International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Bill

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr. Clarke) on the introduction of this excellent Bill. As a co-sponsor of the Bill, I am delighted, along with other hon. Members, to register my support for it. Several hon. Members have mentioned yesterday evening’s event in Portcullis House in support of the Bill, which was excellent for a number of reasons. It involved not only Members of Parliament but volunteers and non-governmental organisations, and it also had a touch of glitz and glamour, which does not happen often here. I thank the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill for arranging it. The Bill is a good one, but it is only one piece of the jigsaw. It rightly adds force to the drive to achieve our target of 0.7 per cent. of our gross national income, and the call for annual reports on our progress is excellent. The Bill mentions all the right issues: coherence, sustainability and the millennium development goals. The aspect that I want to concentrate on, however, is the effectiveness of aid. ““Effective aid”” and ““fair trade”” are four words that encapsulate the way forward. This has been a long journey. It has been 35 years since the 0.7 per cent. target was first mentioned at the United Nations General Assembly in 1970. Painfully slow progress has been made to date, but in the past few years there has been a steady increase in the UK’s overseas development assistance, and I congratulate the Chancellor and the Government on that. As the sums involved have increased, so has the responsibility to ensure that that aid is effective. We have a responsibility to several groups. One is the poor in the developing world, whether in the slums of Kibera in Nairobi, the refugee camps in Darfur, or the arid regions of Ethiopia that we often see on our television screens. Those people need every penny to be wisely spent; this can often be a matter of life and death. The victims are often the weakest, the women and the children, and many of them are the victims of man-made disasters as well as natural ones. Another group consists of our constituents, many of whom have problems of their own, but who understand the desperate need of those who live every day close to the edge, unable to change their own lives without the aid that we know can and must be delivered. We can justify an increased level of aid if it is effective aid. We cannot justify it if it is going into some dictator’s bank account.