---

Aid Reviews

I thank the Secretary of State for his statement and for giving me advance copies of it. I welcome the Secretary of State's declaration that our aid programme is both morally right and in our national interest. As he argues against those who decry aid, he will have our strong support. This is not just about charity; it is about justice, tackling global inequality and fulfilling our responsibilities to the world. We put development at the heart of our agenda because we believe we must struggle for a fairer and more equal world. As things change in the world, as we are seeing in north Africa and the middle east, it is right to review our aid programme, but what should not and must not change is the commitment to spend 0.7% of our national income on aid by 2013. There must be no slipping back on that. Will the Secretary of State tell the House when he will bring forward the Bill to put that promise into law? Will the Secretary of State campaign vigorously to show that our aid matters and saves lives? The girls and boys sitting in classrooms in Nepal, the Nigerian women who no longer have to walk miles to fetch water and the millions of children who no longer die from preventable disease are proof of that. Is not that the way to build support for aid, rather than by announcing as ““new”” decisions that we had already made? Will the Secretary of State admit that there is nothing new about ending significant bilateral aid to Russia? We ended it in 2007. Grand gestures of shutting down already closed programmes create a misleading picture of aid and undermine rather than support it. He should know better. As tackling poverty depends greatly on trade as well as aid, will he implement the Bribery Act 2010 now? Will the Secretary of State acknowledge that after 13 years in which the Labour Government tripled the aid budget, reversing the cuts of the previous Tory Government, this country led the world in tackling global poverty? Is he not concerned that that leadership, which is so important during a global economic downturn, is undermined by his decision to freeze the percentage of aid as a share of national income for the next two years? Can he tell the House how many lives will be lost and how many fewer children will go to school because of the lost £2.2 billion in aid? Will the Secretary of State assure the House that he will protect his Department from raids by other Government Departments? DFID's budget is for the world's poorest, and he must not let other Government Departments use his budget as a source of cash. Will he reclaim the £1.8 million that he gave to fund the Pope's visit? That was not tackling global poverty, nor was his Department's loan of £161 million to the Turks and Caicos Islands. He has to be strong and stop his ministerial colleagues using DFID as a hole in the wall. In our 2009 White Paper, we recognised the need to help people who suffer the twin problems of grinding poverty and living in an area ravaged by violence. It is right that we co-ordinate our development, diplomatic and security efforts, but our aid programme must not become subsumed in our military and security objectives. Of course, in places such as Yemen it is right that our aid efforts complement our foreign and security policy objectives where they can. We are absolutely committed to upholding our security and countering terrorism, but that must be the responsibility of the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Will the Secretary of State confirm that poverty reduction will remain the focus of DFID money? I welcome the Government's continuation of Labour's commitment to the international co-ordination of aid through multilateral organisations, and in particular the Secretary of State's reaffirmation of the EU's work, but will he reconsider his decision on the ILO? The Secretary of State's men-only ministerial team talk a lot about how they will empower women in the developing world. Why, then, has he still not decided how much he will contribute to the new UN women's agency? Why should the women of the world have to wait for the men in his Government to put their money where their mouth is? On bilateral aid, we welcome the focus on setting aid objectives for each country, but did the recipient countries play a part in that? Will the Secretary of State continue the spirit of the 2005 Paris declaration, which put the developing country in the driving seat and did so much to end the problematic post-colonial relationship between donor and recipient countries? Will he confirm that the decisions to cut aid to very poor countries such as Niger and Lesotho involved co-ordination with other donor countries, to ensure that our decisions do not leave them high and dry? Will he also explain his decision to end aid to Burundi, where there is deep poverty, and which is in the great lakes region, where there is still instability? I welcome the Secretary of State's continuation of the previous Labour Government's focus on results and value for money. We made progress towards the millennium development goals, such as cutting maternal mortality and increasing child survival. To say that that was wasting money is an insult to all those who worked on those programmes, and it is to deny the value of those lives that were saved. I hope we will hear no more of that. With more than 1 billion people still living in poverty, the Secretary of State is right to recognise that there is a long way to go. As Secretary of State for International Development, he will have the Opposition's support. We will back him in his work if he keeps faith with British generosity and our duty to the world's poor.