§ 6.19 p.m.
§ Mr. George Cunningham (Islington, South-West)From the not too warlike waters of Iceland we turn to the even more peaceful waters of Britain's overseas aid programme.
In the course of this debate I wanted to discuss two very different subjects which are covered by the Estimates before us. Now that I am on my feet, I am not sure that anything could be 722 done if I proceeded to do so. However, in accordance with your wish, Mr. Speaker, that each hon. Member should submit only one topic, I shall confine my remarks to one, although it is an odd state of affairs when this House restricts each Member to only one subject, even when there is a shortage of Members wishing to discuss matters dealt with in the Estimates. The whole procedure for these debates needs to be looked at again more thoroughly than was done recently by the Procedure Committee. Manifestly, the way that we proceed now is totally unsatisfactory.
The Bill which we are passing covers a total of £303 million. That is the amount for which the Government are asking. None of the proposals for expenditure covered by that amount has been looked at by any Committee of this House. I repeat what I have said before, and will probably say many times again, that until we devise a method by which, when expenditure proposals of this kind come to the whole House, they have already been examined to some extent at least by a Committee of the House, we shall not get proper scrutiny of Government expenditure before it takes place comparable with the excellent scrutiny of expenditure as it takes place which is done by the Public Accounts Committee.
Another unsatisfactory feature of our habits is that Government Departments in Whitehall get notice of what is to be discussed only about a day and a half before a matter is actually discussed. This is less notice than one has to give to a Minister when asking a Question for oral answer. That seems to me to be odd. The point arose in the Procedure Committee when it considered the procedure on these Bills, but I believe that the Committee too lightly accepted the opinion expressed by the then Leader of the House that Whitehall would put up with whatever nonsense the House chose to impose upon it. That may be a very good parliamentary doctrine but it gives rise to severe inconveniences for the House, quite apart from the inconvenience to Whitehall.
It means that because Ministers have not had sufficient notice of what is to be discussed, they can reasonably get away with a less thorough answer than had they been given longer notice. 723 Therefore, the House is not exercising its right to impose inconvenience upon the executive. It is simply making do with a manifestly unsatisfactory procedure when, with just a little effort, it could follow a better method.
Turning to aid itself, I should apologise to the Minister for subjecting him to these occasional rantings of mine in which I seem always to stand in a majority of one, but I am afraid that he and his colleagues are likely to have to put up with them for some time longer. I thank him for the letter he wrote me following the last similar discussion about a complaint which I have expressed on some occasions, namely, the fact that it is impossible to find within the Estimates all the items which are booked to the overseas aid programme. He has again undertaken to see what he can do to find a way round this mighty problem by identifying the items in the Chief Secretary's memorandum presented to the House at the same time of year as the main Estimates.
If I may add a further comment on what has been said before about that, what is required is that all the individual items which are booked to the aid programme should be identifiable. It does not matter very much whether they are all included in one Vote. That is perhaps a more difficult exercise to get done; it is certainly not likely to be done in the near future. But what can be done in the near future is to find a regular way of supplying the House, without my having to ask for it each time, with the kind of list of individual items with which the Minister supplies me when I take the trouble to put a Question down on the Order Paper.
When we last discussed Supplementary Estimates on overseas aid, I believe on 31st January, I made the point that it was wrong that the Sub-Committee of the Expenditure Committee which covers defence, foreign affairs and overseas aid should never look at the aid Estimates. The situation has, of course, become worse since then because we now have, besides the Sub-Committee of the Expenditure Committee whose job it is to look at these things, a Select Committee on Overseas Aid.
I am confidently prepared to predict that that Sub-Committee, on which I 724 have the honour to serve, will not look at the Estimates, either. Thus we are to have two Committees of the House, both concerned with overseas aid—a ridiculous situation in itself, by the way— and neither of them is to look at the Estimates proposals for expenditure before we go through the process of voting perhaps £10 million, £20 million or £30 million at a time. This cannot go on. It goes on only because the public and informed public institutions outside the House do not take any interest in how we run our affairs in this House against the results of the decisions we take.
It is manifestly silly that we should not submit the Estimates to committee consideration before we pass them through the House when we have not just one Committee, but two Committees well fitted for that task by their terms of reference and that we manage to devise our habits in such a way that neither of them does so. It is almost impossible to believe that any legislature in the world would put up with such a situation, and I am prepared to say that the only legislature which does put up with it is this one.
In the Estimates at which we are now looking there are a number of items, some of them quite detailed, which it would have been appropriate to look at in a Committee if a Committee bothered to do so. I do not want to trouble the House with going into them now but I wish to make one or two points of detail. There is, for example, the provision for voting a small sum of £4,000 to the Voluntary Committee on Overseas Aid Development, which appears in Document 78, at page 75. It seems to me that the provision of an extra £4,000 for additional rent for a very small organisation like the VCOAD is something which could do with a word of explanation, not necessarily this afternoon.
Then there is the provision of, I believe, £500,000 of extra money to the United Nations Development Programme, referred to in Document 166 at page 4. If it is possible to do so, it would be useful if the Minister could say something about what has happened to the Jackson Report on the United Nations aid-giving family, because some of us at least have felt that until the United Nations agencies put their own house in order, much as one would wish to increase the amount of our aid going into 725 the United Nations aid agencies, and probably UNDP in particular, we ought to use refusal to do so as a means of stimulating production of the information for which Sir Robert Jackson called in his report in 1969 or 1970.
Finally there is the provision in Document 78, at pages 46 and 74, under the heading "British Council", in which reference is made to changed arrangements for dividing the costs of the council between the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Overseas Development Administration. I have missed something here but if it is the case that there are new arrangements which have not been previously explained in the House, this would be a good opportunity for that to be done.
There are two principal items in the documents to which I wish to make reference. The first is the takeover of responsibility for overseas pensions. This appears in item D.22 in Document 78, at page 52. This item is a very good illustration of the importance of the Estimates which nobody else seems to believe in except me. When the Government first decided to take over responsibility for these pensions, the authority for that purpose was secured by means of a notional £10 item in the Estimates. That was in the Estimates presented in February last year.
A Bill is now going through the House to give the Government the authority to do these things, but they have done some of them without that, simply on the authority of the Appropriation Act, based upon a one-line item of £10—no more—in the Estimates. Nothing could better illustrate the need for the House to find a means in Committee to go into the Estimates in some detail, because the amount of money involved, tokenly expressed in the Estimates as £10, is in fact £50 million. That is what the Gov-enrment get the authority to forgo—not to spend—by means of what is superficially such a tiny item in the Estimates.
On the substance of the pension takeover, I want to revert to the point mentioned during the Second Reading of the Bill, namely, whether the expenditure of £12 million under this head should be booked to the overseas aid programme. As has been said before, this is a significant item. If it is the case that this 726 expenditure does not need to be booked to the overseas aid programme it is like giving the programme £12 million extra, which is like giving it a 4 per cent. increase—in fact, rather more—in its present volume.
When I raised this matter on Second Reading the Minister gave some explanations of why he thought it ought properly to be booked to the overseas aid programme. He said, first, that our taking over this expenditure relieved the overseas Governments from having to do it and, secondly, that the work done by the personnel in respect of whom these payments were made was normally of a developmental character. I should not dispute both those facts. What I should dispute is that it follows from them that the money ought to be booked to the overseas aid programme.
We are saying that the obligation to pay these pensions belongs legally to the British Government and not to the overseas Governments. As long as we were helping overseas Governments to discharge an obligation which legally rested upon them that money was properly booked as aid, but now that we are legally taking on the obligations ourselves it seems conceptually wrong that we should book it as overseas aid.
I recognise that the sum of £12 million is likely to tail off, but in the meantime the Minister will have to deny to other possible recipients of overseas aid the £12 million which is to be taken out of his programme. I know that it comes out of the Minister's programme under the present arrangements. My case is that under the new arrangements it is no longer logically sensible to do that.
Am I right in thinking that the Minister could not make these payments under the Overseas Aid Act? I think I am right in that view. The Overseas Aid Act, goodness knows, is widely drawn and allows the Minister to do almost anything, but I do not think that it allows him to make payments to former civil servants, experts and so on, in developing countries in respect of services already discharged. I do not think that that can be argued to be payment for developmental purposes.
I assume that that must be the case, otherwise there would not have been a need to introduce a new Bill. If the 727 Minister, under his principal legislative authority, should not have made these payments, it is all the more clear that they ought not to be booked to the overseas aid programme. In order to safeguard myself, may I say that if I am wrong and the money can be paid under the Overseas Aid Act I should still argue logically that it ought not to be booked to the aid programme.
Finally, there is the matter of aid to Uganda, which appears in Document 78 at page 57. It shows that the Minister is asking for £80,000 under one loan, and £750,000 under another, to be spent during the remainder of the financial year 1972-73. That means that in the next 10 days the Minister will disburse to the Amin régime £830,000—the better part of £1 million.
The figures in the document show that these are tranches of disbursements from two loans which have been almost wholly disbursed, but these payments, even if made in the next fortnight, will not wholly discharge the loans. There will remain nominally due to Uganda the sum of about £250,000 under one loan and £600,000 under the other. A total of £850,000 will still be due to Uganda under those two loans after the end of this financial year.
I am all in favour of meeting our obligations, but the commitment of funds to a developing country is not something to which we should feel ourselves absolutely tied if that country behaves in the manner in which Uganda has behaved towards this country and its own citizens. I find it offensive and unnecessary that we should be proposing to disburse the better part of £1 million to Uganda in the next fortnight and that we should appear to accept the obligation to disburse the same amount again some time after the end of the month. I hope that the Minister will be able to say that the whole business of disbursing from current commitment to Uganda will now be reviewed.
I know that the Government have put on the shelf their earlier idea of a £10 million loan to Uganda—I should think so too—but it is not enough to say "We will not give you anything new, but we will go on disbursing to you out of the loan you are now receiving". The occasions on which we should allow non- 728 aid considerations to interrupt our aid programme are very rare, but if ever there was one such instance it is Uganda.
There needs to be some kind of relationship between the giving Government and the receiving Government if the aid is to work. No one can have any confidence that the present Government of Uganda can make good use of £10, far less £1 million, and it is wrong that £2 million should go to or be in prospect for Uganda over the coming months when people in this country have suffered so much at the hands of that Government.
I know that the Minister will not be able to say that the money will be stopped, but I hope he will be able to say that, in consultation with his right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary, he will review current aid to Uganda based upon past commitments as well as any commitment which it was previously expected would be undertaken.
§ 6.40 p.m.
§ The Minister for Overseas Development (Mr. Richard Wood)The hon. Member for Islington, South-West (Mr. George Cunningham) raised in the House an identical or very similar subject when I was in Africa at the end of January. I begin by congratulating him on his astonishing good fortune in again drawing a very high place in the ballot. If I may offer a word of advice, it is this. If he could continue this excellent good fortune, for instance, in raffles in his constituency, he would soon be a very rich man. But because he is not only a wizard at figures and, obviously, very interested in figures, but also draws a very high place in the ballot, I shall continue—in deference to you, Mr. Speaker—to refer to him as the hon. Member for Islington, South-West when privately thinking of him as the recurring decimal. This is a very difficult thing for me ever to put out of my mind.
The hon. Gentleman has raised a very serious question. There may be arguments to the effect, and in support of the arguments he has adduced, that the ideal methods of conducting the business of the House of Commons could and would be better if they were different from the present methods. But the hon. Gentleman will agree that the House of Commons has been willing over the years to try to adapt itself and to evolve its procedures. 729 It may be that one day the hon. Gentleman may be seen as one who has effected a significant change in our procedures.
A number of hon. Members are interested in these matters. Much of what the hon. Gentleman has said today is a matter, perhaps—although it has been attached to these particular Estimates—of more general significance and a matter for my right hon. Friend the Lord President of the Council and the usual channels. I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman might operate effectively at one end of the usual channels in order to try to achieve the reforms which he has in mind. He will be considered later to have been a reformer, because I am sure that his persistence will bear fruit. For most of the time today he has been rather in the position of a lone reformer, but I see that he is now supported in the Chamber by one of his hon. Friends.
We remember times when Parliament conducted its business on the Supplementary Estimates rather differently from the way it does now. When I first arrived in the House of Commons, a critical Opposition would table an amendment reducing a Minister's salary by £10. I am glad that that expedient has died out. I should take it as a personal insult if the hon. Gentleman had suggested that in this case. But it is probably more than the effects of inflation which have led Oppositions in more recent years, instead of following that method, to substitute reasoned motions criticising the Government or a Minister for particular activities. The House of Commons has for long chosen to conduct its scrutiny of public expenditure in broad terms rather than from subhead to subhead. Here the hon. Gentleman may have a point, which my right hon. Friend would certainly want to consider, as to whether there should be some means of scrutiny, as he suggested, before these Estimates are considered by the whole House.
Recently things have taken a new turn, both in the lifetime of the present Government and when the previous Government were in office. It was then expected that the principal debates on public expenditure would be those on the While Paper on Public Expenditure rather than those on the departmental Estimates. I say "expected" because it has not quite turned out that way. This place is full 730 to overflowing to hear the Budget Statement of my right hon. Friend the Chancellor, but the debate on the White Paper has already been diminished from two days to one day. Even during that single day a great many hon. Members have found duties outside the Chamber more important than listening to the debate.
Therefore, the hon. Gentleman is not alone in his experience this evening of conducting this debate in a thin House of Commons. All this may show that the hon. Gentleman has a point when he comments on our scrutiny of expenditure. On the other hand, experience shows that the House has come, over the course of time, to arrange its procedures in a perfectly pragmatic way, so that the matters to which it wants to give attention in fact receive attention. We have gone some way to provide more detailed scrutiny for the effort we make in the overseas development sector. My right hon. Friend the Lord President has set up a Select Committee, which the hon. Gentleman will complain will not scrutinise the Estimates in the way that he would have in mind. But he has pointed out that he is a member of that Committee. I understand that the Committee is free to decide its procedure. Any comment from me on the way that the Committee does its business would not be particularly appropriate or well received.
Over the last few years, under the previous Government and the present Government, the establishment of Select Committees has been the means by which the House has tried to secure a more detailed scrutiny of policies and expenditure, perhaps not detailed Estimates but certainly the general direction of the way we are doing our job in overseas development. It may be that in any further improvements to the Committee structure we may move further in the direction suggested by the hon. Gentleman.
This is a general point about the way in which we conduct our business. Therefore, I shall certainly see that my right hon. Friend studies the hon. Gentleman's views. I cannot, however, add very much to what either he would say or that which I now say.
I do not have the details of the hon. Gentleman's point about the rent for the VCOAD. I shall get them and write to him as soon as I can.
731 On the question of the United Nations agencies and the very important Jackson Report, this is a matter where progress has to be made which involves about 100 countries. The difficulties are similar to those I described recently on Second Reading of the Overseas Pensions Bill. The United Nations agencies have to secure the agreement, assent and consideration of a number of countries to a certain course of future action, and it all takes time. Therefore progress is slow. But we are doing what we can to try to push on with this matter, which we regard as very important.
On the question of the British Council and the division between the Foreign Office and the Overseas Development Administration, in general there has been some transfer to the British Council of functions which were previously exercised elsewhere, such as the matter of training, which has necessitated an adjustment in the Estimates. I can explain further on that matter if the hon. Gentleman will allow me to write to him.
The hon. Gentleman raised the important matter of overseas pension policy. I was aware, as I think the hon. Gentleman was aware in retrospect, that the policy which was announced in March 1970 by the previous Government was unanimously accepted by Parliament. Therefore, that acceptance having been given, it seems a perfectly logical way for Parliament to proceed by the means of this expendient of the £10 in the Estimates, which would draw attention to the matter, which has been announced to the House and has won its unanimous approval. I do not believe that there is anything either improper or unsuitable in that procedure.
As to the second stage of that policy, we realised that it would be impossible to continue to make that change under the authority of the Overseas Aid Act alone and it thus became necessary to introduce the Overseas Pensions Bill.
The hon. Gentleman asked me this evening, as he did the other day, about the propriety of putting pensions on the aid programme. I cannot add very much to what I have already said to him. I do not wish to waste his time or that of the House but I gave him as good an answer as I could, as reported in 732 HANSARD of 1st March at col. 1798. I cannot improve on that now. The acceptance that the hon. Member gave to two of the points I made on that occasion has given me encouragement that eventually he might accept the first point also.
§ Mr. George CunninghamIs it possible that the right hon. Gentleman has given any consideration since 31st January to the precedent I mentioned then of the Central African Pensions Fund where, in a directly comparable matter, we did not count our contribution to that fund as part of the overseas aid programme?
§ Mr. WoodI can only reply to the hon. Gentleman that the matter is being further considered, but I do not believe that any direction in which that consideration leads us will make a very great difference to the principle that he discussed on that occasion and again tonight about which I expressed my views both then and again tonight.
The hon. Gentleman also mentioned aid to Uganda which is covered on page 57 of the Estimates. He will know that in a statement in November 1972 my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State announced the withdrawal of the loan of £10 million and also announced the future arrangements that we intended to make for the British people working in Uganda in various forms of education and assistance.
At any one moment in any developing country which we are aiding on a considerable scale there is a good deal of economic activity which our aid is supporting. That was so last November and remains so today. A number of economic activities are supported by our capital aid. However rapidly we want to withdraw our assistance for the reasons to which the hon. Gentleman has properly drawn our attention, I cannot believe it can make very much sense for the developing country, for instance, to leave a bridge half built or a road completely unconnected with anything else, nor can it be in the interests of our contractors and firms working in that developing country.
We therefore took the view that certain economic developments that were taking place in Uganda must be completed because their complete disruption would lead to great difficulties for our citizens, 733 firms and contractors as well, no doubt, as the Ugandans, I cannot believe that it would make any sense at all to bring all capital aid to an abrupt conclusion and cut it off without taking into consideration the damage that would be done to interests we do not want to damage.
That completes the explanation I ought to give to the hon. Gentleman, but I repeat my undertaking that I will draw to the attention of my right hon. Friend what he has said as I believe that this would be handled more suitably in general than by the particular references to the overseas Estimates. I hope that the hon. Member will be satisfied with that conclusion.