Overseas Aid (UK-based Consultants) — [Mr George Howarth in the Chair]

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 3:08 pm on 20 November 2012.

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Photo of Tony Cunningham Tony Cunningham Shadow Minister (International Development) 3:08, 20 November 2012

I totally agree. Does the Minister feel that that approach represents true value for money for the British taxpayer? Can she demonstrate that it is the most effective approach to reducing poverty? If DFID is about anything, it is about reducing poverty among some of the poorest people in the world.

The British public—my hon. Friend touched on this—are compassionate, caring and extremely generous, and we have only to witness some recent examples to see that that is true. I could cite Haiti, because of the disaster that struck it. It is not in the British Commonwealth, and it is not a country that DFID deals with; indeed, it was suggested that, because it was a French colony, France would lead the way in dealing with the disaster there. However, the British people showed huge generosity; they did not care whether Haiti was a French colony or a British colony—they cared for the people of Haiti and gave enormously generously.

It is vital that we can show people that their money is going to help millions of families—women and children around the world—and that it is not being wasted by large consultancies in the UK. In the light of that and the Department’s recent announcement that it will investigate where its money is spent, may I, in the spirit of transparency, pick up on my hon. Friend’s comments and ask the Minister yet again when the internal report will be published in full? Interestingly, I asked that question at DFID questions recently. The Secretary of State—I appreciate that she is new to her post—gave me the longest answer in the whole Question Time, but did she tell me when the report will be produced? No. We need to know when it will be produced and whether it will be produced in full. We have a right to know where the money is being spent.

I hope the Department will be open and transparent about how British taxpayers’ money is spent and where it is going. The Secretary of State is relatively new, but I hope she will get to grips—people keep using that term—with how money is being spent in her Department, because the £500 million given to UK consultants represents 8% of the DFID budget. We also hope that the report will shed light on other funding streams. What struck me about my hon. Friend’s comments was the fact that a small non-governmental organisation that was digging wells for poor people was refused £250,000 when we are spending 8% of the budget on consultants.

The coalition Government have sought a different style of development. I do not want to get into an ideological argument, but there seems to be an increased emphasis on the private sector and on a more—I choose my words carefully, and I should when I am looking at my hon. Friend—paternalistic approach to the way we deal with the developing world. That approach ideologically favours the private sector, and we have seen examples of that.

I am not saying that I am against the private sector, which is hugely important. Let me give one example. Recently, I was in Nairobi, and I went to look at private schools. Now, private schools in Nairobi are not like the private schools we would imagine in other parts of the world. Kibera is the largest slum in Nairobi—one slum, one million people. There are a handful of schools on the outskirts. If local people want their children to have an education, they have no choice but to pay a relatively small amount to allow their children to go to school. The amount they pay for their child to go to school for a month is the same as the cost of a bottle of beer in one of the top-class hotels in Nairobi that some of the consultants we are talking about might stay at. People do not have a choice about making such payments, but this is more a social enterprise than anything else, so I am not against everything that is private.