Sustainable Development Goals

Lord Purvis of Tweed Excerpts

Wednesday 10th July 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, it is very often frustrating following the noble Lord in these debates, because I agree with everything that he says and he says it much better. That includes the observation that, in the Chamber now, noble Lords are considering the minutiae of public lavatories. One of the global sustainable development goals for humanity focuses on the lack of toilets in public buildings in the least developed countries, and especially toilets and facilities in schools for girls. It should be the focus of all of us in the House to make sure that the UK is pushing that. A reverse of the situation would have been far more appropriate today.

That being said, I commend the Minister on securing this debate and on the very open way in which she introduced it. In many respects, she was very frank about the need for government to better co-ordinate on the domestic element of the VNR. However, I wish to approach a different subject and look at what I think will be critical to the last decade of the global goals: finance for development and the need for a new British approach.

Three weeks ago, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact published a synthesis of its findings on the current state of UK aid from 2015 to 2019. Its conclusion was stark:

“The government has clearly signalled its intention to use the aid programme to pursue direct UK national interests, in particular, by helping to position the UK as a key trade and investment partner with frontier economies. While the pursuit of mutual prosperity is not necessarily in conflict with good development practice, the focus needs to remain on building long-term opportunities, rather than securing short-term advantage”.


I agree with this recommendation and hope that the Minister does too; I hope that the Government are reflecting on it.

The current UK aid strategy dates from 2015 and has a similar timeframe to the global goals, as the Minister said. Introduced under Justine Greening and George Osborne, it heralded a “fundamental shift” towards national interest. This strategy is now almost four years old and, in a few weeks, we are likely to be on our fifth Secretary of State, which means that they have averaged just nine months in office during this period. As the ODI put it, the strategy is part of an unwelcome trend to define ODA as primarily within the national interest, as an element of the rising tide of political populism. The idea that aid should serve the national interest is gaining currency, but it is contrary to the founding principles of the goals and to why the UK took the lead on securing a 0.7% commitment. As the ODI itself has shown, there is little explicit recognition that aid orientated towards securing domestic interests is not always the most efficient or effective way of maximising global development ambitions.

The ODI’s new principled aid index ranks bilateral development assistance committee donors by how they use their official development assistance to pursue the long-term national interest but in a safer, sustainable and more prosperous world. A principled aid allocation strategy, while not excluding national interest, has lower scores for countries that have this as a stated principle or major aim. That is for good reason: too many developed countries, either formally or informally, still have tied aid, aid for arms or informal conditionality, or link aid decisions to votes in rule-making bodies such as the UN and the WTO. The UK has been a superb example of not doing that. If that is put at risk, it would be detrimental to our standing in the world. The principled aid index is therefore a superb means by which we can begin to open up this argument and have a finance framework for development for the remaining decades of the goals.

In spite of this, as the Minister said, we have seen UK leadership making major improvements and development around the world, pegged to the ambitions of the global goals. We are second on the principled aid index of all OECD countries. We fail to be top because of the national interest bias that I have outlined. Having an approach that may pander to some in the press is in fact likely to be a less effective and less efficient means of spending public money, which they claim is their concern when the pandering starts. It is an unvirtuous circle that we need to make sure is broken.

We should be proud of what we have already achieved—here I agree with the Minister’s comments. The past few decades have seen a dramatic fall in global poverty, with more than a billion people lifted out of poverty since 1990. It is estimated that around 650 million now live in extreme poverty, which is down from 1.85 billion in 1990. This trend has slowed. The rate of extreme poverty reduction is slowing dramatically. According to the World Poverty Clock, 40,000 people will be lifted out of poverty today but 13,000 will fall into it. The absolute number of people living in extreme poverty is still rising in 14 countries, primarily as a result of high population growth. Because of this and some other indicators, we are on course to miss a substantial number of goals. Aid flows are not progressing at the pace that we had expected and the UN needs. For example, there was $144 billion in development investment in 2017, but the need in that period was $2.5 trillion. We have to be open: the billions to trillions narrative is not materialising.

To attempt to address this, there will be a high-level dialogue on financing for development under the aegis of the UN General Assembly—after the dialogue that the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, mentioned—on 26 September this year. It follows the high-level political forum on sustainable development. The president of the General Assembly said that this was necessary because of the slow pace. Can the Minister ensure—maybe she cannot ensure, but certainly request—that whoever our Prime Minister is attends this dialogue on financing for development, consistent with the approach that David Cameron took when he was in office? If our Head of Government will be there, will he announce a refreshed and renewed international strategy for how we will mobilise a new coalition of the willing in the EU and the OECD based on the principled aid index? Will he also commit to an accelerated increase of flows?

We should consider a UK conference with the aim of mapping the remainder of the decade to match our long-term commitment. One reason why we in particular can lever this international leadership is that, over the next decade of the global goals, even if our economy remains stagnant, we are committed by law to provide £140 billion of international assistance. Over this decade, because we are committed to that fund, we can use this like no other country. A UN initiative to be convened in early 2020 as a result of the UN dialogue would be the best means of starting a decade of development to meet the goals.

Finally, if global Britain means anything, it is that our aid should be global in perspective and principled in execution. It should be our ambition to be at the top of the principled aid index and do everything in our power around the world to ensure that other countries reach the highest they can in that index too.