International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Mark Reckless Excerpts

Friday 5th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (UKIP)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell). The whole House and many out there in the country will appreciate the integrity of his work and the commitment that he gave as Secretary of State for International Development. Although it was not a particularly high hurdle, the record and reputation of British aid—particularly that part of our spending that goes through the European Union—is now significantly higher, and his reputation reflects his work in that area.

I wish to oppose this Third Reading and the principle behind the Bill—[Hon. Members: “What a surprise!”] I listen to the heckling coming from all round the House as I say that—[Hon. Members: “Absolutely right!”] And it continues. Right hon. and hon. Members would do well to realise that the extent of the disconnect between what they want to do and what their constituents want is nowhere greater than in the area of overseas aid. The most recent poll I have seen was conducted by YouGov. On the question of whether we should increase or decrease our overseas aid, 66% said we should decrease it, and only 7% said we should increase it. In this House, however, the ratio of support seems to be even stronger in the other direction, with Members simply ignoring what their constituents want to see happening in this area.

There is a cosy cartel of establishment parties that ignore what their constituents want in this area, and instead choose—[Hon. Members: “Utter rubbish!”] Again we hear the heckling of Members who do not want to listen to the facts on how their constituents feel about what they purport to do in their name—[Interruption.]

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. Before the hon. Gentleman takes an intervention, may I ask the House to give him the courtesy that has been given to other Members this morning? He might have something important to say.

[Mark Reckless]

I give way to the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn).

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. He is obviously not aware that very large numbers of people in this county feel passionately about inequality in the world, about the Ebola crisis and about many other crises, and that they believe that donating money, through the taxpayer and individually, to help to alleviate that terrible suffering involves a moral duty as well as a public good.

[Mark Reckless]

I am aware that there is a significant number of people in that category, and I pay tribute to what many of them do through their private charity in choosing to give their own money to charitable causes, whether here or overseas. But that is not what we are talking about here. We are talking about taking away money from our constituents under threat of law and forcibly transferring it overseas. I say again that reputable polling on what our constituents believe shows that two thirds of them want to reduce overseas aid and only 7% fall into the category that contains almost everyone in this Chamber, who want it to increase.

[Mr Mike Weir (Angus) (SNP)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mark Reckless]

No, I want to finish my point.

I say again that that polling is simply ignored by a cosy cartel of establishment parties that put aside what their constituents want and displace it with what they want instead—

[Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mark Reckless]

Then they vote that into law, which I oppose.

[Stephen Pound]

I am a member of the establishment!

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[Mark Reckless]

I give way.

[Stephen Pound]

Thank you very much indeed. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is aware that, every month, 30 million people support charities. May I remind him that this is not an either/or? Many of those people wish not only to give money personally but to see their country, their nation, supporting people who have nothing when we have so much. Will he at least accept the fact that there is a spirit of decency, generosity and giving abroad in the land, even if it has not quite become apparent to him yet?

[Mark Reckless]

I do accept that spirit, and I believe that people deserve great credit when they give voluntarily, out of their own resources. What I object to is Members of this House forcing people to give their money to overseas aid through the force of law, when only 7% of our electorate support that course of action.

[Mr Swayne]

The last opinion poll I saw showed that when people were asked what they thought we were giving in international aid, they said 15%. So perhaps there will be dancing in the streets of Rochester when the hon. Gentleman returns and tells his constituents that we have cut it to 0.7%.

[Mark Reckless]

I thank the Minister for his intervention. It reveals the extent of the weight he attaches to the views of our constituents. Members are voting in large numbers to increase and put into law the 0.7%, which represents a rising amount of output, as though they were doing something on behalf of their constituents, when they know that the vast majority of their constituents do not want them to do that.

[Philip Davies]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that his constituents, like mine, would not support the premise of the Bill, which means that, as spending as a percentage of GDP goes down as the cost of government as a whole is reduced, the Government will be spending a higher and higher percentage of their income on overseas aid? My constituents certainly would not want that, and I am sure that his would not want it either.

[Mark Reckless]

The hon. Gentleman is quite correct. He is one of the very few Members who appear actually to vote as their constituents would wish them to.

We have heard today that the numbers are being revised upwards still further. We are now going to be spending £12.4 billion on overseas aid. My party wants to reduce that amount—[Interruption.] We do not want to eliminate it entirely, as the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) might wish, but we want to cut it by 85%. That would give us a saving of £10.5 billion to spend on the priorities of our constituents.

The other question that Members around the House simply seem to ignore is that of whether we as a country can afford this. If we want to give overseas aid on a sustainable basis, we have to sell overseas more than we buy from overseas, yet we now have a current account deficit coming close to 5% of GDP. That figure is usually the sign of a country in crisis and in an unsustainable position, yet we are going to enshrine in law an obligation to make an overseas transfer of 0.7% of our GDP indefinitely, through force of law.

We saw the autumn statement and the Office for Budget Responsibility and its three-men-and-a-dog approach to forecasting the current account deficit. This blithely assumed that the 5% gap would disappear and become less than 2% over the forecast horizon. For some reason, it was assumed that overseas transfers would trend lower, but there is no serious prospect of that happening while we are handing over 0.7% of our resources as overseas aid, never mind our contributions to the EU and the rising amount of remittances that we see transferred overseas as a result of the degree of immigration we have seen in this country.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

The hon. Gentleman clearly does not see the point of giving aid for humanitarian or compassionate reasons, but will he at least acknowledge the self-interest involved? Would he acknowledge that, if we want a safer, more secure world, with fewer people being forced to leave their countries—which his party certainly does not like—sharing our wealth more equally would be a very good way of achieving that?

[Mark Reckless]

No, I do not acknowledge that; the idea that by giving all this overseas aid we are reducing immigration to our country is complete baloney. Immigration tends to come much more from middle income people; the most strife-torn and poorest people do not have the money to pay people smugglers to come illegally to our country. I do not think the argument the hon. Lady makes is right, and the evidence does not support the idea that overseas aid reduces immigration or benefits us from a selfish perspective of leading to more trade. Indeed, we completely untied aid from trade. Other countries, most notably France, have traditionally tried to bring some benefit to constituents and companies by saying, “We will give you this aid but it should be spent in this way which will benefit not only your countries, but our constituents.” By untying aid in that way, we have made it even less popular than it previously was.

There is an idea that we can somehow sustain giving away 0.7% on overseas aid every year, even when we are borrowing 5% of our output every year and we have no plans to put that right. Even the OBR says that our exports are going to grow more slowly than our imports; it just has preposterous assumptions that suddenly we are going to get 2.5% of extra GDP from investment income and somehow transfers are going to decline—they are not. All this money we are giving in overseas aid we are borrowing—and doing so from overseas. We are purporting to be a rich country that is able to give this great handout of 0.7% of everything we produce every year, but we are not giving what we produce—we are giving money that we are borrowing from overseas. These are debts we are building up for our children and our grandchildren. We see the other forecast that debt as a proportion of household income in that sector is going to go up to 180% of GDP, and that is partly happening to pay the taxes this Government need in order to give away 0.7% of their output to overseas. People here should think about what our constituents want and about whether it is sustainable to give away this amount of money when we are actually having to borrow it all from overseas.

[Stephen Doughty]

The hon. Gentleman has tried to paint a picture of a cosy cartel and of us not listening to our constituents. Does he believe that, given that we have all listened to the voices of many churchgoers, mosque-goers and synagogue-goers in our constituencies, all of whom have written to us, and to the voices of people such as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Catholic cardinals, the leaders of all the major faiths and many others, who have all urged us to be here today to vote for this Bill? Does he think we should not be listening to their voices? Does he think they are part of some sort of cosy cartel?

[Mark Reckless]

I think right hon. and hon. Members should listen to all our constituents. The problem is that we listen greatly to those who write to us and lobby us on these matters, but we ignore the fact that the vast majority of our constituents are opposed to what they want. That is why I refer to the radical tradition—the tradition of Gladstonian finance. It is now being represented not in the hon. Gentleman’s party but in mine, because the vast majority of working-class people in this country do not want to give vast amounts of their income to the Government, including for it to be given away in overseas aid.

[Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)]

The hon. Gentleman should know that Gladstone said the lives of the hill tribesmen in the wilds of Afghanistan were as “inviolable” in the “eyes of almighty God” as are our own. Gladstone was a champion of humanitarian intervention in other parts of the world and he would have been proud of our turning up to save lives today. The hon. Gentleman should not quote him in defence of his mean-minded approach.

[Mark Reckless]

I could not disagree more. The difference between the Liberal Democrat party today and the Liberal party of Gladstone could not be greater. What Gladstone would have welcomed—what he was extolling—was private charity. The last thing he would want is the Government to tax people—on the pain of fines unless they give their money, and of going to prison if they do not pay the fines—and for that money to be used as a political class at the top of that country might discern, giving away overseas 0.7% of everything we earn, when we are actually having to borrow 5% of our output, from overseas, in order to finance it. That is the complete antithesis of everything Gladstone stood for, as is what the hon. Gentleman’s party has become.

We may be able to find a degree of consensus on my final point. The only good principle of this Bill is that it sets a precedent for this House taking back control of Government spending, which we abandoned in the 1930s. During that period of national Government, with an overwhelming majority, right hon. and hon. Members of this House gave up scrutinising effectively the spending of government. We now have instead three estimates days a year, when we debate everything except the spending estimates, and then we have one or two votes a year that almost invariably go through nem con, and there is no real scrutiny of spending. So the principle of saying what public spending every Department or activity should have, and putting that into legislation or at least into a process where this House can effectively hold Ministers to account, is a good one. However, specifying a minimum without a maximum is not a sensible way to do it.

[Mr Chope]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless). I used to enjoy listening to him when he was a compassionate Conservative and now he is a compassionate “UKIPer”. He brings a lot of wisdom to this debate. It is important that we realise that what he has just articulated is the view of not just members of the United Kingdom Independence party, but of many members of the Conservative party, including a lot of my hon. Friends who have participated in these debates. Unfortunately, this is the first contribution I have been able to make to the debate on this Bill, because I was unable to speak on Second Reading, I did not serve on the Public Bill Committee and I was not able to speak to the amendments I had tabled on Report because the Bill’s promoter moved a closure motion, which was rather undemocratic.

[Mark Reckless]

Let me ask the hon. Gentleman a question about his statement that so many Conservative Members and supporters share his and my view on these issues. Why is that view so poorly represented within the Conservative parliamentary party, and why we have had only six or so people in the No Lobby today?

[Mr Chope]

I am not sure that it is represented only by a small number of Conservative Members. We saw during these proceedings that the preponderance of people supporting the Bill were on the Opposition Benches and I suspect that a lot of Conservative Members have grave concerns about the Bill—

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[Mr Chope]

The hon. Gentleman is entitled to his own views, but the misunderstanding at the heart of his intervention is that he probably thinks we should equate generosity in spending other people’s money with generosity in spending our own money. Those of us on my side of the argument are keen to encourage people to participate in giving aid for good causes, including causes overseas. We support, and have campaigned strongly for, encouraging tax relief for those sorts of donations. It is easy for people to say, “I want to be generous with somebody else’s money.” As the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood has just said, we are talking about being generous with money—taxpayers’ money—that we do not have but will have to borrow. We should be very careful before we put a burden on future generations.

[Mark Reckless]

As well as support for inoculations and clean water, the area of overseas aid that my party does support is emergency disaster relief, as there is a particular role for Governments and their mechanisms for working quickly. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that emergency relief is one area in which Governments can do useful work?

[Mr Chope]

Absolutely. That is one area in which the British people are traditionally incredibly generous. I am talking about humanitarian disasters such as Ebola and the ghastly happenings in Syria at the moment. The British people as individuals are prepared to put their hands in their pockets to get out their own money and to contribute to these causes. Taxpayer support is at its best when it is in the form of matched-funding, because then the taxpayers’ money follows what the people want. We get into problems when we have an administrative Department second-guessing what people think and then saying, “Let’s have a slab of money thrown here and another slab there.” That is when overseas aid falls into disrepute.

In an earlier intervention, I quoted from the 2012 British social attitudes survey. I think it is worth re-emphasising what I said. When asked what their highest priority would be for extra Government spending against a list of possible options, 41.9% of people said health, 30% said education and 0.5% said overseas aid. When asked for their next preference, 31.5% said education, 29.5% said health and 0.5% said overseas aid. The problem is that people do not want extra taxpayers’ money to be spent in this area at a time when the increases in public expenditure on health and education are not as great as those on overseas aid.

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[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I very much admire and respect the emotion that comes from those who support the Bill, though it is not an emotion that I would express in that way. The problem with the Bill is that it does not reflect that depth of emotion. I listened carefully to what the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) said. The stories that she tells are desperate and tragic and deserve to have help in solving them. All decent people would think that is right. But then it is a question of how that help is to be given, and by what means this country as a whole, both as a Government and as a people, decides to give it, and that is where I find the Bill so inadequate.

I disagree with the hon. Member for Wakefield when she says that the Bill delivers on the commitment given in the party manifestos. Although I happen to think that it was not a wise commitment to give, I think that the Bill singularly fails to do that, because it says it does something but provides no means of ensuring that it is done, and that is not a proper means of legislating. If we had wanted a real Bill, it should have been introduced on a resolution from a Minister, because it would tie down spending, and Back-Bench Members, under the relevant Standing Orders, cannot bring in such Bills. The Bill is therefore unable to make a commitment to spending in any real sense.

What could a Government Bill have done instead? It could have set out where the revenues would come from to fund the promise. It could have hypothecated some element of taxation. It could have set up an independent body to ensure that the revenue was dedicated to the causes that are, in and of themselves, enormously admirable. But the Government chose not to do that. Instead, they chose to support a Back-Bench measure that will have absolutely no effect beyond a declaratory one.

What is the benefit of a declaratory Bill? We heard an hon. Gentleman say that it might lead others in the same direction—a good example Bill—but I do not accept that or think that it is right. We do not change the laws of other countries by what we say we are going to do. We might do it by what we actually do, but a mere declaration of good intention does not, in fact, lead to the good intention being carried out. Indeed, were that the case, the Bill would never have been brought forward, because the original declaration—on the commitment to 0.7% of GDP—was made in 1975, and it was made by a large number of countries that all missed it for many years. The idea that fine-sounding declarations lead to behavioural change is, I think, demonstrably false.

We then come to the details of what the Bill actually says. It would reinforce the duty to reach the 0.7% target from 2015, but, as has been pointed out, it would not come into effect until half way through 2015 so there is an internal contradiction as to its efficacy. It merely makes a statement that that has to be done, and done under a certain framework.

Beyond the declaratory effect, I do not think that that is the right way to legislate. All Governments at all times have a duty to consider their budgetary expenses in the round. There may be occasions when the most pressing expenditure is for a budget different from overseas aid—perhaps the health service in a particularly difficult winter, or the defence budget if the tensions caused by Russia become more extreme. To declare that one area of spending will be protected when no others will is not a sensible way to proceed when constructing the public finances. That has become clear with the issue of hypothecation of tax revenues, which has almost invariably led to an excessive amount of revenue in one area when other areas are in need. The most obvious example is the old road fund licence, where we simply ended up with too much money for roads and the fund was raided.

That is always the case with hypothecation of taxation, and it is why the Treasury has always set its face against hypothecating taxes, but the same applies to the reverse principle—the hypothecation of expenditure. There may be years when that is not affordable. There may be years when we need to spend more, perhaps because there is an emergency. That is the type of aid I am most in favour of: the emergency aid that only Governments can deliver. I believe that other forms of aid are fundamentally a matter of private charity, which Governments support through gift aid, allowing charities to claim back the taxation, rather than being something where it is right for Governments to tax modestly well-off people in this country in order to be charitable.

I have a slight suspicion—this does not apply to current Ministers and certainly did not apply to my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), who was a most distinguished Secretary of State—that it is always possible for Governments to grandstand about their generosity overseas using other people’s money. Therefore, I would not follow the principle even if I thought the Bill was any good, but I do not think it is any good. Its sanctions are useless. It refers to laying a statement before Parliament. Statements are put before Parliament every day. Hansard is full of statements put before Parliament, which are hardly read. I read some of them. Some are very interesting and important, and they are always beautifully written, because Hansard’s command of the English language is so fine that they do not allow sloppy grammar to get through, even from Her Majesty’s Government. A statement from a Minister is not a particularly powerful form of being held to account.

The provisions laid down in the Bill for what the statement will need to say are otiose. No Bill, once it is an Act of Parliament, can be enforced against proceedings in this House. If a Minister entirely fails to take any notice of the requirements of clause 2(3) and puts down a statement saying, as a former Labour Minister memorably said, “There’s no money left”, or something pithy like that, the Bill has no form of recourse against what he has done.

[Mark Reckless]

Does the hon. Gentleman consider that the Bill will be susceptible to enforcement through judicial review? For instance, could a judge determine that a decision on spending for a certain year needed to be taken again because it was not compliant with the law?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

No, it would not be enforceable by judicial review because the sanction provided for is a proceeding in Parliament, and proceedings in Parliament are not judicially reviewable.

[Mark Reckless]

Is not that, of itself, a reason why a judge might determine that because the legislation specifies no remedy that a court can enforce, the general remedy of judicial review would be applicable?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

No. There is a remedy, but it is not enforceable in the courts. It is essentially at the discretion of Ministers because it is a proceeding in Parliament and therefore not challengeable outside.

Parliament is very unwise to bring its proceedings into legislation because it is of such constitutional importance that our proceedings are not judicially reviewable. If we legislate in such a way that we bring our proceedings into the orbit of the courts, we have to be careful about whether a judge may feel that Parliament’s intention was to allow the courts to interfere, overriding the Bill of Rights. I therefore take the greatest exception to clauses 2(3) and (4), which are erroneous in terms of what Parliament ought to be trying to do.

The Government really ought to be held to account for clause 5. They removed from the Bill a detailed, if perhaps rather expensive, way of holding the Government to account and put in something of the most utter wishy-washiness.

I return to the question of whether this Bill increases or decreases trust in politicians. When the House of Commons, and later the House of Lords, legislate to say merely that it is nice to do something, but with no means of enforcing it, and failing to use all the procedures that we have at our command to make sure that it happens, are we assuming that electors do not understand what we are doing and that we can pull the wool over their eyes? Will they not look at what we are doing? This is not a real keeping of the commitment that was made. It is a minimalistic, tokenistic approach to pretending that we have done what we said we would do, because when we looked at what we had proposed in our respective manifestos we realised that it was a silly thing to do because the hypothecation of expenditure is fundamentally unwise in any budgetary system. For that reason, I will oppose Third Reading.