Official Development Assistance

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 15th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, whose principled decision to resign from the Government on this issue was a subject of admiration.

I made my maiden speech in your Lordships’ House in the summer of 2001, at the Second Reading of the Bill on international development. That Bill was a step along a road that made Britain a genuinely world-leading force in development policy—a process that was completed over the next decade or so, as our aid spending reached the UN target of 0.7% GNI. That annual commitment was then consolidated in our domestic law. Today’s debate is being held in very different circumstances, among the smoking ruins of that world-leading role.

It is high time we had a proper discussion of how that self-inflicted trashing of one of the main pillars of Britain’s soft power worldwide came about and what can and should be done in the future. For that opportunity, I am deeply grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, and to the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, for introducing the debate on her behalf. The noble Baroness played an important and positive role during the coalition Government and we should be very grateful for that.

The debacle came in two main stages, for both of which the principal responsibility rests with the right honourable Boris Johnson, whose solipsistic and sloppy policy-making led first to the swallowing-up of DfID in the FCO—a department with no working experience of implementing a multibillion-pound expenditure programme—and then, during the Covid pandemic, to the arbitrary reduction of the 0.7% annual commitment to 0.5%.

That drastic cut in resources, now being extended for a further lengthy period, was both unnecessary and disproportionate. Why do I say that? Because the terms of the 0.7% GNI commitment ensured that there would have been a proportionate reduction in our aid spending anyway, during the Covid pandemic, the Covid-related period of economic contraction and the current recession, however long it lasts.

These cuts too are being inflicted on a world whose needs have never been greater, as the impact of Covid and the Ukraine war are being felt worldwide. Hard though the Government try to conceal their impact on individual countries and on multi-annual programmes, their true extent is becoming daily more evident: in Somalia, suffering from an unprecedented drought; in Yemen, whose humanitarian crisis is as bad as ever; in programmes needed to combat climate change and mitigate its consequences; and in conflict prevention spending. That is without counting the substantial chunk of our aid budget which is going to the cost of Ukrainian refugees in this country. That payment is of course a worthy cause, without doubt, and it meets DAC rules, at least for one year, but it is hardly a core objective of our aid policy.

We really should hang down our heads in shame, even if other developed countries spend less on ODA than us; they should do so too. I have heard a recently retired senior UN official describe our aid policy now as making us a laughing stock in New York. What is to be done, as Lenin once wrote? Well, we can hope that the recent and very welcome appointment of the right honourable Andrew Mitchell as Minister for Development, with a seat in Cabinet, will remedy some of the damage inflicted by the balkanisation of DfID. Can we not also now create a critical path towards restoring our aid spending to 0.7% of GNI—that remains a commitment in our domestic law, I remind the House—and avoid simply postponing that outcome to the Greek calends, which is what current government policy actually adds up to?

Then there is the challenge of climate change. What contribution are we planning to make to the loss and damage fund which it was agreed at COP 27 should be set up? Will climate change spending be separate from the 0.5% cap—as it should be, as it is for the common good and not simply for the good of developing countries? Will we be prepared to champion a new global programme of debt forgiveness, not just the rephasing of debt, to help those developing countries most affected by Covid and the surge of inflation? Will we ensure that there is no reduction in WHO and other global health programmes, to which many other noble Lords have referred, which are designed to guard against future pandemics and long-standing diseases such as malaria?

The answers to those questions matter, not just for ethical and humanitarian reasons, but because they affect Britain’s soft power in an era when we will need it more than ever, as we face the rivalry of authoritarian states, which will be a continuing feature of the world in which we live.

At the beginning of this week, I listened to the Foreign Secretary’s first major speech since he took office. It was very well crafted and its main contention that we need to strengthen our relations, in particular with the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, was surely well taken. But just how compelling will that message be when it is accompanied by drastic cuts in our contributions to those same countries’ own development priorities? Not very compelling, I suggest. I fear that the gap between rhetoric and reality is just too wide.