Commonwealth Development Corporation Bill

Mark Menzies Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons
Tuesday 29th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

I must make progress.

As I mentioned earlier, contrary to some of the reports that we have seen in the past week, the future of the CDC will absolutely not come at the expense of DFID’s existing work on humanitarian support, human development and directly tackling what might be called the symptoms of poverty—disease, hunger and preventable suffering.

We all have a deep responsibility to tackle the underlying causes of poverty. That is why successive Governments have rightly focused increasingly on helping countries to grow, lifting the poorest out of poverty forever. That means creating jobs for the world’s poorest people, and driving the structural economic change that will end poverty permanently. To do this, we need to build the broadest possible coalition to fight poverty.

That includes NGOs and civil society organisations from the UK and from developing countries, which do such vital work. DFID’s recent civil society partnership review clearly stated the Government’s desire to work even more collaboratively with them in pursuit of these objectives.

Eliminating poverty also means working in partnership with multilateral agencies such as the Global Fund, with other bilateral development agencies, and directly with Governments in developing countries.

[Mark Menzies (Fylde) (Con)]

An example of that was the event that I and the Minister of State, Department for International Development, my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) went to last week with His Royal Highness the ambassador of Saudi Arabia. DFID is working with wealthy donor countries to unlock enormous potential across the middle east. If not for the leadership shown by DFID, some of that work would be undone.