Foreign Aid Expenditure

Anne Main Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2016 Westminster Hall

[Steve Double]

I would like to make a little more progress, and then I will accept further interventions.

The issue can be emotive and controversial for some. It is far too easy to get caught up in the attention-grabbing headlines or misled by the wildly exaggerated information out there in the public domain. People want to know how the money is spent and whether it is being spent in our interest, and rightly so. That was clearly demonstrated in the Twitter discussion held this afternoon, in which the Chair of the Select Committee on International Development, the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), and I participated. We had about 3,000 contributions in just an hour. In fact, it was impossible to keep up with the number of people posting, let alone respond to them all, but it was clear from that discussion that there are strong feelings on both sides of the debate.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

I am sure my hon. Friend will accept that there are concerns. My right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) set up the traffic light system that shows how our aid budget is being spent. There are far too many red and amber warnings about how well the money is being spent, and that is what the public are concerned about.

[Steve Double]

I agree with my hon. Friend. It is absolutely essential that we ensure our aid budget is being spent well and wisely and is delivering value for money for the British taxpayer. I am sure that the Department for International Development is committed to achieving that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton), a fellow member of the International Development Committee, and I agree with many of her points. It is important for Members to understand the reason why we are here today, which is not only the petition but the fact that it was started by The Mail on Sunday, which said when talking about our aid budget:

“Rather than helping people who desperately need it, much of this money is wasted and…fuels corruption, funds despots and corrodes democracy in developing nations.”

Quite frankly, that is lazy and wrong, and it is irresponsible for anyone who cares about our national security and global security—

[Mrs Main]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way on that point?

[Stephen Doughty]

I will give way in a moment, but let me make a few points. It is important to note that there is both a moral argument and a practical and national security argument for why we should spend 0.7% on aid. The moral argument should shame us all. As a Christian, I think it is appalling that 800 women die every day in childbirth and 20,000 children die every day from preventable diseases. We can list the statistics, which should shame us all. It is irresponsible for us to ignore those in a world where poverty, insecurity and instability have consequences for our streets and our cities.

Gross poverty has fuelled instability in Yemen. There are ungoverned spaces there where militants can train and extremism can flourish. The Mail on Sunday is quite happy to tell us about the immigrants flooding towards us—it was happy to put that on its front page instead of the massacre in Orlando—but what it does not tell us is that many of those people trying to find a better future are fleeing because of the very poverty and insecurity that our aid aims to tackle. Do we seriously think that diseases such as Ebola and other pandemics, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, resist borders? Of course they do not. Our aid plays a crucial role in tackling such diseases.

[Mrs Main]

The hon. Gentleman said that there is nothing in the corruption point. If he reads the ICAI report on anti-corruption and DFID, he will see that it is on red-amber, showing that there are serious concerns about our 0.7% budget being used corruptly in some areas.