International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill — House of Lords, 2015-02-06
Topic: International Affairs
Michael Bruce Forsyth (Conservative, Centre-right): And rightly so. The department is absolutely heroic. It has been given an impossible task. If the noble Lord has read the report, he will see that it had to juggle its budgets and go to the Treasury for extra cash. My noble friend on the Front Bench is shaking her head. If she wants to intervene and contradict me, I would be happy to give way, because it is clear from the report that it has had to do so because of the Government’s policy. By the way, the Government do not need this Bill to decide to spend 0.7%, 0.8%, 0.9% or 2% of GDP on development aid. This is not a sine qua non as far as the Government’s policy is concerned. Indeed, without the Bill the UK’s international aid budget has grown exponentially over the past few years. In absolute terms, the UK ODA spending increased from £3.8 billion in 2003 to £11.4 billion in 2013. That is an increase of £8 billion over a 10-year period. The most recent rise in spending is particularly striking; it increased by £2.67 billion between 2012 and 2013. That is a 33% increase in spending, which is a lot to take account of in one year The National Audit Office report, which I shall paraphrase and summarise—I hope the noble Lord will accept that it is a fair assessment—said that DfID spent an extra £1 billion in international aid in just eight weeks towards the end of 2013 to satisfy the 0.7% target. Spending an extra £1 billion in eight weeks before the year end reminds me of the bad old days of local government when all the roads started getting dug up in March because the local authorities were trying to spend their budgets. All kinds of projects that would not have made the cut if considered on a priority basis and a sensible basis suddenly got done. This is the very situation that we are creating by having this inflexible target over a limited period of time, and it is what the amendment seeks to address My noble friend Lord Fowler chided me for using words such as "rush". He is absolutely right; one of the beneficiaries of the rush to spend was indeed the AIDS programme—and a very worthwhile programme that is. I do not know which programmes lost out the following year when they had to be throttled back in order for the target to be met, but of DfID’s spending in 2013, around 40% occurred in November and December. If that does not say that this is a department trying to spend the money and struggling to meet a target, I do not know what it says. Why did it take until the last two months of the calendar year, the year in which the target is assessed, to spend 40% of the budget? The National Audit Office outlined a number of concerns relating to the 0.7% target and its impact on efficiency of aid spending. These include DfID having to, "quickly add some activities to its 2013 plans but delay others set for 2014, making it more difficult to achieve value for money" One of the arguments that we have heard this morning was used by the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, as I recall, in his Second Reading speech. He said, "If we have this target, we can stop talking about the quantity of aid and start thinking about the quality of aid". I paraphrase him and am relying on memory; I hope I have not misrepresented him.