Oral Answers to Questions
Lord Bruce of Bennachie Excerpts(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Mitchell
The hon. Gentleman will understand that a Government who are properly co-ordinated and working together will discuss all these matters to make sure that, as I have said, we wire together in the best possible interests defence, diplomacy and development. However, as the hon. Gentleman is well aware, as he has been a junior DFID Minister, the OECD Development Assistance Committee rules are what pertain in the spending of money on development, and the coalition Government have confirmed what his Government said: those rules will persist.
Malcolm Bruce (Gordon) (LD)
I welcome my right hon. Friend’s initiative in setting up a more effective watchdog for transparency and accountability and to publish what DFID funds in more detail from January. That will provide a welcome reinforcement of the value of our aid. May I also say that the Select Committees are very anxious to start their work and anything he can do to ensure that they are constituted will help to enable the International Development Committee to take evidence from him next Thursday so we can expand on these issues?
Mr Mitchell
I am grateful to the Chair of the International Development Committee for his comments. He knows a great deal about these matters. The transparency guarantee is enormously important, first in reassuring British taxpayers by enabling them to see where the money is being spent and that it is being well spent; and secondly, in assisting in the building of civic society to ensure that people in the countries we are trying to help can hold their own political leaders to account. I look forward to discussing next week with his Committee these and other matters, especially independent evaluation.
Global Poverty
Lord Bruce of Bennachie Excerpts(13 years, 10 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for International Development (Mr Andrew Mitchell)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the matter of global poverty.
This is the first opportunity since the general election that the House has had to debate international development and my first chance, as Secretary of State, to set out for the House how the coalition will address this vital agenda. My purpose today is twofold. First, I want to set out for the House the changes that we are making in my Department. Secondly, in the context of last week’s Budget, in which the Chancellor set out the scale of the fiscal crisis bequeathed us by the previous Government—a crisis that means that of every £4 of public expenditure, £1 is borrowed—I want to make it clear why our coalition Government stand four-square behind our commitment to the world’s poorest people, and why we will increase our expenditure on international development to 0.7% of our gross national income from 2013, define that expenditure under the OECD/Development Assistance Committee rules and enshrine that commitment in law.
In his Budget, my right hon. Friend the Chancellor reaffirmed that development spending will increase. As the Prime Minister has consistently made clear, the coalition Government will not seek to balance the books on the backs of the poorest in the world. It is clearly helpful that that strong commitment transcends party politics, both in the House and in the country. It is a strength of international development that it is seen not as the preserve or the passion of any one political party, but as a British commitment in which Members in all parts of the House strongly believe.
In that context I would like to say how pleased I was to see that the right hon. Member for Gordon (Malcolm Bruce) has been elected—unopposed—to resume his chairmanship of the Select Committee on International Development. I am also pleased that many hon. Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry), who have a long record of particular involvement and commitment in this area are in their places.
I should also like to express my admiration and respect for the extraordinary collection of skills and expertise in the Department for International Development, which I now have the privilege to lead. As the Prime Minister said on his visit to the Department last week, we should be very proud of the leading role DFID is taking in the fight against international poverty. The fact that in this time of great economic difficulty DFID has a ring-fenced, protected budget is not because we believe that money alone is the key to international development.
Malcolm Bruce (Gordon) (LD)
I welcome the right hon. Gentleman to his position as Secretary of State. He said that he hoped to enshrine in law the commitment that all parties in the House share. Can he give any more information on how and when that might happen?
Mr Mitchell
I thank my right hon. Friend for his comment. I am not able today to give final details, but negotiations continue in the usual manner. I shall make sure that the House is informed as soon as final decisions on that point have been made.
We understand that one of the main causes of sustained poverty is conflict—that it is conflict that so often condemns women and children to grievous suffering. If someone is living in one of those dreadful camps, which hon. Members may have visited, around the world—the Prime Minister and I visited some in Darfur—it does not matter how much access to money, aid, trade or different articles of development they may have, because for as long as the conflict continues, they will remain poor, frightened, dispossessed and angry. Just as conflict condemns people to remain in poverty, so it is wealth creation—jobs, enterprise, trade and engagement with the private sector—that enables people to lift themselves out of poverty. All that underlines, again and again, as the Prime Minister did at the G20 last weekend, the importance of not giving up on the Doha round and, notwithstanding how difficult it is, remaining absolutely committed to it.
Making progress in the fight against international poverty and achieving the goals set down by the whole international community and enshrined in the eight millennium development goals cannot be done without meeting the financial commitments set out so clearly at Gleneagles in 2005—commitments that were underlined and strongly endorsed by the Prime Minister in Canada at the weekend. Although the British Government focused particularly at the G8 summit on MDG 5 on maternal mortality, the most off-track of all the MDGs, we are also leading the argument for real progress to be made on all the goals.
When the UN summit meets in September in New York, there will be just five years left for those goals to be achieved. We want to see measurable outcomes and a clear agenda for action agreed for the whole international community to ensure that the goals are now reached. In essence, we are trying to ensure that good, basic health care, education, clean water and sanitation reach the people at the end of the track, who today in all too many places in the world have none of those things.
Well spent aid has achieved miracles around the world. That is not of course to argue that aid is not sometimes stolen, embezzled or badly used. We will confront all three of those things head-on, but thanks to aid we have eradicated smallpox; we have reduced polio from 350,000 cases a year in 1998 to under 2,000 today; while the number of people on life-saving treatments for AIDS has increased from 400,000 in 2003 to 4 million in 2008. In Afghanistan, there are today 2 million girls in school thanks to the international aid effort.
Mr Alexander
I find myself in agreement with my hon. Friend. I was similarly horrified by the pictures that appeared in Britain’s newspapers. It reinforces the importance and urgency of continuing to make the case, not just for human rights, as he describes, but for effective mechanisms of democratic accountability so that the public in countries where such difficulties are emerging can exercise constraint on those Governments and security forces.
I want to address our aid promises, which have already been the subject of some of our exchanges. The Secretary of State and the Prime Minister have been at pains to insist repeatedly in recent weeks that they fully intend to meet the 0.7% aid target by 2013, and I welcome the fact that the coalition agreement, on page 22, section 18, under the title “International Development”, states:
“We will honour our commitment to spend 0.7% of GNI on overseas aid from 2013, and to enshrine this commitment in law.”
I was hoping that a little more clarity might have been brought to that commitment by the Secretary of State in the debate, but despite repeated questioning, we still have no timetable for the legislation he promised in the first Session of this Parliament. Indeed, I have here an explanatory note, issued by his Department on the day of the Loyal Address, entitled: “Background Note—Non Legislative Item—International Development Spending from 2013”. Why is this the case, given that a draft Bill was scrutinised by the International Development Committee in the last Parliament? That deserves a better answer than the one offered today to the Committee Chairman. Will the Minister tell us when the legislation will be introduced?
Malcolm Bruce
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for raising this point, but will he acknowledge that the Select Committee, in scrutinising, acknowledged that there were some difficulties with the draft legislation? There was not unanimity, and indeed his own Government acknowledged that more work needed to be done. Can we get this together? We want legislation, but it is not quite ready. I agree with him, however, that we want a timetable.
Mr Alexander
I am unyielding in my admiration for the right hon. Gentleman’s commitment and expertise on these matters. I recognise that an important process of pre-legislative scrutiny was undertaken by his Committee, but I do not believe that the question of how to ensure effective legislation is what currently divides us. What divides us is the prospect of a parliamentary motion taking the place of legislation. I hope that he agrees that legislation is required.
Malcolm Bruce (Gordon) (LD)
It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Deputy Speaker, given your role on the International Development Committee in the last Parliament. Indeed, having both Mr Speaker and a Deputy Speaker as ex-members of that Committee, I feel that international development will have the kind eye of the Chair during this Parliament.
I very much welcome my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to his position. I believe that the speech he made—whatever the debating points arising out of it—showed that he is someone with a deep commitment to, and passion for, international development, who has a real desire to make an impact and make a difference.
Although Labour Members are entitled to challenge and criticise, I was a little disappointed with the tone of the speech by the right hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mr Alexander)—not least because I wanted to open my remarks by paying a genuine and warm tribute to the Labour Government and the Labour party. I believe that the establishment of the Department for International Development and the International Development Act 2002 set the basis for reforming the mistakes made in the past. I think we should recognise that they are now a long way in the past, and all parties now acknowledge that that older style of overseas development has gone for ever. In DFID, as the right hon. Gentleman said, we created a Department that has provided world leadership in development, and it has made a huge impact. I give credit to Clare Short, the first Secretary of State of the Department, and to the right hon. Members for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) and for Paisley and Renfrewshire South, who have all made a contribution to that development.
It seems to me that we are trying to accept that we have perhaps the best Development Ministry in the world, but that it has to move forward and that there is scope for change, innovation and development. The new coalition Government will inevitably want to bring its own ideas to bear. It is certainly my hope that we will build on that, develop it and take it forward. I am the Chairman of this cross-party Select Committee, and we will of course monitor progress, ask questions and make periodic reports to the House.
On the exchanges we had about the 0.7% commitment, we should all be grateful that there is complete consensus in the House over the commitment to deliver that by 2013. In an informal conversation I had with the Secretary of State—I hope he will not mind my saying this—we realised that it is not this House that lacks commitment; the problem is the engagement with the wider public, which requires the House to maintain its united commitment and to engage the public to ensure that support remains for achieving this goal.
In that context, the Secretary of State clearly read out—as, indeed, did the shadow Secretary of State—what it says in the coalition agreement about enshrining the 0.7% commitment in law. I do not want to labour the point. I just want to say that the Select Committee took evidence on the draft legislation that came before us under the previous Government—I have to say it came very late in their programme, and the previous Government should acknowledge that—and it raised a number of questions. No one denied the value of having this legislation. If the present Government have the same commitment, I look forward to taking it forward, but some refinement will need to be made, in the light of the evidence our Committee took, if the legislation is to be fit for purpose. I hope that in due course the Secretary of State will give us an indication of how and when that legislation will be brought into law.
As a final point on this issue, the commitment does not require legislation—and neither does the lack of legislation in any way bring the commitment into question. What it does is set and reinforce the example, demonstrating to the public that Parliament is united over this achievement.
The Secretary of State set out a number of priorities that he wants to bring to bear on development in the future. Of course, there are some questions in the development community, and rightly so. He said that his primary aim is for aid to be transparent and accountable and that he wants to set up a new mechanism for achieving that. In due course, further details will no doubt be brought to the House. I appreciate that the Select Committee will have an important role to play in the process.
I agree with the Secretary of State that the more we can demonstrate the outcomes from our investment and aid, the more we can convince people that the programme is effective, that it works and that it does deliver. I add the cautionary note that not every aspect of aid can be so easily measured or monitored, and certainly not in the same time scale. I support the objective, but it is important to recognise that not every aspect of the budget can be subjected to the same objective criteria; we need some other ways to evaluate it. The principle, however, seems to me to be fundamentally sound and right.
There is perhaps also some concern about the definition of official development assistance, how it is applied and how it will be controlled across Departments. The vast majority of overseas development assistance currently goes through DFID, and I hope that that will continue to be the case; but the House needs to be sure that ODA which does not go through DFID meets the same objective criteria.
Mr Thomas
Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that transparency of development assistance is not something dramatically new? Does he recall, as Opposition Members do, that when the Conservatives were in opposition they used independent evaluations of DFID programmes to ask perfectly reasonable questions on the Floor of the House? Further measures may be welcome, but the right hon. Gentleman should bear in mind the fact that the last Government also took a series of measures to increase transparency.
Malcolm Bruce
I certainly accept that there was not only a lively debate but activity in the Department and the evaluation unit. The Committee visited the unit and met its representatives.
I do not suggest that there was a monopoly on one side of the House in this regard, but a permanent problem with aid and development is establishing what works, how the extent to which it works can be measured, and how people can be reassured that it works. We have all observed it in journalists’ correspondence, and in what is said by people we meet around the place. The bottom line is that people think that billions of pounds of British taxpayers’ money is being put into Swiss bank accounts on behalf of corrupt politicians. We all know that that is not what happens to the vast majority of UK aid—indeed, we hope, to any of it—but we must constantly improve presentation so that we can reassure taxpayers that that is demonstrably not the case, and that the aid really is making a difference. If it is possible to improve the existing mechanism, there is no reason why we should not try to do so.
The summit on the millennium development goals will take place later this year. The current Parliament is due to end in 2015, the year in which the MDGs are set to be delivered. We know that they will not be, but during this Parliament we must determine exactly how much we can prioritise them, and what we must do about those in regard to which we fall farthest behind.
Let me say something about MDGs 4 and 5. The Select Committee paid particular attention to maternal health in the last Parliament, and I was horrified by what we learned during that inquiry about the appalling and needless suffering of so many women in so many parts of the world. As has been said by the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Ann McKechin), whom I welcome back to the Committee, the problem is often the treatment and status of women rather than our inability to deliver services that could meet the needs of women in poor countries. Certain societies do not recognise the importance or necessity of such services.
I was particularly shocked, when the Committee visited northern Nigeria, to be told that the education of girls involved learning the Koran by rote, on the grounds that that was all that they needed to know because they would be married by the time they were 12 and pregnant by the time they were 13—and, in many instances, dead before they were 14.
We should not even think of girls in societies of that kind in the context of girls in our own society, who, at 12 or 13, might be regarded as far too young to give birth, but who might none the less be quite well developed. In countries where nutrition is poor, many girls aged 12 or 13 are not fit to give birth to children, which is why they die. Worse, those who do give birth are expected to deliver their children alone, without any form of attendance or support. I consider that appalling. I welcome the commitment to treating it as a priority, but I think it reasonable to suggest that the health of children up to the age of five should be linked to it. While the welfare of women has a very big impact on children, an awful lot of children die at the age of three, four or five. Unless we consider the two issues together, we may not be able to achieve the results for which we hope.
I was slightly surprised that the Secretary of State did not say more about the role of economic development and the role of the partnership between the public and private sectors, although there was a passage in his speech about it. Unlike the former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South, I am not talking about the role of the private sector in delivering social programmes and the like. I am talking about how we can deliver economic development better in partnership: how DFID’s engagement can create a climate in which businesses, whether indigenous or external, will invest and commit themselves to developing countries, so that those countries can grow their economies and revenue bases and reduce their dependence on aid.
The Secretary of State mentioned CDC in passing. The way in which CDC operates—as a kind of arm’s length “fund of funds”—is very easy to criticise, and Private Eye has had a field day doing so. However, CDC has clearly delivered a substantial amount of investment at no cost to the taxpayer, and has increased our development capacity because of the profitability of the fund. There are question marks over the use of tax havens, although I see the logic of the argument that that releases even more money for investment. I do not particularly want to develop that argument, but I have felt for some time that there is a gap between DFID’s development activity and CDC and the business sector that could be addressed constructively.
Mr Andrew Mitchell
The Chairman of the Select Committee has made an extremely good point, but if he reads the report of what I said today, he will see that we are very much on the case. We are restructuring the way the Department handles the issues to which he has referred, and we are looking specifically at CDC to ensure that we secure as much development gain and value from its work as we possibly can. We aim to do more rather than less.
Malcolm Bruce
I shall be interested to see how that develops.
I entirely accept that investing in health, education and infrastructure helps to create a climate in any given country that will make the business community better able to thrive and survive, but there are times when a partnership with business is needed to establish what aspects of health, education and infrastructure will best deliver investment. If we could do that more effectively, we might speed up the process of economic development rather than just aid support, with the help of better trading relations, a World Trade Organisation deal giving people real access to markets, and the elimination of internal obstacles to trade, both within countries and between neighbouring countries.
The hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) has left the Chamber, but I want to say something about climate change. There is concern in the developing countries that all the commitment to poverty reduction could be easily subsumed into climate change measures. The 10% ruling was arbitrary, but I consider it important for the Government to focus primarily on poverty reduction, and not to allow climate change to divert funds that could be used for that purpose. We need a safeguard to ensure that that does not happen.
I am conscious of your constraint, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and I shall not say too much more, but I want to make two or three comments about the country programmes. The Secretary of State said that there would be a review of those programmes. We need a fairly early indication of how that will take place, so that people are not faced with too long a period of uncertainty about where it is heading. Other countries, notably and recently Sweden, have conducted such reviews. It might be best if our review focused on a smaller number of countries in which our assistance could be even more effective.
The Secretary of State will not be surprised to learn that I have a view on the debate about China. The hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley), who is present, does not agree with the rest of the Committee on the subject. I entirely accept that the development relationship with China should come to an end—that is not a point of concern to me—but the general relationship with the country seems to me to have continuing value, and it will require some budget if it is to continue. The Committee heard effective evidence of how well that can be done, and what a contribution it makes to reducing the MDGs, given the size and scale of China. I urge the Secretary of State to look at our report again. It does not really disagree with his conclusions or those of his predecessor, but it does suggest that there should be a little more space in the continuing relationship with China. That would be very beneficial to UK-China relations and to poverty reduction in China, not because the Chinese want our money but because we would be able to work with them to deliver better ways of achieving poverty reduction. Such an approach might even lead to partnerships in third countries between Britain and China, which would be a remarkably interesting and worthwhile development. That is all I would ask that he take on board.
Mr Mitchell
The Chair of the Select Committee is on to a very good point, because the Conservatives have for years said that it was wrong to spend taxpayers’ money in China. That country has just spent £20 billion on the Olympics, it has a space programme and it is a nuclear power. Since we made that plea on behalf of the British taxpayer, the right hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mr Alexander) has spent tens of millions of pounds on British aid in China. The Chair of the Select Committee rightly says that we need a partnership, an elevated relationship whereby we work together on common objectives and have a high-level dialogue on partnering on aid and development. We are in the process of working out precisely how to do that.
Malcolm Bruce
I am grateful for that intervention. The only practical point I make is that it requires a bit of funding to do demonstration projects.
Interestingly, the same arguments will start to apply to India, and I suspect that we are unlikely to come to the same conclusion on India. I found it interesting that the arguments used by the previous Government to justify the closure of the programme in China were used in reverse to defend the programme in India.
Mr Mitchell
China and India are fundamentally different, because India has more poor people within its boundaries than the whole of sub-Saharan Africa and the average income of an Indian is a third that of a Chinese. Of course we also have deep historical links with India through the Commonwealth and many other mechanisms, so I do not think that there is a direct analogy between the two countries.
Malcolm Bruce
I think that intervention proves my point. The Select Committee may well wish to examine the issue of India again, but we have not yet been formulated and we have made no such decisions.
Finally, it is impossible to have a discussion on global poverty without examining this country’s engagement in Afghanistan. I am concerned about the debate about Afghanistan, because the situation is complicated. Inevitably, the focus is on the military engagement and the casualty rate, and rightly so. We have to show, and we do show, enormous appreciation of the bravery of our forces and the sacrifices that they are making in order to contain an insurgency and create the space for a successful Afghanistan that can manage its own affairs—we hope that that is what will happen. It worries me that people do not appreciate what is happening in Afghanistan. They do not appreciate that we are operating across the whole country, that we are having real success in large parts of it and that the military operation in the south is not the whole expression of what is happening. So it is important that the Department for International Development’s engagement in Afghanistan continues in a way that demonstrates that what we are trying to do is build a state that can not only run its own affairs and enable us to remove our military support, but deliver to its people a development programme that will take them out of poverty. That will be the best and strongest basis for a secure future for Afghanistan and it is the right and proper, legitimate aspiration of the people of Afghanistan. Our UK aid programme must be focused on that more than anything else. People are looking for a clear separation between aid and development, and military support and containment; they are not looking for confusion between the two. I hope that, provided we can keep that right, we will be able to maintain a programme in Afghanistan that will continue to command popular support, because it is a poor country that we should and would be engaged in even if it was not in a conflict situation.
This is an important debate. The change in Government clearly will result in questions from all parts of the House about the future of our overseas development assistance, but what is clear to me is that we have a coalition Government who are determined to deliver our United Nations obligations and to apply principles to development that will continue to mean that Britain is a leading global player. As Chairman of the Select Committee, I look forward to its engaging with the Department in a constructive way that will help to shape that policy and influence it positively.
Hugh Bayley
I would like our Government to contribute to IDA16 at least the same proportion of their development finance during the three-year period in question as the UK contributed to IDA15. In other words, it would be more money in real terms but the same proportion of UK aid overall. That would be a good starting point. If the UK were to make such a commitment, implying an increase in our contribution to IDA for the crucial three-year period leading up to 2015, we would be in a strong position to seek commitments from other development partners. I know that, in reality, some G7 countries—Italy, for instance—have made very negative decisions on development spending. There are others, however—including France, which was broadly on track, although it might have slipped back a bit now—that we ought to be able to persuade to make a firm commitment in relation to IDA.
I can make an offer to the Secretary of State. Through the Parliamentary Network on the World Bank, I have been one of the architects of a campaign among parliamentarians in countries north and south to raise the question of the IDA16 replenishment in their Parliaments, and to seek commitments from donor country Governments to debate the financial commitment they will make to IDA16. We are also seeking a serious debate in the Parliaments of developing and developed countries on what can be done to improve the aid effectiveness of the World Bank’s IDA programmes, building on the Paris declaration, the Accra programme of action and the findings of the World Bank’s own mid-term review of IDA15. That review contained some good proposals about how the World Bank could achieve more with the money that it already has.
I would also like to see the introduction of a peer review mechanism, so that one World Bank office can review the performance of another, in order to drive up aid effectiveness. I would like parliamentarians in each country to have a role in these processes. In Ghana, for example, one would expect the country office of the World Bank to report to parliamentarians in Ghana. That is not to say that the constitutional relationship should change. The World Bank is owned by its shareholders, and they are Governments. In relation to achieving greater aid effectiveness, however, we want to see more openness and transparency.
We are going to run the campaign as well as we can and in as many Parliaments as possible, in the north and the south, during the period of discussion on the IDA replenishment. I hope that the UK Government will support us. I have already written to the Secretary of State to ask him to come to the Parliamentary Network on the World Bank’s annual conference in December as a keynote speaker. We are also about to launch a call to action to publicise what we are doing. If he were able to provide some sponsorship and support for that in July, or some time soon, we would welcome that.
Malcolm Bruce
The hon. Gentleman is a valued member of the Committee, and his work with the Parliamentary Network on the World Bank is also valuable. Does he agree that the effectiveness of such a campaign will be dependent on the amount of information that is published and made available to Members of Parliament, especially in the developing countries? Does he welcome in principle the Secretary of State’s commitment to publishing the detail of the funding on the website? Will he reinforce my request to the Secretary of State for as much detail as possible, in order to illuminate what is going on and enable parliamentarians to be more effective?
Hugh Bayley
Yes, I do welcome that commitment, and I very much endorse what the Chairman of the Select Committee says. I should perhaps acknowledge that one of the reasons that the Parliamentary Network on the World Bank is able to launch its campaign is that the Department for International Development has supported the core cost of running our Paris-based secretariat, which is developing the campaign.
A second opportunity for the UK to re-engage with our G7 and EU partners and win commitments from them in the next few months will be in the work leading up to the September UN summit on achieving the millennium development goals. Again, it would be helpful if the UK Government were to set out their plans for any bilateral conversations with other EU and G7 Heads of Government and to seek to influence the statements those Governments will make at the UN summit on the level of their aid funding. There will certainly be an anticipation in the developing world that donors will come up with the resources to back up the conclusions of the summit on achieving the millennium development goals.
The Secretary of State said that the Government intended to legislate to commit the United Kingdom to providing 0.7 % of its gross national income for development aid. The Chairman of the Select Committee reminded the House that the Committee had examined the draft Bill and made a number of recommendations. The first of those was that the millennium development goals summit is an important opportunity to renew commitments to aid allocations. The Committee’s report also identified the real danger that, as aid levels increase to meet the 0.7 % target already agreed, more official development assistance will be spent through other Government Departments that are not subject to the UK’s International Development Act 2002. I agree with the Chairman of the Select Committee that we need greater clarity from our Government if a proportion of the increased aid to which they are committed is going to be spent by Departments other than DFID. We need reassurance that the goals of that spending will remain similar to those of DFID, and that poverty alleviation remains the key goal, whether the money is spent in DFID or any other Department. There has been a great deal of interest in this point among the NGO community.
We live in a globalising world. I do not need to remind hon. Members how much the world economy, environmental challenges and migration bind us all together; that is well understood. The centre of gravity of global politics is moving from west to east. In that context, “east” does not just mean Japan, China, Korea and India; it also means the Pacific basin as a whole, including California and British Columbia. Were there more time, I could say a lot about the UK and Europe’s need to recast their foreign and defence policy—to some extent, the UK Government will be doing that in their strategic defence review—but I shall just say a few words before I sit down about EU policy.
The European Union as a whole still has the world’s largest GDP—some $16.5 trillion a year, compared with $15 trillion for the United States, $5.5 trillion for China and $5 trillion for Japan. The UK’s share of that is some $2.5 trillion. The EU remains economically a big player on the world stage, but the UK on its own is rather less so. I believe that the EU punches below its weight. I am not in any sense a federalist, but I want the new European External Action Service, under Baroness Ashton, to deliver a great deal more for people living in Europe than the old directorate-general for external relations. I want to see a comprehensive approach whereby the European Union’s common foreign and security policy and common security and defence policy, as well as its development policy, EU aid policy and trade policy, all pull in the same direction to ensure that long-term development, state building, peace building, trade, foreign relations and reform of international institutions such as the UN also all pull in the same direction better to co-ordinate the development policies of the European Union and member states and to strengthen the poverty focus.
We have a strong poverty focus in this country, whereas the EU has a much less stronger one. Only half of EU aid goes to the least developed countries compared with about two thirds among donors as a whole. We need to minimise duplication and wasteful competition between individual bilateral donors, reduce red tape and increase the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of our aid. Now, 60% of all the world’s aid—some €50 billion out of a total €80 billion—comes from Europe, both from EU member states bilaterally and from the EU acting on behalf of the Union as a whole. If the world is to succeed in achieving the millennium development goals by 2015, the EU and its member states must deliver more with the resources that are already committed to development as well as increase their spending to meet the commitments given at Gleneagles.
The Government are in a position to use the EU to multiply the value and effectiveness of aid from member states. It would be wrong, in my view, to back away from the EU or to reduce the UK’s contribution to EU development programmes. Our aid alone, however well spent, will not be enough to ensure that the least developed countries achieve the millennium development goals. Glorious isolation would make us less influential and less effective than concerted action to get the new European External Action Service to improve the EU’s performance.
Mr Thomas
With all due respect to the hon. Gentleman, the fact that this G8 communiqué was the first in five years not to include any mention of the Gleneagles commitments and that organisations as significant as Oxfam—which he has praised in the past—damned the communiqué and the actions of the Government for failing to get such language included should be a gentle reminder to him of why we are concerned about the Government’s performance.
Malcolm Bruce
I can understand the Labour party’s desire to protect its record, but has not the problem been that we have had a commitment to the Gleneagles goals in every communiqué from every G8 in the last five years—and absolutely no delivery? Words are no use unless we get delivery.
Mr Thomas
I welcome the fact that the right hon. Gentleman has been elected to resume the chairmanship of the Select Committee. The notion that there was no delivery on the Gleneagles commitments in the last five years is simply wrong. I accept that there was not enough delivery, and the hon. Member for Banbury and others are right to say that some countries need to do more. The Secretary of State has yet to prove that his Department is as influential and as central as it was before 6 May.