Queen’s Speech

Lord Loomba Excerpts

Monday 23rd May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Loomba (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome Her Majesty’s most gracious Speech and the opening remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay of St Johns. We have heard a lot about the EU referendum, so I shall not touch that topic. I will, however, mention that parliamentarians, especially the British Indians from both Houses, have come together—there are more than 1 million British Indians in England—and we will campaign for the remain vote.

Tonight I shall concentrate on the commitment on international development aid. It is good to see that that commitment is set to continue. However, as noted from the joint Treasury and DfID policy paper produced last November, it aims to give value for money and seeks to prevent new threats to national security, most notably by earmarking 50% of the aid budget for fragile states, but it does not go into the detail of how this will work in practice.

The change in the way in which aid is spent by DfID—and, indeed, may not be spent by DfID in the future but by other departments in the name of four core objectives, brought about by our need to curtail spending and ensure better value for money across government departments—is welcome. One cannot argue with spending more wisely, but the question is: are the Government spending more wisely? We heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Flather, that there are some problems with the spending.

The paper underlines the four core objectives that will underpin aid spending in the future. Two of these involve: promoting global prosperity, tackling extreme poverty and helping the world’s most vulnerable; and improving the rights of women and girls. One of the key ways of achieving these two aims, as well as our continuing commitment to supporting sustainable development goals, is through education and imparting knowledge and skills to empower people to achieve prosperity for themselves.

To take one example of where our aims can be met fourfold, there is a very successful university in Bangladesh, the Asian University for Women, whose mission statement is to seek to,

“graduate women who will be skilled and innovative professionals, service-oriented leaders in the businesses and communities in which they will work and live, and promoters of intercultural understanding and sustainable human and economic development in Asia and throughout the world”.

Bangladesh is one of the countries that has regularly been in the top 10 for aid from the UK, yet this university is struggling to obtain funding to enable it to carry on doing its good work. The British Council does sterling work in promoting education and improving skills and knowledge. It does much of its work through ODA funding from the FCO. DfID is subject to rigorous assessments of its spending through the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, which has noted that DfID should include a more complete explanation of the main categories of ODA spent by other government departments in its Statistics on International Development report to enhance transparency.

Would the Minister agree that, where there is crossover between DfID and the British Council, there is a need for better co-operation between these two organisations to ensure better value for money in order to achieve our aims and objectives, so that universities, such as the Asian University for Women, get much-needed support?