Commonwealth Development Corporation Bill

Debate between Stephen Doughty and Richard Fuller

Programme motion: House of Commons & 3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 10th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Richard Fuller]

Is not the level of investment now consistent with this increase? For CDC’s current level of activity to be maintained, it requires this level of increase, so cannot concerns about too rapid growth perhaps be overstated?

[Stephen Doughty]

I do not believe that that case has been made; there has been no justification at any point for the actual figures. To maintain CDC at its current level of activity, we need to realise that it has managed perfectly well with £1.5 billion since 1999 and has recycled it within its own budgets. If it was going up by £1.5 billion or £2 billion, I could understand it with a view to creating space for the next 10 years, but £6 billion and £12 billion seem to me to be well out of the appropriate range.

Commonwealth Development Corporation Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Stephen Doughty and Richard Fuller

Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Stephen Doughty]

The hon. Gentleman clearly did not listen to what I said either on Second Reading or in Committee this morning. He knows full well that I do not support the views of War on Want on the role of business and private capital in supporting developments, jobs and job creation. I made it clear that I did not support that part of its views. What I did support was the suggestion that the CDC is being given a different set of rules to play by from other development finance institutions and indeed other routes on which we can put our valuable aid money, for which we should demand the highest levels of scrutiny, transparency and effectiveness, and coherence with the rest of our programme.

I do not want to stray too far from the terms of the amendment, but in the new clauses we will discuss some of those issues of coherence. Without additional safeguards and caveats on where that money is spent, the transparency arrangements, the business case that should be presented and so on, whatever number we put in, whether it is £1 million less that the hon. Member for Rochford and Southend East suggests, the £3 billion less that I suggest or indeed any other figure, or a proportion as suggested by SNP Members, we could see multiple distortive effects. For example, the value of investments currently going into middle-income countries is still significantly higher than into lower-income countries. The value of investments going into Africa has gone down and the value of investments going into south Asia—mostly to India, a country to which we were supposed to end giving aid—has in fact gone up. The reality is, if we boost the CDC’s budget further without any change in that overall strategy, we will see a multiplication of that effect.

[Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)]

On a point of clarity, when the hon. Gentleman talks about the value of investments, does he mean the valuation of investments made historically, and therefore revalued on the balance sheet, or is he talking about new disbursements?

[Stephen Doughty]

I am talking about the issue before us today, which is about new investment and new disbursements. The figures I am referring to about those shifts relate to new disbursements by CDC—new investments made in recent years. We can have a lengthy debate about what went on in CDC before 2012 and the legacy investments that are still part of the portfolio—

Commonwealth Development Corporation Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Stephen Doughty and Richard Fuller

Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Richard Fuller]

It is, Mr Streeter.

[Stephen Doughty]

Q I have a follow-up question for Oxfam or War on Want. I do not agree with everything War on Want says, but a good point it made was about the differing standards that appear to be applied to the CDC as opposed to non-governmental organisations, other multilaterals and so on. The multilateral aid review is pretty robust on how we should deal with multilaterals—publish every item of spending over £500 and so on. Gideon, perhaps you could say a little more about where a double standard might be going on here in expectations.

Gideon Rabinowitz: I have made the point already: it is clear and on the record that the CDC has a bit of catching up to do on transparency. One of the reasons why it would be helpful for it to make progress on transparency is that everyone would then know a lot more about where it is investing, what it is investing in, what the justifications for those investments are, and why it thinks it is providing financial and value additionality in those investments. We would all be starting this debate from a different position if there was greater awareness of what the CDC was doing and how it is working.

The other point that we are keen to emphasise is that if there is some way in which the Bill can leverage that additional transparency to include encouragement of reporting around a wider range of development impacts and indicators to help secure our confidence that the CDC is focused on the right investments, that would be very valuable. The type of indicators that we have to report against in our programmes could be rolled out more broadly in some of those investments.