Official Development Assistance and the British Council

Debate between Tom Tugendhat and Patrick Grady

Wednesday 30th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

I do not think I have ever agreed with so many consecutive speeches from the Conservative Benches. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) and the Chair of the International Development Committee, the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion), on securing this debate.

It is great that we are getting to discuss the estimates on estimates day. Not so long ago, Members would have been called to order and dismissed from the Chamber for trying to do that, so this is one arrangement—possibly the only arrangement—that has been a beneficial emergence from the establishment of English votes for English laws in this House. If EVEL is to be done away with, and I hope it is, I hope that this aspect of scrutinising line by line Government expenditure through the estimates is retained. Sadly, as the hon. Member for Rotherham said, we are discussing only one line in today’s estimates documents. What was once an entire Department—the Department for International Development—with its own estimate and all the scrutiny that could accompany that has been reduced to one budget heading in HC14, the estimates document, on page 187, “Strategic priorities and other programme spending”. All the amazing, life-saving work carried out by DFID staff, partners, stakeholders and grassroots organisations around the world has been diminished not only by the savage cuts to the budget, but even by the way it is accounted for and reported in the Government’s spending paperwork.

[Tom Tugendhat]

The hon. Member is making a very good point. Does he agree that we could learn, although perhaps only in this example, from the US Congress, the French Parliament and a few other Parliaments around the world where the Government are required to publish their accounts line by line in a way that can be compared year on year? It is a bit difficult to hold the budget to account if we are not given the details with which to do it.

[Patrick Grady]

Absolutely. Indeed, if we had that kind of appropriations process, we could vote to amend the budget lines. I agree again with the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield on that, but at least we should be thankful that it is not just listed as “a giant cash machine in the sky” in the budget. Of all the offensive, dismissive and belittling expressions used by the Prime Minister, both before and since his election to office, that description of the UK’s aid budget and everything that went with it—to dismiss so frivolously and contemptuously the leadership that it showed, the cross-party consensus that it represented, the diplomatic weight that it carried—tells us everything we need to know about the ideology behind the decision to walk away from the 0.7% target and slash spending by over £4 billion. It has nothing to do with the pressures of covid on the economy and everything to do with an ideological distrust of what aid is supposed to achieve.

But aid works. Aid saves lives. The 0.7% was not a magic number; it was agreed by developed countries in the 1970s as the result of working out how much was needed to address global poverty at the time and how much those who could afford it should contribute. It helped to shape the goals of those days that eventually became the millennium development goals and the global goals for sustainable development—goals that the UK helped to devise.

Foreign Affairs Committee

Debate between Tom Tugendhat and Patrick Grady

Thursday 22nd October 2020 Westminster Hall

[Tom Tugendhat]

I am afraid I cannot speak for the Government on that, and I do not know. All I can say is what I read in the newspapers yesterday and heard from the Treasury.

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

I congratulate the Committee and the Chair on its report. Who knows who else No. 10 might snatch for promotion!

The hon. Member has touched on this point: does he share my concern that there is a bit of a mismatch between the rhetoric and the reality of the Government, particularly the domestic-facing Departments? We have UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office embassies saying, “Come to the UK and study on Chevening scholarships,” and the Home Office refusing visas to students who have been granted Chevening scholarships; we have the FCDO publishing frameworks on business and human rights and then we have the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy funding companies that are perhaps in breach of some of those business principles. The integrated review needs to be properly integrated.

Could the hon. Member also say a word on the scrutiny of official development assistance and the role of a dedicated ODA Committee in this House?

[Tom Tugendhat]

I agree. The point about integration is that it is not just about having Foreign Departments for the sake of co-ordinating embassies—it is about delivering effects for the British people across these islands. That means that integration needs to include the Home Office, of course, and Education and Justice. That does not mean, I hasten to add, that everything should be run by our diplomatic service, but merely that it should be co-ordinated so that the effect is properly strategic. The hon. Member’s own work in Malawi, to which I pay huge tribute, is a demonstration of how co-ordination can work between the public and private sectors and between different levels of government on our islands. I think there is a real opportunity there.

On his second point, there is always a challenge in the rhetoric. We have to make sure that the rhetoric matches the reality. That is why linking up the strategy with the money really does matter.