16:41 Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is also in our national interests to keep up our investment in international aid? By making poorer countries more stable, we improve the world’s stability. By tackling diseases, we stop them spreading to our own country. If we are to fight climate change, we need to fight it globally. Aid is not just the right thing to do morally, but it is in our interests to continue it.

The hon. Gentleman is generous in giving way again. Does he agree that that underlines the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire) on the importance of having DFID leading on this? DFID has that expertise and experience as a separate Department and, actually, some of the criticisms levelled by the National Audit Office and others—I am not an aid purist, and some important aid spending needs to be done in conjunction with other Departments, such as through the Stabilisation Unit, International Climate Finance and other institutions —have been levelled at spending when it has been done well but without the remit of DFID. We need to see DFID in a leading role, using its expertise to ensure our money is spent effectively.

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17:13 Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)

We know that the world is facing some huge crises. Some of them are global, such as climate change, and some are a consequence of natural disasters, but many of them are man-made—person-made—and often a consequence of conflict. We look at Syria, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan and the crisis affecting the Rohingya people of Burma, most of whom now live in neighbouring Bangladesh. In that context, the distinction between what is a response to a humanitarian situation and what is development is increasingly irrelevant. People are escaping conflict and living as refugees or internally displaced people for large parts of their lives. Children are spending their entire childhoods displaced. They need humanitarian assistance, but they and their communities also need development support.

Alongside that, it is important that we see more autonomy for DFID’s country offices. I was interested to listen to the Secretary of State when he came to the Committee last week, because he was proposing something quite radical in terms of greater autonomy for the country offices. He made an important point—it is something we said in one of our reports—about the concern that, in recent years, DFID has lost some of its in-house expertise in certain areas and made itself much more reliant on contracting for that expertise. Indeed, many of the people now getting the contracts used to be the in-house experts. The Secretary of State contrasted how much DFID spends on specialist country advisers on education or climate change with some of the other donors who spend a lot more. I welcomed him saying to us that he would look at that again, and all power to his elbow.

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17:32 Andrew Mitchell (Conservative)

For many years, the right hon. Gentleman has made a major contribution to DFID debates and at one stage he had responsibility for the Department. Last week, it was heartening when we had a number of young people down here, talking about not only climate change but concerns about the medical welfare of people in some developing countries. They wanted to maintain the level of financing for tackling, for example, HIV. DFID also plays a major part in developing British markets for the future. That means jobs for British people. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that people tend to forget that when they look at the amount of money we spend overseas?

Fifthly, on climate change, DFID leadership has made a huge direct contribution to tackling something that affects the poorest people in the world first and hardest. The British taxpayer has made a huge contribution through the international climate change mitigation funds. Britain is leading work on international development around the world, and that has a huge benefit.

Does my right hon. Friend agree that we come back to the problem of public perception of international aid? When we tackle climate change, disease and terrorism, that has a direct benefit to this country. Although it may be thought that diseases are thousands of miles away, they are only one plane journey away. Does my right hon. Friend share my frustration that we do not do enough to explain how taking world-leading responsibility directly benefits the UK?

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17:49 Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)

There is a clearly demonstrated passion on both sides of the House for the work of DFID and the value it brings around the world. Like other Members, I have had the huge privilege of visiting projects both before my election and since: peace villages in Rwanda, food security and nutrition projects in Uganda, climate change projects in Malawi—all transforming people’s lives on a daily basis thanks to the support of DFID.

That is fair enough, although the campaigning had gone on for years. I think back to the jubilee debt campaign, the trade justice movement and the Make Poverty History campaign, which mobilised tens of thousands of people on to the streets of towns and cities across the United Kingdom. In many ways, the climate change protest—there was one here last Wednesday—is the successor to those movements. Now is the time to tackle climate change. If we do not, the progress towards the SDGs and MDGs is likely to go backwards, which is not in anybody’s interest. Those movements mobilised churches, trade unions and different parts of civil society. That sentiment still exists, and although it is quiet now, the hon. Gentleman is right that if there was a serious threat, that noise would make itself heard, just as it did in the days of the Gleneagles summit and the years after.

Aid is not a tool of soft power to be used as some political lever. It should be dispensed on the basis of need and in pursuit of internationally agreed objectives, such as the SDGs and the Global Fund—and I join others in welcoming the announcement about the replenishment of that fund. When Government talk of aid working in the national interest, the question I always put back to them is: how is meeting the sustainable development goals not in the national interest? How is the national interest different from tackling global poverty and climate change? Even from a self-interested point of view, if we want to stop the migration of people, we need to give them reasons to stay in their home countries, and access to a good education and nutrition and not having to run away from major climate disasters are very good reasons—if that is the perspective we want to take.

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18:01 Alec Shelbrooke (Conservative)

I wonder if the Minister can develop the following point in summing up. At the climate change lobby on Wednesday, I was asked a question by some of my constituents and I did some research at the Library. The statement made is not actually correct, but I will come on to that. It was said that 90% of our development projects use fossil fuels. I went to the Library and asked some questions, and I will read out two sections from the reply, which I think the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby) might recognise:

I ask the Minister to go away and look at where we can perhaps shift the balance in the middle to lower income countries, because clearly we want to make a big impact on climate change. My hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson) said that in trying to make a difference in the world we can reduce our carbon emissions but that that is a small drop in terms of what happens; however, we have the ability in the international development budget to have a far greater reach than to just those changes we do here in climate change. The Minister may not be able to answer that point from the Dispatch Box tonight, so I ask her to go away and see whether a balance can be struck to get more renewables into those projects and move away from fossil fuels, because ultimately that will give far more sustainability to the ongoing energy needs of those countries than just bringing in what is rapidly becoming a very old technology.

The one message I would like to send tonight is that this is not just about giving away our money to poor countries; this is an investment in our own country and in the world, and therefore in the futures of our children and ongoing generations, and that it all adds to our bigger security picture, our bigger climate change picture and our bigger moral duty, which allows us to lead this world in a way that not many countries can.

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18:15 Jim Shannon (DUP)

Some Members have referred to climate change. Last Wednesday, we had the opportunity to attend a mass rally out on the green, in which Christian Aid was very much involved. It was a pleasure to be there and to meet some of my constituents and other people from Northern Ireland who were there to encourage us as politicians to ensure that action is taken. There is an onus on us to ensure that we do our bit here, so that we can help others elsewhere. The hon. Member for Elmet and Rothwell mentioned ideas on renewables for countries where sunshine is plentiful, and that might be an appropriate method in those places. This is now a regular topic of conversation in my office and my advice centre, and I think it is probably the same in everybody else’s as well, because people are genuinely interested in this subject. They want to see the rest of the world address climate issues, including the problems elsewhere that we in the west have perhaps contributed to over the years.

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18:26 Mrs Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)

We should be proud to be a global leader in international development. We were at the forefront of negotiating the sustainable development goals because, of course, David Cameron was on the high-level panel that came up with them, and they followed on from the millennium development goals. Of course, there are far more goals this time, but every single one of them will have an impact on people in the world’s poorest countries, and we need to be aware of how to help them. If we do not tackle climate change soon and at scale, people in developing countries will be forced to migrate, which will be in nobody’s interest if they have to keep moving from country to country. We need to address that problem, and we need to address it now.

My three main things to act on are climate change—that is absolutely critical—sexual exploitation and abuse, and the minimum age for marriage. We need to be doing far more to ensure that abuse cannot exist in the aid sector any more, and we need a study to find a baseline of where we are, so that we can make things better for girls. As for marriage, if someone has to be in education or training until they are 18, how on earth can they be married? That seems a nonsense to me, so I shall continue to campaign on that until the law has been changed.

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18:36 Stephen Kerr (Stirling) (Con)

Like me, the hon. Gentleman took part in the net zero debate last week, and we need to bring that element to international development. If we utilise our spending on renewables to bring forward new technologies, not the old carbon technologies, surely that will result in a much better outcome for these countries, including in enterprise.

Indeed, and I appreciate the hon. Gentleman’s contribution. We have been discussing many aspects of the various goals that, as a Parliament, we are united in supporting, and climate change is part of that mix.

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19:00 Chris Law (SNP)

In two weeks, the UK will present its voluntary national review of the sustainable development goals to the UN at the high-level political forum on sustainable development. At a time when we should be using our aid funding and resources to ensure high-quality education around the world, reduce inequality and tackle the climate emergency, it beggars belief that the UK Government are wasting resources attempting to manage and mitigate the needless damage of Brexit. It is something we simply cannot allow to happen, so I am pleased to have added my name on behalf of the SNP in support of the amendment, tabled by the right hon. Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett) and the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), that would have stopped the mobilisation of departmental spending to facilitate a no-deal Brexit.

To conclude, I cast my mind back three weeks to the debate in this House on sustainable development goals, when we were in agreement on the importance of tackling the massive challenges that we as a planet will face in the coming years—whether it be disease, displacement, food security, poverty or climate change. We are already in a position to have a significant impact on tackling these challenges, but only if DFID is adequately resourced and funded. We cannot let other Departments, Brexit or future right-wing Tory Prime Ministers derail that and we must be resolute in our defence of international development and the 0.7% commitment.

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