International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Friday 5th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mark Reckless]

The hon. Gentleman is quite correct. He is one of the very few Members who appear actually to vote as their constituents would wish them to.

We have heard today that the numbers are being revised upwards still further. We are now going to be spending £12.4 billion on overseas aid. My party wants to reduce that amount—[Interruption.] We do not want to eliminate it entirely, as the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) might wish, but we want to cut it by 85%. That would give us a saving of £10.5 billion to spend on the priorities of our constituents.

The other question that Members around the House simply seem to ignore is that of whether we as a country can afford this. If we want to give overseas aid on a sustainable basis, we have to sell overseas more than we buy from overseas, yet we now have a current account deficit coming close to 5% of GDP. That figure is usually the sign of a country in crisis and in an unsustainable position, yet we are going to enshrine in law an obligation to make an overseas transfer of 0.7% of our GDP indefinitely, through force of law.

We saw the autumn statement and the Office for Budget Responsibility and its three-men-and-a-dog approach to forecasting the current account deficit. This blithely assumed that the 5% gap would disappear and become less than 2% over the forecast horizon. For some reason, it was assumed that overseas transfers would trend lower, but there is no serious prospect of that happening while we are handing over 0.7% of our resources as overseas aid, never mind our contributions to the EU and the rising amount of remittances that we see transferred overseas as a result of the degree of immigration we have seen in this country.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

The hon. Gentleman clearly does not see the point of giving aid for humanitarian or compassionate reasons, but will he at least acknowledge the self-interest involved? Would he acknowledge that, if we want a safer, more secure world, with fewer people being forced to leave their countries—which his party certainly does not like—sharing our wealth more equally would be a very good way of achieving that?

[Mark Reckless]

No, I do not acknowledge that; the idea that by giving all this overseas aid we are reducing immigration to our country is complete baloney. Immigration tends to come much more from middle income people; the most strife-torn and poorest people do not have the money to pay people smugglers to come illegally to our country. I do not think the argument the hon. Lady makes is right, and the evidence does not support the idea that overseas aid reduces immigration or benefits us from a selfish perspective of leading to more trade. Indeed, we completely untied aid from trade. Other countries, most notably France, have traditionally tried to bring some benefit to constituents and companies by saying, “We will give you this aid but it should be spent in this way which will benefit not only your countries, but our constituents.” By untying aid in that way, we have made it even less popular than it previously was.

There is an idea that we can somehow sustain giving away 0.7% on overseas aid every year, even when we are borrowing 5% of our output every year and we have no plans to put that right. Even the OBR says that our exports are going to grow more slowly than our imports; it just has preposterous assumptions that suddenly we are going to get 2.5% of extra GDP from investment income and somehow transfers are going to decline—they are not. All this money we are giving in overseas aid we are borrowing—and doing so from overseas. We are purporting to be a rich country that is able to give this great handout of 0.7% of everything we produce every year, but we are not giving what we produce—we are giving money that we are borrowing from overseas. These are debts we are building up for our children and our grandchildren. We see the other forecast that debt as a proportion of household income in that sector is going to go up to 180% of GDP, and that is partly happening to pay the taxes this Government need in order to give away 0.7% of their output to overseas. People here should think about what our constituents want and about whether it is sustainable to give away this amount of money when we are actually having to borrow it all from overseas.