Official Development Assistance

Peter Kyle Excerpts

Thursday 26th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Dominic Raab]

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend, who was a fantastic Development Secretary. We have talked at length about these issues since our time in opposition, and will continue to do so. He mentioned a number of points. He read out some statistics. With respect, I do not think it is possible to talk with the precision that he did about the implications, because we are not going to take a salami-slicing approach and just say, “We’re going to cut a third from all areas of ODA.” That is not what we are going to do. We are going to take a strategic approach. We will safeguard those areas that we regard as an absolute priority, including many of the things he mentioned, particularly public health and international public health, alongside covid, climate change and girls’ education.

My right hon. Friend talked about ICAI. As he knows, I am committed to reinforcing ICAI’s role; we welcome the transparency and scrutiny. Finally, he talked about the US. With respect, I disagree. At 0.5% next year, we will still be spending a greater proportion of GNI than the US. Given the widespread cross-party concerns in the US about defence spending within the European context, I think they will welcome the fact that we are increasing our security and defence budget.

[Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)]

If, during a global pandemic, the Government do not accept that solving problems abroad before they reach our shores is worth doing, this is an argument we are never going to win. There has been a year-on-year reduction in deaths from terrorism and extremism from countries where we have been investing huge amounts of development resources. Now that we are withdrawing that resource, the opposite will happen. This is also an economic argument, because where we have to use the military to respond to extremism, civil strife and the breakdown of law and order, we put British armed forces—our service people—in danger, we spend an absolute fortune and Britain ends up paying a very high price for our credibility. Does the Foreign Secretary not accept that when we withdraw international development aid and resource, we will end up paying far, far more by using the military in the long term? This is an economic and a military argument.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Before the Foreign Secretary answers that question, I must point out to the House that when a Minister makes a statement, the idea is that people ask short questions. They are not meant to be making speeches. A question is one phrase with a question mark at the end. It does not require lots of statistics, a huge preamble or lots of rhetoric. We are only a quarter of the way through the list of people who have asked to speak in this statement, but we have used up three quarters of the hour allocated to it. That simply is not fair to the other people who have yet to ask their questions, so I beg for short questions—and if the questions are short, it will be easier for the Foreign Secretary to give shorter answers.