International Trade and Development Agency — House of Commons, 2018-12-12
Topic: International Affairs
Stephen John Doughty (Labour, Centre-left): The hon. Gentleman says that I was not listening. I was listening carefully. He is blurring objectives. The focus should be on poverty and on our common interest. There is a way of devising international development policy and trade policy that is in the common interest of both parties—of our country and of developing countries—and ensures that we move together in generating and spreading wealth and prosperity for all people in the world, including in those countries, rather than having a self-interested trade policy Past Conservative Governments do not have a positive record on this. I would hate to see a day when we slip back to things like the Pergau Dam scandal, or where things are tied simply to self-interested trade policies and we attempt to get self-advantage rather than to focus on common interests between ourselves and some of the poorest countries in the world There is a good way to go about this. It is the policy that we have practised in Government through the Department for International Development. It is the policy that has been pursued in much of our work through multilateral agencies, which do much to promote trade and development and provide trade capacity The hon. Gentleman spoke about the EU. One of the greatest tragedies of Brexit is that we are potentially coming out of key European development agencies, the European development fund and the arrangements that exist for close co-operation with many countries, including many in the Commonwealth and African, Caribbean and Pacific countries. It has been far from perfect. I have campaigned when I think the EU has got things wrong in its relationships. In fact, my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow West will remember he and I having lively discussions about policy in a previous life and where that went The reality is that, on the whole, the EU has had development and poverty eradication at the heart of its policies and its relationships with the ACP countries. We already have trade agreements with many of those countries. We already have supportive policies in aid and development. One of the tragedies of Brexit is that we will potentially just chuck all that in the bin The European development fund, the European Commission’s humanitarian office—ECHO—and many other programmes are some of the Department for International Development’s highest rated multilateral programmes. I previously served on the International Development Committee, and we saw evidence of that when looking at the funding of multilateral agencies It seems absurd to suggest that we come out of all those programmes and create something else that is hugely bureaucratic and would, I fear—whatever the intentions of the hon. Member for Braintree—be used by other Government Members and those with agendas to simply undermine the work of the Department for International Development There is also the crucial issue of the extra bureaucracy and cost of setting up such an agency. Why do we need it? We already have a Department. We already have UK aid. We already have the multilateral agencies that have these relationships. We already have many experts working in trade facilitation and trade and international development. Why would we create another costly agency and reorganise and shunt civil servants back and forth yet again when we already have people doing excellent work in that area, in not only this country but many of the others with which we co-operate? I do not need to mention all the names, but there are many other agencies that we have worked with for many years, such as Crown Agents Of course, we also have the Commonwealth Development Corporation. Mr Speaker, you will know, because I have spoken on this at great length before, that I have been a critical friend of the CDC. The CDC has got things wrong in the past. The huge extra funding given to it was premature and too much to absorb quickly, but I know that the CDC is working to look at all those issues. It is important that we stick with what we have. It works perfectly well. It has poverty eradication at the heart of it. We have excellent people working on it. We do not need to create something else As I said, this Bill unfortunately sits alongside a series of other agendas. We have seen attempts by this Government to rebadge aid and development spending and redraw the definitions used at an international and UK level—"Let’s say we’re keeping the 0.7% target, but we’ll undermine it in every way we can by sticking everything else under it and claiming that it’s development spending." We have seen the repeated diversion of our aid funding to private contractors, many of whom have actually been seriously criticised for some of the work they have been doing. As I have said, we have had the huge increases to the CDC. I am not opposed to an increase to the CDC, but I have had some serious concerns about its level We have also seen this with the Government’s two cross-Government funds—the conflict, stability and security fund and the prosperity fund. Many parts of that work are excellent—the funds are doing excellent work—and we cannot have a purist development policy in which we do not work with other agencies. However, I certainly have some serious questions about the way in which other Departments have been spending money through the prosperity fund without reference to our development objectives and without reference to poverty eradication as the first point. Quite frankly, there has been very lax scrutiny from other Departments—including, I am sorry to say, the Foreign Office—about where that is going and how it is being spent I do not think that the fate of the world’s poorest people and the relationships of common interest that we should be building together, as I have said, should somehow be used instrumentally in the Brexit process. They should not be used as some sort of Brexit sweeteners for us to try and grab magical trade deals that, frankly, we already have, but are also not going to replace our excellent trading relations with our EU neighbours or, indeed, the trading relations that exist between us as an integral part of the European Union and many of the world’s developing countries We have to have a relationship of mutual respect: not simply one of self-interest, but one of common interest. We will truly make poverty history by supporting and working alongside developing countries, not by acting in an instrumental way in which we are putting our own interests before those of others. I therefore oppose the Bill, and I hope the House will divide on this Question put (Standing Order No. 23).