Official Development Assistance: Bilateral Allocations

Question

Asked by

To ask His Majesty’s Government when they intend to publish a full list of bilateral allocations for Official Development Assistance spending for 2026–27 to 2028–29.

The Government are committed to publishing FCDO country ODA allocations in or before the FCDO annual report and accounts 2025-26. The annual report is due to be published in July. Publishing the annual report is in line with previous FCDO practice.

I am grateful to the Minister for that Answer, and I look forward to the publication. The cuts to the UK’s official development assistance—some of the most severe across G20 countries—mean that the remaining bilateral spend will need to be targeted to remain as effective as possible. How will the Government monitor, track and publish progress against the FCDO’s six refreshed priorities? For example, on women and girls, which I am pleased to see is one of the six priorities, what discretion will heads of missions have, and how will the Government ensure effectiveness in these areas of bilateral spend?

What we are doing to make this better—I appreciate that there is less money—is to give three years’ worth of certainty to our posts. We are also requiring them, rather than submitting for approval programme by programme, to do that as a portfolio, so that we can see how everything fits together. Posts are experts, they are there in country, and we pay them to know what they are doing. They can do an analysis of what they think the best approaches are for that particular place, and we are enabling them to do that with the three years’ worth of certainty that they now have.

My Lords, HIV/AIDS may have gone off the front pages here in Britain, rightly or wrongly, but what is beyond doubt is that it remains a serious scourge in many countries overseas. How do our overseas assistance programmes, current and future, measure up to that specific and very serious challenge?

It is absolutely a serious challenge. While we see medical advances that enable us to make progress, we see problems emerge in other areas. We see prevalence among young girls, in particular, increasing to a worrying extent. This is one of the reasons that we decided to maintain a very strong commitment to the Global Fund, which as noble Lords will know, fights three diseases, one of which is HIV. We work closely with the Global Fund and our country partners in order to keep going on this battle, which we are making progress with, but there is still an awful lot more to do.

My Lords, I appreciate the challenge the Minister is facing with the cuts, and I agree with my noble friend about the protection of certain ring-fenced things, including the priority on the WPS agenda. Will the Minister leverage that more extensively, working together with colleagues in the Ministry of Defence? I seek her reassurance that 12 years of quality education for every girl in the world and of course—this is personal for me—preventing sexual violence in conflict remain key priorities for the Government.

I think that is right. I think we need to work more closely with our colleagues in the MoD because there is clearly a high degree of complementarity between our development investments and the work that we need to do to keep our country safe in the field of defence. On quality education, it is one of the next challenges that the world needs to lean into. We have made improvements in getting children into school, and there is a protective quality to that, but what they are coming out with, the skills and the education that they are attaining during that period in school, is not good enough. We need to address that globally so that it is good quality as well as getting attendance up.

My Lords, I declare an interest as an adviser to the aid and development contractor DAI. I am hosting an event in Parliament this evening looking at new and innovative ways to support humanitarian action as traditional funding streams shrink. I am delighted that the Minister has agreed to attend. In that spirit, will she say what progress has been made to use UK trade, investment, philanthropy, the private sector and other routes to deliver real poverty reduction benefits in developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, either alongside remaining aid programmes or as an alternative?

I very much welcome the question from the noble Lord. He will be aware that we had a Global Partnerships Conference just a few weeks ago addressing specifically that problem. I think it is understood now, if it was not before, that with all the aid spending that there has ever been, we would still be falling far short of our ambitions and the ambitions of our partner countries to achieve the sustainable development goals. We do have to work better together, and we do have to leverage, as the noble Lord said, and we do have to grow economies and enable partners to lead their own development, because that is not just the right thing to do in terms of making the money go further, but it is the right way to be a good partner for the long term too.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her answers so far and confirm that I am pleased that the Government will introduce individual country allocations for ODA assistance. One of the main challenges for that assistance will be Ebola, particularly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. Will the Minister ensure that local actors, especially churches, faith leaders and faith actors who are best placed to respond, are adequately empowered through funding and decision-making as part of that response to help those who are deeply afflicted at the moment?

I think that is a shrewd observation. I recently returned from DRC, and I understand completely the point my noble friend makes. There is very little trust among the community in that part of the world. Particularly, they do not trust military actors, and some of the usual mechanisms you might use to intervene in that kind of context are not advisable in this one. Faith leaders and other community leaders are central to being able to make any progress against this dreadful disease.

My Lords, more than 100 UNRWA staff are now suspected of having links with Hamas, with many being suspected of being actively involved in the appalling 7 October attacks; 70 employees have been dismissed following these accusations. The UK pays tens of millions of pounds to UNRWA through ODA. Can the noble Baroness say whether Ministers have considered suspending that funding, as we did in government, given the recent revelations about UNRWA staff?

Given that UNRWA is the only agency that can really deliver what is needed at scale in what has become an incredibly challenging and militarised context, it is important that we maintain our funding of UNRWA, and we reinstated it when we came into power. I think that was the right decision and I stand by it. When there are issues and problems of the nature that the noble Lord outlines, the right thing for us to do is to make sure that they are dealt with. UNRWA has done so on occasions in the past. There have been reports and they have been acted on. It is our job to maintain that higher standard and those requirements of UNRWA.

My Lords, I understand that the FCDO sent a delegation to Afghanistan in recent weeks, and I wonder whether the Minister might be able to say something about the outcome of that visit, with particular reference to continuing assistance for women and girls.

Noble Lords do not need me to tell them just what a difficult context this is. Since the return of the Taliban, the prospects for women and girls have diminished greatly. We work closely with our partners, we still fund programmes in Afghanistan and we will continue to do so.

My Lords, while I am delighted that the Government are still prioritising women and girls, how are they going to ensure that this priority remains through the multilateral grants?