That was also a great surprise to me. I referred earlier to the letter that the Secretary of State sent to many of the other DFID contractors on 16 December. That letter was very clear about tax avoidance measures and tax havens. It contained a series of criteria, most of which I think are very reasonable, and which we should expect to be observed by organisations that are benefiting from our aid spending. My question is this: why are those criteria not being applied to the CDC? The Secretary of State repeatedly refused to confirm that they would be. There seems to be one rule for one organisation and a different rule for others.
Eurodad research found that 118 out of 157 fund investments made by the CDC went through jurisdictions that feature in the top 20 of the Tax Justice Network’s Financial Secrecy Index. That does not seem to me to be coherent with the other statements that are being made by the Government. Indeed, the will of the House has been shown by cross-party support for amendments to other Bills that would crack down on tax avoidance and evasion.
Lastly, I want to return to the issue of coherence, and I urge colleagues to support new clause 7. The hon. Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller) referred to this as some sort of laundry list and suggested I was creating hypothetical straw men that did not actually exist and was dealing with things that have happened in the past. That is not the case; I am talking about things that are happening now. It is a fact that, as data revealed to me since the Committee stage in parliamentary questions show, in 2015 alone CDC invested £56.9 million in private fee-paying education and £117.9 million in private fee-paying healthcare.
3.45 pm
The reality—I am sure hon. Members will say this; it has been alluded to already—is that there are private providers, voluntary providers and faith providers providing excellent health and education in many developing countries. That is a fact; indeed, it is how our education and health systems started out. The question, however, is: what is the priority for our spending of our money? Is it to further support and expand such fee-paying education and healthcare providers, or should it be, as I would argue, to provide free at-the-point-of-use public healthcare and education, supporting teachers’ and nurses’ salaries, and the development of good departments of national health and education, and removing user fees, as we in this country have done in the past, to ensure that there is access for the poorest people? Even very small user fees can be a huge disincentive, particularly to those on the lowest incomes. The evidence of individual projects—the Rainbow Hospitals trust in India that CDC has invested in, or GEMS Education, which appears to be funding private schools that charge up to £10,000 a year in Kenya—suggests that there is an incoherence between what we say we are doing and our priorities in health and education and what CDC is doing.
Another current example concerns palm oil. We have all heard about the scandals involving Feronia in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and all the concerns about this being an unsustainable product and about land grabs and human rights. Whether or not there have been improvements in that project and there are good aspects to it, it seems to me to be incongruous that we are providing taxpayers’ money to invest in things that are not in line with our other objectives.
Finally, on fossil fuels, the Minister and others made important points about the importance of CDC being able to invest in energy infrastructure. We heard a good example earlier from one of my fellow Committee members about excellent investment in energy infrastructure projects in Africa, and CDC is investing in many good projects. It is odd, however, that we would continue to invest in fossil fuel-led programmes when we have our climate change objectives and we are trying to help developing countries jump over that dirty phase of development. We should be setting higher standards and prioritising and shifting resources to ensure best practice.
I am therefore keen to see new clause 7 put to a vote. It enjoys support among Members from a number of parties. I hope the Minister will be able to answer some of the concerns raised on Report before we move further with the Bill. It is right that we ask these questions. This is a large sum of money: this is not a little increase of a few million pounds here and a few millions there; this is potentially billions of pounds of spending, and a significant proportion of the international development budget, and it is only right that it receives the appropriate scrutiny.