International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Tony Cunningham Excerpts

Friday 13th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Sir Tony Cunningham (Workington) (Lab)]

I do not intend to speak for long, because I want to ensure, if possible, that the Bill gets its Second Reading today. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Preston (Mark Hendrick), not only on coming so high in the ballot, but on choosing a topic that I can only describe as—to repeat, to some extent, what the Minister said—one of the great issues of our time. Let me also say how pleased I am that the Government are supportive—even if for only half of the Bill—and determined, as I and many others are, that it gets on the statute book. However, there are some forgotten people as well. We should not forget the millions of people outside this Chamber who have campaigned on the issue—people from non-governmental organisations and all sorts of other organisations—and for whom, if the Bill goes through, it will be a dream come true.

People talk about the effectiveness of aid, but let me give the House just one statistic that comes to mind when people ask whether it does any good. As a result of aid involving malaria nets and all the work done with medicines and so on, over the last 10 years a third of the African children who would have died from malaria have not done so. There are many justifications for the Bill. We hear about how it can help deal with migration and terrorism, and about how it is good for business and trade, but at the end of day, we are doing this because it is the right thing to do. Recently I was in Zambia. We went from Lusaka down to Choma, and then out into the bush country—not even on roads, but through long grass and so on—to a little village. We saw mothers there who were pulling clean water from a well that had been provided by overseas aid. The look on their faces! When the words of one of those mothers were translated into English, we heard that she was simply saying how pleased she was that her children were not sick—that they had clean water and were disease-free.

This Bill is the right thing to do morally, but—to pick up the point the Minister made—it also puts the UK on the moral high ground where it deserves to be. That will enable us to say, in bilateral or multilateral negotiations with other countries, that we are the first country in the world to do this.

The Bill is important for us as a Parliament, for the Government and for the Opposition. It is important for the United Kingdom, but far more than that, it is important for millions of people in some of the poorest countries of the world. It is for them that we are doing this, and I hope that the House will support the Bill.