Queen’s Speech

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Wednesday 15th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles]

My Lords, having worked in international development for the best working years of my life, I can only admire the admirable simplicity of the approach of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames, to this subject. However, as I will demonstrate, I do not think that compassion is enough. I also regret that the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, is not in his place. I worked for an organisation that had equity investments in three seed companies in Africa. It worked very closely with the largest privately owned American seed company. It brought clonal tea to Zimbabwe and Tanzania and bred elite oil palms for the Far East. In fact, it did everything that the noble Lord suggested should be done now, and I was part of the British aid programme at the time.

International development and aid has in fact always been controversial. It has never been a simple subject. Indeed, if your Lordships were to read the 238 pages of DfID’s annual report—perhaps noble Lords do not read those 238 pages—you may end up, like me, completely confused. I say that advisedly. I am not sure, but I think that DfID is driven by the millennium development goals, yet those are not working. It is true to say that the countries that will be able to achieve the millennium development goals would have achieved them anyway and that those that cannot achieve them would never have done so anyway. There are countries going in and out of the green, amber and red definitions of the millennium goals, which certainly need to be thoroughly revised in 2015.

Our own House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee wrote a very good report about the effectiveness of aid, which noble Lords will no doubt have read. Reading that report, you see that there is deep controversy in the evidence given to that committee about the effectiveness of aid. Whatever might be said about my noble friend Lord Ashcroft’s blogs, he knew and knows about Zimbabwe from when he was young, and about Belize. Those are two quite difficult countries and in his blogs there are very interesting views.

There used to be great debate in this House about development and aid. Lord Balogh and Lord Bauer used to go head to head. Lord Balogh was an adviser on official development assistance, while Lord Bauer would say that economic growth and development were what was needed and that aid interrupted the progress towards economic growth and the elimination or amelioration of poverty. We now have consensus, which the noble Lord, Lord Collins referred to, so we cease to debate the matter as we are all agreed. All that does, if I may say so, is open the door to Mr Nigel Farage—not a very welcome development—because, as he says, if all three Front Benches agree there must be something wrong. On that proposition, I agree with him, even if his attitude to aid is completely mistaken.

I suggest a way of thinking about economic development and international development. There are four strands to it. First, there is economic growth, which leads one on to poverty. I think everybody agrees—the Secretary of State has said it—that economic growth is the most important means of reducing poverty. The House of Lords committee said that economic growth is essential if poverty is to be reduced, which is of course absolutely right. Secondly, the millennium development goals talk about the eradication of poverty but then refer to the eradication of extreme poverty. However, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says that we have poverty in the United Kingdom. Thirdly, we have corruption. Nothing should be done if it leads to corruption and we must do everything to avoid it, but we have corruption here. We have not lost it; there is still some about. Fourthly, there is disaster relief, which I would like to leave out, but of course if Cockermouth gets flooded we give its people relief.

We need economic growth now in the United Kingdom. I have heard economic growth mentioned several times tonight in connection with the eurozone and Europe. We have not eliminated poverty and we never will. We have corruption. The Charity Commission is looking at the moment at a charity that appears to have behaved very badly. Is anybody suggesting that we should get rid of the serious fraud squad? We do disaster relief, too, so when thinking about international development we should stop thinking about achieving things and about targets or exits and endings. It is not that at all but a continuous process, which has gone on here and in the whole of the developed world and will go on everywhere else. When it goes on successfully, of course we will build much more interesting relationships of the kind my noble friend Lady Nicholson mentioned with Iraq, because that is all part of how you come out of problems of one sort or another and create positive relationships. We can make sense of the debate about international development only when we realise that none of the four strands which I have mentioned go away. They all persist.

I have quickly to declare an interest. I used to work for a thing that was called the Commonwealth Development Corporation. It was a classic development finance institution. We used to look for economic opportunities, carrying our own technology and management capability with us. We were prepared to lead and to be in consortia. We took risks and went where other people—the pure private sector—were not quite prepared to go. We did things that were quite risky and exciting and on the whole very successful. However, the previous Administration wanted rid of it. They thought that there was no place for such a gap-filling development finance institution, so they tried to sell it to the private sector. They modelled it on that private sector and left it in limbo.

The Secretary of State now says, “We work with the CDC”, although she qualifies that by describing it as the “revitalised” CDC. I wonder what that means and whether my noble friend on the Front Bench will tell us, if not now then later, when we have a Statement on CDC. I hope that we might get a trailer tonight because we still need a classically designed development finance institution that is not aid per se, or a profit maximiser, but a central economic development institution.