override, unilaterally and without parliamentary approval, the obligation in our domestic law to allocate 0.7% of our GNI each year to overseas aid. I will register five points.

First, this is not a debate between cuts and no cuts to our aid budget. The 0.7% commitment is a self-correcting mechanism that automatically reduces our annual spend for any year in which our economy shrinks, as the pandemic caused it to do.

Secondly, this is not about figures on spreadsheets—0.5% versus 0.7%. It is about inflicting cuts on many of the poorest countries in the world, just when they were suffering grievously from the impact of Covid-19, and on multiannual programmes to which we had given advance commitment. It is about hunger, girls’ education, health programmes and much else.

Thirdly, these cuts are clearly inconsistent with our previous support for attaining the UN’s sustainable development goals by 2030. That attainment is already slipping out of reach. Our cuts will make that more certain.

Fourthly, this autumn’s crucial COP 26 meeting on climate change will have no chance of succeeding if the developed world is not ready to honour and add to the commitments made in Paris for assistance to developing countries. Our cuts make that harder to achieve and are inconsistent with our playing a leadership role, as we should be doing.

Fifthly, these cuts are inflicting damage on Britain’s influence and soft power right around the world and will continue to do so as long as they are sustained—some advertisement for global Britain.