0.7% Official Development Assistance Target

Nigel Evans Excerpts

Tuesday 8th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Hilary Benn]

With respect to the hon. Gentleman, that is not the point. We made a promise. I presume he is as committed to keeping promises he makes as the rest of us here in this Chamber.

What of the human cost? We heard from the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) in her powerful speech about lives blighted, lives shortened and lives lost. Let me just take one example. How can it be right to cut aid for clean water by 80%? The arguments against doing that are so strong, such as the importance of clean water for hand-washing in a pandemic. There is the fact that the single most important thing we can do if we want to reduce infant mortality, apart from improving immediate postnatal care, is provide clean water, because every day babies and small children die because they drink dirty water. Clean water helps girls to go to school, the very thing that the Government say is a priority.

As International Development Secretary—the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield talked about his experience—I learned that there are moments when those of who have the privilege to do the job have our minds changed. We learn and we understand, and we realise why something is so important. In this example, I came across a well one day with a lot of people standing around it. I was told that the well was closed. I had never come across a closed well before, but it was explained that because demand for water in that part of the city was so high, after the first rush of buckets was drawn from it in the morning, the well had to be closed so that the water table had time to replenish to allow the well to be reopened.

One of the people waiting was a girl of about 13 or 14. The well was here and she was standing there—I can remember it to this day. She told me in a very quiet voice that it was her responsibility in her family to get the water every day, because until she did so, she could not go to school. Because the well was closed not just that day, but many days, she was often late for class. That is what this is about: a lack of plentiful, clean water, which all of us here take for granted, meant a lack of education for her and millions of other girls like her.

Are we really going to say that it is acceptable to cut our support for clean water? Is anyone actually going to argue that these cuts are popular with the British people? I fundamentally disagree; the British people are much more compassionate than that. It is not a competition between charity at home and aid abroad. We can, we should, we must do both.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

With immediate effect, there is a time limit of four minutes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Liam Byrne]

We were proud to set the ambition, and we set a critical path to doing it, because we knew precisely this—that development and deterrence are two sides of the same coin. They are essential to the defence of the realm.

The Prime Minister, when he presented the Integrated Review, boasted that we were about to send the new Queen Elizabeth carrier group on a worldwide tour. In how many of the 100 countries where we are cutting aid will that carrier group come into port? I bet that everywhere it does, we will find that our projection of power is as nothing compared with the power of a project to make poverty history.

Two thirds of the world’s poorest live in fragile, conflict- affected and violent states. It beggars belief that under the Government’s proposals, nations such as Libya and Iraq will no longer receive bilateral aid. There should be a simple rule of policy that we will not drop aid in places where we drop bombs, or where others drop bombs that they bought from us. Investing in places where we can alleviate poverty is one of the biggest investments we can make in safeguarding our security for the years to come.

My final point is simply this. The Chair of the International Development Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion), helpfully set out the extraordinary range of cuts that are now being confronted. As chair of the Parliamentary Network on the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, I asked the IMF this afternoon for an update on the sheer scale of investment that is needed to get the global community back on its feet. Low-income countries will now need $200 billion extra to step up their covid response, followed by $250 billion extra in accelerated investment as we try to move from the pandemic to the Paris agreement. We are now going to—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. Sorry, we have to leave it there.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Virendra Sharma (Ealing, Southall) (Lab) [V]]

I hope to be brief.

Looking around the world, we see so many problems that need our help—[Inaudible.] It has been a discourtesy to this House and to millions of people up and down the country who voted in 2019 for 0.7%, that this Government tried to cut that without any discussion or debate. I was heartened by the Prime Minister dispatching ventilators and oxygen converters to India, but Nepal is still waiting. India leads the world in vaccine research and production, whereas Nepal has no facilities to produce vaccines. Millions of vulnerable people in Nepal need vaccines, especially second doses. Those are not coming, but we have 500 million doses for 70 million people.

I have visited amazing programmes and met people whose lives were changed and saved by British aid. No one who has seen that work would condone a cut. The cut is barbaric at this time . When I meet people abroad, and online now, I am nothing but proud of our record as a donor to good works, But that work on gender equality, clean water and sanitation, 12 good years of education, ending human trafficking and modern slavery—[Inaudible]. We cannot let this Government waste that work without a fight. We must end this debate and support the return of 0.7% as our commitment to the nation and to the world.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Thank you very much. Sorry about those communications problems, but we got the vast majority of it, Mr Sharma.

--- Later in debate ---

[Florence Eshalomi (Vauxhall) (Lab/Co-op) [V]]

I thank the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) for his persistence in bringing this issue to the House today. I am deeply concerned by the UK stepping back from its responsibilities to the world’s poorest and abandoning its commitment by cutting aid, and so are many of my Vauxhall constituents who have contacted me.

Six years ago in 2015, we were the first G7 nation to enshrine in law our commitment to the UN’s target of 0.7% of gross national income on overseas aid. As we prepare to host the G7 summit at the end of this week, the UK is breaking its promise, while other G7 countries such as France and the USA are maintaining or increasing their aid commitments. This is not the global Britain we want the world to see. The aid budget should be used to tackle the global challenges facing us all: the pandemic, the climate crisis and rising poverty and inequality.

A few months ago on 8 March, we celebrated International Women’s Day, and men and women across the UK spoke out against violence against women and girls. We can choose to challenge and call out the inequality we know that so many women continue to face. I am sure that Members across the House would agree that one of the best ways to help address that inequality is to ensure that women and girls have access to vital education —not only at home here in the UK, but right across the world.

The UK’s ambitious targets of getting 40 million more girls into school and 20 million girls reading by the age of 10 by 2026 have been adopted by the G7. Indeed, the Prime Minister said a few weeks ago on 12 May:

“Supporting girls to get 12 years of quality education is one of the smartest investments we can make as the world recovers from Covid-19. Otherwise we risk creating a lost pandemic generation…I’m going to be working throughout the UK’s G7 presidency to ensure leaders invest in those girls and boost children’s life chances around the world.”

Reducing the aid budget is in direct contradiction to the rhetoric from the Prime Minister a few weeks ago and the reality faced by millions of people working across the world to support women or girls and many others across the aid sector. The cuts will have far-reaching consequences for some of the world’s most marginalised and vulnerable people. Projects such as the International Rescue Committee’s Girls’ Education Challenge—the UK’s key programme for supporting girls’ education in Africa and Asia—could now be at risk because of this cut. I am concerned by the UK’s sudden role—[Inaudible.]

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I think we have just lost Florence. I am terribly sorry. [Interruption.] I think we will have to leave it there. I call Pauline Latham.

[Mrs Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)]

Thank you for calling me, Mr Deputy Speaker, a little earlier than I anticipated.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) on securing this debate—sad though it is that we have to have it—and thank Mr Speaker and the Deputy Speakers for allowing us to go ahead. The saddest part is that we will not be allowed a vote on the issue. We will not be able to decide democratically what this House wants to do. It has been decided for us.

I am very disappointed that the Minister is not in his place at the moment, because I wanted to paint a picture of the things that I have seen when travelling with the International Development Committee. I want everyone in the Chamber to imagine that their daughter has got married young, too young, and that there is now no contraception for that daughter, so she has a child early. However, we have not managed to help that future mother with nutrition, so when she has her baby—if she survives it—she will have a child who is stunted. That could be in any country that we help, because those are the poorest people in the world.

The child will never get the brain power it deserves, because it has been starved during the gestation period, but we are cutting the amount of money for nutrition, so he or she will never catch up—can never catch up, because once someone’s brain is stunted, it can never do so. None of us in this Chamber wants to see that happen, but that is the reality of it. The mother could die because there is no contraception, the child will not reach its potential because it is stunted, and the child might never have a job and so afford to send its own children to school. The cycle goes on and on.

The problem is that we will be partly responsible, because we are cutting our aid budget so much. I have seen some of the figures, and the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) listed a lot of the cuts, which seem totally random and not thought through—“Oh, we’ll just cut that!”, or, “Yes, we’ll do that!” I think that the problem with some of the Ministers who have made the decisions is that they have not been to see for themselves the devastation of the impact on those poor people, the poorest people in the world, whom we as a very rich nation by comparison should be helping.

I have spent 11 years in this place, sitting on the International Development Committee, so I have seen the good that our aid has done. It is not perfect; we do not always get everything right, but we get a hell of a lot right to help those poorest people. We have saved lives—but we will lose lives.

The Minister is not a callous man or a cold man, and I am sure that when he made his speech, it was not one that he wanted to give. I am sure that he will do what he is told and give the speech he has been given at the end of this debate, but I am disappointed. I hope—now he has returned to the Chamber—that he will read what I have said about what we are doing to the poorest people in the world. He should go back to the Treasury and to the Prime Minister to say, “We are wrong.” It is as simple as that. Let us change our policy and go back to 0.7%.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

We are trying to get Florence Eshalomi back, to give her the last minute. We will see how that goes.