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6.45 pm
Mr. Bowen Wells (Hertford and Stortford): It is my pleasant and traditional task to congratulate the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Dr. Palmer) on his excellent maiden speech. It could not have come in a more appropriate debate. His predecessor, Sir Jim Lester, was an assiduous attender of debates on overseas aid, and supported many initiatives on the subject in the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, on which he sat for many years. He was a strong supporter of overseas development and the aid budget throughout the times when the hon. Gentleman said that the budget was diminishing. I assure him and his constituents that the budget would have diminished a great deal more if it had not been for Sir Jim Lester's advocacy of it.
I thank the hon. Gentleman very much for the courteous way in which he referred to our former colleague and for the thought-provoking and thoughtful nature of his maiden speech. I am sure that the whole House looks forward to hearing him as often as the huge Labour majority will permit.
I want first to look for the points of consensus in the debate, before addressing one or two areas in which we might diverge from the thoughts put before us by the new Secretary of State. I welcome the review. I know that we Conservatives make fun of the fact that the Government are conducting so many reviews--as far as we can see, we have government by review at the moment--but the review of the aid budget has not come too soon. We must think through what we are trying to achieve and how to achieve it.
The objectives that the Secretary of State set before the House are not in dispute. The Conservatives are as keen as the Secretary of State for abject poverty to be relieved. She was right to point out that we have made huge progress and that our objective should be to make further progress more quickly. The elimination of abject poverty is a wonderful objective.
The poverty that we talk about in overseas development debates is not the same as domestic poverty. The Labour party tells us that domestic poverty grew under the influence of 18 years of Conservative government. It is talking about comparative poverty, for which the right hon. Lady's objectives cannot be achieved. We cannot eliminate comparative poverty. In the sense that she is looking for elimination of abject poverty, I am sure that we can agree on how that has to be done.
Elimination of abject poverty has to be done through basic health care--and population control along with it, as my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, South (Mr. Ottaway) said. I urge on the Secretary of State the necessity of population control alongside the issues of women's health and the health of the child--on which huge progress has also been made, some of it under the influence of the United Nations, particularly UNICEF's immunisation programme in Lebanon during the middle of a great war.
I take issue with the Secretary of State on her response to my question. I believe that some international organisations--many of them UN organisations--can do things which we as a single sovereign nation cannot. One of them--apart from the immunisation programme in Lebanon--is the elimination of smallpox throughout the world, which has been achieved.
I congratulate the Secretary of State on Britain rejoining UNESCO. Her hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for International Development, the hon. Member for--I never get this quite right--Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley (Mr. Foulkes) and I fought for us to rejoin UNESCO. Did I get his constituency right?
Mr. Wells:
Good--that is an achievement.
One of the primary reasons for fighting to rejoin UNESCO was the basic primary education objective, to which I am delighted the Secretary of State wants our initial contribution to be devoted.
I am a little cynical about the Secretary of State being able to get the money. She announced the other day that she has managed to get money from the contingency reserve. That is wonderful, and gives my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) and me hope that, by fighting the Treasury, she will be able to get more money for the aid budget. I shall make some proposals later about emergency aid and how we fund it.
The issue should cover health, population control, housing, shelter, reliable sources of food, water--and together with that, clean water and sanitation--and at least primary education. That leads to what we must also do: provide employment for those who survive their youth, in order to enable them to help themselves.
The objective of aid must be to enable people in third-world countries to help themselves. This is where I am worried about some of the arguments that have been put before the House. I worry that, in their desire to help, Government Members want, in their rather patronising way, to give the fish but not the fishing rod. I very much hope that I am wrong, because the fishing rod, the capacity to help oneself, leads to a more rapid improvement in health and welfare and to the relief of poverty for which we are all looking than any other method.
We should be giving not cash but investment. Investment in productive, wealth-creating businesses and agriculture will provide jobs and improve the ability to raise the necessary money through taxation to pay for health care, housing and education, which I suggest cannot be supplied on any sustainable basis through any conceivable aid programme that we may put forward.
Barriers to trade or protection, which I see that some of the briefing for this debate still urges should be undertaken by non-governmental organisations--briefing from Oxfam, to be precise--will not enrich countries. Trade itself will enrich countries. I was very pleased to hear Government Members saying that we must enable third-world countries to sell to this country--and Europe particularly.
We must take that up fiercely with Europe; Europe must open its market to imports from the third world to enable the third world to earn its own living instead of being dependent on aid. Aid should enable, not create dependency. Some countries are literally dependent on the regular receipt of aid. That is no way in which finally to eliminate poverty. We must enable people to help themselves.
Aid can work only where there is good, sound government--preferably of a democratic kind. Sadly, we can point to countries that have a form of government that is not democratic but provides the stability and capacity for people to have the confidence to invest in their own future. We must help that. Governments can destroy the developmental process.
Although the British aid budget is of outstanding quality, as my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex said, it is also very thinly spread. I suggest to the Secretary of State and the Under-Secretary that we must take some hard decisions. We must concentrate our aid and assistance where it can work best, and not necessarily where it is most needed.
Some countries greatly need aid. We heard of the plight of the people in Iraq in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, but people in Sudan, for example, the Central African Republic and Burma are also desperately poor. We cannot help those people because of the nature of their Governments, who are certainly not democratic. They are tyrannical, and fight wars with each other which result in absolute poverty of the most degrading kind. We would love to help, but, given those conditions, we cannot, and we need to recognise that.
We must say that, sadly, until such Governments are in a position to offer a proper economic framework in which to work in accordance with the world development report--a framework that includes a basic legal framework, effective macro-economic environmental policies, investment in basic social services and infrastructure, a comprehensive safety net for vulnerable
members of society, basic environmental protection, and I would add the absence of corruption--we cannot help them.
I am glad to say that, at last, corruption is beginning to be spoken of in international financial circles by people such as the president of the World bank. The Under-Secretary and I were urging the World bank about eight years ago to make certain that money did not go to corrupt Governments, because it would only be disbursed, get into the wrong hands and go back into Swiss bank accounts.
Mr. Soames:
How does my hon. Friend envisage the Secretary of State overcoming the very difficult conundrum of distributing aid in the way that he rightly suggests but at the same time retaining enough from what will be a much more limited aid budget than she aspires to or would like for the many post-conflict resolutions such as in Bosnia, where aid was applied not in the conventional sense as it is in Africa but to provide stability and some form of normality, and to enable peace-keeping operations? How does he see that balance being struck, in an inevitably very limited programme?
Mr. Wells:
I shall come to the issue of emergency aid and the kind of aid to which my hon. Friend referred in his excellent and very constructive speech. As he hinted, we must find alternative sources for the know-how fund and the kind of emergency aid that we have been offering, which is of huge value and which we can hardly avoid giving. People are in the most appalling conditions--usually war, or tension between warring parties.
Those areas include Bosnia, Iraq, Burma, the central African republics and Sudan, which is in an appalling condition. We need to provide emergency aid for those people, but the Secretary of State must look for alternative sources of finance. The Gulf states should be invited to contribute, and should work with us in Palestine and all over the world. We should head a group of nations that will fund international operations with efficiency and a humanitarian approach, like that exhibited by our armed services and the ODA in Bosnia.
The additional finance cannot come from the taxpayers' pockets in this country. We cannot raise enough, and we should not sacrifice the important investment that we make in eliminating poverty. I regret the way in which emergency aid has taken a bigger percentage of the bilateral budget in the past few years, because that is a distortion of objectives of the aid budget. On the other hand, I do not want to stop providing emergency aid, so we have to find extra money for it.
My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex has diverted me from my point, which was that we cannot provide aid alone. We must do it with other Governments, and in partnership with the private sector. In fact, the private sector must provide the majority of the money and investment needed. I am proud that we contribute 1.38 per cent. of gross national product when both private and public funds are taken into account.
I ask the Secretary of State to bear in mind another danger. We must not enter another colonial era and impose on sovereign states our ideas of what they should do. That would be to repeat the mistakes of colonialism.
For example, some years ago the then Prime Minister of Jamaica, Michael Manley, said that he would introduce compulsory primary education during his five years in
office. That never happened. The introduction of compulsory primary education would be the most developmentally important improvement for Jamaica, and I would support a proposal that we stopped all other aid to Jamaica, provided the Jamaicans agreed to spend money on primary education.
However, I would not spend the money on school buildings or books--I would spend it on training teachers to teach. In that way, we could make a huge contribution, but it could be done only with the support of the Jamaican Government and people. We could not impose that on them.
I shall run through a few topics quickly, because I know that many right hon. and hon. Members wish to speak. If the Secretary of State could find a way to finance aid and trade provision outside the aid budget, nobody would support her more than I would. Indeed, Neil Martin, the first Overseas Aid Minister in the 1979 Government, told the House that the Government's objective was to eliminate the aid and trade provision.
That is what we should try to do, but we cannot send our companies into competition with other companies pursuing contracts overseas if the other companies have subsidies provided by the European Community, their national Governments or any other organisation. If we did, our companies, and therefore our constituents, would be at a disadvantage. Those overseas contracts are very important, and the hon. Member for Workington (Mr. Campbell-Savours) gave the example of the provision of railway lines. Many other contracts are linked to aid and trade provision.
If the Secretary of State cannot find other ways to finance aid and trade provision on her budget, I hope that it can be done on somebody else's. The aid budget should be left available for our bilateral programme, but the Secretary of State will have to fight tooth and nail to achieve that, and she will have to convince the international bodies that frown on subsidising exports to permit her to subsidise British exports. If she can solve that problem, God bless her.
I am extremely cynical about programme aid. Programme aid is the way in which the World bank, especially, has financed third-world Governments. It has given them blocks of money for a programme that has never been carried out. That money, which should have been invested because it has to be repaid, then adds to the country's debt burden. The money carries a notional interest rate--even if it is International Development Association money--and, if it is World bank money, it sometimes carries a considerable interest rate. Programme aid should be phased out.
I also wish the Secretary of State to examine food aid, and to eliminate that as well. I am not convinced that food aid helps the ordinary agriculturalist to produce food to sustain his family's development or to provide agricultural products for export. Food aid actually undermines that process.
Emergency technical assistance is, as I have said, a large element of the bilateral programme, but it has been wasted in many countries. We send people with technical expertise into Ministries, but they are frustrated in their attempts. For example, we sent a person to Zambia, 35 years ago, to teach the Zambians how to run their customs and excise unit. That person and his successor spent their careers in that job, never training any
Zambians or improving their customs and excise function. We could use the money in the technical assistance budget much more effectively.
We must pursue transparency in international financial institutions. We must receive a proper report of the votes by our representative in those institutions, and he should appear before a Select Committee to explain what they are doing with our money. The institutions must also adopt a policy of taking responsibility if they invest in projects and objectives that are not achieved. They should write off, against their reserves, the money that they have donated in such cases, like any other bank that makes a failed investment. The reserves are available to do that, and that would assist in the reduction of debt.
We should also save money on aid administration. We do not need all the development groups that exist expensively overseas. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Mr. Goodlad) said, the Commonwealth Development Corporation and its relationship to the aid budget needs careful examination. The CDC could be used to provide more money for aid objectives by enabling it to take a shareholding and to borrow on the markets to expand its programme. It could thus make a major contribution to private investment in third-world countries.
On the subject of debt, I wish to commend to the House the report by the all-party group on overseas development, "Africa's Multilateral Debt:--A Modest Proposal". In that document we proposed that the debt of those countries should be written off. Much of that debt is owed to the international financial institutions, which refused to write it off. The countries concerned have been using our bilateral aid budget to pay interest and capital back to those institutions. We should have zero further tolerance of that process.
We must pursue the objective of getting the international financial institutions to write off debt in appropriate cases. One appropriate case has already been mentioned--Uganda, which has completed an economic programme in association with the International Monetary Fund, and has behaved impeccably for the past 10 years. Uganda took part in the HIPC--heavily indebted poor countries--initiative, which I understand has failed because Germany, Japan and the United States now oppose the proposals that were agreed at the most recent World bank conference.
I urge a return to that subject, to make certain that the debt is considered as a whole. There is debt to international financial institutions, bilateral debt, which we should continue to write off where appropriate, and private debts--usually, in the case of Africa, trade debts. Those all need to be considered as part of the whole debt. Then manageable debt repayment must be agreed with the countries concerned. If necessary, that must be financed by gold sales through the IMF or in other ways.
As I said at the beginning of my speech, we must concentrate aid where it can work and can benefit the poor. We must make hard-headed decisions that, in certain countries, we cannot help. India is one example, because India can help itself. It is a huge country, and a nuclear power with huge armed forces, yet it takes a lion's share of our bilateral aid programme.
The problems of India are not lack of money but socio-religious problems, which we cannot affect. Therefore, we should say to India, "You must stand on your own. We will assist with private investment, and encourage that in every possible way, but we shall not make you a recipient of our bilateral aid budget. You must find ways to change your community, so that the poorest people in your country can benefit from the increasing riches of India as a whole."
I know that that will affect the aid statistics, because, on a "per head" basis, India is one of the poorest countries. But India can help itself if it wishes to, and it must make the changes itself. Similar remarks could be made about Bangladesh.
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