International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Bill

As my hon. Friend knows, I was present when he raised those matters in Westminster Hall. I sympathise with his argument, to which I shall specifically refer later in my speech. We will support the Bill, but the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill knows that it is unlikely to proceed on to the statute book without Government support and co-operation. We want to see the Bill on the statute book, which is why it would be helpful if the Minister were to clarify in his winding-up speech how clause 8(2)(a), which provides for the Secretary of State to commit to aid spending three years in advance, fits with the Department’s intention not to provide a proportion of financial support to, for example, Uganda, if certain criteria are not met. We want to discuss various omissions, which the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill, DFID officials and the relevant Ministers need to consider, in Committee and on Report. My hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, East has raised one of those omissions: there is a case for including a provision to assess humanitarian aid, if only so that lessons can be learned to improve effectiveness in subsequent emergencies. The Bill does not refer to the international finance facility for immunisation or future international finance facilities, and it fails to mention global aid to fight AIDS, TB and malaria, which will use up significant sums of money from British taxpayers and elsewhere. It also does not refer to harmonisation, which is an important point raised by the right hon. Member for Oxford, East (Mr. Smith). If the Minister cannot explain those omissions today, I would be grateful if he were subsequently to explain how those policy areas fit into the context of the Bill, whether Ministers and the Department believe that the House would benefit from analysis of the outcomes in those particular policy areas and whether the Government intend to assist the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill in widening the scope of his Bill to cover those important areas. The Bill does not appear suitably to address the effectiveness of direct budgetary support, which goes to the heart of the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr. Cash). The Government’s own figures state that Britain has given nearly £1.5 billion in direct budgetary support to 20 countries since 2000. In the financial year 2004–05, for example, Uganda received £61 million in bilateral aid, of which £35 million was direct budgetary support. If the Bill were implemented unamended, just 42.6 per cent. of total bilateral aid going to Uganda would be transparent, while the rest would be outside the Bill. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a significant percentage of direct budgetary support money is unaccounted for and does not end up where it was intended to go. The Bill is an opportunity for the Government to improve accountability and transparency on money allocated by DFID in direct budgetary support and thereby improve the lives of millions of people in developing and poorer nations. The Bill clearly covers both bilateral and multilateral support, although the wording is confused in places. How does DFID propose to measure and analyse outputs from multilateral assistance, when it has limited control—and sometimes limited knowledge—over how and where the money is spent? Will the Minister explain how the Bill accords with specific countries’ poverty reduction strategy papers? Does the Bill cover both international development assistance and official development assistance? Are countries not classified as developing by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, such as eastern European countries, covered by the Bill? How will EU multilateral aid be monitored and become transparent? That point was rightly highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for Stone, who has been a passionate and consistent advocate for, and believer in, resolving these issues. Our long-term goal must be to facilitate the developing world in graduating from aid dependency to pluralistic societies with strong economies, thereby creating wealth and more and better jobs. That can be achieved only through alleviating global poverty, creating freer and fairer trade, making wider and deeper debt reductions, enhancing civil society and democracy, and assisting developing countries to build their export capacity and to develop their infrastructure. We welcome and support the Bill’s principal objective, as it would implement robust accountability systems so that development assistance is more effective for developing nations and their citizens. I hope that we shall be able to work across political parties to improve it and to facilitate its expeditious passage to enactment.