Integrated Review: Development Aid

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Wednesday 28th April 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, I cannot claim a fraction of the expertise on aid that noble Lords have displayed this afternoon. My knowledge, such as it is, was gleaned during the Economic Affairs Committee’s inquiry into overseas aid in 2012, and my subsequent unavailing efforts to promote a Bill to make the 0.7% of GDP target for aid apply over five years rather than for every single year within it. Incidentally, had that Bill gone through, the Government’s arguably illegal effort to cut aid this year would have been possible without reducing aid over a five-year period by a single penny.

I am not here to cry over spilt milk. I will make one point and one point only. The debate on aid is overpolarised. On the one hand, there is an anti-aid lobby—we do not see it in our House, but we do in the popular newspapers—which paints a vision of resources being poured into land cruisers, sexual predators, bribery and corruption, instead of being given back to the British people. There is a fraction of substance to some of that, but it is hugely exaggerated. It is a way of disguising what are basically right-wing, free-market doctrines about subsidies and free markets. On the other hand, there are those who are against any critical examination of aid at all—all efforts, they think, to snatch food from the mouths of babes. They rose en masse against my Bill, although it was designed to secure one thing and one thing only: a more effective and rational planning of aid to maximise its benefits. Perhaps the Minister, on the ropes as he is this afternoon, will reconsider the case for my proposal.