My Lords, as noble Lords may know, this debate was tabled by my noble friend Lady Northover. Unfortunately, she has suffered a close family bereavement and is unable to be here. She has asked me to take over the debate, which I am honoured to do. I am sure noble Lords will want to join me in offering condolences to my noble friend. Before I start, I draw attention to my entry in the register as an adviser to DAI, chair of Water Unite, president of the Caribbean Council and mentor with the Westminster Foundation for Democracy.
Many noble Lords will know that between 2005 and 2015, I had the privilege and honour to chair the International Development Committee in the House of Commons. By 2005, since the creation of DfID by Labour in 1997 and the passing of the International Development Act 2002, which untied aid and focused on poverty reduction, prioritising the poorest people in the poorest countries, the UK had emerged as perhaps the world’s leading donor—not totally in cash terms but in terms of focus and impact. Between 2005 and 2010, Ministers such as Hilary Benn and Douglas Alexander provided leadership among other donors, persuading them to step up to the plate as the UK moved, albeit a bit erratically, towards delivering 0.7% of GNI in official development assistance. Indeed, I remember being in my car one Friday when I got a message from Douglas Alexander. He was ringing me only to say how excited he was that he had persuaded the Italian Government to dramatically increase their contribution to the World Food Programme. That is just an example of our Ministers persuading others to do the right thing.
Throughout that time and, indeed, the whole time I was there, the International Development Committee engaged with the World Bank, regional development banks, United Nations agencies, the European Commission and other donors. The important point for noble Lords to note is that, in all cases, the UK was regarded with respect and admiration not only for the level of our development assistance but for its focus on what made a difference in reducing poverty and building capacity.
My Lords, it is a huge privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Bennachie. I first heard him speak more than 30 years ago, when he was president of the Scottish Liberal Democrats and I was an undergraduate. He was then, as now, detailed, good-humoured and generous to opponents, as he is in all his interventions.
I feel, looking at who is speaking after me, that it will probably fall to me to point out that there is an alternative case—a counterargument that was best expressed by the great American economist Thomas Sowell. Foreign aid, if badly done, can provide perverse incentives. You end up rewarding countries that are doing the wrong thing and ceasing to reward countries that are doing the right thing. Foreign aid, if badly done, becomes an alternative revenue stream, so that a Government do not need to raise money through taxation, and this can lead to bad democratic as well as bad economic outcomes. There are numerous surveys comparing countries in receipt of aid and not, and the same country in times when it was and was not, that show that there can be these negative correlations.
None of this, however, is an argument against foreign aid: it is an argument against doing it wrongly, or without proper concentration on the outcomes. There is a general argument against feeling that you are doing the right thing if you put a fiver into every outstretched hat without thinking through exactly where it is going. To take the most uncontroversial aspects, I think we can all agree that Governments have an important role to play in disaster relief: the capacity of many countries is simply not up to dealing with extraordinary catastrophes that are not budgeted for normally. But Governments also have an important role to play in doing the things—the unsexy things, if you like—that charities will struggle to raise the money for. There is a lot to be said, for example, for improving infrastructure, but that is a much harder thing to raise money for from the general population than clinics, schools or whatever.
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, for enabling us to focus on this important subject. In 2020, the Government decided to reduce our ODA spending to 0.5% of GNI, down from the hard-won UN target of 0.7%. This has had a hugely damaging impact on critical aid and development programmes. The outcry at the time was widespread and has not abated. The noble Lord set out the damage vividly. In my view—and I say this with great regret—the Government’s recent approach to international aid and development is shameful. The list of global humanitarian crises continues to grow. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the appalling flooding in Pakistan and the food crisis in the Horn of Africa have all added to existing challenges arising from conflict, climate change and Covid-19. Yet, as the humanitarian need grows, our approach is to cut our funding and take steps back from our global responsibilities—indeed, our global promise—to help the world’s most vulnerable people.
A reduction in our aid spending of £3 billion, 21%, in the space of a year from 2020 to 2021, undermines any aspirations the UK might have had to be a leader in global development. Yesterday, on the “Today” programme, David Miliband of the International Rescue Committee referred to the swingeing budget cuts and quoted Andrew Mitchell, Minister of State for International Development, saying that Britain is no longer an aid superpower, and the price is being paid by the poorest people in the world. Not only is supporting the world’s poorest the right thing to do, but our global standing is boosted by strong leadership in this area. Cutting our aid budget does reputational damage to the UK, diminishes our international standing and, I believe, signals a retreat from the world stage.
In 2020, only Germany spent more than us on aid in both absolute and proportional terms. With the reduction to 0.5%, the UK slipped from sixth in the world in terms of aid as a percentage of GNI to ninth in 2021. It took long years of work to reach the target of 2013, which was proudly supported by the then Chancellor, George Osborne, who called it a historic achievement. But by 2020 our promise to the world’s poorest had been broken, and in 2021, hosting refugees in the UK had become the biggest sector for ODA spending, as the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, said. Last year, more than £1 billion, or 14% of the bilateral aid budget, went on UK refugee costs, in contrast to the £743 million going to humanitarian aid. I understand that using ODA in this way is accepted by the OECD Development Assistance Committee, but no other G7 country is using its aid budget for this purpose. The knock-on effect for other essential programmes funded by the reduced ODA budget is severe. We must, of course, support refugees, but, as Oxfam points out, surely not at the expense of life-saving humanitarian aid or development projects that reduce poverty and help prevent the very crises that can cause forced displacement.
My Lords, I begin by congratulating my noble friend Lord Bruce of Bennachie on his excellent, thoughtful and comprehensive opening speech, and my noble friend Lady Northover on securing this timely and extremely important debate. I refer noble Lords to my register of interests, my development assistance work and my role in the Global TB Caucus.
As my noble friend Lord Bruce said so powerfully, it is greatly to be regretted that the cross-party consensus that existed for over a decade in achieving the UN target of 0.7% has broken down, for what I sincerely hope will be a short and temporary period only. I agree with Andrew Mitchell when he said that the UK has lost its reputation as a “development superpower”. As noble Lords have said, the cuts to the overseas aid budget have already had a deeply damaging impact in so many countries. I was extremely proud to work in 2015 with my noble friend Lord Purvis of Tweed on the Bill that enshrined the commitment to 0.7%, and to work closely with the noble Baronesses, Lady Jenkin and Lady Sugg, the noble Lords, Lord Collins and Lord McConnell, and various others, on ensuring a genuinely cross-party approach to development assistance.
In my remaining remarks today, I will concentrate on the importance of focusing on the long term—however difficult in our current economic circumstances—and learning lessons from Covid in terms of global public health. Effective international co-operation through Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, has been one of the development assistance success stories, and the UK’s continuing positive role within Gavi is to be commended.
In the last three years, we have all learned that an airborne pathogen on the other side of the world can, very quickly, have severe consequences for all of us. The first recorded cases of Covid-19 happened to be in China, a country with very strong surveillance systems, including on public health. However, at the outset of the Covid pandemic, only two countries in had the capacity to diagnose Covid-19. Where the next pandemic develops is just as important as what the next pandemic is. The only sure way to prevent the next pandemic is to make sure that there are at least basic healthcare systems to care for and prevent respiratory diseases in every part of the world.
I very much agree with what the noble Baroness just said. To start, I will say something which I hope has the unanimous approval of the House: it is very good to see Andrew Mitchell back in the Government as Minister for Development. He did so much in the past, as the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, mentioned, and we look forward to what he will contribute in future. In all conscience, he has inherited a very difficult position.
I am sure that there will be an array of financial numbers of one kind or another in this debate. They are very important but, crucial as they are, I would like to concentrate on some of the casualties that the world is suffering from our failure to meet global health challenges. It is a measure that perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, might agree to. I declare my interest as an ambassador for UNAIDS but hasten to add that the views I express are very much my own.
I will concentrate on HIV/AIDS because it establishes so much of what is wrong at the moment. AIDS is one of the deadliest pandemics of our time. Some 36 million people have died so far from AIDS. Every minute a life is lost to AIDS. The fallout from Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine has hit the AIDS response worldwide, with the result that progress against the HIV pandemic has stalled. Risks have increased, but resources for the response have reduced. Worst of all, the aim of eliminating HIV as a public health risk by 2030 is very much in doubt. I was in Geneva a week or two ago, talking to the health organisations there, and I am bound to say that there was not much confidence that we would, on present policies, meet that target. One of the problems has been that domestic funding for the HIV response is low. It is low in low-income and middle-income countries and has fallen for two consecutive years. Progress in ensuring that all people living with HIV are accessing life-saving antiretroviral treatment has also stalled. The number of people on HIV treatment grew more slowly in 2021 than it has over a decade.
My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Bennachie, for his excellent introduction, which was informed and passionate. I would also like to highlight and underline my deep regret at His Majesty’s Government’s cuts to official development assistance spending.
I find myself in touch weekly with some of the poverty here in our own country as I visit food banks, debt advice centres, or the clubs that some of our churches now run to give breakfast to schoolchildren. I am acutely aware that we have real need here in our own country, but it is of a completely different order compared with what many other countries in the world face. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, that we need to spend our aid carefully. It is actually quite difficult to spend large amounts of money. We sometimes find it difficult in this country and sometimes people do not spend it well. Of course we need to work at that, but the answer is not to cut our aid but to make sure that we are using it in the most effective way.
This is not just about long-term development. We are cutting our spending at a time when we are seeing some of the most appalling famines facing our world since the 1980s. I refer in particular to the Horn of Africa, which is experiencing its worst drought in 40 years. Early on, that was compounded by terrible swarms of locusts, which simply devastated the crops, and it has been made even worse by the civil war going on in some of those countries. As a result, more than 50 million people across east Africa are now suffering from acute food insecurity.
This is made even worse because of other diseases. We just heard the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, expand the point about HIV/AIDS brilliantly. Of course, where there is real famine, that disease can be fatal. There are also the well-known—actually, they are not well-known—neglected tropical diseases such as leprosy, rabies, dengue fever and Guinea worm disease. Such diseases are treatable in this country but, in a context where people are suffering from famine, many malnourished people die from them.
My Lords, I remind the House of my declarations in the register of interests: I co-chair the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Tuberculosis and chair the Global TB Caucus. I will make some general remarks about AIDS and the ODA budget, then some specific ones about the need to tackle tuberculosis as an urgent priority.
First, on the general issue of aid, I am a long-standing supporter of a strong international development programme. I welcomed the increase in the aid budget, although I share some of my noble friend Lord Hannan of Kingsclere’s scepticism about arbitrary targets. I recognise the power of aid to do good and, when properly deployed, as an effective instrument of soft power for the UK. I regret the necessity of having to cut back on the aid programme over the past couple of years, for the reasons noble Lords have set out.
However, we must have a note of realism. We have been confronted with two external shocks to our economy: first, the Covid crisis, and latterly, the oil price crisis. It has been necessary for the Government to respond to those with interventions that amount to hundreds of billions of pounds a year, with the consequence that the Government have been forced to increase taxation on people across the country and take very difficult decisions on the levels of domestic budgets going forward. We simply have to recognise that that is the fiscal context. Although it is regrettable that the aid budget has had to be reduced, it is still 0.5% of our GNI, which places us well above OECD countries’ average and, proportionately, is considerably above the level spent by, for instance, the United States of America.
Within that resource, we also have the continuing power to do very great good, as evidenced by the Government’s recent contribution to replenishing the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The level of replenishment the UK provided was not as much as many would have liked; nevertheless, it amounted to £1 billion over the next three years, making us one of the world’s leading contributors. However, the scale of these multilateral programmes presents a problem for the overall aid budget, because the proportion of the budget they take is very high. One consequence of sharply reducing aid spending was that pressure fell on programmes that are not multilateral.
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, in her absence, for securing this very important debate at what I always feel is an ideal time of year to reflect on those matters. I send my condolences to her; I am sure that she is very disappointed that she could not be here today, but she had a very able substitute in the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, who teed up the excellent and timely debate. I draw attention to my interests in the register.
First, I will perhaps surprise your Lordships by thanking and congratulating the Prime Minister—not necessarily on his record on international aid but on his appointment of Andrew Mitchell as the new Development Minister. Mr Mitchell and I have had our differences, and we will have more in future, but he understands and is passionate about the subject and was an excellent Secretary of State for International Development when he was previously in post. I sincerely hope that the Prime Minister will build on that initial decision and give both Mr Mitchell and the Foreign Secretary time to sort out the chaos they have inherited, at least until the next election, when perhaps there might be other changes in store.
Having said that, we should never forget the fact that we now have a Prime Minister of the United Kingdom who, at the height of a global pandemic, decided to cut our aid budget by 30%. That was a cruel and inhumane act, for which should never be forgotten. It was counterproductive to the interests of the country and to the international efforts to counter the pandemic. While I actually agree with both noble Lords, Lord Hannan and Lord Herbert, on the need to focus on where we spend aid, rather than how much we spend, it is undoubtedly the case that, moving away from a debate on what we spend to a debate on how much we spend, which is where we now are, is counterproductive to effective aid for the United Kingdom. So we need to start on that point. The pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the global migration escalation we have seen in recent years all show just how interdependent our world is today. The polarisation of global relations we have seen in recent years shows just important our soft power is as a country and the influence we are able to exert, not least through our support for official development assistance. That 30% cut, and the distortion of the expenditure by spending so much of the money in this country rather than in other countries around the world, have both showed up an inhumanity. We have damaged the UK’s interests globally and diminished our security as well.
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DfID did not just provide first aid and essential humanitarian relief; multilaterally and bilaterally, it advocated and supported programmes which made a difference. If poverty reduction was or is to be sustained, people need access to clean water and safe sanitation; health systems need to be established and sustained; girls and women need access to education and to reproductive health, including family planning, assistance during childbirth and safe abortion; and there needs to be an end to child marriage and female genital mutilation. DfID also supported effective cash transfer schemes, because the poorest people use the cash for essential items—namely, food, healthcare and education—something which, I regret to say, the Daily Mail never seemed to understand. Of course, all this is delivered with the consent of the Governments of the countries where the programmes are happening. Yes, we all know that poor governance and corruption are a challenge for development, but they cannot be a cover for not delivering to poor people, who, after all, are not to blame but are in need.
Our committee travelled all over Africa and south Asia to see for ourselves the impact of UK aid and development, and we were always looking for what worked, what could be scaled up and what could be transferred. We found some problems and identified some improvements but, overall, the committee was extremely proud of the UK’s achievements and the communities’ appreciation for its transformational impact. I was especially proud that during the coalition Government, the UK achieved official development assistance spending of 0.7% of GNI and that the Liberal Democrats, supported by the entire coalition Government, enshrined it in legislation which is still on the statute book and still applies.
Andrew Mitchell—who I had worked with throughout the 2005-10 Parliament, when he shadowed the department—proved a dynamic and reforming Minister when he came into the coalition Government as Secretary of State. He instituted three critical reviews of multilateral, bilateral and humanitarian aid. The latter was chaired by the late Lord Ashdown—Paddy. International agencies were uncomfortable with the questions DfID was asking them, but they respected the UK’s leadership and they engaged. That is important: not every donor could have had that impact on agencies at that level.
Andrew Mitchell created the Independent Commission for Aid Impact. Interestingly, he set it up to ensure that it reported to and through the International Development Committee, not to Ministers. It was modelled—this was definitely his idea—in a similar way to the Public Accounts Committee. He also reformed the CDC, paving the way for it to become British Investment International. The committee engaged positively with all these radical reforms, as well as pursuing our own priorities, such as ensuring that DfID built a disability focus into its work. That was followed through by my noble friend Lady Featherstone, who was an excellent junior Minister—as was her successor, my noble friend Lady Northover, who initiated this debate, as I have said, and is sad not to be here. This experience proved—this is an important point—that all the major parties could bring their strengths to bear to deliver a truly world-beating aid and development programme. Andrew Mitchell described the UK as a “development superpower”. It is not a term I would personally use, but I understand what he means. I can testify that we provided a role model to the world, respected by our donor peers and the beneficiaries.
Like many, I am shocked and appalled at how this reputation and capacity, built up by successive Governments of all parties, have been brought crashing down by an act of simple, crass vandalism. This has meant that people who might have lived have died. Those who have been lifted out of poverty have fallen back, and others who had the prospect of improved lives have seen their hopes dashed away. Sudden cuts on this scale have real and devastating consequences for ordinary people living on the brink. This, it transpired, is because of an unbudgeted surge in Home Office spending on refugees, chiefly Ukrainian and Afghan.
UK aid and development assistance has been the most visible manifestation of our soft power as a nation. But the British Council and the BBC World Service are essential to our positive impact, generating respect and engagement with the UK in cultural, political and economic terms, yet the ODA dimension of these is also being cut. The World Service is 75% funded by the licence fee, but the licence fee has been frozen. The impact of the Word Service has increased, not diminished, in recent years, and is more important than ever in the wake of the war in Ukraine and an increasingly hawkish China. If this is to be maintained, these services will require at least ad hoc additional spending, not funded by cuts elsewhere.
I argue that the case for restoring 0.7%, with these pressures, is surely in the national interest now and not subject to the overall economy. Underfunding our soft power only further undermines our weakened international reputation.
So what has happened? We have seen the merger of DfID and the FCO, which was done in such a cack-handed way that years and years of capacity was lost; it dissipated or, in Andrew Mitchell’s words, it “vapourised”. The dysfunctionality meant that nobody really knew who was making decisions, nobody knew who they could turn to, decisions were not being made, offers were not being followed through and programmes were being cut.
As of now, we need to recognise that our capacity to deliver world-class aid and development does not exist in the way that it did prior to these decisions. We have to recognise that the consequences of the merger, of cutting from 0.7% to 0.5% and of uncontrolled spending outside the development budget on refugees have made our ability to deliver the kind of aid and development that people have expected in the UK almost impossible.
If we are going to rebuild our reputation—it will take time to do so—I hope that the disasters of the last few years have come to an end. The appointment of Andrew Mitchell as Minister for Development and attending Cabinet is surely welcome. He has made it clear that he wants to refocus aid spending. He points out that the UK’s reputation as a leader was achieved when we were spending 0.5% and so it is not as though we cannot do good things with the money that we have got—but we could do a lot better with more.
However, if we are to build back our leadership, it will take time, because it has been thrown away so ruthlessly. It will require rebuilding discrete development capacity within the FCDO—I think this is really important, and I will repeat this in a question to the Minister. Of course there can be cross-fertilisation between diplomacy and development—there is nothing wrong with that; it is a good thing and it should happen—but there needs to be recognition that they are different and require different skill sets. Aid spend is about the benefit of the recipients, not simply UK commercial or political interests.
The needs of refugees here at home of course qualify for ODA, and they must be met, but this surely cannot be open-ended in its impact on development spend. The Chancellor has gone some way to acknowledge this; he has allowed ODA to rise this year to 0.55% because of that call. If ODA were to rise immediately to 0.7%, maybe we could rebuild and deliver the refugee priorities, as well as restructure our capacity. But in its absence, the Government must set out what can be spent on development.
It was a shock in the summer to find that billions of pounds that nobody knew about had suddenly been siphoned away from development to support a refugee crisis. Nobody denies the refugees’ needs and nobody denies that they qualify for ODA, but a lot of people would ask how you can have any kind of coherent development spend if it can be siphoned off at short notice without anybody’s knowledge or control.
It surely cannot be right that the needs of refugees are funded at the expense of poor people in Africa and Asia who are facing climate change, conflict and disease. Other countries have recognised that and have raised their aid spend to meet refugee needs. We should do the same. I acknowledge that the Chancellor has done a bit, but it does not go far enough.
I have reminded the House previously that the Chancellor was of course a member of the International Development Committee in his first Parliament. I believe that he genuinely understands all this, and I understand his difficulties, but I hope that the team in place now not only understands but will work to deliver what it knows can be done.
It is important to understand that the UK model depends on working with development contractors. The department does not do it itself; it does it through partners. It provides the budget, framework and commissioning, but those partners help to deliver the programmes. Those partners have also had to take painful decisions, tell people that programmes no longer exist, and let people go and let people down. Such a model is cost-effective and flexible, but all partners have seen contracts and programmes cut in mid-flow. Frankly, the uncertainty makes it pretty difficult to deliver any effective programmes.
Many experienced and talented people have left the sector—there is no use in denying this—whether within government or among the development partners. Our capacity to rebuild is compromised, and will be further, if we cannot provide predictability in delivery in the future. I am advised that partners are being asked to bid for programmes with smaller contracts, greater detail than ever before and more bureaucracy, and they are not being awarded anyway. That does not leave anybody with any confidence as to how we can deliver on the ground.
I have seen for myself, as many other noble Lords will have, how well-planned and sustained development programmes work on the ground and deliver long-term reductions in poverty and long-term changes to capacity within affected countries and communities. This is how sustainable, long-term development created the partnerships that can deliver the SDGs, lift people permanently out of poverty and be transformational. That is what the UK used to be great at. We used to be leaders, and we must aspire to be so again.
Others on these Benches and elsewhere will no doubt highlight the challenges facing different areas of development and different geographical concerns, relating to their own personal experience or knowledge. However, I hope that the era of damage and destruction to what was our offer is over. I used to be genuinely proud of the UK’s standing and achievements on international development. I urge the Government to take the steps that can make me and millions of others proud again.
I ask the Minister: will the Government ensure that we rebuild discrete development delivery capacity and expertise within the FCDO? Will the Government ensure that a core part of development is identified and protected from short-term chops and changes, therefore allowing sustainable programmes that the delivery agencies, beneficiaries and partners can all have confidence in and can deliver?
In my view, we have been through a shameful trashing of a world-class achievement by this country. That has to end. We have a team in place now that has knowledge and understanding, and some credibility. I urge the Minister, as I believe other Members of the House will urge likewise, to pass on to that team that we expect that reputation to be rebuilt—starting now.
We, the UK, are doing quite a lot of good work in Africa. DfID is funding a lot of schemes on practically removing trade barriers at borders; dealing not with the treaties but with the actual implementation, so that we increase the flow of goods across borders, which is of course an incredibly important poverty alleviation mechanism but one that no charity is going to be able to make a big appeal out of. So let us all agree—the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, put it very well—that we have refocused on areas that are more important and where we get, if you like, more bang for our buck. There was a particular move, during the coalition years that he referred to, away from funding organisations that spent a lot of money on advocacy and trying to refocus them on spending money on getting actual product on the ground in the places where they were delivering. I think that was the right thing to do: there was a certain dishonesty involved with some organisations that would raise money, saying, “We are going to provide farm tools for a family in Zimbabwe”, or whatever, and then the bulk of their budget would go on lobbying operations in London.
So, we have already done a number of good things. We are becoming more focused and it is possible to get a great deal out of limited budgets. But where I have a problem—I am afraid I am going to make myself incredibly unpopular, not for the first time, as I say this—is with the idea of setting arbitrary budgetary targets, whether for overseas aid or for any other aspect of government spending. First, I think it is always a bad idea to judge one’s policy in terms of cost rather than outcome. This is true whether it is a local council budget or a Whitehall department. There is a lamentable tendency, which carries on under this Conservative Government, to boast about the fact that we are spending £200 million on X or Y, rather than looking at what we are doing with it. That also creates perverse incentives.
There is a deeper problem, and it is the democratic one. It may very well be desirable to spend 0.7% of GDP on international assistance; it may very well be desirable to spend 2% of GDP on defence, as the NATO alliance demands; but if those things are true, why is it not equally desirable to spend whatever arbitrary figure we come up with on education, on healthcare or on policing? At which point, what is the point of having general elections? Democracy is about the arbitration of competing goals. It is not our job in this Chamber, but I argue that it is the primary job of the other place. There are clashing interests, people who have perfectly good arguments for why they need more money, there is not a magic wand or a magic money tree, and it is the role of elected representatives to decide on the most equitable outcome. If all that is lifted out of the democratic process and set in stone in statute—or even, as Gordon Brown now suggests, in a constitutional settlement that would guarantee a certain amount of health spending, or whatever—there is precious little point in people voting at all.
We did, indeed, show leadership, whether or not we use the phrase “superpower in foreign aid”, but I think we also have historically shown leadership as a democracy. We have held up an example of a free, open society in which leaders are answerable to the wider population. We have shown that that model works and people around the world have chosen to mimic it. For that reason, if for no other, we should be very careful about abandoning the principle that taxes should not be raised except by elected representatives.
How much further will we fall in our global responsibilities and international standing? I am fearful that this temporary reduction in ODA spending to 0.5% of GNI will become permanent. I am neither an economist nor a fiscal expert, so I have grappled with the detail of the two conditions set out earlier this year that have to be met before the UK will return to the 0.7% target. Can the Minister tell us how often those two conditions have been met in recent years? I fear that we are setting the bar so high that it makes the target impossible to achieve, but is this the intention? Will he expand on what the “sustainable basis” for these conditions might look like? This phrase is surely open to wide interpretation.
I briefly mentioned the impact of the ODA cuts to critical aid and development programmes. What has not been given as much attention is the direct damage the cuts will do to research institutions, scientists and researchers in DAC countries and to the people in low-income countries whom the ODA research funding is intended to benefit. The outcry over the ODA cuts from research institutions and scientific societies acknowledges the damage they will do to progressing life-saving and health-promoting programmes.
For the UK, our reputation as a global funder and major contributor to science and human development is at stake. I have a continued interest as the former CEO of Universities UK when we set up an international unit to help UK universities build sustainable relationships with international institutions, researchers, students and partners. While our universities recognise that ODA funding exists primarily to benefit other countries, ODA funding has become an integral part of university research and global or international strategies. It has helped drive universities’ commitments to meeting the UN sustainable development goals, by embedding them within institutional research strategies. The UUK International report last year said that ODA had
“contributed to the university ecosystem and global reputation, and changed the way international research is conducted.”
The Global Challenges Research Fund and the Newton Fund are both recipients of ODA money, and have enabled UK universities to, for example, play key roles in efforts to develop renewable energy and clean water technology; improve worldwide labour laws; and roll out 5G networks in lower- and middle-income countries. In 2021, ODA-funded projects enabled UK universities to support the national effort against Covid-19, through enhanced virus-detection technology. ODA funding has enabled UK universities to deliver projects that have improved the lives of millions around the world. UUKi has said that cuts to the ODA spend on the scale announced will “severely limit” UK universities’ ability to tackle global challenges and are likely to lead to
“the termination of existing and future research projects, damaging the sector’s international standing and reducing its capacity to drive economic growth and prosperity in the UK.”
In July 2020, the then FCDO Minister in the other place asserted that
“being a global force for good”
was
“at the heart of the UK’s foreign policy”.—[Official Report, Commons, 9/7/20; col. 1200.]
Given the direction of ODA spending, what assurance can the Minister give us that this is still the case?
The UK has been for decades an active participant in conversations around global health security, including the global response to antimicrobial resistance. What we have not done, however, is focus seriously on the airborne pathogen that is already killing more people than any other disease; namely, tuberculosis. Some 1.5 million people died of this curable disease in 2020. According to the WHO, Covid-19 has set back the fight against TB by as much as a decade. To quote from the WHO’s report:
“In 2020, more people died from TB, with far fewer people being diagnosed and treated or provided with TB preventive treatment compared with 2019, and overall spending on essential TB services falling … In many countries, human, financial and other resources have been reallocated from tackling TB to the COVID-19 response, limiting the availability of essential services … people have struggled to seek care in the context of lockdowns.”
Concentrating now on a stronger global TB response makes long-term sense. Measures include training more doctors, providing more diagnostic machines, assisting community groups doing outreach and awareness raising, and providing well-equipped respiratory wards, academics, and even oxygen. Can the Minister say whether the Government would support a comprehensive review into how enhanced investments in the global fight against TB could support the response to future pandemics?
In addition to the impact of Covid, one of the many tragic consequences of the truly awful war in Ukraine has been to set back the fight against multi-drug-resistant TB in Ukraine as well as in the wider region. Can the Minister say whether there are plans to give Ukraine additional support in the area of public health, and in particular in the fight against multi-drug-resistant TB?
Ebola is another prime example where a longer-term approach taken by Governments would make sense. When there is an outbreak of a disease, there is a race to find a vaccine, as we have seen with Covid, but then when the outbreak recedes, so does the urgency. This frequently reflects a desire by Governments to save money in the short term, which all too often results in paying more later. When a vaccine has been developed, as in the case of Ebola Zaire, it is often not seen as a priority to make sure that it is deployed. We know that an outbreak of Ebola Zaire could happen at any moment. When there was an outbreak in 2014, it cost west Africa $50 billion, and yet countries still cannot access the vaccine that exists.
If Covid has taught us one thing, it is that we are not safe just because we are far away. It surely makes sense to make Ebola vaccines widely available now. Can the Minister say whether the Government will press the WHO to accelerate the development of its guidelines for deploying Ebola Zaire vaccines? Will the Government outline their support for the development of an Ebola Sudan vaccine? There is a very real risk that without a global, publicly funded strategy, the market will fail to deliver vaccines to stop pandemics before they surge. I appreciate that these are quite technical questions, and if the Minister is unable to give a comprehensive reply in his closing remarks, I would be very happy to receive a letter after the debate.
To conclude, I stress again that I hope we return as soon as possible to the commitment to 0.7%. But it is not just about more aid, it is about better, more joined-up aid, and a more effective global approach. This issue is in our national interest, in our increasingly interconnected world, but, more importantly, it is also the right thing to do.
It is important to mention that there is an important difference between the position today and the position in, for example, the 1980s. In the 1980s we had no medicines and no way of combating HIV. It was, in effect, a death sentence. We obviously used advertising and every other means to warn people. Only yesterday, a man came up to me in this House and thanked me on behalf of a whole range of other people for that advertising, which he said had saved his life. It probably saved many lives, but nothing like the number of lives that can be saved by antiretroviral drugs. The really sad thing is that, although antiretroviral drugs lead to a normal, useful, full life after treatment, we are not using their full potential. That is the real tragedy of the situation. It is so different from where we were before. Then we did not have the means. Now we have the means, but what do we do? We do not use them. That is something that this Government should address.
Another issue is that we have not seen the end, or even the beginning of the end, of the discrimination that has perpetuated this pandemic. Some 68 countries have criminal laws that punish consensual, same-sex relations. There is not a lot that this Government can do in the sense of taking action themselves—I seek to persuade people, when I speak outside this country, that Britain has done a great deal since the really serious days when we followed such policies—but we can take all action possible to combat the position.
One position I would like to raise is the change which has taken place as far as the victims of AIDS are concerned. It used to be the case, and it is still portrayed on television as being the case, that all victims are young men. It is certainly true that in the past the majority of victims were young men; it was tragic to see in the hospitals bed after bed occupied by young men who were going to die. But today we have a situation where women have progressively taken a bigger proportion of the victim total and, most tragically of all, so have small children—100,000 have died in the last 12 months. All those things need to be taken into account.
On current trends, we will miss the United Nations target of ending AIDS as a public health threat by 2030. Let us be clear that the result of that will be more AIDS-related deaths and more infection. The real tragedy is that we could face, combat and defeat that. We are a wealthy country; such countries need to remember what is at stake. What is at stake is thousands of deaths and new infections, all preventable. What is at stake is the end of the pandemic or a pandemic which goes on and on. Beating pandemics is ultimately a political challenge. We can end AIDS by 2030, but only if we are bold in our actions and investments. We need courageous political leadership and we need people worldwide to insist that their leaders be courageous.
In the past, the UK has stepped up to the table when we have faced similar situations. In 2017, the UK spearheaded action that helped avert a famine in east Africa, providing £700 million to the region. However, this year, despite the severe conditions, our commitment to the region has been reduced by £156 million. A few weeks ago, I tabled a series of Written Questions naming each of the main countries in the Horn of Africa and asking what our support in development aid has been over each of the past five years. The Answers made for salutary reading. There have been massive cuts not just to development programmes but to simple aid to save lives. Only 65% of the money allocated has been spent. We need greater certainty to get this money where it is needed. As the crisis is getting worse, we are providing less. We all acknowledge that the current crisis is a global crisis compounded by President Putin’s war in Ukraine and the recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, in the face of such challenges, some of our neighbouring countries, such as France, Italy and Germany, have increased their ODA commitments, while we reduce ours.
If we are not persuaded that increasing our spending is the right and moral thing to do when whole communities are starving, we just need to look at some of the practical issues around what happens when we withdraw from helping others. In the Central African Republic, Russia and China have been steadily intensifying their efforts across the region. Right now, a Russian Government-linked private military corporation, the Wagner Group, is conducting military operations in Mali—admittedly in west Africa—to secure uranium, gold and diamond contracts to fund the war in Ukraine. How much longer will it be before these and other countries move into east Africa as we withdraw? The catastrophe in Somalia has allowed the nation to become a hotbed of terrorism. Al-Shabaab has been able to recruit more people from among those spurred on by hunger and dissatisfaction with the Government.
So, feeding people who are starving is not just a practical and moral issue. If we are not engaging, we are opening up places to much more unscrupulous Governments and regimes moving in and taking advantage. This is a vital part of our presence on the world scene. Across the world, many nations are jostling to establish themselves as global leaders. The danger is that we are simply withdrawing. Responding to issues at home is of course important—we all need to make cuts in doing so, and cope with the rising cost of energy together—but we cannot do it in a world where the challenges are so much greater. The 0.2% of our GNI is a drop in the ocean when compared with the Government’s borrowing elsewhere. Of course we must be prudent here at home and look after our own poor, but this is neither the time nor the place to cut back on our commitments to the wider world when we face such terrible catastrophes right across the globe.
It has not been desirable—nobody could say it has—to see a sharp increase in spending on aid followed by a sharp decrease over the past 10 years. That does not result in money being spent well. In an ideal world, we would see more stable funding for international development. I hope we will be able to return to the previous levels of spending, but we must avoid the trap—again, this was well expressed by my noble friend Lord Hannan—of assuming, simply because we reach what is in the end a relatively arbitrary target, that all is well with the world and with the budget. It behoves us to look carefully at how money is being spent in any government programme, and that includes international aid.
It must also be pointed that there is no government department that is so scrutinised on the impact of spending. One of the important reforms that was introduced by the coalition Government was the introduction of the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, which undertakes a line-by-line scrutiny of international aid spending. It would be good if we had that across many other departments.
My final point on the overall level of spending on aid is that we need to be careful not to give up on making the case for aid. One of the consequences of locking in spending at the level of 0.7% of GNI was that a kind of assumption was built-in across the political parties that spending would just increase year on year, that it would continue at those very high levels and that it was not necessary to make a political and public case for what was being done. In that sense, the arguments against spending at the levels that were reached crept up on us and on many in the international development world. If we are to return spending to the levels that were previously seen, the case for that has to be made to a public that is looking at all sorts of other areas where they wish public money to be spent and where there are many other priorities. Nevertheless, there is a good case to be made.
I will draw attention to one final area by very strongly echoing what my friend the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, said about tuberculosis. I am very proud to work with her globally in the fight against the disease; however, I will not repeat everything she said. Many people believe that there is a vaccine which will help to prevent tuberculosis, but there is not: there is no effective adult vaccine to combat TB. In just the same way that, as the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, mentioned, the UN sustainable development goal to beat HIV/AIDS in just eight years’ time by 2030 will not be reached, the target to beat tuberculosis will not be reached either. In fact, on the current trajectory, we will not beat tuberculosis for a century. A million and half people die unnecessarily from a treatable and curable disease. That is a very good example of where greater resource that was marshalled carefully could yield very great results, and of where the UK has a very strong role to play in the area of global public health on the research and development necessary to develop new tools and to produce the vaccine that is so desperately needed to combat the disease.
However, I want to concentrate most of my remarks on how we spend aid. I am just as angry at bad spend as I am at the examples of extreme poverty that many of us could share in the Chamber. It is vitally important, if we are going to attack extreme poverty and global injustice, that we are able to ensure that money is invested properly for the long term, sustainably making a real impact. I will briefly highlight four areas on that objective, the first of which is in relation to conflict. When the new Development Minister, Andrew Mitchell, was Secretary of State a decade ago, he and the noble Lord, Lord Hague, set a target for the percentage of our ODA that would be spent on conflict prevention and stabilisation. That was subsequently increased by the Cameron Government in 2015, if I remember rightly, to 50% of the budget being targeted on those vitally important areas for the poorest people in the worst circumstances in the world. So I ask the Minister: what is the target today? Do the Government still have a target and, if they do, what is that target? Will we see a consistent application of expenditure on conflict prevention and stabilisation within our official development assistance?
The second area is climate. I have much sympathy for Alok Sharma in what must have been a terribly difficult job over the past 12 months as president of the climate COP; while all the chaos was happening here in the United Kingdom, he was striving to reach international agreements. Some agreements, however inadequate, have been reached at COP 26 and COP 27. I ask the Minister: how much of our official development assistance will go towards those agreements? How much will we contribute to those just transitions that are important not only to tackle the climate crisis but to ensure development and longer-term prosperity for those countries most affected by the transition that is required.
The third area is capacity. I believe very much in capacity building, rather than just charity, in these situations. The sustainable development goals give us, to use the former Prime Minister’s words, an “oven-ready” deal that we could be using across the world in every country to ensure effective sustainable development. Again, we have all too often, in short-term programming and programming which is about collecting the numbers on how many people might be affected by a vaccine or the provision of school education, missed the fact that we need to build sustainable education and health systems, as well as economies—trade was mentioned earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Hannan. We need to build those systems and opportunities for the long-term development of sustainable finance and development in country across the global South.
In relation to the SDGs, I have one specific question for the Minister. It is now four or five years—in fact, it was Rory Stewart, four or five Development Secretaries back, who made the presentation—since the UK produced a voluntary national review on the sustainable development goals for presentation to the annual United Nations forum on this, which takes place every July. Can the Minister tell us whether we will do this next year? It is a straightforward question; it would be nice to get a straightforward answer.
My fourth and final point is about consistency. We cannot go on having programmes that are frozen, ended, suspended or cut back to one year when they were going to be three years, as we have seen over the past two or three years. It is deeply damaging to the organisations and the expertise of the staff involved in them, but it is even more damaging to the recipients and the beneficiaries of those development programmes. It is not sustainable development. I would welcome a commitment from the Minister today that we will see a return to three-year-minimum programming, which would allow people to build up properly their development policies and programmes in the future.
I see my time is almost up, so I will finish on this point. A lot of words will be spoken about the messages that are sent to us at this time of year about caring for others and remembering that there are so many in need, at home and abroad. We cannot keep using just words. We must have action, consistently applied over many years, to end these global injustices and to ensure that people have the opportunities and the rights that we take for granted, even in these difficult times, and which others need and deserve as well.