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12.16 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Dr. Liam Fox): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Mrs. Winterton) on obtaining this important debate and for the doughty way in which she follows these issues in the House. Not for the first time, we are in complete agreement.
I also have the pleasure of congratulating my right hon. Friend Baroness Chalker on all her work. Government and Opposition Members will want to add their congratulations on the job that she does on our behalf. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley (Mr. Foulkes) for his kind words. That may be the last time that we shall agree in this debate.
This is an important debate. We need to see aid in a wider context than that of bilateral aid. I am sorry that aid has been treated as a political football and reduced to a trite and simplistic debate in recent years. We need to build support for development. The debate needs to be updated in the light of the changing pattern of aid. It is not only how the aid is given that matters, but how it is used: we need to change the focus of debate from input to outcomes.
There is a moral case to be made for aid. It is not just a matter of soundbites about what great Christians hon. Members of whatever party may be. I am sorry that the hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) said that charity begins at home, as more harm has been done to the case for aid by that phrase than by any other. The House is full of knockabout politics, but it is not mature to pretend that the relative poverty in which some people in the United Kingdom undoubtedly live is in any way comparable with the starvation and absolute poverty that exist overseas. It does not help us to have a mature debate to have it premised on that phrase.
The Government's overall aims on aid are clear: to relieve poverty and suffering and to promote sustainable growth. We do that through bilateral aid, a multilateral programme, the non-governmental organisations, debt relief, trade development and private investment. The nature of our aid has changed. We have moved away from bricks and mortar aid to more sustainable aid, as my hon. Friend mentioned, by providing expertise. I am sad that that was not brought out more in the debate.
My hon. Friend the Member for Congleton was correct in the figures that she gave for our aid budget. Our bilateral budget was £2,154 million in 1996-97. We are the sixth largest donor, behind Japan, France, America, Germany and the Netherlands, and at 0.28 per cent. of GDP, our overseas development assistance is above the average of all donors and ahead of the United States, Japan and Italy. All those figures are on the record.
The hon. Member for Glasgow, Central (Mr. Watson) was correct when he said that we needed to use our wealth to help those less fortunate than ourselves. That is what I refer to as the moral case. The hon. Gentleman has written a book entitled "Rags to Riches", which could have been a history of the economy under the Conservative Government but which I believe is something else.
We need now to look at the output from our aid programme and where it goes. Where the aid goes matters greatly. Three quarters of our bilateral aid goes to the poorest countries. I recently visited slum clearance projects in Calcutta. No one can tell me that that was not
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My hon. Friend the Member for Congleton asked whether, by placing greater emphasis on our multilateral aid, we were losing a foreign policy tool. That would be so if we played no role in directing multilateral policy and the recipients did not recognise any benefit as coming from the United Kingdom's role. My hon. Friend is correct in saying that in our European projects and some other projects, we need to get better value for money, simplify administration and reduce costs. That has to be the United Kingdom's role, because our model of aid is regarded, as the hon. Member for Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley (Mr. Foulkes) will have seen when he goes abroad, as a prime model for other countries to follow. The one thing that is said wherever one goes in the world about British aid projects is that the quality of aid is second to none. We must ensure that that is also the case with the multilateral agencies.
The multilateral agencies give us an advantage of scale. We are part of the World bank, of which my right hon. and learned Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer is a governor. Through its concessional facility, the International Development Association, it has among the most effective multilateral aid programmes.
Perhaps my greatest sadness in today's debate has been the absence of an acknowledgement of the role of the non-governmental organisations. They are a national asset. They are something which Britain does very well. The NGOs can often reach areas that we cannot reach, for political as well as logistical reasons. Examples such as the work of Oxfam and Save the Children in Cambodia spring to mind.
The role of NGOs has changed. They exhibit greater professionalism. There is a greater willingness to work together and with bilateral and multilateral agencies. They take a longer-term perspective. They recognise our aims to encourage skills rather than provide bricks and mortar. They are able to operate in areas of political and cultural sensitivity in which government cannot always operate. They have also achieved--I am sure that this comment is echoed on both sides of the House--ever greater stature in recent years. For example, 10 years ago the then World Wildlife Fund was probably associated purely with pandas, but the organisation now operates on human development as well as environmental projects. That is a mature path for the organisation to have taken, and I welcome it. However, we have to point out that the United Kingdom's aid programme is six times the value of all the NGOs put together. We have to remember its scale when we talk about the size of our aid programme.
The Government have also concentrated on debt relief. It does not really matter to a country whether we give it money bilaterally, multilaterally or by writing off its debts. Money is money and the United Kingdom has taken a leading role in debt relief. We have written off aid loans to 31 of the world's poorest countries at a value of £1.2 billion. I am sorry that the Opposition did not give any credit to the Government for that. The official bilateral debt of 21 countries has so far been rescheduled under the Naples terms. That has provided up to 67 per
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The heavily indebted poor countries debt initiative launched at last month's World bank and International Monetary Fund meeting was based on proposals made by my right hon. and learned Friend the Chancellor. None of this did we hear from the Opposition. None of this do we ever hear from them, because they like to concentrate on one narrow political football with which they think that they might score cheap political points rather than engage in a genuine debate. We need to have a genuine debate. The aid debate has been sidelined for too long and it is too important to be treated in the light-hearted and trite way in which it often is treated in this country.
My hon. Friend the Member for Congleton raised some issues linked to abortion. She is well aware that she shares my personal views on the subject of abortion. The Government's position is clear. Abortion is not acceptable as a method of family planning. We are prepared to provide assistance to treat the complications of unsafe abortion, but coercion has no place in family planning policy. No United Kingdom bilateral aid supports Chinese family planning policy, as has already been stated in the debate. We are constantly engaged with the UNFPA and IPPF on related subjects. We shall continue to make our views known, as I have outlined.
So a spectrum of help is clearly available. We have direct aid. We have pump priming, for example, by the Commonwealth Development Corporation, the work of which is not often recognised in the House. Every £1 invested by CDC brings in £5 of private investment. We have private investment. We have trade. The World Trade Organisation summit will seek to give the least developed countries access to the developed markets. The United Kingdom has been at the forefront of that move. We regret that some others--the United States, some of our EU partners and Japan--are dragging their feet and we hope that they will not do so when the summit takes place.
Dr. Fox:
I am sorry, but the hon. Gentleman will appreciate how little time I have.
We are historically a free trading nation. We pushed the general agreement on tariffs and trade last time. We are pushing free trade by the year 2020. We believe that that growth in the world economy will benefit most those in the least developed countries.
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