International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Bill

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for taking forward her right honourable friend’s Bill. I speak as another veteran support of the aid programme, from the NGO perspective. Friends should also be constructive critics, and I shall make a few comments that will not delay the passage of the Bill. Meanwhile, I add my congratulations to the two maiden speakers on their very sincere and eloquent contributions and their remarks about this House, which will be much appreciated. Most of us remember the old ODA and the mistakes and distortions of aid under previous administrations. From groundnut schemes to giant power projects, we blundered our way through developing countries in the name of poverty eradication when really we were establishing post-colonial elites to the detriment of the poor and of our own political relations with those countries. That was not that long ago. I personally credit the NGOs and universities—notably the Institute of Development Studies and the Overseas Development Institute—with many of the positive changes that have gradually percolated into departmental policies since those days. The new broom Government of 1997 had already learned a lot from the reforming era of the noble Baroness, Lady Chalker. The noble Lord, Lord Judd, mentioned a number of challenges, and there will be many. He mentioned climate change, trade and conflict. There are also the inequalities in aid giving and the problems of absorptive capacity. These will continue in future, but now we have a much more balanced, better targeted and more rights-based programme than we have ever had. The recent Development Assistance Committee peer review was in itself testimony to the quality of our aid programme. It said that the UK programme was at,"““an historic high point of political and public support””." I am glad that through this Bill, measuring performance against the millennium development goals, the Government will be able to report more fully and honestly to Parliament—or to the magical Palace of Westminster, as the noble Baroness put it. The present DfID departmental report has grown to 300 pages, and is already quite comprehensive in terms of MDG progress. Does the Minister expect the new one to duplicate this or replace it? I hope that it will not be too heavy with statistics. On the subject of aid reporting, many will be pleased to see that the Prime Minister has set up yet another group to monitor the Gleneagles targets, but I hope that DfID will continue to fund low-level civil society monitoring groups, especially in HIPC countries, as they can usually do this debt monitoring work much more effectively. This was because an urgent priority since the World Bank’s independent evaluation, which showed that at least eight countries have slipped back to dangerous levels of debt when we thought that they were through the process. The DAC review noted ““substantial movement”” towards the 0.7 per cent target. We have all watched progress towards the UN targets go into loops under successive governments and the graph is now steeply up, but it seems highly unlikely that it will ever be more than a target. I am more interested in seeing the MDGs in the Bill, because individually they tell the story of our aid programme much more accurately. Incidentally, the DAC review questioned whether a 10 per cent reduction in staff was wise in the context of a fairly rapid budget increase. Perhaps the Minister will have a ready answer to that. A good deal of our aid budget is, rightly, spent in this country. It is 10 years since I introduced a debate in this House on the development of education—perhaps the first of its kind. Since then, and through the influence of the Development Education Association, both DfID and the DfES have moved a long way towards the building of awareness of international affairs and citizenship in schools and local communities. I could give many examples, but my key point is that the public have not until now been given the chance to comment properly on our aid programme. Diversion of aid and corruption have long been easy targets, and a preoccupation of those who always find reasons to dampen down enthusiasm. The much bigger development budgets tend to operate behind screens of jargon, official spin and mystique, and it is rare that the media expose scandals which have occurred in our aid programme on the scale of Pergau or Narmada. I doubt that the innocuous language of this Bill will reveal much more, but it should improve the public’s general awareness of the detail. Will the Minister confirm that both DfID and the DfES, and perhaps other joined-up departments, will report annually on development education and development awareness? Perhaps DfID, as the lead agency, could take on this role within the terms of the Bill. In the spirit of greater transparency I would like to introduce an idea that has probably already been considered by the Government and rejected. Under paragraph 2(1)(b) of the Schedule the report has to include a list of aid recipient countries. I recommend that, here or elsewhere, the UK itself is included on the list of recipients. I say that in all seriousness as one who has worked for most of his life in the aid business. For fear of admitting too much, we have repeatedly failed to acknowledge the contribution of our own country in the annual statistics. Through our policy of untied aid, which I commend, we have thereby neatly dodged any traces of our own involvement. How many people, for example, are employed in the UK in all our aid programmes, including those of the NGOs and churches? I doubt the Government could answer that, but I believe they should take steps to do so if they are going to be transparent. Surely this of all Governments should be brave enough to admit, under Clause 6(1) of the Bill, to the retention of some of our aid in this country. Not only do we support a larger department—and there are some statistics in the annual report already—but there are a host of consultants based in the UK working for DfID, the EU or one of the many international and UN aid agencies. Even if we have ended our tied aid, many of our overseas operations still require technical support from home, and that means jobs for people in British industries. Then there are the many UK-based media, local community and education projects I have already mentioned that are supported by DfID and the DfES. There are the British Council and BBC World Service aid programmes, funded by the FCO. It would be healthy if these projects were all reported and audited in a separate column to give the public a truer picture of how aid benefits the givers as well as the receivers. I would not be surprised to learn from this exercise that the UK is one of our own leading aid beneficiaries. There was a time, when I was on Christian Aid’s staff, when I could be cynical about government spending at home. We in the NGOs always told the public that we deducted 2 or 3 per cent for administration and a little more for fundraising, and all the rest would go to the poor. I have come to appreciate the true costs of aid administration, and now of awareness-building. I genuinely believe the public have a right to know exactly what those costs are. I too wish this Bill a fair wind.