International Development Expenditure - 18th June 2011

On 13th June Britain hosted a conference for the Global Alliance of Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI). This conference sought to raise funds for the vaccination of 250 million children in the developing world. Over the last decade GAVI has prevented an estimated 5.4 million deaths and immunised more than 288 million children in 72 of the world’s poorest countries. David Cameron announced an extra £814 million from the British International Development budget for GAVI in the years to 2015.

This funding will help vaccinate over 80 million children and save 1.4 million lives. This announcement ought to have provided an opportunity for some celebration, but the only letters and emails I have received have been ones of complaint -demanding to know how we can afford to help the world’s poorest people when we are making expenditure cuts at home.

It is true that we are in dire financial straits, we are borrowing £400 million every day and we have to balance our books quickly if we are to avoid the disaster now facing Greece. Consequently, there has to be swingeing cuts in almost every department of state. Where we choose to make those cuts -and where we choose not to do so- defines who and what we are: it tells the world something important about us and our values.
Years ago we made an international pledge to increase our international development aid to 0.7% of our national income.

Other nations may renege from such commitments but we will stand by our word: we will not balance our books on the backs of the world’s poorest people. Children in Britain do not die from these diseases and I believe it was right for us to lead a pledging conference to support efforts to ensure children in poor countries get the same chance to live. For the price of a cup of coffee - you can vaccinate a child in the poor world against killer diseases.

International development expenditure directly impacts on our influence in other countries and in the counsels of international institutions. It also has a significant impact on security: it is in the poorest and most dysfunctional states that desperation and terrorist ideologies thrive.

Of course, it is the duty of the Government to protect taxpayers’ money, this is not charity: you cannot just put the cash in the collection box and forget it. It is the job of the Government to ensure it is well and effectively spent. In our first few months of government we conducted the first comprehensive review of the strengths and weaknesses of each multilateral organisation in receipt of UK funding. As a consequence we cancelled £100 million of low-performing programmes and redirected the money to better uses like tackling malaria. We are cutting aid to countries that no longer need it and redirecting it to fragile states which incubate threats to Britain.

We are tackling corruption and some of the daft programmes that were passed off as ‘development awareness’ schemes; we have set up an independent aid watchdog to provide tough, external scrutiny of all aid spending; the department is cutting its own administration costs by a third; and we are implementing plans for a radical new ‘cash on delivery’ approach to aid – payment by results, where money is only handed over if results have actually been achieved.

We should be proud that are spending so much more to help the world’s poorest people, and we because this is so important, we must ensure that none of it is wasted.