Aid Impact

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Thursday 3rd September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sugg (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for welcoming the commitment to keep ICAI. On the Select Committee point, the Government agree that Parliament has an important role in scrutinising UK aid spending, and Select Committees are of course fundamental in scrutinising the Government’s spending and policies. We acknowledge that, as a consequence of the merger, the House of Commons might have to reconfigure the Select Committee structure, but the Government’s view is that normally the committee structure mirrors the departmental structure.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con) [V]]

My Lords, the independent commission clearly does a good and much-needed job in evaluating aid flows, but does my noble friend agree that it has been particularly useful in bringing home the fact that aid alone is not an effective driver of development or indeed of poverty reduction, and that issues such as counterterrorism, security, human rights breaches, private investment conditions and, obviously, good governance under the law are just as much part of the modern development package? Does she further agree that the proposed merger between our aid and foreign policy departments, about which I think we are going to hear a Statement later today, offers a highly effective and rational way of bringing these essential modern-day strands of development closer together?

[Baroness Sugg (Con)]

My noble friend is right that my noble friend Lord Ahmad will be repeating a Statement later today. The advantages that my noble friend highlights are exactly the reason why the Prime Minister has merged DfID and the FCO to become the new FCDO. My noble friend is right that aid alone is not going to resolve many of the world’s problems. We need to make sure that we are taking a joined-up approach and bringing the strands of foreign policy, development and trade together in order to tackle these huge global challenges.