Foreign Aid Expenditure

Flick Drummond Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Flick Drummond (Portsmouth South) (Con)]

Our commitment to overseas aid was a manifesto commitment that I supported wholeheartedly, having been brought up in developing countries for the first 20 years of my life. It is our responsibility as one of the world’s largest and most prosperous economies to help those in need and those in danger of exploitation. We should feel a sense of pride and involvement in the amount of aid that we deliver and the benefits it brings, but obviously we need to do more at home to explain exactly how our aid is delivered, because sadly now it has become a target for the press. However, it is also important that we debate these issues, because we must always ensure that public money is well spent and directed to the right ends.

In fact, 86% of people believe in the importance of overseas aid. We are debating this petition because it has crossed the threshold of support, but I personally receive far more correspondence supporting the work of the Department for International Development than correspondence attempting to undermine it.

The work that we have done with Rwanda shows that even the most chaotic states can get on the road to recovery with the right intervention, and Britain has been the birthplace of many of the world’s most important charitable and voluntary organisations. Those organisations are key partners of DFID in delivering aid, as well as raising funds themselves.

However, this issue is never just about spending money; it is also about deploying British expertise that has been built up over decades. We are a trading nation. We must always be on the look-out for new markets and new partners to deal with. The investment in developing countries brings them into our markets, as we can see now across Asia. It is also vital that we get the world’s young into work, for their own dignity and personal development as well as for their economic future.

With the rise of the internet, people in poorer counties can see the lifestyle that we enjoy here in the developed world and it is no surprise that they want to migrate here. By developing other countries, we also help to prevent the large amount of migration that is denuding countries of their most valuable resource—their informed and educated population. Our foreign aid must be directed towards building the economies of developing countries and it must continue to do so until it is no longer needed.