International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Bill

I remind the House that my right hon. Friend the Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr. Clarke) has campaigned long and hard in the House for the poor of the world. I congratulate him on that and on bringing forward the Bill, which I support. The hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) told us that his time as the shadow Secretary of State for International Development was a life-changing and attitude-changing period. Anyone who has travelled to a developing country and left the down-town malls to move into the countryside and seen the lives of a quarter or maybe a half of the world’s population cannot help but be moved. The hon. Gentleman was right to start by focusing on the lives and livelihoods of the people that my right hon. Friend is trying to help through the Bill. I have travelled with the hon. Gentleman to displaced persons’ camps—refugee camps—in Darfur. When we look into the eyes of frightened children and frightened parents we cannot return to the UK, forget about it and shrug it off. We have to do something about it, which is what my right hon. Friend seeks to do through his Bill. The measure needs to be supported. All hon. Members on both sides of the House need to talk to colleagues who may have doubts to impress upon them the importance of burying those doubts so as to help the people we intend to help. I am sometimes humbled by the reaction that we get from the poorest of the poor when we arrive, as far as they are concerned, like spacemen from a different planet. In one of the refugee camps in Darfur I started a conversation with a family—husband, wife and child—who had just arrived at the camp the night before. Their shelter had not yet been built. They had bent a few sticks in arches and later they hoped to gather some cardboard, polythene sheet or something to cover the structure so that they and their child could shelter not from the rain but from the sun. Their possessions were what they had carried with them as they had fled from persecution, from their own Government’s jets bombing their village, and from Arab militias who, after the bombing, were chasing them away from their land, their livestock and their child’s future. Those people had next to nothing, but they asked me to sit and drink a cup of karkadee, a sort of herbal tea that people in the area drink. What they gave to me was probably a greater proportion of their entire family wealth at the time than I shall give in development assistance throughout my life, despite being a regular donor to a number of development charities. We stop and think, and realise that we must do more. When I went to Kenya with the Select Committee on International Development, I saw in the slums of Nairobi the work that a women’s voluntary body, Kenwa, was doing in campaigning for the rights of women who are themselves and their families affected by AIDS. I went to the organisation’s community centre and was met—those who have been to Africa know that this happens fairly often—by teams of children dancing to celebrate the visit. Their faces were even more shocking than the frightened eyes of those people who had just arrived at the refugee camp . That was because the eyes of the children were dead. The faces of those children were empty. Their parents had died from AIDS and, if it were not for the voluntary body, they, too, would be dead from neglect and starvation. They were exhausted and empty. They needed support, which has to come largely from the rich world. If it does not, we doom them to an existence that, as the hon. Member for Buckingham said, most people in this country cannot even imagine. I was pleased to bring the leader of Kenwa to London to testify before the all-party Africa group, which I chair, when we were preparing a report on AIDS. I felt that it was important for people in this country to know what Kenwa was doing. The leader is a remarkable woman. She has been HIV positive for 10 years. In the middle of the Select Committee’s visit to her project, someone told her that a woman was dying, so she cancelled everything and asked me, ““Please go and see her and reassure her that someone will bury her.”” I accompanied her to meet the woman. When one sees what those people are doing, one knows that a little money, help and support will increase their impact enormously. We must ensure that that support is available. Last year was designated as a year for Africa. The previous year, the Government set up the Commission for Africa, which responded to a development strategy for the continent that Africans had written, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development. The Commission for Africa’s report and the NEPAD strategy are widely highly regarded. The commission’s influence led last year to commitments from the rich nations to double their aid to Africa and to increase by almost double aid to other countries. It led to decisions to write off 100 per cent. of the debt of the poorest indebted countries. Unfortunately, it failed to lead to the progress that all hon. Members wanted on trade. To try to drive forward the agenda for Africa in our country, other donor countries and in Africa—without reciprocal policy change in Africa, our aid will not achieve the desired results—I chaired the preparatory committee for a conference funded by the British Council, the UK branches of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the Department for International Development. It brought together 119 parliamentarians from G8, EU and African countries to discuss what we needed to do as parliamentarians to ensure that the agreements on aid and debt to secure a better future for Africa materialise and achieve the results that we want. At the end of the conference, which was held in the British museum, we passed a declaration. Among other things, it stated:"““We undertake to hold our government to account and to exercise oversight . . . by requiring our Executives to make annual reports to parliament about the official development assistance and other development resources which they have received or distributed and how it has been spent.””" We sought to impose that obligation on every Government in Africa, the G8 countries and in the European Union. That is precisely what the Bill would do. It would ensure that we, as a Parliament, impose on our Government the obligation to report annually on whether they are meeting the important agreements that were made last year as part of the year for Africa. If we pass the Bill, we can hold our heads high when we talk to parliamentarians from other donor countries and say, ““We have done what we all agreed that we needed to do. When will you ensure that there is a similar report to the Assemblée Nationale, the Bundestag, Congress, the Japanese Diet?”” and so on. We need to change the way in which we examine the effectiveness of the aid that we provide, but if we are going to change the lives of the people in the poorest countries of the world, it will not be enough for Britain alone to do that. The whole donor community needs to do it. Clause 2 of the Bill puts an obligation on our Government to provide a report that covers the full range of the Government’s work, not just the work of the Department for International Development. Last year, as part of its policy contribution to the year for Africa, the all-party group on Africa published a report, ““The UK Government and Africa in 2005: How Joined Up is Whitehall?”” Our conclusion was that, in many areas, there was good policy co-ordination between Government Departments. In the case of debt write-off, for example, there was good co-ordination between the Department for International Development and the Treasury. However, that was not always the case. On trade reform, better co-ordination is needed between agriculture policy, trade policy and international development policy. We still have an over-reliance in the NHS and our health private services on skilled health workers from the poorest countries in the world. We also need better co-ordination in fighting corruption, as the hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash) mentioned. Clause 6 deals with the 0.7 per cent. of gross national income target. I congratulate the Secretary of State for International Development and our Government on setting a timetable for the UK to meet that target. However, we need an annual report to check on our progress. We need to be aware of what is happening, because there could be a change of Government policy in the future. Worse still, there could be a change of Government. We have heard support from both sides of the House for the Government’s international development policies, and implicit support for the 0.7 per cent. target. That is a good thing, but I hope that the pressure to meet that target will continue to be voiced from both sides of the House. It is worth looking back in history to see how policies can change when a party moves from Opposition into Government, in order to realise just how important it is for Parliament to require the Executive to produce the annual report proposed in the Bill. Thirty years ago, in 1975, the then Labour Government published a White Paper on what was then called overseas development, ““More Help for the Poorest””. That was the first British Government document to propose that aid be refocused on the poorest countries and on the poorest groups of people in those countries. The White Paper was strongly supported by the then Conservative spokesman on overseas development, Christopher Tugendhat, who said in a debate in the House on 7 November 1975:"““I welcome the distinction drawn by the White Paper and its emphasis on directing United Kingdom bilateral aid as far as possible to the poorest countries””." On the volume of aid, he said:"““The Minister””—" that is, the Labour Minister—"““said that he did not wish to argue the case for more aid in the House. I do not think that he needs to do so, as much of what he would say would be generally accepted.””—[Official Report, 7 November 1975; Vol. 899, cc. 790, 792.]" Mr. Tugendhat also made it clear later in the debate that he was speaking for his party as a whole. When challenged by a sceptical Labour MP about whether the then Leader of the Opposition supported the policy, he said that"““my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition has this subject quite as much at heart as anyone else on our side of the House and that her sympathies are very much with the poor and the needy.””—[Official Report, 7 November 1975; Vol. 899, c. 862.]" I remind the House that few things changed more quickly in 1979, after the change of Government, than the commitment to overseas aid. In 1979, the UK spent 0.51 per cent. of gross national income on development assistance. By the following year, that had dropped to 0.35 per cent. The purpose of aid had changed too. In February 1980, Neil Marten, the Minister for Overseas Development, announced that the Government would"““give greater weight in the allocation of our aid to political, industrial and commercial considerations””.—[Official Report, 20 February 1980; Vol. 979, c. 464.]" What happened? The aid-and-trade provision was substantially expanded. Aid was used to support British companies, such as Leyland buses, Hawker Siddeley aircraft and Westland Helicopters. Of course, we remember the case of the Pergau dam, which prompted me to bring before the House, when my party was in opposition, a ten-minute Bill to require aid to be used, as is now the policy, for the purpose of poverty alleviation, rather than export promotion. I appreciate that there is a vigorous debate going on in the Conservative party about its future policy direction. We have heard a lot of progressive policy from Conservative Members in today’s debate, and I know from speaking to those Members over many years that these are deeply held convictions. They feel passionately about the issue, and I hope passionately that they win the policy debate in their party. I hope, too, that we and our party retain the commitment, which we have at the highest levels of government, to development assistance. However, we cannot know for sure that the progressives, if I may call them that, on the Opposition Benches—the Conservative modernisers—will win the debate, and I cannot be absolutely sure that the pro-development caucus in my party will continue always to gain the support from the highest levels of government that we gain now. I want both to happen. If we had an annual report to the House on what was happening—in terms of volume and of quality—with our development assistance, we would be better able, as pro-development Members of Parliament on both sides of the House, to ensure that our respective parties backed what we were doing. My right hon. Friend the Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill changed for the better the lives of hundreds of thousands of disabled people in this country with his Disabled Persons (Services, Consultation and Representation) Act 1986. Two decades later, he is still held in high regard by development organisations and campaigners in this country. He made his name with that legislation. If this Bill gets on to the statute book, with the help of hon. Members on both sides of the House, it will change for the better the lives of hundreds of millions of the poorest and most needy people in the world. Let us all ensure that that happens.