0.7% Official Development Assistance Target

Pauline Latham Excerpts

Tuesday 8th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)]

Thank you for calling me, Mr Deputy Speaker, a little earlier than I anticipated.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) on securing this debate—sad though it is that we have to have it—and thank Mr Speaker and the Deputy Speakers for allowing us to go ahead. The saddest part is that we will not be allowed a vote on the issue. We will not be able to decide democratically what this House wants to do. It has been decided for us.

I am very disappointed that the Minister is not in his place at the moment, because I wanted to paint a picture of the things that I have seen when travelling with the International Development Committee. I want everyone in the Chamber to imagine that their daughter has got married young, too young, and that there is now no contraception for that daughter, so she has a child early. However, we have not managed to help that future mother with nutrition, so when she has her baby—if she survives it—she will have a child who is stunted. That could be in any country that we help, because those are the poorest people in the world.

The child will never get the brain power it deserves, because it has been starved during the gestation period, but we are cutting the amount of money for nutrition, so he or she will never catch up—can never catch up, because once someone’s brain is stunted, it can never do so. None of us in this Chamber wants to see that happen, but that is the reality of it. The mother could die because there is no contraception, the child will not reach its potential because it is stunted, and the child might never have a job and so afford to send its own children to school. The cycle goes on and on.

The problem is that we will be partly responsible, because we are cutting our aid budget so much. I have seen some of the figures, and the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) listed a lot of the cuts, which seem totally random and not thought through—“Oh, we’ll just cut that!”, or, “Yes, we’ll do that!” I think that the problem with some of the Ministers who have made the decisions is that they have not been to see for themselves the devastation of the impact on those poor people, the poorest people in the world, whom we as a very rich nation by comparison should be helping.

I have spent 11 years in this place, sitting on the International Development Committee, so I have seen the good that our aid has done. It is not perfect; we do not always get everything right, but we get a hell of a lot right to help those poorest people. We have saved lives—but we will lose lives.

The Minister is not a callous man or a cold man, and I am sure that when he made his speech, it was not one that he wanted to give. I am sure that he will do what he is told and give the speech he has been given at the end of this debate, but I am disappointed. I hope—now he has returned to the Chamber—that he will read what I have said about what we are doing to the poorest people in the world. He should go back to the Treasury and to the Prime Minister to say, “We are wrong.” It is as simple as that. Let us change our policy and go back to 0.7%.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

We are trying to get Florence Eshalomi back, to give her the last minute. We will see how that goes.