Sir Andrew Mitchell
MP for Sutton Coldfield · Conservative · United Kingdom
“I urge Labour Members to rise up now and say that the historical interest and support of the Labour party have been for international development. People might expect the beastly Tories to cut aid and development, but they do not expect the Labour party to do that. Now is a chance to have a real reset, which should include three things.”
“As we get older, we tend to look back at the past through rose-tinted spectacles, but I acknowledge at the outset that British development policy is at its best by far when it is conducted on an all-party basis. It is not a Labour, Conservative or Liberal policy; it is a British policy. That was one of its great glories in the past.”
“Friend the Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale about the importance of saving the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, but we have to accept that we will not get a major boost in public support unless it comes from the top. We had an era of huge support, led by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Theresa May.”
“The Government are the 100% shareholder in BII and are therefore able to set out very clearly what its priorities should be, but they should then leave an organisation like BII to get on with following that mandate. I argue that there have been three great losses from the Johnson and Starmer premierships.”
“I argue that, since the Suez crisis, international development has been the only area of indisputable British international leadership—and we have lost that.”
“I do not really agree with that because, while the hon. Gentleman cites a number of areas where Britain makes a big contribution, there is a big black hole where we have cut off our legs in respect to international development. I will say a word or two about that in a moment.”
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Every one of 4,936 lines we hold for Sir Andrew Mitchell, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 28 of 99.
“I will certainly be pleased to arrange for Foreign Office officials to meet the hon. Lady’s constituent’s family if she believes that there are lessons to be learned, but I also want to pay a special tribute to all the men and women who work in the emergency centre at the Foreign Office, who have often been working through the night throughout this emergency and have done so with huge diligence, tenacity and commitment.”
“I think the hon. Gentleman confuses the role of the British Government, which has been set out clearly by the Prime Minister and by me in the House. He will also know that when it comes to the use of intelligence assets and so forth, we do not discuss those matters across the Floor of the House.”
“The people who serve in the Israel Defence Forces are taught, as part of their basic training, the importance of abiding by international humanitarian law. I would contrast the Israel Defence Forces, who seek to defend Israeli citizens, with Hamas, who seek to use their citizens to defend Hamas.”
“Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I assure my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) that we in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office are the servants of the House. We will do anything that the House requests in respect of fulfilling the role that he has identified, which we fulfilled in the early days of the Ukrainian war.”
“Although we can rightly be proud of all we have done to deliver international development, the UK and our global partners must redouble our efforts given the challenges that we faced to achieve those goals. We asked in the White Paper what the UK could do. We were told to make a new development offer based on mutual respect, powered by finance at scale, and supported by a more responsive international system. We have listened: that is what the White Paper will deliver. The Prime Minister has launched the White Paper to do development more effectively and differently, and yesterday’s global food security summit was an example of that. I commend this statement to the House.”
“When I visited families in east Africa suffering the worst drought in 40 years, it was clear that the current focus on immediate relief comes at the cost of early thinking and building in resilience and adaptation for the future. The new fund will respond directly to that specific challenge. Innovation is at the heart of our efforts to transform lives through sustainable growth. The wondrous creativity of science and technology can address problems that money alone will never solve. Only by sharing research and innovating together can we make the breakthroughs that our world needs. The world has never been so intimately connected, nor our fates so closely entwined.”
“Conflict and instability are on the rise and hold back development: by 2030 up to two thirds of the world’s poor will live in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. Humanitarian needs are at their highest since 1945, with twice as many people needing assistance compared with five years ago. The resulting devastation is spreading across affected regions, as seen at present in the Sahel and the middle east. The tragic events in Israel and Gaza bring home the humanitarian costs of conflict and violence, with women and children most directly affected. I am therefore pleased to announce today that we will create a fund dedicating up to 15% of our bilateral humanitarian spend to support resilience and adaptation alongside our delivery of humanitarian relief, which we expect to amount to £1 billion next year.”
“We will deploy policy and investment to defend and advance sexual and reproductive health and rights. Effective development is rooted in respectful partnerships of equals, but the Government will continue to stand up for our values. We know that individual rights, the rule of law and strong institutions are essential to achieving sustainable development. Take for example the work of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, to which Members of Parliament make such a substantial contribution. It is the UK’s leading champion of democracy globally. We are increasing our support for its work so that we can support fairer, more inclusive and more accountable democratic systems around the world. We must also find better ways to anticipate and prevent humanitarian crises and the conflicts that often drive them.”
“We will deliver on our pledge to provide £11.6 billion in international climate finance in the five years up to 2026. We will ensure a balance between adaptation and mitigation financing and provide at least £3 billion to protect and restore nature. Britain’s work on women and girls is paramount. We cannot understand development unless we see it through the eyes of girls and women. Increasing access to education, empowering women so that they can decide for themselves whether and when they have children, and ending sexual violence are central to economic opportunity and growth. Those rights are universal and should be non-negotiable. The White Paper extends and reinvigorates that work. We will use research and diplomacy to end the preventable deaths of mothers, babies and children.”
“Together with Prime Minister Mia Mottley and other supporters of the Bridgetown initiative, we are driving reforms of the multilateral development banks so that they can scale up financing for low and middle-income countries. We will also work with institutional investors such as pension funds to plug the SDG’s $3.9 trillion annual financing gap. International development and climate action are inseparable. Climate change and nature loss are being felt everywhere, and their impact will only intensify over the next decade. It will be most acute in developing countries, reversing fragile development gains, increasing food prices and compounding insecurity and instability. To meet that challenge, we must mobilise more—and more reliable—finance.”
“It has an impressive track record, and now will go further and faster, investing in the hardest places. As was suggested by the International Development Committee, to whom I pay tribute, BII will aim to make more than half of its investments in the poorest and most fragile countries by 2030, while also enhancing its transparency, cementing its place as a world leader. The White Paper presents our vision for much-needed reform of the international financial system, mobilising greater finance from the private sector and scaling up the lending capacity of the international financial institutions. The UK has pioneered the use of climate-resilient debt clauses, enabling vulnerable countries to hold off on debt repayments following an extreme weather event.”
“The Government have been clear on our intention to return to 0.7% of GNI when the fiscal circumstances permit, but the White Paper also makes it clear that we will not achieve the sustainable development goals through business-as-usual official development assistance funding. We need a quantum leap in financing and investing, which only the private sector can provide. The private sector is an essential engine of development, giving communities the building blocks for economic independence. Self-sufficiency is development’s essential purpose, and our work with the UK private sector delivers back for taxpayers many times over. British Investment International, formerly known as CDC, is already a core part of the Government’s offer on international development.”
“After decades of hard-won but persistent progress, we live in a world facing a daunting set of challenges: a world that is seeing rising poverty, where progress is in retreat; a world where the UN sustainable development goals are nearly all off track for 2030; a world where faith in multilateral institutions is fading despite co-operation being desperately needed; a world facing a climate crisis, growing conflict and the prospect of further pandemics; a contested world, where unity and solidarity are increasingly important, yet ever more difficult to achieve. This White Paper sets out a road map to 2030, charting the path the UK must take to galvanise global attention and lead by example in the fight to end extreme poverty, tackle climate change and address biodiversity loss. When it comes to international development, finance matters.”
“This is an area of policy that does not belong either to the Conservative party or to Labour; it is a British policy and commitment. As the whole House knows, development has helped transform the lives of billions of people. The UK can be immensely proud of our distinct contribution to this incredible success story. Two centuries ago, three quarters of the world lived in extreme poverty. When I was born, around half still did. By 2015, when the world met the millennium development goals, the proportion of a much larger global population had fallen to just 12%. Evidence shows that development works, but it also shows that we now need to think about how we do development.”
“Mr Deputy Speaker, since my statement to the House on 18 July, the Government have consulted extensively to secure evidence and ideas on international development that will transform our world. I pay tribute to the team of 15 officials who have worked night and day and most of their weekends for nearly six months on this, under the leadership of Nick Dyer and Annabel Gerry, and to Geraldine Bedell and the Richard Curtis team who have helped with the shortened version of the international development White Paper. We drew on the sharpest and most expert minds from non-governmental organisations, academia, business, nearly 50 Governments around the world, and all political parties in the House. I particularly wish to thank colleagues across the House for their contributions to shaping this White Paper.”
“She will have seen the climate resilient debt clauses launched by Britain and the work we are doing on the G20 common framework to increase access for countries. It is also important to ensure that the private sector is bound into debt settlements when they affect sovereign states.”
“Mitigation projects in middle-income countries are easy by contrast; when it comes to poor countries and adaptation, it is much more difficult. She will see the emphasis in the White Paper on accepting the advice from the Select Committee on increasing the amount that British International Investment does in poor countries. She will notice, too, the emphasis on social protection, and the fact that 62% of the budget will now be spent in fragile and conflict states. Finally, the hon. Lady asked about debt, where she is right that we need to do far more. It is absurd that a country such as Ghana can borrow only for seven or eight years, yet our children can get mortgages for 30 years. Ghana borrows at 7%, and our children borrow at 2%. That is clearly completely wrong, but there is a lot of new thinking.”
“The answer is that we use either, depending on what delivers for our taxpayers and what delivers results on the ground. That is the yardstick; there is no ideology. We go with what works and what is best. The hon. Lady pointed out the increase in spending in other Departments of ODA money and the development budget. It is true that that has gone up, but every penny is spent within the rules laid down by the OECD Development Assistance Committee. We brought in the innovation of the ODA star chamber in Whitehall, co-chaired by the Development Minister and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. There is already clear evidence of that ratcheting up the quality of ODA, as the hon. Lady would wish. The hon. Lady talked about access to finance for poor countries, which is incredibly important.”
“I thank the hon. Lady for her co-operation and her kind personal remarks. She will know that, in order to get buy-in from our friends and experts around the world and from the civil service, the White Paper needed to run to 2030. In the unlikely event that my party is not in government after the next election, any other Government would, I hope, build on it to make it a huge success. I note the hon. Lady’s remarks about the merger of DFID into the Foreign Office. My task, which the Prime Minister gave me, was to try to make the merger work. That means there needs to be an ability within Government to focus on global public goods and delivering them into the 2030s. That is what I am trying to do. She rightly asks how we get the balance right between multilateralism and bilateral funding.”
“My right hon. Friend knows a great deal about this area from his past ministerial posts, and he is absolutely right. The key trick is to secure the status money, whether provided by the multilateral banks or the development finance institutions, and to marry it with the private sector and the $60 trillion of pension funds out there. If we can marry the two, de-risk through using that status money, and show pension managers what the real risk and the scale of the returns are, we can achieve the holy grail of getting enormous amounts of more money into climate finance, mitigation and adaptation, which is what the Bridgetown agenda is all about.”
“She chides me for not having made the point about civil society and the platform, but I am delighted to tell her that although I did not mention it in the statement, it is in there; UKDev—UK International Development—is a platform to achieve precisely what she said needs to be achieved in that bridge between civil society and Government and state work.”
“She asked in which areas we would be specifically restoring funding where cuts had been made; she will see in the White Paper that the International Citizen Service is set to return and our aid match will increase. As for the humanitarian work we will do next year, we expect to spend £1 billion on humanitarian relief, plus we have the new resilience and adaptation fund, which will produce an extra 15% on that. The White Paper is long and to many of us it is a most exciting read. A short form is available—I have a copy here—as I mentioned. Thanks to the Richard Curtis team, it is also an excellent read.”
“As far as I am aware, there is no difference between the policy of the Government and that of the official Opposition on the restoration of the 0.7% target. She talked about cuts in programmes, but the White Paper explains how many of the programmes will be increased. She specifically mentions South Sudan. As the budget is now in much better shape, next year the bilateral programme spending in South Sudan will increase from £47.9 million to £110 million, which is an increase of 130%. The Kenyan bilateral programme spending will increase by 225% and the Jordanian one will increase by 130%. So we are now able to do more through our bilateral programmes.”
“I thank the hon. Lady for her party’s collaboration and for the tone and content of what she said. She mentioned that the 0.7% figure does not feature extensively in the White Paper, but the White Paper is about doing development in a different way. We are ratcheting in, through these new mechanisms, billions and billions of pounds, which makes a huge difference. In many ways, it dwarfs the difference between the 0.51% or 0.52% that we are spending at the moment, and the 0.7%. She will have seen at the time of the autumn statement last year that the Treasury estimate of when the two fiscal tests would be satisfied was 2028-29—in March, it was 2027-28. All of us hope that the two tests will be satisfied as soon as possible.”
“My right hon. Friend is right on that, and of course he was one of the 26 Conservative Members who voted not to cut the 0.7%. I hope that he will be energised by the alternative means we have found—the multipliers to ratchet in enormous amounts of money. He is right in what he says about the link between defence, development and diplomacy. When he gets a moment to read to read this White Paper, he will be enthused by the lines it is taking.”
“He will recall that at the spring meetings the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced that Britain would use its SDRs to the tune of £5.3 billion to elevate the two IMF funds that directly deal with poverty and international development.”
“If the right hon. Gentleman reads with care the chapter to which he referred, he will see that it is one of the most brilliant chapters in it—that is my biased opinion. The reason for that is that we have in Washington an extraordinary team of young and brilliant officials who have enormous influence in the World Bank, and he is a considerable expert on this area. As for the multipliers and making sure that we sweat the balance sheets of these multilateral banks to ratchet in huge amounts of more money, he will see a great deal to please him. If these reforms are implemented, as I believe they will be, driven hard by Britain through the multilateral sector, we will see a vast increase in funding. As for what he says about the SDRs, using them creatively is something we are keen to do.”
“I thank my right hon. Friend for the tremendous contribution she has made on the matters she is addressing. Chapter 5 directly addresses tackling climate change and biodiversity loss, and delivering economic transformation, and I am glad it has her approval. Chapter 3 deals with mobilising the money and what I described in my response to my right hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Dominic Raab), the former Deputy Prime Minister, as the “multipliers” and how we ratchet in private sector money. Those will make a fantastic difference and we also have to make sure that this money reaches the poorest people in the world. Britain’s role in the G7, in these international organisations, has always been to focus on the poorest people in the world. We are proud of doing that and the House would expect us to do it.”
“She will know that there has been argument about loss and damage, and a holding position has now been secured, ahead of the COP. That is very important, but loss and damage must do two things. It must get a broader spectrum of where the money is coming from, otherwise we will just be reorienting it within the international development budget and that will be robbing Peter to pay Paul—there is no sense in doing that. The other thing is that it must bring in a wider group of countries, not just the narrow OECD ones that account for aid—it must be wider than that. Those two things are required to make loss and damage work.”
“I thank the Chair of the International Development Committee and, through her, all of its members, who bring their expertise and enthusiasm to this subject with eloquence and skill. She mentions the importance of debt relief and localism, and she is absolutely right on that. She also mentions the work on atrocity prevention, which we have particularly been doing in Sudan since the crisis emerged there. That work is very important and we are finding new ways of amplifying it. What she says about biodiversity may well be true. The White Paper runs to 148 pages. If she and I had our way, it would have been longer, but we have to draw a line somewhere and I yield to no one on the importance of the point she makes about biodiversity.”
“My right hon. Friend makes a very interesting point about the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Samoa next year; I will take that away and see what we can do on the matter. Gender-based violence, for the reasons she has often said, is central to what we are doing. We cannot understand all these matters unless we see international development through the eyes of girls and women, so she is absolutely right about that. On gender-based violence, she will be well aware of the work led by my noble Friend Lord Ahmad in the other place, which he continues to do with great vigour and success.”
“We did get an extra £2.5 billion out of the Treasury to compensate for it, and he will have noticed that the figure being spent on that has been quite sharply reducing over recent months. The hon. Gentleman talked about the merger. My views on the merger before I entered Government were fairly lurid, but surely the right thing to do now is to focus on whether we can create an entity that will deliver the global public goods we all support for the 2030s. If we can, that will be building on when we had two Departments. I notice that the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy), who speaks for the official Opposition, is nodding at those remarks.”
“On the hon. Gentleman’s last point about loss and damage, I set out the position of the Government. Some progress was made against expectations a couple of weekends ago. Expanding the pool from which the money comes—the payers—perhaps in the way he suggests and trying to find a deeper pool than just the development budget is extremely important. The hon. Gentleman’s second point was about the percentage of the development budget that goes to pay the first-year costs of asylum seekers. He will know that that is absolutely part of the rules on the way in which the budget is administered. We would be asking for a change in the OECD Development Assistance Committee rules, which is very difficult to achieve, as we have to get 30 countries to agree. We decided not to do that.”
“I thank my right hon. Friend for his comments about the importance of nature and biodiversity, which are very prominent in the White Paper. He asks how civil society can access support. The section of the White Paper about the new platform, UKDev, which I hope he will read with interest, talks about engagement with civil society, but there are a number of programmes that meet his suggestion, including the UK Aid Match programme. Where good charities are using their own money, if the taxpayer puts similar amounts of money alongside that, we are getting two for one—we are getting double the results for the taxpayer’s money.”
“Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran) is right about the cultural point. To make a merger work—there is no such thing as a merger; one side wins and one side loses, as I learned many years ago in the City of London—the culture is very important. If development practitioners and experts are respected by the traditional British Foreign Office and they work together, as they have done on putting this White Paper together, that is a very great strength indeed.”
“I think the D is a good deal less silent than it was. I thank the hon. Lady for what she has said. On the immediate return of the money, she is right; that is the stated policy of the Government and, I think, of the official Opposition. On restoring the Department, I draw her attention to what the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) and the shadow Foreign Secretary, the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), have said, which is that they have an open mind on this, and they are trying to see where we get to by the time there is a general election, were they to come into government. If we can produce something that is better than the two separate Departments and delivers global public goods in the 2030s, that might well be seen by everyone as a step forward. The hon.”
“I am very glad that my hon. Friend—who is, after all, the Government’s envoy on these matters—has already read the White Paper so assiduously. She will, as she said, have noted that there is a clear commitment to do what she sets out, and I have every confidence that working with her, the Government will be able to advance that important agenda.”
“I think everyone is praying that a peace process will start as soon as possible. We need to get a political track, and as the hon. Lady will know, we are pressing for humanitarian pauses to achieve what she wants us to achieve. I provided a statement to the House last week, and indeed the week before; both went on for an hour and a half and involved 70 Members asking questions, so I do not wish to try Mr Deputy Speaker’s patience by addressing that point directly. However, in the White Paper, the hon. Lady will be able to see Britain’s commitment to humanitarian relief.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right about the importance of AMR, and we certainly aspire to be a global leader in that area. As he knows, I spoke about AMR when I was in New York earlier this year, and we are guided specifically by Sally Davies, the master of Trinity College Cambridge and former chief medical officer, who is an expert on this matter. AMR is now the world’s third biggest killer after strokes and heart attacks, and we will be prioritising it in the way that my hon. Friend suggests.”
“First, I thank the hon. Gentleman for his contribution to the White Paper, and for bringing the expertise that he deploys in the International Development Committee to bear on it. We did indeed consult the devolved Administrations; I myself had, I think, two very useful discussions with the Government of Scotland. As the hon. Gentleman knows, I share his view that the work Scotland has done in places such as Malawi is highly effective.”
“I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the work he does as chair of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy. He will know that the team that put together the White Paper looked carefully at what the WFD does, and recognised the unique contribution it makes, supported as it is across the House and in the other place. I am very glad that, following the public accountability process—which, as my hon. Friend knows, is going on at the moment—we expect to be able to substantially reinforce the funding for the WFD.”
“As the hon. Lady knows, next year, we will increase bilateral funding to Afghanistan to £151 million. We are able to do that because the budget is much more carefully targeted and is now properly cultivated to deliver results. On the subject of education and of the treatment of women and girls in Afghanistan, which is absolutely abhorrent, we do everything we can through various mechanisms, including the Afghanistan World Bank trust fund, to boost those important objectives. As the hon. Lady would expect, we focus on trying to win results with that money—which is paid by the British taxpayer—in the best way we possibly can.”
“My right hon. Friend speaks with great wisdom; from what we have heard today, her final point is clearly being achieved, which is very welcome. What she says about women’s voices being silenced and their fundamental rights being fettered is, I fear, absolutely right, and the White Paper addresses that head-on. We are finding ways of stopping impunity and calling to account those people who abuse human rights in a number of new ways that target accountability, and which I know my right hon. Friend—who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on Sudan and South Sudan—welcomes.”
“As we know, a very large number of UNRWA humanitarian workers have lost their lives, along with others, in the Gazan conflict. Any attack and any loss of life by a humanitarian worker is deeply to be regretted. Those are people who have put themselves in harm’s way for fellow members of humanity. They are unarmed and just trying to do good to their fellow citizens. On the humanitarian need overall, climate change has particularly exacerbated that, and it is of course the poorest who are hit first and hardest, as the White Paper emphasises.”
“The hon. Lady makes an extremely good point about the increase in humanitarian need—as she rightly, says, it has increased significantly—that I set out in my statement. That is why we have found £1,000 million to allocate in a budget for tackling humanitarian need next year. If she has a chance to look at the White Paper, she will see that it includes the resilience adaptation fund, which is designed to ensure that when crises take place, we can do things such as provide for greater irrigation, water retention and reservoir capacity in a drought, so that in the event that such crises take place again—which, alas, happens all too often—their impact is not as great as before. The hon. Lady asks specifically about UNRWA.”
“I anticipate, along with my colleagues, having many such discussions, and not only at COP but in other fora. My hon. Friend is entirely right that the absence of water and hygiene facilities hits girls in particular and stops many from going to school. He will know that Education Cannot Wait—an international fund strongly supported by the British taxpayer, to which we allocated £80 million earlier this year—is able directly to help people caught up in conflict in that way. We want them to go to school and they often cannot do so, for the reasons he has given, and Education Cannot Wait tries to alleviate that directly.”
“The hon. Member is right to make it clear that corruption is the cancer in international development spending. That is why we always ensure that, if there is any hint of that, we intervene immediately to stop it. It is also one of the reasons why we so seldom work directly through budget support, where we cannot track so easily the way taxpayers’ money is being spent, but allocate very directly in a way that we—and, more importantly, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact—can properly hold to account.”
“I am not remotely surprised that my hon. Friend has already read the whole paper—all 148 pages. It is two pages shorter than the White Paper produced in 2009, but I beg to suggest that it is a rather better read. On BII, we have taken the advice of the Select Committee, recognising that it could do more in the poorest and most difficult countries. BII is investing in a port in Somalia, which, as he will understand, is quite a gritty thing to do, but we will see the funding to the poorest countries from BII rise in the period to 2030 from about 38% to 50%. That is a very significant increase, and one that the Select Committee has urged us to embrace. HALO is a brilliant charity that does work far beyond just dealing with high explosives, and we give it our strong support.”
“Conflict-affected and fragile states are indeed the most difficult places in which to operate, but they are also two of the most important types of place in which to operate. The hon. Member will be interested to know that, while over half of the development budget goes to the least developed countries, something like 62% goes to fragile and conflict-affected states. There is no doubt that the Select Committee and ICAI will ensure that the focus he requests is maintained.”
“Britain has produced these clauses, and we have done the right thing on that.”