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8.3 pm
Mr. Andrew Rowe (Faversham and Mid-Kent): Many good things have come out of the east end of London, including a long-running television drama. Although no one would pretend that the House of Commons is likely to command the same audiences as that programme, if the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Ms King) continues to speak as she did tonight, the cable television audience for the House of Commons will increase. I congratulate her on her maiden speech.
As many others have done, I should like to welcome the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Clare Short) to her post as Secretary of State for International Development. I also welcome the Under-Secretary to his post. I have known the right hon. Lady for quite a long time and we have worked together on one or two occasions. She was useless in at least one of those roles: she was my pair for a while, but she was so conscientious that she was completely worthless to me. Nevertheless, her conscientiousness will stand the world's poor in good stead.
As has been said, self-interest and altruism combine in this job. We have a duty to other humans. It is nonsense to suggest that it is an exclusively Christian duty, but Christians should certainly share that sense of duty--even if no one else does. I am glad to say that, in many parts of the world, Christians actively fulfil that duty.
The imbalance of resources, about which we have heard so much tonight, leads to instability, war, disease and--something which has hardly been mentioned in the debate and about which I do not know enough to make a specialist contribution--refugees. It is extraordinary that we have heard so little about refugees because the refugee problem is one of the world's greatest problems, and it is rapidly growing. Many refugees have been condemned to appallingly constricted lives and frequently have little opportunity. Even if they are welcomed at first, they rapidly become a burden on their hosts, who become understandably resentful of their presence. I hope that another contributor to the debate will address that serious matter.
We have also heard about pollution. I believe that most anti-pollution campaigns are a luxury for the rich. If someone is rich enough to do something about a polluted river, he is not normally one of the world's poor. We must take on the responsibility; it has taken us long enough to clean the Thames. It is interesting that the great contribution of Chadwick and his colleagues in introducing drains into British cities was almost entirely because the rich suddenly woke up to the fact that one day they, too, might get cholera. Although there was also a humanitarian aspect, that was the driving force that released the floods of money required.
The job involves detail as well as principles. As has been said, the programme must be cost-effective. As I hinted in an earlier intervention, I believe that
volunteers are a major element of that cost-effectiveness. Organisations such as Voluntary Service Overseas reckon that the cost of sending one of their--often highly skilled--volunteers abroad for a year is less than £12,000. That is extraordinarily cost-effective when compared with much of the other aid that is sent abroad. Those volunteers do not stay very long; everyone knows that they are on limited contracts; they do not disrupt the local economy or the local hierarchy. One of the rules of Voluntary Service Overseas is that a volunteer may not go if a local person could do the job equally well. I very much welcome those speakers who have urged the Secretary of State to consider expanding that opportunity.
I hope that the review will be detailed. There are a number of small but telling ways in which the rules of one part of either the Government or the Department militate against the expressed objectives of another. For example, a number of young British people who have qualified as doctors, nurses or schoolteachers decide to work abroad. When they wish to return--perhaps to take a further qualification before returning to contribute to the overseas country--they are charged the full rate as overseas students even though they are British citizens. That cannot make sense. It is nonsense that they should have to pay--they are usually self-funded--the full rate of an overseas student, and I hope that we can look into that.
We have splendid scholarships, such as the Chevening scholarships, for overseas people to come here to learn skills that are of use to their country. Most of those scholarships are not differentiated into bands, with the result that a health worker may have to compete against an engineer or financial expert for a scholarship. It would not be difficult to create priority bands, which would ensure that some people involved in social services got a greater opportunity than they currently enjoy. Many of the countries that send such students are obsessed solely with engineering, financial or computer skills and do not think about the need to improve their health and social services infrastructure.
Earlier, the debate touched on the question of differentiation between countries. We are approaching a point where some of the developing countries are infinitely richer than others, yet all are lumped together for the purposes of many elements of aid. Overseas students who obtain nearly all their money from a donor--whether from the British Council or via the international development budget--are charged exactly the same as self-funding students from Malaysia or some other rich country. That is a small point that needs to be considered.
We should concentrate far more on practical projects. I am sure that the Secretary of State is determined to resist demands for high-tech machinery in countries where there is neither the power to run it nor the staff to maintain it. Many countries are littered with scanning machines and other highly advanced equipment that they have absolutely no way of using. There has usually been connivance between a pushy salesman and someone wanting to ingratiate themselves with whoever wanted the equipment, using aid money to buy a machine that will lie idle when, for the same amount of money, they could have done much better.
We also want to support low-cost projects. In India, I have seen many examples where training children to educate not only their peers but their parents and indeed the whole village in simple hygiene and health care--
simple messages--has transformed the lives of villagers. Similarly, women are the key to much development. Drawing again on India, which is the country I know best, I have seen women who have been given basic training and a simple kit transforming the care of everyone in the village. They are trained to diagnose common illnesses and refer them--at once, if necessary--to a health centre; and they can dispense vitamins and simple drugs, carry out injections and keep an eye on child development.
Many of those women develop so fast, it is wonderful to see--their self-confidence increases and I know of one woman who became chairperson of the panchayat or local parish council. The difference such projects make is tangible. As my wife frequently points out to me, when we see riots in foreign countries on television, we see only men, because the women are too busy working. It is worth remembering that women carry the main burden in most places.
The aid world is full of corruption and I urge Ministers to take a serious view of how our aid budget feeds it and what international action can be taken to cut it out. Stopping corruption is terribly important. It takes many forms, such as diversion of aid directly into the wrong pockets and inappropriate projects being chosen because of bribery or because a firm wants a future, bigger contract.
Aid personnel and many consultants are being awarded salaries and fees that are obscenely high in relation to the incomes of those whom they are seeking to help. For example, the United Nations should be far more rigorous in its cost-benefit analysis when deciding whom to send abroad to assist with its programmes. If a year's salary and expenses for one consultant would, for example, pay for 500 village development workers, one has to be jolly sure that employing that consultant will deliver the goods, rather than giving the money to the village development workers. We often do not consider that.
It is important to encourage those British institutions that are seeking to set up training institutions within the countries that need help, instead of expecting their students to come to enormously expensive centres in the west, where practical placements are difficult to find. In some senses, students get inferior training by coming to London, but want to come here because it is prestigious. The cost of their doing so is out of all proportion and there is no reason why developing countries should not sustain training centres.
I have a tenuous connection with a project in Delhi. In a city dominated by the Bharatiya Janata party or BJP--the Hindu fundamentalist Government--efforts are being made to double the project's size, even though the project is not sure that that is desirable. It runs 25 slums in Delhi and the reason why the BJP wants it to expand, even though it is run by a Christian organisation, is that the Christians are not misusing the money. The money is going straight into the work. The medical superintendent of one of the largest ODA projects--an expansion of one of the Delhi hospitals that will nearly double its size--is a man whose simplicity is so amazing that I felt quite humbled when I visited his home.
One of the other elements of corruption can be seen when big western companies deliberately target poor populations to sell abroad what they have been prevented by their domestic Governments from selling at home--for example, tobacco companies. Similarly, companies such
as Nestle are quite ruthless about promoting powdered baby milk in countries where they know that the chances of getting water fit to mix it up properly are very slight. Mother's milk would be infinitely better for the children. Stopping that sort of thing takes concerted action.
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