Government Overseas Aid Commitment: Private Investment

Toby Perkins Excerpts

Tuesday 9th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

We have all sorts of choices ahead of us as we take back control of that money. I have outlined today that I think we should be doing more investment to create the jobs and livelihoods that these nations need to lift themselves out of poverty and to bring a return to the UK, so that we can make the work that we do more sustainable and, if we choose, increase it.

[Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

There is a legal duty under the International Development Act 2002 to ensure that aid spending is spent on poverty reduction overseas. There is also a responsibility on investors to maximise returns for their pension holders and shareholders. Those are probably contradictory priorities. Does the Secretary of State recognise that, if she is talking about this investment in terms of aid rather than of investment, she is going to have to change that legislation? Alternatively, is she talking about something entirely different from what we currently understand aid spending to be?

[Penny Mordaunt]

I refer the hon. Gentleman to the answer that I gave a moment ago. These are two different things, and I think many Opposition Members are confusing them. One reason why we are in the 0.7% club is that we do not mark our own homework; someone else does. That should provide some reassurance to people that we are not doing something that we are saying we are.

There is a difference when it comes to what a private company, entirely separate from Government, chooses to do—and what we are trying to encourage them to do: do some good in the world by investing in the developing nations that need investment and get a great return on their investment. There is a separate issue about what we do with public funds, which count towards the ODA spend. We are not talking about using private funds to replace that.

In terms of the Development Assistance Committee rules, we are talking about looking at how we count ODA, and about ensuring that when we get returns back we have more flexibility on what we do with them. We could spend more money on development or we could retain our 0.7% commitment and spend some of those returns on the national health service.

Oral Answers to Questions

Toby Perkins Excerpts

Wednesday 12th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green]

I am delighted to echo my right hon. Friend’s call for a welcome for the new statue of Jane Austen in Basingstoke. I am genuinely astonished that there is not a statue of Jane Austen anywhere else in the country, given that she is one of our greatest authors and is still popular 200 years after her birth. I am also happy to echo my right hon. Friend’s desire for more statues of Britain’s greatest women to be spread around the country.

[Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

Q12. Politicians are said to be here today and gone tomorrow, but whatever tomorrow may bring, the Prime Minister is not even here today to mark the end of her first year in power. I also note that, for the first time since she became Prime Minister—[Interruption.] Listen: you might like to hear this. For the first time since she became Prime Minister, her image has been removed from the front page of the Conservative party website. Can the First Secretary tell us why she has gone from being the next iron lady to “The Lady Vanishes”?

[Damian Green]

The hon. Gentleman is ingenious in asking very personal questions, and I commend him for it. Unfortunately, he has his own record on this subject. As recently as June last year, he said that the leader of the Labour party was

“not destined to become Prime Minister”,

and called on him to resign. I suggest that he might want to make peace with his own Front Benchers before starting to be rude about ours.

Draft International Development Association (Seventeenth Replenishment: Additional Payments) Order 2016

Toby Perkins Excerpts

Monday 12th September 2016 General Committees

[Rory Stewart]

The questions asked by the hon. Lady and my hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling are central to this subject. This is, in the end, UK taxpayers’ money that comes from hard-working people. Those people believe in trying to deal with humanitarian crises and in helping the world’s poorest people, but they have an absolute right to expect that their hard-won money is being used in the right way.

We have a series of different mechanisms in place to try to deal with that. A multilateral aid review happens every three years and the independent commission reports directly to Parliament. We have our own internal audit team, and we also do annual reviews. It is possible to look at the development tracker on our website and to see our annual review, published in April, specifically of the IDA programme. We gave the programme an alpha-plus in the previous review, but note three particular areas of gender, climate change and the issue of fragile and conflict states regarding which we think it could be better. One reason why we work so closely with and are one of the larger contributors to the World Bank is that it has a very good track record—better than that of almost anyone else—in trying to address issues of corruption, transparency and predictability in the management of its financial processes.

[Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

I support entirely the contributions that we are making to support some of the world’s poorest. Given that this is a loan, will the Minister clarify whether the amount that we are lending comes out of the spending of 0.7% of gross domestic product to which the Government and we are committed? If so, when that money comes back in, does it effectively increase the amount that has been spent, because we are counting money as a loan, rather than grant spending?

Foreign Aid Expenditure

Toby Perkins Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2016 Westminster Hall

[James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr Wilson. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) on introducing this debate and on his excellent speech. There have been many excellent speeches; in fact, I am honoured to follow a very good one.

Across the House the word “pride” is mentioned constantly. Of course it is a source of huge pride that our country delivers this spending target, and that is absolutely right. I have not visited many of the international development projects that other Members have referred to, but I trust what they say entirely. Turning to my experience, my wife and I were in the Sri Lankan tsunami. It was Boxing day and I was standing on a beach when it came in. The very next day, someone with whom I had been swimming in the sea the day before—who confessed he was a Chelsea headhunter—got a box, put it in the middle of the restaurant area and said to every western tourist, “Put every penny you have got into there.” He was British. The British are good at this: we raise money, we are passionate about charitable giving, and I agree with that.

I accept that there is an overwhelming governmental mandate for this policy and I welcome the consensus across the House, but my concern is that there is a danger of complacency. We have a very large current account deficit in this country and a persisting public expenditure deficit in terms of public borrowing. Of course I have immense trust in the predictions of our Chancellor, not least in terms of the outcome of certain decisions we might be making shortly—unlike some—and I am sure we will go back into the black soon, but what if we do not and these issues persist? My personal view is that I would like there to be some consideration, when we protect Government budgets, that we do so on the understanding that some of it comes from a surplus. In other words, that it is clear we can afford it and that we are not borrowing the money and putting charitable spending on a credit card, which worries me.

[Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

I do not want to turn this into a political debate because it has been remarkably consensual, but let me tell the hon. Gentleman that I and many of my colleagues could give him a whole list of alternative things that we think the Government could make different decisions about rather than aid spending. He can wait for the Government to be at a point where they can say, “These are now lavish times: these are times when we are actually going to afford for children not to die of diarrhoea or afford for them to go to school,” but we will never reach that moment. He is arguing for the end of aid spending, not something else.

[James Cartlidge]

It is a political debate, and we have to debate this issue. Of course I am not arguing for the end of aid spending; that is a ludicrous thing to say. Japan, the United States, Italy, Portugal and Spain are not international pariahs and they spend 0.2% of their GDP on aid. That is disappointing, but that is a £8.5 billion difference. When we make a choice in this country to protect DFID when there is a deficit, it is a statement of fact that we will inevitably impose tougher reductions on other Departments. That means things like social care and long-term care of the elderly; we have to be open and honest about that.

That is my concern, especially in this political climate. The hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes), who is not in the Chamber any more, made the point that she had constituents who were concerned because we have food banks. Many years ago Charles Dickens wrote about telescopic philanthropy: the perception in humanitarian spending that we are prioritising the problems abroad rather than those at home. In those areas where there is an anger at politics and a feeling of disengagement—I fear I know how some of those people will be expressing that shortly—and in this climate we have to be very open and transparent. We have to show the public that we are debating these things and are prudent in our use of public finances.

Oral Answers to Questions

Toby Perkins Excerpts

Wednesday 7th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mitchell]

The hon. Gentleman is entirely accurate about the effects of climate change on very vulnerable people in Bangladesh, where only a fairly small rise in the water level could wipe out hundreds of thousands of homes. We are directly involved in protecting 15 million vulnerable people from those effects of climate change, and we will continue—through, for example, the development of scuba rice, which grows in very difficult circumstances—to target malnutrition.

[Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

6. What steps he plans to take to assess the value for money of aid expenditure on climate change projects.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development (Mr Stephen O’Brien)]

Value for money is a process, not a one-off event. The value for money of climate change projects is assessed during design and appraisal, during implementation and, for a sample of completed projects, through evaluation.

[Toby Perkins]

It is vital at this time that we get absolute value for every penny we spend, but the Minister will be aware that 70% of CO₂ emissions come from developed countries, whereas the World Bank estimates that 80% of the damage will be suffered by the developing world. After the Durban climate change conference, what steps will be taken to ensure that new and additional clauses are not dropped from climate change financing?

[Mr O’Brien]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to imply that the effects of climate change have a continually damaging effect on the poorest people of the world. Therefore, we hope that the discussions that have taken place in Durban will produce the success and the architecture that are required. However, there have been some announcements, particularly as part of Fast Start, to help people from developing countries around the world to adapt to the effects of climate change. That will be through the UN adaptation fund or the least-developed countries fund, and will be particularly for climate resilience programmes in both Ethiopia and Kenya. There is therefore a significant focus on the poorest.

Oral Answers to Questions

Toby Perkins Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd June 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I join my hon. Friend in congratulating his constituent. Transparency on pay is an important principle, because it is good for democracy and accountability if we know how much people in the public sector are earning. I also think that it will help us to control public spending. When people see how much people are paid in the public sector, the pressure will be on to keep top pay levels down. It would also be worth while having a maximum multiple of 20 times earnings; we are holding a review to get that done. People at the top of a public sector organisation should not earn more than 20 times what people at the bottom earn. It is that sort of progressive idea that we are looking forward to introducing.

[Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

Q7. Does the Prime Minister share the concerns of two schoolteachers from Chesterfield who came to see me this weekend, that children from areas of greater deprivation will suffer disproportionately from his plans to cut 10,000 university places?

[The Prime Minister]

First, I welcome the hon. Gentleman to his place as the Member of Parliament for Chesterfield. We can all remember one of his predecessors in that seat, Tony Benn, who left this House saying that he wanted to spend more time doing politics.

What I would say to the hon. Gentleman is that we want to help children from less well-off backgrounds by having a pupil premium. We will take money from outside the education budget to ensure that the pupil premium is well funded, so that children from the poorest homes get to go to the best schools and the money follows the pupil into those schools. As for university places, let me say this to the hon. Gentleman: we are expanding the number of university places by 10,000, compared with the legacy that we were left.