Alice Macdonald

The hon. Member is right; this is an internationally agreed percentage of gross national income, but too many countries have not met that target. As has been mentioned, some countries are stepping back, so it is important to be clear that we will keep our commitment to getting back to 0.7% as soon as the fiscal circumstances allow. However, in this new reality, we must ensure that our aid delivers maximum impact where it is spent, that we take actions to mitigate the effect of these cuts and that we keep the commitment to return to 0.7% in the long term. In that spirit, I will focus on five key areas where the Government should act. First, they must cut in-donor refugee costs. As many Members know, we spend a significant portion of our current aid budget in the UK on those costs, which were approximately £4 billion in 2023. That trend started under the previous Conservative Government—who also left us with huge backlogs in the asylum system—and I know that this Government are determined to tackle it. We have seen some progress in bringing down those costs, and provisional estimates suggest that they were £2.8 billion in 2024, but we need to continue that trajectory with a clear timeline and a commitment across Departments to get them down. Secondly, we must maximise the impact of our aid. It is important that we align with the “leave no one behind” principle in the 2015 sustainable development goals. I would not want to be in the shoes of the Minister for International Development in the other place, because there are difficult decisions to be made, as members of the International Development Committee recently heard. It is important that Members of Parliament, including Back Benchers, clearly see the criteria and the vision against which those decisions are being made. The “leave no one behind” principle must, as I alluded to earlier, include a focus on women and girls. It is clear that the USAID cuts will have a big impact in that area. In 2023, the US was the largest single donor in areas including population, reproductive health and family planning. Under the Conservative Government’s last round of cuts to the aid budget, we saw that women and girls were disproportionately affected, so it is important that does not happen again. I recently asked the Minister for Europe in the main Chamber whether women and girls would remain “at the heart” of our policy, and he assured me that they would. At the International Development Committee, the Minister for International Development in the other place assured us that although there would be less money for women and girls in education, it would be mainstreamed across all the priorities. Can the Minister elaborate on how we will ensure that they are prioritised and, importantly, how we will continue to support women’s rights organisations? As UN Women has shown recently, there has been a detrimental impact, with many such organisations at risk of having to close their doors altogether. When we invest in women and girls, we get better outcomes, not only for those countries but for ourselves.