Official Development Assistance and the British Council

Neil Parish Excerpts

Wednesday 30th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

I welcome the chance to speak on the estimates for spending on official development assistance. I wish to take the opportunity, as other hon. Members have done, to question the Government’s decision to cut the aid budget from 0.7% to 0.5% of GNI. I understand the points raised by the Treasury about the need to make savings, given the financial strain caused by covid-19, and I understand that difficult decisions must be made. However, as has been said in this House, the cut of approximately £4 billion in aid is worth only about 1% of what the Chancellor has borrowed to protect us from covid.

I take issue with any cut to our aid budget, but I take even more issue with where the cuts appear to be falling. If we absolutely must cut aid, we need to investigate very carefully where savings can be made. I question whether the Government should have done more to manage the reduction of the budget without slashing funding for lifesaving programmes. The cut from £15 billion to £10.7 billion is a cut of about 30%, so why have we cut 60% of the UNICEF budget, 85% of the United Nations Population Fund’s, and 80% of our funding for water projects? Clean water is life itself.

[Anthony Mangnall]

My hon. Friend is making an important point. One of the bigger issues is the speed at which the cuts were announced, which did not give time for any of the organisations that saw those cuts to be able to prepare for them—to be able to put in mitigating circumstances to allow them to run programmes on a skeleton staff, or whatever it may have been. We have not given the right amount of lead time for these businesses and organisations to be able to prepare for the cuts. If we wanted to make the cuts, we should have delayed doing it and put them into another year altogether.

[Neil Parish]

I thank my hon. Friend; he is right. There seems to have been very little planning generally in both the speed of the cuts and where they have fallen.

Why have we not looked at the administration costs in this budget? Why have water projects and UNICEF projects, in particular, been cut so drastically? We need to pause and think for a moment. Let us try to rectify much of the damage that has been done, because these things can be brought back into place. I have given just a few examples, but it seems that the most vital programmes have taken a disproportionate hit. Cutting the budget for the UN Population Fund from £154 million to £23 million will have a devastating impact on the ground. Likewise, our commitments to water and sanitation projects will be cut from £176 million to about £35 million. We are not talking about billions of pounds. These are relatively small amounts of cash, especially in the grand scheme of £400 billion that we have borrowed to battle covid-19 and save lives in this country—which I very much support. I therefore question whether the money for these programmes could have been cut in other areas instead.

I have been to Bangladesh and seen for myself the needs of people there. They are people with very little or nothing who cannot rely on a generous welfare state when things go wrong as we can here in the UK. It is easy to forget, as we live in a prosperous country, that there are people in the world who do not have access to clean water. As I said, water is life itself, and so slashing our capacity to provide clean water to the poorest will cost lives. We must ask ourselves what we would do if our children and grandchildren were in that position and reliant on the generosity of foreign Governments to provide clean water. Would we actually stand by and see our children and grandchildren dying for lack of clean water? We would not.

For better or worse, we have a colonial past, and in many cases the poorest nations are former colonies. We cannot turn our back on them now. We must help people in these countries and others who need it who are reliant on aid. This would be true at any time, but in the midst of a pandemic depriving people of clean water when it may be their only defence against the virus is catastrophic. Some people may say that we are doing our bit by supplying vaccines to the developing world as part of COVAX and other schemes, which is true, but mass vaccination programmes are not delivered overnight, and humans need clean water every day to survive. Likewise, cutting funding for family planning is counterproductive when the population in the poorest countries is already greater than their resources, including food and clean water. Preventing access to contraception will cause families to spiral into even greater poverty, putting thousands of lives at risk.

There is a broader problem of the signal that this decision sends to the rest of the world on climate action. The cuts will diminish the ability of the world’s poorest to cope with climate change, and those people are often the hardest hit by it. Taking the water cuts, for example, there is the context of increasing droughts. We need to strengthen the resilience to drought of communities in poor countries, not weaken it. This aid budget cut also means a cut to the UK’s highly effective programme to prevent deforestation in Indonesia. The green economic growth programme focused on providing sustainable livelihoods for local populations who often end up working in harmful environmental practices such as deforestation due to the lack of alternative ways to make a living. The UK programme was changing that; now it has abruptly been cancelled, despite its success.

The Environment Bill is currently going through the Lords, and promises to be world leading on climate change and deforestation. It will be completely undermined if we are cutting funding to tackle deforestation abroad at the same time as making commitments in legislation. There does not appear to be any joined-up thinking—dare I say it—across Government. We are taking strong domestic action on the environment, but these cuts signal that we are not serious enough about tackling the issue globally.

I regret any cuts to our overseas aid budget and cannot see how they deliver tangible benefits to our national finances. I therefore hope that the Government come forward with a method of restoring the budget, whether that is very quickly or more gradually over a longer period of time. In the meantime, these cuts have landed disproportionately and hit the most needed humanitarian programmes. Whatever path the Government choose to take, those programmes must be the first to be restored. I hope that our Ministers can soon bring forward exactly the way in which we are going to reinstate the 0.7% of GNI in the very near future.