Contribution
I declare an interest in that my wife works for Save the Children. Indeed, I met her while working in the sector almost 11 years ago to this day.
I start by setting out some context around the erosion of the budget, because it has not just been reduced in absolute terms but as a proportion. That makes some of the arguments about not being able to afford official development assistance due to the lack of growth in the economy slightly disingenuous—because, of course, when the economy does not perform, the amount that we contribute goes down anyway.
There has also been a lot of salami-slicing of the budget. The merger with the FCDO was bad for the amount of aid being directed to the global south; we have also heard about the Home Office eating into the budget. With regard to the latest reason for reducing the aid budget—which is about defence—a lot of the uplift in the defence budget has been on the capital side. We are borrowing to invest in that capital. Therefore it is also slightly disingenuous to say that there is a direct transfer between the international aid budget and the money that is going into defence. That needs to be made clear.
The public misunderstand how much we commit to spending on international aid. In polls, they consistently overestimate it. I believe that if the British public truly understood that the commitment was 0.7%, they would stand by that commitment. It is like asking somebody who is down to their last £100 if they would give 70p to somebody more needy than them. I know that the British public are generous, and that they would not baulk at that figure. I think that they would maintain that commitment.
I now move to the points that were excellently put by the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) on how we have allowed public support to erode over time. The public’s perception of international aid is that a lot of it is wasted, that some of it is spent on woke projects, that it goes to corrupt Governments, and that the trade-off between investment in the poor overseas and the poor in the UK is a zero-sum game.
It would be easy for me to say that it is the fault of right-wing populists, the media and so on. However, I think that the sector itself has failed to communicate properly. It has failed to tell a long-term story of its success. For 30 years, we have had the same images on our screens—starving African children with flies hovering around their noses. That is the image that we consistently feed to the public, instead of telling some of the stories of progress, such as how we have halved infant mortality and lifted a billion people out of destitution. Those are the stories that we should have been telling the public all along.
I believe that the development sector was one of the most scrutinised in terms of its monitoring and evaluation. From time to time, I am sure that there have been pet projects that were useless. However, generally speaking we have achieved so much from our investment in international aid, so we need to get that message across.
The following points were made by the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Noah Law), so I will not go into them in detail. However, we need to sell the changing purpose of aid—how it is about not dependency but creating independence, how we work in partnership because it is not mere charity, and how it is based on shared values because we all want a good future for our children. It is about telling those stories of progress.
Other Members have already made good points about how this is also in our self-interest—the raw, naked interest of Britain. If we vacate this field, it will be filled by others. When I lived in Uganda for a period, I saw how China is moving in where the UK is moving out, so this has an impact on soft power all over the world.
The points made about conflict security have been well put; whether we feel it in inflation or migration, these problems arrive back on our shores. The arguments against the aid budget are rooted in moral confusion, they demonstrate a poor analysis of the efficacy of aid, and they are strategically short-sighted. That is why we need to restore the 0.7% budget and recreate an independent Department for International Development, so that we can start marshalling that money towards the good, effective and important work that it has always done.