International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill — House of Lords, 2015-02-27
Topic: International Affairs
David Lawrence Lipsey (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I very much regret that I was not able to be here to move this amendment in Committee, but I am delighted to say that the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth—as I would have expected—did that job much better than I could have done. I certainly do not intend to detain the House for longer than I need, as it would be a better use of its time to read his magnificent speech The amendment is designed to increase the flexibility of the one-year programme so as to avert the danger that the money will be rushed out to hit the target in one year and that there will not be enough to hit the target so easily the year after. It is intended to avoid waste, to provide ministerial flexibility and to help in the management of our national budgets As I said, I do not intend to expand on that theme for long but I want to deal with one argument which was put very powerfully this morning by my noble friend Lord McConnell and which appeared very much in the debate at Second Reading. The argument is that the Bill will set the quantity of aid, enabling us then to focus on the quality. I will not address the second half of that—the quality, which comes up in other amendments. I just caution the House against thinking that the Bill will in practice set the quantity, and I do so by reference to Ireland. A report states that at the millennium summit in 2000, the Taoiseach announced a framework for reaching the UN target. It was to be attained by the end of 2007. In 2005, the target was adjusted to 2012. According to a subsequent OECD peer review, that deadline was extended again to 2015, but this has also been missed. Now, according to that authoritative source, the 2015 target is also going to be missed In other words, you can set these targets, and you can even enshrine them, as the Bill does, in legislation. You can insist that each year the Secretary of State gives an explanation to the House if the target has not been met; nevertheless, the targets do not easily hold, and if economic imperatives dictate otherwise then we will find that they do not hold. I would be pretty willing to have a fair bet with anyone in this House that within the next 10 years there will be one or more such occasions when they do not hold. The debate over quantity will inevitably persist while there is pressure on public expenditure and there are competing programmes I am realistic enough to know that this amendment is unlikely to be accepted today. However, it would be comforting and would help to bring the House together if the Minister could indicate that the Government are not without sympathy on the point about flexibility. It would help if they could indicate that, within the terms of the legislation, they will be prepared to look at this flexibly and will not allow something stupid such as a last-minute rushing out of the money through the door—as I am afraid happened last year, according to the independent National Audit Office reports—and that they will manage the Bill so as to minimise any possible ill side-effects from what is generally agreed to be a desirable thing; namely, effective overseas aid.