Foreign Aid Expenditure

Robert Jenrick Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2016 Westminster Hall

[Robert Jenrick (Newark) (Con)]

At the risk of sounding like Mark Antony at the funeral pyre of Julius Caesar, I genuinely come here to praise international aid, but I come as a critical friend, in the knowledge that several hundred of my constituents signed The Mail on Sunday’s petition. As a general rule in politics, if we brush aside the fears of our constituents, it only damages the goals that some of us wish to further. I do believe in international aid. Today’s debate has been extremely good, but relatively few of us have acknowledged the views, if we are honest with ourselves, of millions of citizens of this country. If we believe in international aid and a 0.7% commitment, as I do, it is absolutely right that we try to acknowledge and address some of those concerns, so that the commitment remains for future generations to benefit from.

The concerns that I hear from my constituents fall into a couple of categories; we have discussed many of those concerns today. First, of course, are the concerns, some legitimate and some not, about waste, and the lack of scrutiny of some of the poorer decisions that DFID has made over the years, as well as the many good ones. There are also concerns about politicisation, as we have heard in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict. We have already heard a lot of that debate, and time is pressing.

The other point I would make on behalf of some of those who are concerned about the 0.7% commitment is that the commitment may not be the best way to do government. Those of us who have pressed the Government to spend on particular projects know that, because of the 0.7% commitment, there is often a lower bar for getting a project approved in DFID than in any other Department; we all have to address that if we care about the maintenance of this public commitment. We have to be able to say to our constituents that this money is being spent as well by DFID as if it were being spent on the NHS, on education or by any other Department. One way of doing that is by measuring the 0.7% commitment not in one year, but over two or five years, or even over an entire economic cycle, so that we could be sure that projects were not being pushed through at the last minute, as we all know they frequently are, and that the quality of projects was sufficiently high to allow us all to stand tall at hustings and in conversations with our constituents, and to defend them, in the knowledge that they were furthering the cause of poverty alleviation across the world.