International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 18th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, the Bill is about reporting. As the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, said, you can on occasion get involved in disbursing rather more rapidly than you first intended. You can also be caught by delays created by circumstances and not be able to disburse. It is the unexpected effects on DfID’s cash flow and its accountability with which the Bill seeks to deal.

It is a pleasure for me to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hollick. The Commonwealth Development Corporation has of course behaved in entirely the way he was describing and has been doing so for nearly 70 years, having been formed in 1948 as the Colonial Development Corporation, subsequently becoming the Commonwealth Development Corporation and finally, in order to be modern, CDC Group—like “UK Aid” rather than DfID. It has been 100% owned by the British taxpayer throughout its life. It was a public corporation and technically still is. It is doing well, and I commend it to your Lordships as being an interesting institution to study when one is thinking about international development and aid.

International development and aid is a very complex subject. We have heard about some of that complexity this morning in some passionately delivered speeches. Measuring outcomes is very difficult. I was in a sense a colleague of the noble Lord, Lord Judd, for many years; he was at an NGO and I was at CDC as an economic development operator. I entirely agree with his conclusion that the whole business of knowing whether or not you are achieving a good outcome is very humbling. You cannot be at all certain that you know what you have actually achieved, and you might have to wait for your grandchildren to tell you.

International development and aid is also very controversial, which has also been illustrated this morning. I commend to your Lordships the great days of Lord Bauer and Lord Balogh debating the subject of aid in the 1960s as an interesting study. The literature that has followed over the years is very controversial, different in its views and passionately expressed. This is therefore a very difficult subject. When we consider it, it is probably as well to remember that we did not achieve our own development with anyone providing an aid programme, unless you include the Marshall Plan. There was no equivalent in the days when we were becoming developed.

The history, and what is being done, makes DfID’s task highly complex and difficult to evaluate as a whole. I come back to thinking in some detail about part of what DfID is doing, and trying to evaluate the whole. The reporting is also very complicated. The question then arises: is the system of accountability satisfactory? That is what I would like to spend the rest of my time on. The 2006 Act is pretty complete, setting out as it does accountability very well and in great detail. My question is: do the amendments to that accountability chain created by the 2015 Act actually stand up? Were they needed and, if so, why?

We should also remember that in 2011 the independent evaluator of DfID’s programme, ICAI, was also created. It is very busy looking in depth and detail at what DfID does and reporting to the Select Committee down the corridor. My argument is that, before deciding on the Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, and what he is attempting to do, we should consider the accountability chain that affects DfID.

DfID’s latest report, published in July, is 156 pages long. It does not have a single photograph; it is absolutely not a glossy. Well done DfID. I challenge your Lordships to find any other report that has more words on a page than that DfID report; it is very dense. I draw the House’s attention to an interesting paragraph about the remaining need to deal with matters that arose in the recapitalisation of my old employer, CDC, in 2004; Private Eye spent quite a lot of time in 2004 addressing some of the issues contained in it. It would make the most amazing subject for a PhD, and it would probably engage the Select Committee down the corridor for a full day, if it wanted to spend that time. That is only one paragraph; there are dozens of similar ones in the report. I draw attention to a particular line in it that says the Asian Development Bank supported 166,000 households to get water. I thought, “166,000 households in a world population of however many billion? It doesn’t sound like very much to me”. It would be very interesting to have another day just quizzing DfID on how it accounts for the money it disburses to this multilateral called the Asian Development Bank, and whether it thinks it is getting value for money. There is a legion of questions that we could ask arising from the DfID report. We should be very careful before we say that the burden we put on the department with the 2015 Act is okay.

Reporting to the OECD has been mentioned. The Development Assistance Committee has 35 members. It lists countries in four categories up to incomes of $13,000 a year. The money going has to be 25% concessional, using a 10% discount rate. Those reports, which are not easy to make, have to be in by 31 December. The recipe from the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, does not actually simplify DfID’s job because there is no way we can escape the 31 December date for the OECD, nor would we want to. We will always have two year-ends, one on 31 December and the other on 31 March. That is the way it is and it would be a mistake to try to change it.

It is also true that DfID has so far achieved the 0.7%—and well done DfID—but the risks are still great. Suppose a delay is caused by an unexpected war or the shutting of a border. It only has to miss the target by £250 million, which is not a big sum in its life, to be on 0.69% or thereabouts, not 0.7%, and trigger the statutory requirement under the 2015 Act, if I read it correctly.

We should consider briefly the obligation under the 2015 Act. The Secretary of State’s statement is required to cover the economic and fiscal circumstances here and,

“circumstances arising outside the United Kingdom”.

That could lead to another 156-page report. It is an open door to a huge system of reporting. Do we really need it? Surely the present system of accountability under the 2006 Act means that Section 2 of the 2015 Act is not needed. My noble friends on the Front Bench are very good at explaining to the House when they consider something to be unnecessary, and that is my argument. We should not change the reality of what is being reported or what is being done, but we should look at whether we are putting an additional contingent liability on DfID with Section 2 of the 2015 Act. I think we are, and I look forward to further stages of the Bill in order to return to this subject.