Soft Power and the UK’s Influence (Select Committee Report)

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, whose knowledge of what is happening in global health is unparalleled. It is also a pleasure to serve with him on the group, of which he is a co-chair and where he is doing very useful work.

As for persuasion and power, I am not sure I am not keener on persuasion than power. As this is a big and comprehensive report, my focus will be on the part which deals with DfID, the aid programme, international development and the Government’s response. I feel that there is a certain out-of-balance approach to aid and international development in the way that we are handling it now. It is not that what we are doing is not okay; it is just that I think we could be doing a lot more.

In the time that I was with what is now the CDC Group, I knocked about in 50 different countries looking for economic opportunities with high development returns and, usually, sustainable but rather low financial returns. This was because, as a gap filler, we were looking to do things that the fully commercial private sector did not find attractive. In doing that we carried with us our own marketing, investigation, engineering and agricultural skills. This enabled us to know, for example, that in Uganda we could upgrade the hydroelectric power station at Owen Falls from 24 to 36 megawatts by installing new innards in the dam which were available because of modern technology. To do that you had to know something about the electricity generation and distribution industry. Indeed, at the time, only 60% of the electricity being generated in Uganda was actually being paid for.

We also went to the island of New Ireland which looks out on the Bismarck Sea. The villages down the coast are alternately Catholic and Protestant and, in the middle, there is a Baha’i village called Madina. There we took coconut lands out of production and put in oil palms. It was experimental and innovative. We knew that we could probably do it successfully because of our knowledge of soils and rainfalls; of how to build a proper factory and how to out-load the palm oil into the Bismarck Sea. We came across the graveyards of ancestors, although the Government promised us that the land tenure arrangements were perfectly okay. They also promised us a road which we never got. Nevertheless, because we had the capacity and the people who knew how to get round those problems, it was a success—as, indeed, was clonal tea in the back blocks of Malawi. There we built a small clinic, as we always did. When I was visiting, I always used to open the door of the fridge to see what was in it; very often there was not very much. We built a school but one could find, with deep regret, that there was no teacher. We also made sure that the employees had good seeds for their gardens. The introduction of hybrid seeds into many parts of Africa has been a long struggle but, once managed, the benefits are seen.

One lesson from all this is that, if you can find economic opportunities—and they may be marginal and in difficult places—then go for them. Do not allow people to tell you that, if you do not have a perfect set of conditions, you should not be doing it. The rule of law may have holes in it. Certainly, land tenure very often does. Governments make promises which they do not always keep. Accounting standards in those places were not always up to scratch. It was probably more like the days of Abraham Darby and Adam Smith when there were not any aid programmes.

In my view, the great strength of our aid programme and of DfID is in disaster relief, reconstruction, poverty alleviation, health, and disease control. The NGOs and charities that work with them are fantastic. Mercy Ships and my noble friend Lord McColl; a charity called Send a Cow, built up by a colleague of mine from the past; and VSO, as has been mentioned, are all wonderful. I believe that DfID could and should be doing more; certainly in the area of health, there seem to be no limits. However, the middle ground—the ground that DfID occupies between disaster relief, poverty alleviation and health issues, and economic development—seems much more uncertain. We get caught up in the international bureaucracy of overseas development assistance. We worry about reputations—about inputs rather more than about outputs.

Maybe some values are universal, once people have adequate food. Considering what we were told after the war was going to happen, for example in India, it is amazing how successful the world has been at feeding itself. It has not been completely adequate but it has been much more adequate than we ever supposed in those days. I suggest that these values are universal: a roof that does not leak; cooking you can do without filling the house with smoke; a doctor or a nurse not far away; a school for your children and, if you are on a river in somewhere such as Sarawak, an engine for your boat. Maybe we should be talking more about universal values and not just about British values.

I also worry about capacity building for the reasons I have already given: the abstract nature of the language and the caution of the people engaged in it so that we are always going to do tomorrow what actually needs to be done today. Why is there this hesitation? Aid enthusiasts and managers are basically very uncomfortable with limited liability companies working as the seizers of economic opportunity in economic development. To them, the whole thing is too risky and too capitalist. It is all about income and its distribution between stakeholders, whereas the aid enthusiasts and managers are controllers of expenditure. Their conclusion is that conventional economic development is not really aid and that it is something which is better left to others. If and when they do get involved, it is through intermediaries. Indeed, the government response to the report and comments in other material suggest that that is really what they are saying. This seems to me, in 2015, to be wrong and in need of change. The skills and technology for economic development in difficult places are too badly wanted and it is too urgent that these matters are carried forward for them to be contracted out to others. This activity needs to be an integral part of the aid programme, and in making it so, we should remember how we came to be a developed nation. Why do we think that it can happen so differently for others?