Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Toby Perkins and Rory Stewart

Tuesday 18th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

T4. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North (Alex Norris) for asking almost exactly the question that I was about to ask, because that gives me the opportunity to expand on the answer he was given. Will the Minister tell us a little more about whether the Government are minded to make Spice and Mamba—drugs that are causing huge problems in Nottingham Prison and many others—class A drugs? What other strategies do we have to reduce the amount of drugs in prisons?

[Rory Stewart]

The big legislative change that we are trying to introduce, and for which we would very much like to get cross-party support, is a provision to allow us to do proper testing on Spice—an endeavour that is in a private Member’s Bill that is currently trying to make its way through the House. As the hon. Gentleman has pointed out, Spice is a real problem. It is provoking unbelievably aggressive behaviour and it is extremely bad for people’s health. We can search along the perimeter but yes, we also need to do more in the law.

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

Debate between Toby Perkins and Rory Stewart

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?