That this House takes note of the United Kingdom’s contribution to international development, in particular with regard to the impact of climate change on developing nations.
My Lords, I appreciate the number of noble Lords who have chosen to take part in this debate, and I look forward to the maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Winchester. I also appreciate that the noble Lord, Lord Benyon, is answering this debate, as the Minister spanning both FCDO and Defra. He has shown himself committed over many years to addressing climate change.
I start by declaring non-financial interests as a trustee of AgDevCo and MedAccess, both of which have been recipients of ODA, and as a council member of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
The UN’s millennium development goals, set out in 2000, saw considerable progress. By 2015, more people had been pulled out of poverty; more children were in school; and more women were able to access family planning, with the benefit this brought to the women themselves, their families and their communities. The MDGs were superseded by the sustainable development goals in 2015, aiming to end absolute poverty by 2030. The United Kingdom played a leading role in their development, with the UN committee co-chaired by the UK, and an outstanding—then DfID—civil servant, Michael Anderson, as the key negotiator and penholder. The UK was at the heart of the development agenda globally, as well as within the EU, and the biggest global contributor financially.
I had the privilege in the coalition Government to serve first as a DfID spokesperson in your Lordships’ House, and then as Africa Minister from 2014. During that time, we brought the UK’s commitment to international development up to the UN-recommended target of 0.7% of GNI. The last act of the coalition was to enshrine that commitment into law, with cross-party support.
Since then, without consultation, in 2020, Boris Johnson smashed DfID and merged it with the FCO. Later that year, he cut the aid budget. DfID served a long-term goal: working with huge expertise to seek to address poverty and the long-term economic development of the poorest countries, so that they could transition out of aid. The FCO, by contrast, focused on the UK’s more immediate foreign policy concerns. Both are laudable aims, with some compatibility in terms of global stability, on which the two departments, with the Ministry of Defence, had long worked together.
However, the two departments did not sit easily together. To put some budgets, for example, in the hands of ambassadors, great though they might be at their job, risked the long-term strategic aim of economic development, which was DfID’s raison d’être. With the collapse of Afghanistan to the Taliban in 2021, and especially the invasion by Putin of Ukraine in 2022, the ODA budget was turned inward, supporting refugees in the UK.
From 2020, of course, we suffered the pandemic, but so did every other country, with the poorest the least able to protect their citizens. However, what we face now is far more profound, and that is climate change. The overwhelming scientific consensus has long been that human activity is having a dangerous and profound effect on the climate. The world agreed collective action at Paris in 2015 to tackle this, seeking to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees centigrade over pre-industrial levels.
My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness for her thoughtful address, in which she made a number of extremely important comments. Like her, I much look forward to the maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate shortly. I want to talk about climate change and then go on to focus more specifically on malaria.
The COP 26 conference was a great success. The Glasgow climate pact, with 90% of the world’s economies committed to net-zero targets, was a remarkable step forward. The House is well aware that developing countries disproportionately are affected by the impacts of climate change, severe weather events, rising sea levels, and disruption to agriculture and water sources. Indeed, at that time, the developed nations reinforced the pledge to provide £79 billion to developing countries annually. This was followed by the recent COP 28—two COPs later—where nearly every country in the world agreed to move away from fossil fuels after 28 years of international climate negotiations. It was a world first getting fossil fuels into a UN climate agreement; again, those in need were recognised.
Of course, I am a great expert in international climate events because I was a bag-carrier at the first international climate conference, in 1989, when Mrs Thatcher was fighting the ozone layer. She was doing so because the British Antarctic scientists had said that there was a gap in the ozone layer—had it been the Spanish, French or German Antarctic survey, I am not so sure how energetic she would have been. But it was the model, and it was rigorously science-based. It was very much the hallmark of British development policy. It was about industrial collaboration and innovation. It was about public relations and an NGO campaign, as well as international action. I would say that that formula has not changed greatly.
I said that I wanted to speak in particular about malaria, one of the world’s oldest and deadliest diseases. It still kills a child every minute, yet it is relatively cheap and easy to address. In the 19th century, Louis Pasteur, the great pioneering French chemist and microbiologist, said:
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, and to recognise that questions of health, development, poverty and climate change are all interrelated. I thank also the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, for initiating this debate. I must declare that I am a shortly-to-retire member of your Lordships’ Environment and Climate Change Committee, and therefore will concentrate largely on that aspect.
Yesterday’s edition of the Times—which is not normally regarded as an ultra-green broadsheet—reported clearly and with alarm that last year was the hottest on record and probably the hottest for over 100,000 years. It also indicated that it was one of the most disappointing years for the COP process; although the Minister and the UK delegation were helpful in ensuring that it was not quite the disappointment that the petrostates and some of the fossil fuel companies were looking for, it still did not go sufficiently far forward to say that we were on target for the 1.5 degree limit to global warming that was set in Paris, which was concluded to still be possible at the Glasgow COP 26 but now looks to be within 0.02 degrees of being reached already.
I have three essential points. First, this more rapid than expected rise in temperature and the level of carbon emissions, with rising sea levels and extreme floods, extreme heat, wildfires and so forth, means that the very existence of some nation states which are party to the COP process is at stake. Obviously, the low-lying islands of the Pacific and some in the Caribbean are first in line, but there are large areas of other countries, such as low-lying areas of Bangladesh, where agricultural and industrial land could easily be flooded within a relatively few years.
It all makes the case for establishing an effective loss and damage fund, as was agreed in principle but does not seem to have been followed up sufficiently by other nations. The threat has already been sustained to the land, biodiversity and very existence of many of these islands. As far as Britain’s commitment is concerned, we have been more forthcoming than most rich countries in making our contributions to all the bilateral and multilateral arrangements. But we have not even ourselves fulfilled all our commitments, and many other countries are further behind.
My Lords, I thank my noble friend for initiating this debate and draw attention to my entry in the register as a consultant at DAI and the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, as a non-financial chair of Water Unite and as president of the Caribbean Council.
There is no doubt that the precipitate merger of DfID and the FCO and the accompanying slashing of budgets has had deeply damaging effects. The UK’s reputation as a world leader in development assistance was literally trashed, leaving many vulnerable people bereft and at risk. As my noble friend said, dedicated and experienced development practitioners left the sector and relationships with partner countries were damaged. In this context, I welcome the appointment of Andrew Mitchell and the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, but that alone will not undo the damage. Under the OBR forecast, the Government’s tests for the restoration of 0.7% will be met by 2027, but the Chancellor said it cannot be done in the next five years. His priority is domestic tax cuts rather than the poor people of the world.
The Motion calls for a particular regard to the UK’s development impact on climate change in developing nations. In 2011, Paddy Ashdown, the late and much-missed Member of this House, published a review of the UK’s response to humanitarian emergencies, commissioned by Andrew Mitchell. One of its key findings was that those best able to acquire resilience were those who had already experienced disasters. The focus had to be on anticipation, prevention, mitigation and rapid recovery. People in developing countries should, of course, benefit from renewable technologies but, for many, the more urgent priority is to mitigate the impact of climate change that developed economies have inflicted on them.
In headlines, the UK makes impressive statements on the commitment to funding climate resilience in developing countries. The 2023 results for UK international climate finance are impressive but they are not stand-alone statistics. How is the four-year spending commitment of £11.6 billion broken down? How much is UK ODA, how much is from other donors, how much is from the private sector and how much is designation of existing ODA spending? Can the Government provide more detailed examples? The only ones in the results are small case studies from Zambia, Madagascar and Mexico.
My Lords, my contribution to this debate will start with tributes to three people. First, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, not just for securing a much-needed discussion of Britain’s contribution to development aid but for her untiring and effective work as a Minister in the coalition Government and in opposition. Secondly, I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, for her principled resignation in protest against the misguided decision to reduce our aid. Thirdly, I pay tribute to the Minister for Development, Andrew Mitchell, for having set out in last November’s White Paper the first reasonably coherent and consistent framework for our aid since the ill-advised upheaval caused by the amalgamation of DfID and the FCO.
Useful though that White Paper was, it lacked one essential element: adequate resourcing to face the worldwide challenges of climate change, pandemic disease, malnutrition, educational shortcomings and war and violent upheavals. The Government say that they will return those resources to 0.7% as soon as our circumstances permit, but what about the circumstances of the developing countries, recipients of aid, which have been just as adversely affected by the Covid pandemic, the cost of living rises and wars in Ukraine and the Middle East? The Government’s assurance has already been repeated several times and a cynic would say that it is all set for serial repetition in the years ahead. It has no credibility. Better, surely, if it is unrealistic—I accept that it is—to revert immediately to the full 0.7%, at least to set out on the path towards it, even if only modestly at first. The opportunity for that is the Budget on 6 March. I urge that it be taken.
How best to link global action against climate change to the situation of developing countries, many of which, let us recall, have contributed little or nothing to the climate crisis we all face? Obviously, we and other donor countries need to make a better job of fulfilling the commitment on aid we have collectively entered into at successive COP meetings, most recently in the UAE. What plans do the Government have to do that? We need to ensure that this increase does not come at the expense of other priorities of the developing country recipients, thus robbing Peter to pay Paul and expecting the global South to accept our priorities over theirs.
My Lords, I too am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, for the opportunity to debate this hugely significant subject. I too am looking forward to the maiden speech by my right reverend friend the Bishop of Winchester, who has real expertise in this area.
When it comes to thinking about the impact of climate change on developing nations, the injustices at play are twofold. First is the fact that those nations that are being and will yet be most affected by climate change are those that have contributed least to the crisis. Secondly, much of the funds that fuelled our Industrial Revolution, wherein were sown the seeds of climate change, were generated by extracting and exploiting the resources of many of those regions, most devastatingly, of course, through the transatlantic chattel slave trade.
Our moral debt is as great as the climate emergency we face, so I was pleased to see that the Government’s international development White Paper, published in November, included “tackling climate change” in its title. I was also most encouraged to read the Government advocating for a move away from donor-recipient models of aid towards partnerships built on mutual respect, putting greater value on the voice, perspectives and needs of developing nations, as well as supporting local leadership. The paper hearteningly states:
“We will engage with humility and acknowledge our past”.
With that in mind, might the Minister inform the House of the outcomes of the Secretary of State’s meeting with the Barbadian Prime Minister in December, and whether they discussed the issue of reparations? Responding with humility and honestly acknowledging our past includes such complex issues, which directly affect a country’s ability or inability to respond to climate change.
I have said that we as a country carry a weighty moral debt, yet for developing nations the financial debt is a more tangible problem, as the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, and the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, have both already mentioned. According to the World Bank, in 2022 the external debts of countries with low and middle incomes reached $9 trillion, double the figure in 2010. The cost of servicing these debt payments is crippling, and drains funds away from what is needed to become climate resilient. Analysis by Development Finance International has shown that lower-income countries spend over 12 times more on debt payments than on adapting to the climate crisis. Indeed, some are turning to fossil fuel extraction to generate the revenue needed to reduce the burden.
My Lords, I welcome this debate. I am an outlier because I am a pensioner of what was CDC and is now BII. Indeed, I was its chief executive about half way through its history. It is still there, and it is still doing development.
I hope for two things really. The first is that it will be accepted that, in CDC, we always thought of what we were doing from the point of view of the country where we were doing it. We never did it with the western agenda in our minds. Secondly, I hope that the pessimism, the difficulty and the incredible challenge of the debate in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, does not make us all so uncertain and depressed that in the end we stop trying to do anything. That is a bit extreme but it is a serious danger: if you do not keep trying, you stop doing things altogether.
There are 17 Commonwealth members in sub-Saharan Africa and 13 of them are in the bottom quartile of per capita incomes of the world’s countries. When we work in those countries, do we think about climate change first? I think the answer is: what do they think about first? I suspect that they think that climate change is just another aspect of the problems that they have, which are dominated by food security, so it is just a bit more of the same and not necessarily because there is so much uncertainty about the effects of climate change. People have to think more carefully about some of the certainties they are trying to express. We simply do not know why, perhaps, the yields of maize from the small farmers of Rwanda will start to drop. There is so much that we do not know about it.
I would like to refer quickly to BII, which is doing some very interesting things in relation to the prosperity of small farmers. It has made more than one investment in a Kenyan-based business which builds solar plants to drive pumps to irrigate. I think the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, made a reference to rain-fed agriculture. Of course, we all know that if you can move from rain-fed in a place where there is enough groundwater available and irrigate, your yields will increase dramatically—not just by a little but, in east Africa, dramatically.
My Lords, we see all too often the terrible impact of climate change on developing countries, from devastating floods in Pakistan to appalling droughts in a number of African countries. Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland, has eloquently set out the impact of climate change on various groups, above all on the poorest of the poor in low-income developing countries. Surely a rich country such as the UK should be doing more to allocate new resources—I emphasise, new funding—rather than recycling money from other development aid allocations, greatly diminishing their impact.
It is also a regret that the Government have reneged on their original pledge to stop new oil and gas installations. It is damaging to our international reputation to increase reliance on fossil fuels, rather than investing in renewables and nuclear power. This of course led to the resignation of a much-respected Climate Change Minister. My first question to the Minister today is: why do the Government continue to provide generous subsidies and tax breaks to oil and gas companies, which are already making profits running into billions? A loophole in the Government’s windfall tax is said to result in £11.9 billion of tax relief for fossil fuel companies in the North Sea. Will the Government close this loophole and allocate the resulting savings to development aid to counter the effects of climate change in poor countries?
I turn now to the Government’s record on climate change finance for developing countries. So many times, we have been told that the Government will return when circumstances permit to 0.7% of GNI for development aid from the current 0.5%. I ask again what the criteria are for the circumstances in which that will be possible. Would the Minister also accept that the international aid budget is being decimated by the decision to cover the cost of asylum seekers and Ukrainian refugees from this source? The combination of these two decisions by the Government has meant massive cuts in many sectors where aid is desperately needed, including a failure to meet government pledges on mitigating climate change in poor countries. Given that the extreme effects of climate change are a fairly new challenge, is there not a case for establishing a special budget for it, beyond existing ODA spending?
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Nowhere in the world will escape its effect, but some places will be hit first and far worse than others. The small island states of the Pacific are even now seeing their settlements drowned, and I heard yesterday of the first indigenous groups in central America being displaced by climate change. Climate change is operating at four times the global rate in Greenland, with potentially devastating effects there but also in terms of sea level rises globally. We know that the poorest will be hit—are being hit—the most and the worst. We also know that women and girls, the old and the very young, are the most vulnerable, as the Lancet study and others have demonstrated.
Many people in developing countries, especially in Africa, are of course entirely reliant on small-scale, rain-fed agriculture. In east Africa, directly due to climate change, we are seeing the worst drought in over 40 years; Plan International and others report that 20 million people are now at risk of acute food insecurity and, potentially, famine. Whereas in the United Kingdom we have research institutes studying how best to adapt, and the infrastructure potentially to help—for example, converting apple orchards to vineyards—that kind of support and resilience is lacking in the poorest countries, so we will see more conflict and migration and an increased risk of pandemics. As now, these are likely to be exploited by populist and authoritarian movements globally, with associated risks. Yet we know we are not on course to tackle climate change. This week, scientists said that 2023 has been the hottest year on record. So what are we doing to assist developing countries and to tackle climate change?
Here I turn to the recently released international development White Paper. I commend Andrew Mitchell for his leadership in trying to undo some of the damage that Johnson did in dismantling DfID and cutting aid, actions which Johnson took even while apparently being concerned about climate change, simply not seeing the connections in what he aspired to do and what he did. The new paper seeks to take a long-term approach, and I would expect nothing less from Andrew. He has sought wide international and national endorsement, and, again, I would expect nothing less. He has launched the new UKDev—UK International Development—trying to resurrect some of what DfID was. The paper makes the case for development for global stability. I recall that the noble Lord, Lord Hannay—I am glad he is taking part in the debate this afternoon—was a member of the UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change that made this case 20 years ago. It is as true now as it was then.
On climate change, Jim Skea, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is quoted as saying:
“The science and the evidence is clear, unless ambitious action is taken to combat climate change, we will not be able to secure development goals. We need a step change. Now is the time for action”.
The noble Lord, Lord Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute at the LSE, and so well known to us here in this House, says:
“Climate Change and biodiversity loss are existential challenges. Failure to act with urgency and on scale will have devastating effects on prospects for development, undermine poverty reduction, exacerbate conflict, and push the world further off track on the SDGs”.
The new Foreign Secretary, the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, states:
“Climate change’s impact on lives and livelihoods is accelerating, affecting developing countries the most”.
Andrew Mitchell says:
“We know that poverty, conflict, and climate change often go hand in hand”.
The paper itself argues that
“The impacts of climate change and nature loss are being felt by everyone, everywhere. Extreme weather, sea level rise and ecosystem collapse are accelerating, with the impacts felt most acutely in developing countries”.
Who now would disagree?
I am struck in the paper by evidence quoted which is of past actions, when DfID existed and the aid budget stood at 0.7%. Projections forward include many suggested ways of seeking to influence the international community rather than actions the UK can take.
Elsewhere, Sir Mark Lowcock, former Permanent Secretary at DfID and UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs argues that:
“The government abandoned the 0.7 percent commitment in 2020. It then raided the remainder of the aid budget in 2021 and 2022 to deal with domestic problems, above all the cost of looking after refugees, especially from Ukraine. The effect was to reduce the aid budget … to about 0.3 percent of national income … A chunk of the remaining budget—about 15 percent … can, as a result of restrictions imposed by the Treasury, only be used to buy assets. Almost all of that has been going into continuous additional capitalisation of British International Investment (BII). BII has its virtues but it is currently ill equipped to play a major role in addressing the core poverty problem”.
What is more,
“all these changes have been landed on the aid budget with essentially no warning, making a mockery of any hope of rational planning or financial management”.
Quite so.
For poorer countries, addressing climate change requires external finance. However, as Oxfam and others point out, well-off and polluting countries have repeatedly failed to meet the agreed pledge to raise $100 billion annually in climate finance and have only recently established a mechanism for funding loss and damage. Poorer countries need such finance to avoid increasing debt burdens—finance that is new and additional. Can the Minister clarify whether the UK, as it seems, is not seeking to meet its commitment with new and direct funding but rather is including payments to development banks and BII? At COP 28, the UK Government pledged £40 million for the loss and damage fund. Is this new money, or has it been taken from an existing part of the aid budget?
The economic shocks of the pandemic and rising food and fuel prices have plunged 54 global South countries into debt crises. Debt Justice notes that they are spending five times more on debt repayments than they are on adapting to the climate crisis. Tackling climate change clearly needs to be a main focus of our international development strategy. The White Paper states:
“The UK Government will take a whole-of-government approach to deliver our strategic vision for international development … to end extreme poverty, tackle climate change and biodiversity loss”.
So what is this “whole of government” doing? The Government plan to issue new oil and gas licences. Alok Sharma, president of COP 26 in Glasgow, says that he cannot support these, arguing that the UK seems to be
“rowing back from climate action”.
Chris Skidmore, commissioned by the Government to review whether we were on course to deliver net zero by 2050, has taken the extraordinary action of resigning as a Conservative MP in protest:
“Where the UK Government once led in promoting climate action at COP26, it now finds itself opposing the International Energy Agency, the UN climate conferences and the Committee on Climate Change.”
This action follows those of the autumn, when the targets for banning the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles were slowed, undermining certainty in the automotive sector, and weakened commitments on heat pumps, where we are massively behind the rest of Europe. Is this what the “whole of government” is doing to deliver on the White Paper?
Mann Virdee of the Council on Geostrategy quotes Benjamin Franklin:
“Well done is better than well said”.
That is indeed the case. The United Kingdom had a long and proud record as a global leader in international development—something that was in our interest, as well as being the right thing to do. It is difficult to re-establish this without the means to achieve it. Meanwhile, the world faces the existential challenge of climate change, which will affect the poorest and the weakest first and the most. There is little evidence that this Government are joined-up in their approach.
I look forward to the contributions of others. I am sure that the Minister will set out all sorts of things that the Government are doing, but I think that, in his heart of hearts, he will wish that he had a stronger hand to play.
“It is within the power of man to eradicate infection from the earth”.
But that power has so far eradicated only two infectious diseases: smallpox and rinderpest. Polio is coming closer. The Global Malaria Eradication Programme began in 1955 but was later abandoned. During the 1980s and 1990s, with increased insecticide and drug resistance, and a general deterioration of primary health services, the burden of malaria increased substantially in Africa.
The launch of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has been a great initiative. Supported by seed funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, it has now had five directors. I must declare an interest because Sir Richard Feachem, the fund’s first executive director, was appointed by my organisation, along with around 40 other appointments. It has not used us again—I do not know what that means. This has been a wonderful development. We saw mortality fall by 50% between 2000 and 2015. Of course, Covid has set us back, but 25 countries achieved three consecutive years of zero locally acquired malaria between 2020 and 2021.
There is more that we all have to do, but, as the noble Baroness pointed out, with the UN sustainable development goals, the end of the malaria epidemic by 2030 is definitely achievable. I think that we all welcome the Government’s £1 billion contribution to the seventh replenishment of the global fund, supporting vital tools to combat malaria: the distribution of 86 million mosquito nets, 450,000 seasonable malaria chemo prevention treatments, and treatment and care for 18 million people.
British research, innovation and technology have all played a part. I accept that financial resource is always a great help and I appreciate the problems of limited budgets, but I do not think that anybody should underestimate the leadership of Britain in pioneering initiatives and in tackling global health and development issues. It is the leadership, the science base, the collaborative approach and the consistency that can ensure that we play a real part in reducing climate change and assisting developing nations further.
What constitutes our ODA budget, let alone our abandonment of the 0.7% target referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, is also a complex story. I am indebted to the Library for its briefing on this. The largest single element of ODA expenditure covers refugees in this country. The largest sums of bilateral aid to other countries, by far, were to Afghanistan and Ukraine. I recognise that there are good geopolitical and humanitarian reasons for those contributions, but I am not sure that they should be classed as development. Ukraine is still a developed country, although it is scarred by a vicious war, and Afghanistan is probably the country least threatened by rising sea levels. Pacific nations, which are most at risk, received a very small proportion of aid from Britain. Multilateral aid, as I say, is yet to be fully forthcoming.
My third and last point is that the whole process of COP and the IPCC recommendations mean that we need differential targets for richer countries, less-developed countries and large countries such as India and China—although there are disputes about whether they are to be regarded as developing countries, they are some of the biggest polluters and emitters. They need much sharper targets than we will give to the poorest developing countries. We need formally to recognise that in the COP process, otherwise unity across the nations will not continue.
We need to do that and to recognise not only that we were big polluters historically but that most carbon in the atmosphere has been put there not since 1945 but since 1990, when the world leaders in Rio recognised the truth of the science for the first time. That we have recognised that and let the globe warm to the extent that it has is a rebuke to us all.
One of the travesties of the Government’s decision to disrupt aid was the destruction of the cross-party consensus behind the commitment to development spending at 0.7%. That was ended when Johnson and Sunak took over, and we should not let them forget that. Cutting it in the wake of Covid, Brexit and the cost of living crisis was a statement by UK plc to the world’s poor people that we are going to tackle our—partly self-made—problems by cutting development assistance, while their problems get substantially worse.
I will give specific examples. In 2019, UK support for sexual and reproductive health and rights was £748 million; by 2021, it was £534 million. In 2020, our support for the World Food Programme was £549 million; in 2023, it was £286 million. These two areas are crucial to poverty reduction and good development. Giving women access to contraception, to safer, supported births and to safe abortion reduces poverty and improves their contribution within the community, as my noble friend said in her opening speech. With floods, drought and famine, pressure on food supplies, consequent hunger and malnutrition intensify. The World Food Programme has a very good track record of anticipating events and tackling crises.
UK ODA in 2022 was £12.79 billion; it would have been £16 billion if we had not cut it. It was further reduced by the diversion of £3.69 billion to refugee support at home. Development assistance, as previously defined, was cut by £7 billion in a single year. The Government have stated that bilateral aid will be cut again next year to maintain multilateral commitments. It is important to fulfil our obligations, even if this Government have a pretty cavalier attitude to them when it suits them, but this unfortunate choice would not have been necessary if the Government had kept faith with their legal obligation.
In summary, there is a great deal of work to do before the international community will judge the UK to have returned to leadership in international development. An integrated programme of development requires balanced priorities between humanitarian response, climate change, international action and bilateral commitment. When the pressure is on, the Cinderella services suffer. We need to address this. Without doing so, the commitment to leave nobody behind will be impossible to deliver.
The prospect of a substantial number of developing countries, many of them in Africa, requiring urgent debt restructuring, including in some cases outright debt forgiveness, is already in sight. No doubt, as before, many donor countries will argue, short-sightedly in my view, against debt forgiveness. Would it not be better if we were to campaign to link such debt forgiveness to specific recipient country commitments on climate change expenditure? Would that not be a good deal for both? What is the Minister’s response to that sort of approach?
Since 2024 is going to be an election year, I have one final thought. Any change of government that might result will inevitably bring to the fore once again the issue of the government structures for handling our overseas aid. I have myself consistently spoken out against the last set of decisions, which led to the creation of the FCDO. It is not a question of one solution being clearly the right solution and the other being the wrong one; it is the damage caused by the Whitehall turf-fighting and the chaos of departmental reorganisations which make these successive zig-zags so damaging and undesirable. An incoming Government could perhaps give a higher priority to development aid issues other than that one, and in particular to those being highlighted in this debate.
We have an opportunity to build on our previous track record of debt relief. Under previous Governments, 49 low-income countries had all or part of their debts to the UK forgiven. Now many creditors are private commercial entities rather than organisations such as the IMF or the World Bank. As a result, 90% of global debt contracts are overseen by English law. We are in a unique position to legislate for private creditors to offer debt relief so climate-vulnerable countries can invest in adapting to the changes that are to come. At COP 28, the UK, along with France and the World Bank, committed to pause debt repayments when climate disasters hit. This is a valuable step forward but, when so little is owed to the UK, should we not at least ask the same of commercial creditors that operate under English law?
Debt and climate are inextricably linked so, now that the Secretary of State has put climate change at the centre of the new international development White Paper, will the Government revisit the International Development Committee’s report on debt relief and reconsider its recommendation for new legislation? We cannot undo the errors of our past, but we can let ourselves be changed by them and commit ourselves to doing justice to our global neighbours. I urge us to play our part in doing so.
In addition, BII is investing in a 50 megawatt, sun-driven power station and distribution system in Sierra Leone—which is not an easy place. That is a very positive move. It has also formed a subsidiary which has just agreed with the Government of Burundi to do something similar. Burundi is the bottom country on the world list—so some things are being done. In addition, right from the beginning of CDC, power has always been on its agenda. Forestry has always been on it, too, and BII is doing some very interesting work on agroforestry. Smallholder farming has always been on the agenda.
I want to move very briefly to Kew, because there we are missing a trick. Kew does a great deal of very valuable work, collecting and distributing information. It is looking into all sorts of possibilities—the power of wild relatives to improve plants, and so on—but it does not do much after collecting and distributing that information. Does my noble friend see Kew joining in the development programme, as opposed to being simply a scientific institution that says, “If you want the information, please apply for it”?
Other speakers referred to the international development White Paper, published in November. The recommendations, including on climate change, were mainly welcomed when we debated the White Paper in this House. Regrettably, the Government’s approach does not now seem likely to meet their White Paper aspirations. In 2019, the Government pledged to spend £11.6 billion of the ODA budget on climate finance. Instead of a straightforward allocation of funding to meet this pledge, this Government have found various ways to massage the figures. They have expanded what they categorise as climate finance, increased the risk of double counting and backloaded greater proportions of spending to future years, so that the next Government—whoever they may be—will be landed with extra spending.
There are two good examples of this manipulation. First, the Government are including a share of their contributions to multilateral development banks, such as the World Bank, as climate finance. Secondly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, said, they are going to count more funding going to British International Investment as climate finance. NGOs such as Oxfam and Save the Children have justifiably criticised the Government for reclassifying climate finance in ways that are vague in transparency and accountability. Save the Children calculates that these measures, along with increasing the share of humanitarian aid classified as climate finance, amount to a cut of £1.6 billion to the UK’s climate finance. The Minister is shaking his head, but perhaps he can comment on these claims by the NGOs.
Lastly, I want to turn to the loss and damage mechanism by which higher-emitting nations may help address losses in poor regimes, which are the least responsible for climate change. In contrast to adaptation and mitigation, which help poor countries change their own practices, loss and damage finance relates to areas over which they have little or no control, such as sea level rises or extreme weather events. The UK pledged finance for the loss and damage fund at COP 28, which was welcome. I believe it pledged £60 million to this fund but, yet again, it is financing it by taking funding from existing mitigation and adaptation funding. What is the point of robbing Peter to pay Paul?
I end by saying that poor countries are calculated to have been responsible for only around 5% of global emissions over time. They deserve a better response. There is an overwhelming humanitarian case for generosity. It is also in our long-term interest to avoid the future global disruption entailed by millions of climate change refugees.