International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 18th November 2016 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Lipsey]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a simple Bill that I can simply precis. In the last Parliament, legislation was passed committing Britain to spending at least 0.7% of GNI on official development assistance. Ministers are to report to Parliament if they miss this target. However, by making the target an annual one, the Government run the risk of having to rush through expenditure at the end of each financial year to meet their target. The National Audit Office has pointed out examples where precisely this may have happened. This Bill, therefore, intends to make the target one that applies over a five-year period, not one year, which would allow much greater flexibility.

Looking around the Chamber, I see very good representation of what I might call “the aid crew”—people who know a great deal more about aid than I do. My knowledge of aid is confined to a short period on the Economic Affairs Committee, during which time we wrote a report on the subject, to which I will return. However, I do claim perhaps a little knowledge of another subject, and that is how best to manage the public finances. I wrote a book, The Secret Treasury—there were not many secrets, but that is what it was called—and it was mostly about how you sensibly control public expenditure under our system. That is the main motivation behind my Bill today.

I should say straight away that it is not in any way an anti-aid Bill. You could substitute defence, education or health for aid throughout the Bill. If an annual target had been set in those areas, I would have said that that also should be changed to a five-year target—it is mere good sense.

It will be apparent to most noble Lords that this is a re-run of a debate that we had in the last Parliament. I, along with the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, moved amendments to the Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, which would have had the effect of bringing in this five-year target. Noble Lords will have their own opinions as to who won the argument, but no amendment was made. Yes, this is a replay, but it is a replay under very different circumstances. To stretch the football analogy, we are now on a pitch that slopes the opposite way to the one on which we played last time.

Then, David Cameron was the Prime Minister in No. 10, in coalition with the Lib Dems. Mr Cameron was—how shall I put this in “lordly” language?—not known for his strong beliefs. But one belief that he did adhere to was giving a higher priority to aid. Some will think that this was for high moral reasons and others that it was to appease liberal voters so that they would not go back to thinking that the Conservative Party was the nasty party. As is often the case with politicians, I should think it was a bit of both. However, he was adamantly in favour of spending on aid. Today, Theresa May is the Prime Minister. It may be my failing, but I cannot find in her reported words any reference whatsoever to aid. But sometimes actions speak louder than words, and her appointment to DfID of Priti Patel, who has previous as a critic of aid, perhaps says more about where this Prime Minister stands than any words she might have uttered.

The Lib Dems, and I pay tribute to them, supported the Bill, partly for moral reasons and partly no doubt to show their supporters that they were having some influence on the Tory Government. However, that argument was dissolved with the election and the Lib Dems reduced to a rump in the Commons, although it is delightful to see them in such hefty numbers here. There is a new Prime Minister, a new Government and a new Commons with a new mandate. If this Bill has its way, there will be a new, less harmful way of putting in place the 0.7% target for aid.

The Economic Affairs Committee that reported in March 2012 was chaired by the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor, and included two ex-Chancellors and a bevy of heavy hitters, not including me. We were against having targets. The arguments that persuaded us are set out clearly in paragraph 15 of the summary and conclusions of that report, and I will save the House’s time by not reading them out now. I do not really want to go over water that has flowed under the bridge. We have a target of 0.7% a year and it would be way beyond a modest Private Member’s Bill to get rid of that. My Bill would simply change a series of one-year targets to a five-year target, again, of 0.7%. Incidentally, there has been some speculation because the Bill sometimes changes a single calendar year to multiple years. That was a mistake in my drafting. It could easily be amended on Report so that it referred only to calendar years.

This change will be relevant quite soon. Over the past couple of years, Britain has been meeting the Purvis target. However, under the new methodology for calculating gross national income about to be introduced, we would have fallen short. The excellent briefing prepared by our Library suggests that over the last few years we have not been spending what we should have been spending. We do not yet know what the outcome will be for 2016, but with a further shortfall looming, we can guess at the temptation of DfID to shove the money out of the door as fast as possible to meet the target. However, I am not confident that all that money will be well used and my confidence has been further eroded by the Government’s shifting of money from the DfID budget to the Foreign Office budget to make it look as though they are making their target whereas in fact aid money is being used for wholly different purposes.

But it is not my judgment that matters, but the judgment of more objective and more informed observers. Therefore, we have very seriously to consider the report, which was available even last time we debated this subject, from the National Audit Office. It said—not I said—that, when it was unlikely that the ODA target would be met, DfID increased its spending and quickly added activities to its plans, which made it,

“difficult to achieve value for money”.

Achieving value for money is the sole aim of my Bill. The report cited the way that the department had brought forward £300 million of activity planned for 2015 to 2014 to meet the target and then the department asked the Treasury for extra cash to meet the target in the following year. That is the kind of inflation that occurs.

“Never mind”, the defenders of the 0.7% aid target might say, “as this will mean more money for aid, which is what we want”. That is a judgment. My judgment is different. This kind of fiddling the figures is bad for aid and bad for the level of aid. The British public are not, for better or worse, supporters of aid spending. A poll in 2015 showed that 67% of the public made aid their number one target for public expenditure cuts—way out at the top of the list of potential public expenditure cuts. The British public, rightly or wrongly—and, in my view, sadly—are not aid fans.

I am sure that a great deal of shaping the opinion of the public is reflective of a kind of reporting in the press. I do not mean reporting in any pejorative sense because there was an excellent series last year by Dominic Kennedy, the investigations editor at the Times. It revealed examples of where we were using aid to prop up corrupt police forces or for cultural projects of one kind or another. That is not the kind of thing that aid fans like me want to see—projects that alleviate poverty on the ground. The new development secretary has inveighed eloquently about the abuse of multilateral aid programmes, but before she goes on too long about that she would be well advised to get the beam out of her own eye.

Aid will never be a vote winner, but if we continue with a set of rules that make waste all but inevitable, we may face a backlash from taxpayers that renders the whole programme vulnerable. Anyone who thinks that that is fantasy should look at what happened in Ireland. In Ireland they legislated for precisely this target. The Irish people got crosser and crosser and step by step they backed away from it so that they do not have such a target today.

Let me be clear with the House one final time. I am a passionate supporter of development aid. I know that there are great projects going ahead with Britain’s support. By most standards, I would call DfID a competent department. I am proud of that and I am even willing to pay my share of taxes to support that. But I am not happy to pay those taxes—and here I exaggerate to make my point—to go down various toilets of DfID’s devising as the Government try desperately to fulfil the daft mandate given to them by Parliament. I do not actually favour a five-year target, but I prefer it to the one-year aid target that the last Parliament, mistakenly in my view, legislated for. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that reply. I should correct one misunderstanding, which is probably my fault. I did not mean to say that Cameron was doing this for wicked motives; in fact, I said that he might be doing it for high moral motives. However, my more than 40 years in politics, including working for a Prime Minister and a Foreign Secretary, have persuaded me that it is not a good idea to think that you can tell exactly what motive lies behind politicians’ utterances. They nearly always have mixed motives, and we should consider their pronouncements on their merits rather than think that they are doing something for this or that reason. On that basis I do not think that I would make a very good popular journalist, but that is my view.

I also thank all those who have spoken in this debate and, because this has been a remarkably full House for a Friday morning, all those noble Lords who have sat through the speeches, listening carefully and grappling with a real, if limited, issue. I will not use the phrase “House of Lords at its best” because that comes out three or four times a day, but I think we have a good claim to that this morning.

At the same time, there were moments when I felt that we were ships passing in the night and that, in particular, some noble Lords felt that in some way I was up to something, which I was not. I heard the phrase “slippery slope”, and the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, referred to a “Trojan horse”. My noble friend on the Front Bench spoke of the “thin end of the wedge”. I shall therefore use a cliché of my own: “give them an inch and they’ll take a mile”. I may be wrong about this but I believe that, if the Bill were to become law, the aid programme would be more soundly planned, more soundly based and more likely to survive the vicissitudes of public debate. So whether it turns out to be a Trojan horse or a galloping thoroughbred that carries us through to an even better system of aid in the future, only time will tell—but I do refute the proposition that I am in any way aiming to cut the level of aid.

The other thing that strikes me very much is how we would benefit from a Committee stage, where we could narrow things down a bit more. Some very intelligent suggestions were made for better ways of achieving the same objectives that I have. The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, suggested 5% flexibility either way, and the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, had some very good ideas on this, too. With a further stage of the Bill we might be able to progress the debate until we reached a consensus on both sides, provided that the bottom line is observed, which is that whatever emerges does not result in a penny less than 0.7% of GNI being spent on aid—not a penny, because I would not countenance that.

Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.