European Union (Amendment) Bill

That is exactly the problem that amendment No. 245 confronts. Are we talking about aid given purely on the basis of development criteria—how poor a country is, its position with regard to human development and various measures of relative poverty—or aid given as part of a wider objective relating to political and strategic considerations? The amendment is very apt in that context. Having heard the fears of my hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh (Mr. Francois) about the impact of the new high representative, the European External Action Service and the reinforced European common foreign and security policy, I think that they might come together to make the existing situation worse. In saying that, I do not draw a veil over the existing problems of EU aid policy, which are long-standing and widely recognised. European Union development co-operation and aid have stretched back as far as the EU itself, certainly throughout the 25-year history of the Lomé convention. The EU has provided a significant proportion of world aid throughout its history. However, has the money that has been spent by European Union institutions—as opposed to money from individual states—been well used? There is often a sense that the European Union's relatively wealthy nations are trying to compensate developing nations for the effects that EU policies have had on them. An academic study by Karin Arts and Anna Dickson concluded that over the long term, the European Union's policy on development has fallen short, saying that"““the sum effect is the creation of an ineffective, and perhaps symbolic, development policy. That is to say, ineffective in the realm of producing, encouraging or facilitating development, although effective in creating the image of an actor engaged with the world's poor.””" That is absolutely relevant to my hon. Friend's amendment. Are we going to have an EU policy in which the EU is an actor going through the motions with other objectives in mind, or an EU aid policy that delivers aid to the poorest people? Various views were attributed to the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Clare Short) during our earlier debate. She put it succinctly when she said that the European Commission was"““the worst development agency in the world””." Her successor, the right hon. Member for Leeds, Central (Hilary Benn), to whom hon. Members have rightly paid tribute for his sincere convictions on this subject, put it in his own way. On the subject of European development aid, he told the Select Committee on Science and Technology:"““as I think everybody knows, it has not been terribly effective in the past.””" Coming from the right hon. Gentleman, and knowing the terms that he tends to use, that is even more damning than the conclusion of the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood. Time and again, reform has been promised. We were promised it in the treaty, and we have to see that reform against the criterion in my hon. Friend's amendment. We have heard time and again—I think that I heard shades of it in the speech made by the Under-Secretary of State for International Development, the hon. Member for Harrow, West (Mr. Thomas) when he summed up on behalf of the Government—the classic bureaucrat's defence: ““Things have not been as they should, but we are putting them right.”” The Select Committee on International Development put its finger on some of the long-standing problems in European Union policy when it reviewed the effectiveness of the promised reforms in 2002. It said:"““We remain concerned by the lack of transparency as to which funds are intended for poverty reduction, the continuing division of responsibilities between DG Development and DG External Relations, and the questionable ability of the Commission to staff its Delegations adequately and appropriately.””" To be fair to those involved in the European Union's aid effort, lack of transparency and ineffective bureaucracy are hardly unique characteristics of the European Union, but they are important when we debate whether more and more policy making in aid will fall within the remit of central European institutions rather than that of individual member states. In 2003, the International Development Committee said that it was waiting to see whether European Union reforms would result in a greater focus on poverty reduction, but it has been and remains the case that too little of the EU's international development effort is devoted to the poorest countries in the world. For the purposes of the amendment, we need to ask whether so much EU aid will continue to go to countries in eastern and central Europe and the Mediterranean region—countries that may be less developed than we and other western European nations are, but hardly count among the poorest in the world. Far too little EU aid goes to the least developed countries, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa. That is the situation that we confront now, and we must see the amendments in that context. If my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Rayleigh is right in his analysis of the impact of the high representative, the EU's new foreign policy-making institutions and its new drift towards integrated EU supranational control over foreign policy, the situation could get even worse—but my goodness me, we have grounds enough for concern already. Less than half the European Union's aid goes to the least developed countries and low-income countries. Less than 40 per cent. of aid goes to sub-Saharan Africa. I heard the comments of the Under-Secretary of State for International Development about how matters had improved since 2002, but since 2003, the proportion of EU aid going to sub-Saharan Africa has fallen. I quote figures very helpfully supplied to me by the House of Commons Library, which tells me that the amount of EU aid going to sub-Saharan Africa as a proportion of the EU's overall budget has fallen from 38.9 per cent. in 2003 to 35.6 per cent. today. This debate is taking place against the background of a falling proportion of EU aid to sub-Saharan Africa. When one considers the amount of aid being given to individual countries, the situation is even starker. In support of his amendments, my hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh rightly highlighted the case of Mediterranean and eastern European countries; I think that he mentioned Turkey, Morocco and Serbia in his list of the top 10 recipients of EU aid. In fact, according to the note helpfully supplied to me by the Library, those countries are the top three. Turkey receives the most aid, Morocco the next most and Serbia the third most. In terms of aid received per capita, the situation is starker still. According to the Library's calculations, Serbia receives about 60 times more aid per capita than Bangladesh, and a total of three times more in overall aid budget. I may be wrong, but I imagine that when those figures on the distribution of EU aid were produced, Kosovo was counted as part of Serbia. We can therefore read them in the context of European Union policy towards Kosovo and Serbia. That might be worthy on its own account. It might be intended to achieve just results, self-determination and a peaceful solution to the long-standing problems in the Balkans; there might be other issues as well. It is a complicated part of the world, and I do not propose to go into detail during this debate about all the merits of those issues, but the point of the amendment is undoubtedly that aid is a focal point for EU foreign and security policy. It appears from the statistics that the aid disbursed by the European Union is driven by the EU's common foreign and security policy objectives. It certainly cannot be driven by the relative poverty of Serbia or Kosovo, for instance, when compared with the very poorest countries, including Bangladesh.