International Development Policies

Lord Judd Excerpts

Thursday 19th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, yet again we express our appreciation to the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, for providing the opportunity for a debate on this important subject. As a former Minister for Overseas Development myself, perhaps I may say how good it is to see the noble Baroness in her place, and how much I wish her well in her immense responsibilities. It is one thing having 0.7% of GDP to spend, but spending it well and effectively is a huge challenge. Of course, it need not be only 0.7% because one has always to measure oneself against the size of the challenge.

I have just a couple of points that I should like to raise. First, with all the pressure to demonstrate results, there can be a contradiction between long-term development and immediate results. I wonder how carefully that is being watched in the evaluation. Long-term development must not be distorted.

My other, very specific, point in this context is that in military operations—I am not one of those purists who say there is no role to be played by official aid—the military will inevitably have, for example in Afghanistan, huge pressures to demonstrate results and concrete evidence of change to the local population before the extremists come back. However, that may not always be what is really needed in terms of long-term development. I know there was active interface between the two departments at one stage on this issue, and I wonder how it has been resolved and how it is progressing.

Another issue I want to raise briefly is how successful the Ministry is being in growing tax bases. Of course, tax is terribly important to the revenue of Governments in their ongoing programmes. How is that going in our own Overseas Territories and in the Crown dependencies? How many of them have produced public registers of beneficial ownership? By the same token, it would be good to hear something about the progress being made in this country in demanding responsible tax policies in the countries in which we are working by companies that get contracts from us—and indeed from other companies in the world.

What is DfID learning from its work and how far is that enabling it to discover the spheres of the private sector in which it can be most effective? Finally, obviously, as always, the big issue is strengthening governance and furthering human rights as an essential part of that. I wish we could slip away from talking about our impact and talk about our contribution, which seems much more in the spirit of self-generating growth.