International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts

Friday 6th February 2015 Lords Chamber

I have a number of views on value for money and so on that I was going to express now to avoid having to repeat them later. I shall confine myself simply to this point on this occasion but I repeat: there are strong arguments against hypothecation. That is what the Bill is doing and it will lead to the issue of whether other areas of expenditure, which for the general public are more important, should be hypothecated as well, and we run into a very serious situation if we continue on this tack. This is only one of several amendments that we have put forward on this theme, and I hope we do not have to repeat the arguments every time we come to it.

[Lord Low of Dalston (CB)]

Perhaps the noble Lord might be able to help me and in so doing, I hope, help the House. I understand very well the argument that he is making. He has put it very clearly that he is against hypothecation of any proportion of GNI for any particular purpose. However, I am not quite clear on how this amendment assists that argument. If the noble Lord objects to the hypothecation of 0.7% of GNI for development aid, it matters not whether it is “the” target or “a” target; it is still a target. This amendment would not get rid of that hypothecation.

[Lord MacGregor of Pulham Market]

My Lords, there are two themes to all our amendments: hypothecation is one and the other is value for money et cetera. This is not the most important amendment to deal with hypothecation but it happens to be the first. That is the point. A lot of the other amendments—which I hope we can deal with much more swiftly because we will have dealt with the general arguments—are more designed to ease the target so as to deal with problems such as, for example, having in one given year to go on spending to meet the target when it might have been better to spread that over a few years. We have other amendments on those themes to deal with that problem. This is not the most important amendment but it happens to be the one where we can make the general case.