Andrew Mitchell leads an Emergency Debate on the cuts to Britain’s development budget which will fall first and hardest on the humanitarian sectors; specifically girls’ education, clean water and sanitation, HIV/AIDS and food assistance.
0.7% Official Development Assistance Target
Emergency debate (Standing Order No. 24)
2.55pm
Mr Andrew Mitchell (Sutton Coldfield) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the matter of the 0.7% official development assistance target.
I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
Mr Speaker, yesterday you made one of the strongest statements that I have heard from the Chair in more than 30 years, and you made it clear that the House should receive from the Government a meaningful vote. Naturally, in accordance with what you have said, we do not seek to divide the House on the motion today. We seek the meaningful vote that will enable the House to decide whether the Government can break our promise and arguably our law.
I see that my right hon. and hon. Friends and I are described as rebels. It is the Government who are rebelling against their clear and indisputable commitments. Who are these so-called rebels? A short perusal of yesterday’s Order Paper shows that we have among our number eight Select Committee Chairs, four distinguished former Select Committee Chairs, 16 former Ministers, 12 Privy Counsellors and four knights of the realm. From the new intake, my hon. Friends the Members for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall), for Milton Keynes North (Ben Everitt), for Bury South (Christian Wakeford), for Penrith and The Border (Dr Hudson) and for Keighley (Robbie Moore), along with others who have recently arrived in this House, have shown great courage and determination in the face of the possibility of being tarred and feathered by the Government Whips Office.
We are also supported by every former Prime Minister and, I believe, by every former leader of all four major political parties. Over the weekend, the Archbishop of Canterbury said:
“The foreign aid cut is indefensible…Let us…pray”
that it is reversed
“and that our unconscionable broken promise to the world’s poorest people is put right.”
All four distinguished current or former Chairs of the Public Accounts Committee who are in the House support our cause. My right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) describes himself as the last Thatcherite on the Government Benches.
Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
Cheek!
Mr Mitchell
My right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) might possibly wish to disagree there. My right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough said:
“There is no public accounting justification for slashing budgets by 80% in this way. It is like telling the builder before he finishes your garden wall that you won’t pay at the end. Cancelling projects overseas is just a waste of taxpayers’ money when we should be providing long-term stability for schools, clinics and clean water projects.”
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on bringing the matter forward. The House is very much united behind him. It is not just the scale of the aid cuts, but the speed of the enforced shutdown of operations that is hugely harmful. Aid and development are not a tap that we can turn off and on whenever we like. It is time for the Government, on this occasion, to step up to the spot and make sure that they reinforce the aid budget and increase it back to what it was in the past.
Mr Speaker
May I just gently say that we have a lot of speakers and I want to hear from everybody? If you are going to intervene, I am sure that you will understand if you go down the speaking list.
Mr Mitchell
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Of course, what he says has been reinforced by every single member of his party who serves in the House, and it is the point that my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough, a former Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, was making: if we turn this expenditure on and off in this way, the taxpayer does not get proper value for money.
Nor is this about party politics. All 650 of us elected to this House at the last election promised to stand by the 0.7%. The Bill enshrining the 0.7% in law was passed unwhipped in this House, with just six dissenters. Outside the House, in every single constituency in the country, there are people taking action as part of Crack the Crises, the growing environment and development group. Each and every one of us is accountable to those constituents, who are taking action in their local schools, colleges, churches, mosques, charity shops, women’s institute branches, congregations and community groups.
Twelve million people—an average of 15,000 per parliamentary constituency—are supporters of the member organisations of that coalition, and they must be heard. The people who sponsor children through development organisations, the members of churches that are twinned with others in the developing world, the people who were there for Jubilee 2000 and for Make Poverty History—they do not forget when we break our promises to them; they organise.
I can assure the House that, were it not for the covid restrictions, the same people who made the human chain around the Birmingham G8 summit and the quarter of a million people who marched on Edinburgh before the Gleneagles G8 would be preparing today to descend on Cornwall to make their views known at this G7 and to protest this unethical and unlawful betrayal. They would be joined by a whole new generation of young people who are watching this Government break our promise to the world’s poorest. They do not like what they see. This weekend, they may not be on the streets, but they will be watching, and they will remember.
For two decades, the UK has been a development leader, not just because that is morally right and accords with our values, but because it is in our own national interest. By making the countries we seek to help safer and more prosperous, we make life for ourselves here in Britain safer and more prosperous.
Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
My right hon. Friend has been courteous and persuasive in trying to get me to join his cause, but I have declined to do so because I think that the Government are doing precisely what he describes but in ways that do not qualify as aid. I have asked the Government to clarify all the other things that we are doing that are contributing to the reduction of global poverty and, indeed, what we will do with the vaccine programmes to contribute to the alleviation of disease and distress in the poorest countries.
Mr Mitchell
I very much hope that my hon. Friend will stay for the whole debate so that he hears the views across the House. I am sure that will be both instructive and interesting for him.
Mr Speaker, the way the Government are behaving strikes at the heart of our Parliament, as you set out from the Chair yesterday. We cannot secure a meaningful vote. Had we been able to do so yesterday, as I intimated to the House, we would definitely have won by nine, and probably by nearer 20. It is precisely because the Government fear that they would lose that they are not calling a vote. That is not democracy. When countries behave like that in Africa, we British say that they have got it wrong. The Government need to remember that the Government and the Executive are accountable to Parliament, not the other way round, and most especially on issues of supply, as the Minister—he is a very good Minister—knows. That applies in all circumstances, whether the Executive are being run by King Charles I or Boris Johnson.
The Government make two key arguments: first, that they are still spending a huge amount of money—I am sure that is what my right hon. Friend the Minister will say this afternoon—and, secondly, that we are living in unprecedented times for our economy and they will bring the 0.7% back. Let me start with the first—that we are still spending a huge amount of money. Of course, that is entirely correct, but we all promised to spend 0.7% of our GNI, not to change the target and spend 0.5%. All of us made that promise—I have seen every single Member’s manifesto at the last election, and every single elected Member made that promise.
It is arguable, at the least, that the action the Government are taking is unlawful. One of the most senior and distinguished lawyers in the country, the warden of Wadham, Oxford, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, has made it clear that the Government are acting unlawfully because they have changed, rather than missed, the target. I argue to the House this afternoon that what the Government are doing is unethical, possibly illegal and certainly breaks our promise.
On the point about the level of expenditure and the £10 billion, it is rather like buying a car and shaking hands on a deal at 15 grand, only to do a runner while the poor fellow is counting the cash after you have legged it, having handed over only 10 grand. It is not proper, it is fundamentally un-British and we should not behave in this way. It is about the girl whose school closed in South Sudan last week after the headteacher read the letter from the Foreign Office explaining that it is only temporary.
The second argument is that we live in unprecedented economic times and that the Government will bring the 0.7% back, but the 0.7% is configured precisely to take account of our economy. When the economy contracts and goes down, so does the amount of money spent under the 0.7%, and when it increases, that amount goes back up. We are talking about 1% of the money that the Treasury quite rightly spent on covid last year to sustain and support jobs, families and employment. This is 1%—it is practically a rounding error in my right hon. Friend’s books.
We offered an olive branch to the Government last night, which the Government could have accepted, and then we could all have cracked on with other things, by asking them to bring the 0.7% back next year. We accept that they are not going to bring it back this year, but we asked them to bring it back next year, when the Governor of the Bank of England says that the economy will have rebounded to pre-covid levels and growth will be strong. If the Government were serious about bringing it back when the economy improved, they would have accepted the olive branch that my right hon. and hon. Friends and I offered.
Everyone knows what this is about. It is not about the 1% rounding error in the Treasury’s books. It is about the red wall seats. The Government think that it is popular in the red wall seats to stop British aid money going overseas. Indeed, one Treasury Minister told me that 81% of people in the red wall seats do not approve of spending British taxpayers’ money overseas. But we have to be careful about the question we ask, because other polling in the red wall seats shows that 92% of people there do not approve of cutting humanitarian aid. It is also a very patronising attitude to people who live in the red wall seats, because when these dreadful famines, disasters and floods take place, it is the people in the red wall seats who are the first to raise money through car boot sales and pub quizzes to try to help those who are caught. In the words of Talleyrand, the French statesman, this is worse than a crime; it is a mistake. What my right hon. and hon. Friends and I—the so-called rebels—are trying to do is to keep the Government straight.
And so we come to this week’s G7 summit, when the leaders of the richest nations will assemble in Cornwall. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister will be chairing the summit, and he goes into it in the teeth of a global pandemic, when Britain is cutting its support to the poorest. No other country represented at the G7 is doing such a thing. The French have now embraced the 0.7%. The Germans will spend more than 0.7% this year. The Americans—by far the biggest funders in the world—are seeking an increase through Congress of $14 billion in the amount that is spent. We are the only ones going backwards.
Other G7 countries are noticing what the Government are doing. Is it any wonder that, in a letter to President Biden, a dozen Members of Congress have urged him to upbraid Britain for breaking its promise? One sentence in their letter made me wince. It reads as follows:
“Cutting back on foreign assistance during the worst humanitarian crisis of our generation only undermines our collective global response.”
This is what the journalist who used to serve in this House and who probably understands the Conservative party best said at the weekend:
“Try though seasick government whips will to mount one, there is no civilised defence of this cut. This cut looks like what it is: a cheap and brutal gesture, a piece of domestic applause-seeking”.
Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)
The right hon. Gentleman is making a brilliant speech. I just want to flush out one point, which I hope will be a point of consensus. It is possible that this weekend we will get agreement on a fresh issue of $650 billion in special drawing rights. The UK will have surplus SDRs and it is possible that they could be recycled to support aid. It would be a regrettable accounting trick if that, in any way, counted towards making good the cut that has been made. Is that a point of consensus across the House?
Mr Mitchell
The right hon. Gentleman makes a good and useful point, and the decisions made on the SDRs will be extremely helpful.
We come, finally, to the essence of all of this. Because of the way the development budget is configured, these terrible cuts are falling first and hardest on the humanitarian sectors. Let me just mention four of them. The first is girls’ education. The Prime Minister has rightly said that it is his main aspiration on these international development issues—this is strongly supported by my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin)—to ensure that all girls get 12 years of quality education. That is a wonderful and noble British initiative, but what has happened to the funding? It has been cut by 25%. So on the one hand we have the words—the aspiration—and on the other we have the reality of the 25% cut. Worse than that, UNICEF, which has a fantastic reputation and which the British Government judged just a few years ago to be the most effective of all the UN agencies, has had a cut of 60%. On clean water and sanitation, which is pivotal if we are to conquer this pandemic among the poorest of the world, some 10 million people who were expecting to receive British taxpayers’ support will not now get it. Funding to the UN to save the lives of people suffering with HIV/AIDS has been cut by 80%, which is a death sentence for the people who would have been helped. Finally, we are going to end food assistance for 250,000 people. These are not people who have missed eating for a few days; they are people who are starving, and we are going to cut our support for them directly.
I have never forgotten the experience I had as Development Secretary in Karamoja, in northern Uganda, where I stood under a tree next to a football pitch, which was covered by children who were starving. There were about 200 children there and they were waiting in line. They were suffering from acute malnutrition, and British taxpayers’ money and British humanitarian workers were trying to help them. If we catch them early enough, when they are floppy but not actually medically critical, we give them Plumpy’Nut, a biscuity peanut substance that costs about a 5p a head, and they will be recovered in about an hour and probably running around playing football. However, if we miss that point, they have to go to a clinic, have a drip up and it costs about $180 to put them right.
Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)
Does what my right hon. Friend has just said about the 5p not make the point that, although £4 billion is a small amount for a rich country such as ours, it makes an enormous difference in the countries we are trying to help?
Mr Mitchell
My hon. Friend is absolutely right and he puts it enormously eloquently. I end my remarks by saying that that story from Karamoja in northern Uganda has lived with me from the day I saw those things. I will be thinking of those children in this debate and I urge my right hon. and hon. Friends to think about them as well.
5.53pm
Mr Mitchell
Madam Deputy Speaker, I thank you and Mr Speaker for granting this Standing Order No. 24 debate today. I urge the Minister here today, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, to hear the voice of the House. He is a decent and understanding fellow, and I hope he will reflect on what he has heard this afternoon. I believe that only four of the very many people who have spoken supported the Government’s cuts, and I very much hope he will reflect on the innate decency of the British people in what he has heard from Members from all parts of the House this afternoon. The House is not with the Government on this and they should hear that. They should also hear the voices of their loyal Friends on these Benches; we want the Government to get it right. We are genuinely hugely concerned. We know that the cuts will lead inevitably to hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths, and we are worried about the trashing of our international reputation. These concerns are shared across the House, by the Government’s friends, as well as by the people who are not warm towards this Government. I urge the Chief Secretary to consider what he has heard this afternoon and to reflect upon it in the discussions that he is having in the Treasury.
I note that my colleagues and I were referred to in a normally very wise national newspaper as the sort of people who, “Attend left-wing dinner parties in north London.” I confess that when I am London and not in my constituency of the royal town of Sutton Coldfield, I do live in Islington, but I should make it clear that most of my hon. Friends who have joined me today would not be seen dead at a left-wing dinner party, let alone one in north London.
I am extremely grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for chairing the debate and giving the House the chance to consider these matters, influence the thinking of the Treasury and its Chief Secretary, and try to ensure that we get this right.