15:07 Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)

SNP Members happily give credit to the UK Government for meeting, in recent years and after 40 years of delay, the 0.7% of gross national income target for overseas development assistance spending. Despite the progress made in recent years, the need for aid spending has not gone away. As many analysts and institutions have said, including the International Development Committee, aid flows will need to continue to grow from the billions to the trillions if we are to meet the sustainable development goals—they are also known as the global goals—that have been agreed at the United Nations and if we are to tackle the challenge of climate change. The Secretary of State spoke about market failure. Lord Stern once upon a time described climate change as the biggest market failure of all, and that must be at the forefront of our minds.

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15:27 Stephen Doughty (Labour)

Our wider development and sustainability policies might also be incoherent. Many CDC projects are clearly coherent with DFID objectives and the sustainable development goals. We heard about electricity in Uganda and other excellent examples of investment in micro-finance, so there are clearly many high-quality projects, but there are some odd inconsistencies. The CDC apparently invests £29.2 million in GEMS Education Africa, the website of which describes a network of private fee-paying schools and education providers in “leafy, residential” locations that charge anything from around 582,000 to 1,287,000 Kenyan shillings a year—up to £10,000. The CDC also holds a 22.8% share in Rainbow Children’s Medicare Private Ltd, a fee-paying private hospital group in India that the NAO visited as part of its inquiry, saying that the investment was apparently in the whole company and not even focused on improving access for the poorest, for example. The former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), mentioned Feronia Inc. in which the CDC has invested £15.1 million. The main boast on its website is of replanting 13,000 hectares of palm oil, a commodity which is linked to deforestation, habitat degradation and climate change.

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16:14 Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)

Just to clarify this, I am not sure that my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) was correct in saying what I was proposing. I was certainly not suggesting that the Department should come back within the Foreign Office. I was merely saying that I saw huge synergies to be achieved overseas where we have representatives from many Departments, including the Ministry of Defence, DFID and the former Department of Energy and Climate Change and that we should look towards making greater savings so that we can spend the money where it is needed.

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