15:18 Steve Barclay (Conservative)

The fundamental point before the House is that the scale of our overseas aid remains significant. In fact, we continue to lead the world in overseas development. This year we will spend more than £10 million to improve global health, fight poverty and tackle climate change, including £400 million on girls’ education in 25 countries, and we are doubling to £11.6 billion our commitment to international climate finance for the period 2021 to 2026, with at least £3 billion for climate change solutions that will protect and restore nature and biodiversity. According to the OECD, in 2020 we were one of only two G7 countries to actually meet the 0.7% target and the only country to do so each year since 2013. Even after the change we are debating today, we are still the third largest donor in the G7 as a percentage of gross national income, and 0.5% is considerably more than the 29 countries on the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee, which average just 0.41%.

Importantly, the Foreign Office makes its aid spending choices based on maximum impact, coherence and value for money. The Integrated Review has reaffirmed our pledge to fight against global poverty and to achieve the UN sustainability development goals by 2030. We are the fifth largest contributor to the UN peacekeeping budget, the third largest bilateral humanitarian donor, the second largest member state donor to the World Health Organisation, and among the world’s largest donors to the COVAX advance market commitment—the global initiative supporting developing countries with access to vaccines. The funding we will continue to make available to countries all over the world is helping to educate young girls, boosting diversity, tackling climate change, vaccinating the needy against deadly diseases such as Ebola and malaria, and improving the nutrition of staple food crops—millions of lives improved, millions of lives saved.

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15:29 Ian Blackford (Ross, Skye and Lochaber) (SNP)

The Government’s timing could not be worse. International opinion on these cuts is crystal clear. It is rightly seen as a disgraceful abdication of the UK’s international responsibilities in a year—in a year, Minister —when we should be showing some international leadership at the G7 and COP26. Let us simply take a look at what some G7 countries are doing in comparison with the UK. This year, Canada’s aid budget will see an increase of 28%, France will contribute a 36% increase and, under the Biden Administration, the US will see a 39.4% increase. Yet this Tory Government think it is somehow morally justified to impose these cuts. It is morally and ethically flawed, it is intellectually flawed and it shames all of us that this is done in our name. But I say this to the Minister: it is not done in the name of the majority who have been sent to this House.

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15:41 Mrs Theresa May (Maidenhead) (Con)

Will we suddenly see countries cutting us off? No. Will we suddenly be kicked off international tables? No. But the damage it does to our reputation means that it will be far harder for us as a country to argue for the change that we want internationally—and that is across the board, including at COP26 and in respect of our setting out and putting into place the ambitions of the Integrated Review, which does not even mention modern slavery as one of the Government’s development priorities. I only hope that modern slavery is still on the G7 agenda, as it has been in the past.

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15:46 Sarah Champion (Labour)

Funding for neglected tropical diseases is wiped out. Funding for life-saving water, sanitation and hygiene projects is slashed by 80% in the face of covid-19 and climate change. The Concern Worldwide project to provide healthcare to people living in remote and disadvantaged areas of Bangladesh is terminated. The project was due to reach 2.6 million people, including 140,000 people living with a disability.

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16:03 Liam Byrne (Labour)

My final point is simply this. The Chair of the International Development Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion), helpfully set out the extraordinary range of cuts that are now being confronted. As chair of the Parliamentary Network on the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, I asked the IMF this afternoon for an update on the sheer scale of investment that is needed to get the global community back on its feet. Low-income countries will now need $200 billion extra to step up their covid response, followed by $250 billion extra in accelerated investment as we try to move from the pandemic to the Paris agreement. We are now going to—

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16:08 Karen Bradley (Conservative)

A small amount of money, relatively speaking today, helps to stop refugees travelling in boats on the channel. It helps to stop victims of slavery producing the goods that we are buying in our supermarkets and retailers, and it means that girls will get that 12 years of education. In the week of the G7 and in the year of COP26, this is the time for the United Kingdom to stand with our head held high, show that we meet our global commitments and lead the world.

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16:12 Layla Moran (Liberal Democrat)

There is also a cost to the UK’s global reputation. How on earth are we to convince developing nations at COP26 to trust our leadership at the most pivotal climate change summit in a generation when in the same breath we have undermined our credibility with them? This is a Government who say one thing and do another, who cannot be trusted, and who behave in a way that is so fundamentally un-British that it makes me feel ashamed.

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16:23 Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)

I very much welcome this debate today and I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell). It will help widen our understanding of how British overseas aid commitments work and also our soft power, which allows us to speak with such authority on the international stage and goes in part to justify our seat on the UN Security Council. It is also plays a pivotal role in supporting our economy and strengthening our national and international security, which is what I wish to focus on today. I will just say that for too long our aid programmes worked in isolation of wider Government strategies, often without a British flag to even acknowledge their origins. We have come some way, but I would be the first to say that taxpayers’ money must be wisely spent. As a former soldier, I was saddened and horrified to see the failure to utilise our aid programmes in both Afghanistan and Iraq; we won the war but we lost the peace. Hard power and soft power are two sides of the same coin, and we will need a lot more of both over the next decade—this is something the G7 summit will doubtless attempt to address. Our world is on a worrying trajectory, with rising authoritarianism, growing extremism and the new challenges of climate change and defeating a brutal pandemic that continues to damage economies and take lives, but the west has become risk averse, with an absence of leadership and resolve to address these issues alongside weakened international institutions that are no longer able to defend our rules-based order.

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17:00 Kerry McCarthy (Labour)

I want to make a special plea today, though, for the Government to recognise, ahead of COP26, our obligations towards climate-vulnerable countries. These countries bear very little responsibility for our changing climate, yet are most affected by its consequences, be they rising sea levels, changing temperatures, droughts, declining crop yields or extreme weather events, which are becoming ever more frequent and more severe. There is an urgent need for more funding for climate adaptation, as well as aid to help to address the deepening inequality linked to climate change; and, as we play host to the G7, we should be leading on debt relief for the poorest countries, too. We cannot carry on giving less with one hand and taking away with the other.

I also want to flag up the plight of the small island developing states, as chair of the new all-party group. Although the UN has recognised SIDS as having particular social, economic and environmental vulnerabilities, the common metrics used to determine vulnerability and need when it comes to ODA do not take that into account. As a result, many SIDS do not qualify for aid, yet work by the United Nations Development Programme on a multidimensional vulnerability index shows that the majority of SIDS are far more economically vulnerable than their income level would suggest. SIDS are not only facing some of the very worst consequences of climate change; they have also been devastated financially by the pandemic because of the collapse in tourism and are particularly prone to extreme weather events and other natural disasters. The recent volcanic eruption could cost Saint Vincent and the Grenadines up to 50% of GDP. Other SIDS are trapped in a vicious cycle of debt, including Belize, which has defaulted on or restructured its debt five times in the last 14 years.

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17:10 Anthony Mangnall (Totnes) (Con)

It is a staggering miscalculation to ignore our international obligations and moral duties, because we cannot protect ourselves at home if we do so. Many have argued that that money should not be spent abroad, but if we wish to tackle terrorism, asylum and climate change, we have to be out there. We have to be co-operating on an international scale to ensure that each of these points is addressed and that we live in a truly globalised world.

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17:16 Florence Eshalomi (Labour)

Six years ago in 2015, we were the first G7 nation to enshrine in law our commitment to the UN’s target of 0.7% of gross national income on overseas aid. As we prepare to host the G7 summit at the end of this week, the UK is breaking its promise, while other G7 countries such as France and the USA are maintaining or increasing their aid commitments. This is not the global Britain we want the world to see. The aid budget should be used to tackle the global challenges facing us all: the pandemic, the climate crisis and rising poverty and inequality.

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17:27 Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab) [V]

Numerous charities that work in climate and international development—including Greenpeace, Christian Aid and WaterAid—have said that the cuts will make it harder for countries to respond to climate change, and that they

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17:30 Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)

It is important that we retain the 0.7% target, because it is not just about cash or money; it is a totemic policy that was put in place as a guide and an encouragement to countries around the world so that they, too, may meet that target. We cannot do it all on our own; we need other countries to help. We cannot tackle climate change all on our own; we need other countries to help.

I am of course very proud of this country and very proud to be British, but we have to recognise that over the past 200 or 300 years we have enjoyed the fruits of the industrial revolution, which all started where I come from in the north-west of England. We have enjoyed the prosperity that came from that; other countries have not enjoyed that prosperity. If, to tackle climate change, we say to those countries, “You can’t do the same as we did”—understandably, because we have a world crisis with climate change—we have to help them to get over it. That is another reason why we should continue with the 0.7% target.

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17:39 Matt Western (Labour)

This comes at a time when the world would ordinarily be hoping for greater leadership, as we host the G7 as well as COP26 later this year. As we have heard, we are the only G7 country to cut its ODA budget, while others, such as the US, Germany and France, are increasing theirs. I am afraid that cutting the ODA budget at a time when less developed nations are the most vulnerable globally to the pandemic will be seen as one of the most callous choices made by a Chancellor in our lifetime.

The decision to cut official development assistance funding means that UK Research and Innovation needs to find savings of £120 million in allocated funds in 2021-22, hitting more than 800 Global Challenges Research Fund projects—for example, Warwick Medical School’s work in Africa on digital health and the introduction of remote consulting. In response to the pandemic, clinics have been contacting patients by phone, rather than offering in-person visits, for the first time in the continent. There is also the example of Newcastle University—perhaps the hardest-hit of all—which is doing leading work on water security and resilience to climate change, and on river deltas, flooding and rainwater. It is working with 90 partners in 20 countries, helping them and stemming migration.

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17:42 Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP) [V]

The UK is also hosting COP26, but any promises by the Minister responsible, the COP26 President, the right hon. Member for Reading West (Alok Sharma), will have little credibility, because when he was International Development Minister he made commitments that the UK has now abandoned. In 2019, he promised more than £100 million a year for the global polio eradication initiative, only for the funding now to be cut by an eye-watering 95%. The World Health Organisation has estimated that 80 million children are at risk from infectious diseases such as diphtheria, polio and measles owing to the disruption of immunisation caused by the covid pandemic, so vaccination projects should not face cuts. They need extra support to fund the necessary catch-up programmes. We must not allow the re-emergence of polio and other infectious diseases to take a toll on the children of low-income countries.

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