Government Overseas Aid Commitment: Private Investment

Patrick Grady Excerpts

Tuesday 9th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

My right hon. Friend is right. We are entering into the final decade and the last push towards the global goals. We have to be realistic. If we are going to achieve them, and I want to achieve them, we have to let other people help.

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

It is disappointing that this has had to be an urgent question and not a statement and that it has been made while the International Development Committee is travelling, which is why I am standing here and not my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee West (Chris Law).

It is also disappointing in terms of the impact of this announcement. For many years, despite everything else going on, there has been cross-party consensus and huge public support for the delivery of the 0.7% target through public funds. The UK is supposed to be a world leader in this area. This kind of back-peddling and backsliding, and finding different ways to leverage the 0.7%, actually risks undermining that global leadership, which I thought was supposed to be a Government priority in the face of Brexit.

Does the Secretary of State accept that meeting the global goals is in our interests of building a safer, more sustainable and secure world? They are not things that just happen elsewhere in poor countries overseas; they are for everybody’s benefit. Why not be more ambitious and use this money to go beyond the 0.7 % target, which is what the Scottish National party proposed in our White Paper on independence? Will she confirm that she is committed to retaining that target in one shape or form? The Government are already double counting money spent to defence, and this is simply more of the same. If there is going to be an app that lets us choose how money is spent, when can I go on to it and choose to have my tax money spent on not Trident but on aid instead?

[Penny Mordaunt]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for those questions, but I think he is a little confused about what the 0.7% is. It is not possible to count private investment towards that figure, so a pension fund down the road cannot count towards that 0.7%, but public funds can. The Development Assistance Committee measures many things, including private sector investment, but the 0.7% is public money.

If a future Government wished to, they could spend more than 0.7%, and we are committed to spend at least that amount of money. They could do so by counting the returns that were made. At the moment, we are spending more than 0.7% because we cannot do anything other than that with these funds—they do not count towards the 0.7%. We need to get the balance right between our commitments in this agenda, which are world leading—we introduced them and we believe in them—and the demands we make of the British taxpayer. If in future years we can meet 0.7% without having to ask the British taxpayer for more money, that is an option we should explore.