Drop target for foreign aid, peers tell Cameron
Attack on £12bn-a-year pledge and call to speed up end of India handouts
DAVID Cameron was last night urged to abandon his controversial foreign aid target as a major report warned that it will fuel corruption and waste.
A powerful committee of peers attacked the Prime Minister’s pledge to increase aid spending by 37 per cent to more than £12billion a year in order to meet an ‘arbitrary’ United Nations target.
Peers said they fully supported humanitarian aid for disaster zones. But they pointed out that it accounts for less than 10 per cent of the vast budget of the Department for International Development (DFID).
In a devastating verdict they warned that the rush to increase spending ‘risks reducing the quality, value for money and accountability’ of the aid programme.
The finding is a major embarrassment for Mr Cameron who is said, while in opposition, to have adopted the target of spending 0.7 per cent of Britain’s income on aid, partly to help ‘detoxify’ the Conservatives’ image as ‘the Nasty Party’.
The cross-party economic affairs committee
‘Prepare an early exit strategy’
said ministers seemed more interested in the amount of money they were spending on aid than the results they were achieving.
The committee’s chairman, former Tory Cabinet minister Lord Macgregor, said: ‘ We were unanimous in our view that legislation for a 0.7 per cent target is inappropriate, and that the Government should reconsider.
‘We believe aid should be judged by the criteria of effectiveness and value for money, not by whether a specific arbitrary target is reached.’
The committee also called on ministers to ‘urgently prepare an early exit strategy’ from Britain’s £1.1billion aid programme for India.
Peers said sending hundreds of millions of pounds to a country that can afford its own space programme provided a ‘perverse incentive’ for the Indian government to shirk its own responsibility for tackling poverty in its vast population.
They also criticised DFID for failing to do enough to tackle corruption. Peers said they were ‘greatly concerned by the paltry and implausibly low levels of fraud identified by DFID’. They said they had heard ‘compelling evidence... that aid can frequently finance corruption’. Labour peer Baroness Kingsmill said: ‘Almost every witness expressed concerns about corruption. We heard some pretty grim stories. DFID and the Secretary of State need to up their game.’
Mr Cameron has passionately defended the commitment to the target against angry critics – including many of his own MPS – who say the aid budget should not be spared the axe being taken to public services. He has said the Government will not ‘balance the books on the backs of the poorest people in the world’. But Lord Tugendhat, a Tory member of the committee, said: ‘The debate about not balancing the books on the back of the poor sounds very good but that implies that we are maintaining the budget, not that we are aiming to increase it by 37 per cent.
‘It is very difficult, when you look at what’s happening to other programmes, to justify one programme being increased by 37 per cent.’
The Coalition has pledged to enshrine the aid target in law but legislation has been delayed because of fears of a public backlash.
The committee said International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell was unable to ‘put forward any case for legislation other than the Government’s political commitment to it’.
The study found the UK already spends a much higher proportion of its income – about 0.55 per cent – on aid than most other countries. The U.S. spends 0.2 per cent.
The scale of the opposition raises doubts about whether the legislation will get through the Lords.
Mr Mitchell last night hit back, saying that the aid programme was helping to get 11million children into school, vaccinate 55million children and prevent the deaths of 250,000 babies. ‘The Government makes no apologies for sticking to its commitments to the world’s poorest people,’ he said. ‘Going back on this promise would cost lives.’
Billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who now runs his own charity tackling disease in the developing world, said: ‘Abandoning the 0.7 per cent target risks undermining the incredible progress that has been achieved over the last several years.
‘Well-targeted UK aid has helped save millions of lives by rolling back the malaria and HIV epidemics and bringing the world closer to eradicating polio once and for all.’