Post-2015 Development Agenda

Debate between Meg Hillier and Damian Hinds

Thursday 21st March 2013 Westminster Hall

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Brady. I thank the hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) and the Backbench Business Committee for finding time for this debate, which is timely given where we are with the high-level panel.

I start by reflecting on some of the positive stuff that has happened, partly through the millennium development goals. According to the World Bank, the poverty target will be met, with the population share of extremely poor people in developing countries falling from 29% in the baseline year 1990 to 12% in 2015. The target of halving the proportion of people without access to improved water sources has been met, and parity between girls and boys has been achieved in primary education.

In other spheres, life expectancy in Africa has risen by a tenth over the past decade, and there has been remarkable progress on child mortality, which The Economist recently called

“the best story in development”.

That story has barely been recognised. Real income per person has increased by more than 30% over the same period. Secondary school enrolment grew by almost half between 2000 and 2008, and the average number of children per mother is projected to fall from about 5 in 2008 to 3.9 in 2020.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) rightly pointed out that the simplicity and focus of the millennium development goals has been instrumental in helping to forge a shared vision and in mobilising the world around those goals. Obviously, in formulating the next set of objectives, the world collectively needs to learn from that, but I am afraid it will be quite a challenge when we consider all the different bids that people have made for things that should be focused on. Of course, I will add my own bid in a moment.

The panel has already made great progress on the key points, such as poverty reduction, inclusive growth and sustainable development. The panel is clearly right that the first objective must be to finish the job on the existing millennium development goals, including on income, poverty, education—my hon. Friend the Member for Ceredigion (Mr Williams) talked about education—and health, which the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) addressed in detail. And there is equality for girls and women, which we know is fundamental to so many other things. The new agenda must address the underlying causes of poverty, such as strong institutions and the rule of law, which the panel refers to as

“the building blocks for sustained prosperity”.

In all such discussions the different levels of aspiration are often conflated. At the top level are the ultimate aspirations, such as eradicating acute poverty, getting rid of preventable child and maternal mortality, ensuring personal safety for all and the self-fulfilment and realisation of the potential of entire populations.

A level down are the fundamentals of a good, effective society and economy, which are the things that facilitate those ultimate aspirations. In that group are the creation of liberal democracy, the rule of law, a market economy and social security. A further level down are the deliverable programmes, which build towards those fundamentals of a good, effective society and economy. Those programmes include land reform and agricultural productivity—to which my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford alluded—access to micro-finance, roads and bicycles. There are also the fundamentals of infrastructure, health care and immunisation, and essential goods. Critically, of course, that includes education and entry-level jobs.

In the current millennium development goals, and in most of the material I have seen from NGOs and others—I am not an expert on this, unlike so many of the Select Committee members who are here—those different levels of aspiration get grouped together. People need ideas for where they are going at each level, but in a sense, it is mentally useful to separate the levels and know where the real focal point is. I suggest that the real focal point should be at the middle level—in other words, the essentials of building a good, effective society and economy. When the Prime Minister talks about the golden thread of development, I think he is talking about the middle level. We need to do that in parallel with programmes that are focused on the essentials of life, which are health, education and nutrition.

We are talking about human life, and it is difficult to talk in such terms, but one of the great things about the involvement of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett is that they bring an analytical approach to finding the things on which the limited amount of money we have to spend can have the most effect.

The danger is that, most of the time, debates such as this are between people who agree on the most important aspects of the subject. I am sure that everyone in Westminster Hall today agrees that although charity might begin at home, it certainly does not end there. We have a shared humanity and a moral obligation to the poorest people in the world. However bad things might ever be in Britain, they will not be as bad as they are in Bangladesh or Burundi. The second thing that everyone participating in this debate probably believes is that official development assistance plays a key part in addressing the entrenched problems of poor parts of the world, but it is clearly not true that everyone else believes in those two things, too.

Doubters ask three questions that have to be addressed. First, why do this at all? Secondly, why do it through their taxes? Thirdly, why have this 0.7% target, why now and why should this country be in the lead? There are answers to all of those questions, but if we are to carry people with us through the agenda, they are not questions to which we can assume an answer; we have to take the questions head on.

On the question of why do it at all, to some extent the agenda is just something that we feel, rather than something we can argue, debate or explain. However, we need to spend more time explaining to the public some of the successes in development. In the public street and the pub, the conversation is often about the hopelessness of Africa and the idea that however much money we throw at the problems, things will not materially improve. However, that is clearly not true, given some of the statistics that I and other Members have given. I would also argue—this is perhaps slightly more controversial—that we can tie our explanation a little more to the national interests of this country, the United States, France, Germany, the European Union and all wealthy nations, and I will return to that in a moment.

The second thing someone might say is, “Okay, you’ve persuaded me that we should spend money on helping the poorest people in the world. That’s fine, but go and do that with your own money. Why do it out of general taxation?” Answering that question is a harder sell, not least because the British public are extraordinarily generous off their own bat. We have to explain that official development assistance can do things that private charity cannot, particularly by leveraging what other countries do. From the point of view of the recipient nations, there is also the predictability and long-term nature of such development and aid.

The most fundamental issue, however, is the free rider problem, which we do not talk about enough. If the 0.7% target was working perfectly and everyone was meeting it, it would be precisely the vehicle to help us get around the free rider problem. The free rider problem is this: if I, as a country, spend a load of money helping poor countries to develop their economies and societies, that will benefit the world to some extent, but I will never notice the benefit that I get as a nation; but if everybody does the same, I will get a big benefit. As long as everyone else is pulling their weight, therefore, it is perfectly rational to spend quite a lot of money on overseas development; but if I am going to be the only one spending a lot and nobody else is going to, it is not. That is why I said that if the 0.7% target works well, it is in everybody’s interests. However, we need to demonstrate to the public that even though most countries have not, sadly, reached that target, they are making progress towards it. While it is right for us to be proud of our leadership position and of reaching that target first, some of our constituents would, in many ways, rather prefer that we were joint first and that there was more progress from others.

[Meg Hillier]

We should be proud of what we have achieved in leading the way. Will the hon. Gentleman acknowledge that many of our constituents provide a lot of money through remittances, which are often under-counted? Those remittances are very much an example of charity beginning at home.

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Lady makes an extremely good point. Another reason why I am particularly proud about Britain being in the lead on this is that it gives our Prime Minister and our Government extra authority in international discussions. That gives this country more influence over what happens in terms of world policy on overseas development.

Key to all this is the need to emphasise the ways in which foreign aid is in our interests too. When I say “our”, I mean not just the United Kingdom, but all wealthy nations, although this happens to be the British Parliament, so we will focus on ourselves. To maintain support for what the Government do on overseas development, at least a subset of the goals focused on after 2015 should talk about the world’s shared interests. Of course it is right that the headline focus must be on the poorest people and the poorest nations, but there is some value in explaining these other issues to people and showing the progress being made on things that will also benefit people in the wealthier parts of the world.

There are four groups of key development deliverables—things that happen as developing nations get somewhat less poor and, eventually, a little richer. Things happen that benefit them, but there is also a direct benefit to the rest of the world. The first area is the most obvious: economic growth, specialisation and trade. As long as those things happen in a properly inclusive way, they will benefit the country itself through rising incomes. However, that also grows the world economy, leading to a higher world GDP and new export markets for countries such as ours.

The proof of that is that, over the past five years, 28% of the growth in UK exports came from countries classed as low and middle-income, excluding countries such as India, large parts of whose population are very poor. Government projections show that, over the next 10 years, today’s major aid recipients will contribute about £3 trillion to the global economy, accounting for 11% of global growth. If we look at a bar chart showing where global growth comes from today compared with in the 1990s, we see that the pattern has changed substantially, from being focused on richer countries in the 1990s to being focused on middle and lower-income countries today. Eventually, of course, low-income countries become middle-income countries and then contribute even more to the world economy.

The second area is population. We talk a lot these days about food security, about oil and energy more generally and about the resulting strains. While a growing world population is only one of the pressures on food—people who move into the middle classes and who have higher incomes tend to demand different sorts of food—the sheer number of people has an obvious effect on the demand for world resources. It is clearly in the interests of all of us that world population is at a sustainable level.

There are obvious ways in which aspects of development programmes directly impact on population, and the accessibility of family planning is one. Less obvious—this relates to child mortality—is the fact that the more likely a mum is to see her children grow into adulthood, the less likely she is to have more children. Another clear, although even more indirect, relationship relates to the fact that, as nations get richer, mothers tend towards having two children in the very long term, and it has been said many times that development is the best contraceptive. Regardless of one’s view of family planning programmes per se, the overall effort on international development contributes to having a sustainable world population.

The third area is self-sufficiency against disasters and in defence. Ultimately, that means countries making fewer emergency calls on the wealthier parts of the world. We hope that those countries will eventually be able to contribute to the security and defence of the world. The fourth area relates to making places safer, with fewer opportunities for radicalisation, less lawlessness and, ultimately, we hope, fewer wars for countries such as ours to have to intervene in.

My argument is that, somewhere in the 2015 goals, the world—this is not just down to our country—should find space to demonstrate to donor nations how the development and progress I have described is in their interests too. I am proud that this country is a world leader on development, and I hope we will remain one. However, we need to carry others with us, so we should see development goals not only as ends in themselves but, in the way we use them and demonstrate progress, as means to those ends.