Tag: Hilary Benn

The speech made by Hilary Benn, the then Secretary of State for International Development, at Church House in London on 2 June 2004.

In government, Labour has given a lead in international efforts to tackle global poverty.

Compared with 1997, today more of our nation’s wealth is being spent on overseas aid – to directly improve the lives of millions of men and women living in poverty – with whom we share this small and fragile planet.

The UK will spend £4.5 billion on aid by 2005/06 – a 93% increase in the aid budget since 1997. In sharp contrast to this record, the Tories are committed to a real terms cut of £229 million in the Department for International Development’s budget over two years, reducing aid to some of the world’s poorest people.

In office, we have created a separate Department for International Development – recognised around the world as one of the most effective development agencies in the international system. We have led international action to wipe out debt for the poorest nations – relieving $70 billion worth of debt so far – with the UK providing 100% bilateral debt relief for the world’s poorest countries. And we have introduced the International Development Act which says that British aid must be used for the reduction of poverty. Our resources are now targeted on supporting the internationally agreed UN Millennium Development Goals, and by next year we will focus 90 per cent of our bilateral aid on the poorest countries in the world, including £1 billion a year to Africa.

Since 1997, this Labour government has spent £800 million on helping children to get into school around the world; over the next four years this will rise to £1 billion going on education. The UK is now the world’s second largest bilateral donor in the global fight against HIV/AIDS, and we have committed $280 million to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria up to 2008.

Labour’s increase in development assistance has helped to bring real improvements in the lives of the world’s poorest people. Kenya now has an additional 1.2 million children in school thanks to a UK grant of £10 million. Poverty in Rwanda, where the UK is the largest bilateral donor, has decreased from approximately 70 per cent in 1994 to under 60 per cent in 2002. In Uganda immunisation coverage has increased from 41 per cent to over 70 per cent. And there are many more success stories.

Four years ago, the international community united in committing itself to the Millennium Development Goals: to halve world poverty, reduce infant and maternal mortality, and get all of the 113 million children of primary age, not in school currently, into a classroom. We must now ensure that the promises we have made on aid, trade, debt relief and sustainable development are delivered. It is my belief that international development should be an area where there is consensus between the mainstream political parties. Britain is, after all, leading the fight to tackle global poverty, and for our fight to succeed in persuading international partners abroad, our hand should be strengthened by support at home across the political spectrum.

Despite the poor Tory record on overseas aid – in office, the Conservatives halved the aid budget as a proportion of national income from 0.51 per cent of GDP in 1979 to 0.26 per cent in 1997 – I had hoped we had seen a conversion. In 2002, the then Shadow Chancellor Michael Howard said the Tories would support measures we announced in that year’s Spending Review to increase the budget for international development.

But the two-year cash freeze in international development announced by the current Shadow Chancellor Oliver Letwin would mean a real terms cut of £229 million in the development budget.

So, having pledged to meet our commitments, the Conservatives have now broken that pledge, and in doing so have set their face against the growing international consensus about the need for more aid. They have committed themselves to a real terms cut in public spending which would affect help for some of the poorest people in the world.

With typical candour John Bercow has admitted, “I cannot say to you that a freeze would not apply to the international development budget.” It would be disingenuous for the Tories to pretend a cut of this scale could come from waste or without eating deep into the international commitments we wish to make. This is especially so given Oliver Letwin’s confirmation last week that the Tories are looking to reduce public spending as a share of GDP.

Let me illustrate the scale of the cuts the Tories would need to find.

The first year of Conservative cuts would amount to the equivalent of eliminating the UK’s annual programmes for the Sudan (£14 million), Sierra Leone (£40 million) and Ethiopia (£57 million).

92,000 people could be lifted out of poverty each and every year with the money the Tories want to cut.

690,000 children in Africa could be provided with school places each year with the money the Tories want to cut.

For each £100m spent on education in Asia, we could put an additional 2 million children in school. Spent on health in Asia, this could save the lives of another 250,000 children under 5, or avert over 50,000 maternal deaths

The Tories must now explain where the £229 million cut from DFID’s budget over 2 years would be found.

They must also explain why, having supported EU action to co-ordinate overseas aid as part of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, they are now calling for withdrawal from the EU overseas aid programme.

Europe plays an important role in our efforts to alleviate global poverty. The EU is the biggest donor in the world for humanitarian aid and the third largest donor for development assistance. The EU is a major contributor, for instance, to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.

Labour believes we should continue to press for reform in the way EU aid is used: to increase the proportion spent in low-income countries and to focus aid where it can have most impact. We also want Europe’s complex and slow procedures to be further streamlined and simplified.

With Labour, Britain has led the demand for fundamental reform of the EU’s development programmes to contribute to global poverty reduction. This is in contrast to the Tories who did nothing to improve the quality of EU aid while in government and now claim that they can withdraw the UK’s contribution to the EU’s aid programme. This isn’t possible. The Tories cannot simply unilaterally withdraw from existing treaty obligations without the agreement of the 24 other EU member states – but they have yet to identify one country that would support them. It is not credible for the Tories to pretend they can fulfil this commitment unless they plan to withdraw from the EU.

Oliver Letwin has now placed the Tories in a position where they are reneging on a pledge to match Labour’s spending on international development. They have made what should be an issue of consensus an issue of contention, and it is the very poorest people in the world who would suffer from their cuts.

And that’s why Labour intends to continue making international development a priority. Because it is the right thing to do. It is the moral thing to do. And because unless we tackle poverty, injustice and inequality, then we will never have a safe and secure world in which we can all live.

The speech made by Hilary Benn, the Labour MP for Leeds Central, in the House of Commons on 6 July 2022.

I had the great privilege of serving for nearly four years as the International Development Secretary, and I worked with many people— including the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), who it is a great pleasure to follow because he was a terrific Development Secretary—who were passionate about the betterment of human kind. I was able to work with some absolutely wonderful, determined and passionate civil servants at DFID. I must be frank that it was a job that changed the way in which I think about the world, see it and seek to understand it.

We meet here today to look at the wreckage that has resulted from the Government’s reversal of many things that were achieved by the creation of DFID, under Governments of both parties, and I for one am greatly saddened. I think the Prime Minister’s decision to abolish DFID, to break his word and to cut the aid budget was a terrible mistake. It has had material consequences for girls’ education, safe motherhood and access to contraception, as well as for children’s education. The precious opportunity that going to school gives us opens a window on the world and gives us the knowledge, confidence and aspiration to make our way in our lives.

Many of DFID’s programmes, which were funded by the generosity of the British taxpayer, have had to cope with the consequence of sudden cuts. To take one example, UK aid to the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been cut by about 60%. Picking up the point just made by the right hon. Gentleman, that is a country where 27 million people are experiencing, to use the jargon, acute food insecurity. The funding cut from girls’ education—how on earth did that happen?—has now been restored this year, following the Foreign Secretary’s appearance before the International Development Committee, but it will only be the same in cash terms as it was in 2019, so it will in fact be a real-terms reduction.

The process of making those cuts has had a huge impact on our relationship with partner countries, multilateral institutions, non-governmental organisations and other aid organisations. It is a terrible self-inflicted wound that is not just about the money, because Britain had a reputation in the world of development. We had respect, we were listened to and we had great influence in debates about peace and security. I do not wish to appear to be dwelling on glories of the past and I recognise that times change—I will come in a moment to the challenges facing the world—but when we undermine our role as a world leader in development, it is really important that we are honest about what has been lost.

I have read the Government’s new strategy for international development, which was published in May. It talks about providing a “better offer”—whatever that is—and “honest and reliable investment” as if the cuts to our development budget had happened in a completely parallel universe. Whatever else might be said about what has occurred, what Ministers have done has shown that we are not a reliable partner. So, when Samantha Power, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development wants to pick up the phone to talk to Britain, who does she ring in the FCDO? What does that mean for our relationship with other countries? The right hon. Gentleman and I, and others in the Chamber who served in DFID, know that building consistent relationships with other people and creating trust is essential if we are to solve problems, and trust can easily be lost, as the Prime Minister is in the process of finding out.

I am afraid it is the casualness with which that happened that angers me more than anything else. I was sitting in the Chamber when the Prime Minister stood at the Dispatch Box and uttered the words that DFID was like

“some giant cashpoint in the sky.”—[Official Report, 16 June 2020; Vol. 677, c. 670.]

The right hon. Gentleman winces, and rightly so. I listened to that and thought, “This man clearly has no understanding whatsoever of what DFID is and what it has achieved.” While all that has been happening, not a single other G7 country has cut its aid budget—not one—even though they face the same pressures from covid and from the international economic situation and rising prices. Indeed, France and Germany are moving further towards 0.7%. Notwithstanding the rather clever tests that the former Chancellor set on when we will return to 0.7%, I am not sure whether we will see that any time soon.

Having said all of that—and feeling slightly better for having done so—I will address the rest of my remarks to the challenges that confront the world, because that is what we will have to address with the resources now available to the FCDO. The events of the last decade have reminded us of a very important truth. We may think that we have overcome the crises of the past, we may hope that they may never be repeated and we may believe that, because things are as they are today, they will ever be thus, but, sadly, that is not true. The global crash of 2008-09 was the worst since the crash and subsequent depression of the 1930s. The collapse of the Soviet Union was not the end of history; it was a semicolon, as the terrible war in Ukraine is currently demonstrating.

We have achieved incredible things with the gifts that the earth gives us. Look around at every single thing that human beings have built, created or made, from computers to skyscrapers and from vaccines to placing a rover on the surface of the planet Mars: every single one of them has come from things that are either on the earth or lie beneath it. That shows the extraordinary capacity of human beings to interact with what we have and to build and create. What we have done—the development that we have wrought in our own country and in others—would astonish our forebears and ancestors, but, if we thought that the process could be never-ending and that we could continue without consequence, the crisis in the natural world and the climate crisis have taught us that that is not the case, either.

I make that argument not to depress colleagues. On the contrary, I believe that we can overcome those challenges and build something better precisely because human beings have shown their ability to achieve extraordinary things, but we need the process of politics, international relationships, persuasion, encouragement, leadership, ideas, innovation and a lot of determination to be able to do that. When I look at my constituency in Leeds, I see big differences in life expectancy, health, wealth, opportunity and income between those who have and those who do not. The absolute poverty is, of course, very different to that which we are discussing in our debate today, but the challenge to overcome it is exactly the same. We face it as a country and we face it as a world.

I look also at the consequences of the threats to peace and security and how war causes millions to flee. We know that most people will seek to find somewhere safe. Although a lot of them will dream of being able to return home, sometimes that will not be possible. In our human response to those who seek shelter, wherever that happens in the world, we always need to ask ourselves one really important question. If it was us, how would we like to be treated, to be welcomed? When I read that some people who are seeking asylum in this country may have ankle tags fitted, or that some people who are seeking asylum in this country may be put on a plane to a country 5,000 miles away where they know no one and do not speak the language, I think that that, too, is a mistake.

Layla Moran

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the answer is not to detain them indefinitely in places like Campsfield House, which closed under this Government in 2018 but which they intend to reopen? That would be a retrograde step and shows that their plans are simply not working. It is the wrong approach and it should not reopen.

Hilary Benn

The right approach is to consider an asylum application and to make a swift decision. As the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield pointed out, the large majority of those seeking to come to the country are found to have a perfectly valid claim for asylum.

If we do not meet the challenges of war, insecurity, economic development, climate change and damage to the natural world, then people will not stay in the place where they were born and raised. They will do what human beings have done since the dawn of time, which is to move. When the history of this century is written, I think there will be a really big chapter on global migration. Whether it is fleeing in search of food or a better life, getting away from war and persecution, or moving because it has stopped raining where they were living—I have met people who have done precisely that—people will move. All these issues are interconnected—all of them. They cannot be dealt with separately. So, when we argue that Britain should have a strong voice in the world on all these matters, we are making the argument not just because it is morally right but because it is in our self-interest.

There are those, particularly populists, who seek to pretend otherwise. These are the people who pursue narrow nationalism and seek to gain power by sowing division. All I say to them is that if they think we can shut the doors, close the curtains, get into bed, pull up the bed covers and hope that the rest of the world and the rest of the future will go away, they are profoundly mistaken. There are no fences strong enough and no walls high enough that will resist an onward tide of human beings who are on the move. I say that, because the very condition of humankind at the beginning of the 21st century is defined by our interdependence. We depend one upon another. We share a very small and very fragile planet, and we have to co-operate and work together to succeed.

I am not arguing for a separate approach to development, because from my experience I regard security, foreign policy, defence, trade and responding to humanitarian catastrophes as part of a continuum—and of course, development is not something that we bring like some benevolent former colonial power to the partner countries with which we work. Development is something that people, communities, societies and countries do for themselves, and our job is to assist them in that process. If a Government want to get all their children into school but do not have the cash to make it possible, then of course they welcome help from countries like ours to employ the teachers, build the schools, buy the textbooks and put in the desks. We know from our experience—this is another truth—that, in 1,000 years of history, we have made just about every mistake that is possible. I sometimes felt slightly embarrassed about talking to Ministers from developing countries, because I was conscious of that history, and I would say, “I don’t want it to take you as long as it took us to progress from where we were to where we are today”.

We have learned that we can make progress through a process of political, social and economic development, which has transformed the lives of our citizens. We know what the essential building blocks are: peace; good health; the right to go to school; the rule of law; intolerance of corruption; trade; economic opportunity and justice; and sustainability when it comes to the natural world and the climate. All those can help to enable people to improve their lives.

In a world where there is so much change and uncertainty, where what we rely on today may not be relied on tomorrow, it is really important that Britain is seen as a reliable, trusted, consistent and honest partner. I am afraid that the events of the past two years, which are reflected in the estimates before the House, have done that aim great harm. That is why I look forward to the day when that harm is undone.

The speech made by Hilary Benn, the Labour MP for Leeds Central, in the House of Commons on 13 July 2021.

Since Ministers announced that the UK was going to be the only G7 country to cut its aid this year, despite all the other countries facing the same fiscal pressures, there is not one Member of this House who is not now aware of the consequences of the decision that Ministers have taken—a cut of 85% in the support that we give to the United Nations Population Fund to prevent maternal and child death and unwanted pregnancy; a cut of 95% to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, at the very moment when the world is closer than it has ever been to eradicating that dreadful disease; and a cut of 50% in the support we give to the humanitarian mine action programme, which stops people losing their arms, their legs and their lives to unexploded ordnance. It is a very long list, and every one of those things harms our reputation and does not help us to persuade others, because other countries judge us not by what we say, but by what we do.

The choice before the House today is a very stark one: do we act to put this right, or do we accept the double lock that has been proposed? I urge the House to reject it, because there is a principle here. What is it about the level of Government spending on helping the world’s poorest people that means that it alone is going to be subject to these tests? No other area of Government expenditure is: just this one. If this is about protecting the public finances, why is this area of Government expenditure—the money we spend on getting children into school, or on vaccinating children so they do not die of diseases that our children do not die of—being singled out? I have great admiration for the OBR, but determining the level of our international aid spending is not part of its responsibility. It is the Government’s responsibility, it is a political responsibility, and Ministers should not try to pass the buck on to someone else, especially since the latest OBR forecast makes clear that it is exceedingly unlikely that the two tests would be met in the next five years.

Mr Harper

Can I just pick the right hon. Gentleman up on that point about other areas of expenditure? The Treasury and the Chancellor have set out these tests—promises that are in our manifesto, and which we mean to keep. The comprehensive spending review is taking place this year, and it seems to me that we will be judging all other areas of Government expenditure by these same measures. I see the Chancellor nodding, so it seems to me that we are being very consistent here, and it is important that we keep our promises about our fiscal responsibilities as well as getting back on track to meet our aid responsibilities.

Hilary Benn

I am afraid that I take a different view of the Government’s consistency from the right hon. Gentleman’s, because they have chosen quite specifically, knowingly and deliberately to break a cast-iron promise to the world’s poorest people that was also contained in that manifesto. As I said in my last contribution on this subject, most of those people probably have no idea that this House made that commitment together, but the Government have chosen to break it, and the choice we are making today is whether we think that is right or wrong.

The Chancellor might think that the double lock is a way out of this political problem, but I do not think it is, because the issue before us has not gone away. It is just the same as it was on the day when the original cut was announced, and the question before us is whether it is right—morally, practically or politically—to break our word to the world’s poorest people. I would argue that it is not: it is wrong in principle and it is harmful in practice, as we have heard from excellent speeches made by Conservative Members. It is not who we are; it is not the country that we should aspire to be; and I ask the House to reject this motion so that we can restore aid to 0.7% and keep the promise that we made to the people of this country and the people of the world.