Foreign Aid Expenditure

Pauline Latham Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2016 Westminster Hall

[Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gapes. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) on starting the debate off. We have heard many interesting speeches and lots of facts and figures from various hon. Members. I would like to bring this down to just one example, and if anybody feels, after they have heard this example, that we should not be spending 0.7% on aid, they must be pretty hard-hearted.

I have been a member of the International Development Committee for six years, and we visited Burundi—a country that is in a much worse situation than it was. Some members of the Committee were embedded with various families overnight. Everybody else in the group had a very happy family, with a mum, a dad and some very smiley children, but I was put with two girls, one of 22 and one of 14. The mother had died, as well as the five-year-old son, I suspect of HIV/AIDS. The girls could not afford to go to the funeral and did not know where their mother was buried. The father wanted to kill the children because they were living in their grandmother’s house and not with him. The villagers hated them.

We went to Burundi with the charity ActionAid UK, which was helpful in putting us with the families. These people had nothing. I asked the girls how often they were able to wash their clothes and they said, “Not very often. Probably about twice a year because we can’t afford soap.” Now, how many people in this country cannot afford soap? The only meal that they had was beans, rice, sweetcorn, and a bit of onion and tomato. They only ate that one meal a day, and they had only one bowl, which they shared with a neighbour’s child. The three of them sat around the bowl eating. They had three chairs, three forks, three spoons, three knives and a platform for a bed. The only other possessions they had were three guinea pigs. Unfortunately, I am not very keen on guinea pigs, so although I was quite happy to sleep on the floor, I had to ask to sleep on the platform because I could not bear the guinea pigs running around me throughout the night. Those guinea pigs were not for eating. They were there because the girls needed something to love, and something for affection. The guinea pigs did not run away. There was no door on the hut, as it was a mud hut. Those people lived, in my view, in absolute poverty. I saw nothing in that hut except those things. I saw no more clothes. Anyone who is not in favour of 0.7% should be ashamed.