Commonwealth Development Corporation Bill

• Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)

   

   
  On behalf of other members of the Select Committee, I inform the House that many of them are abroad on a visit to the middle east but would have spoken in the debate had they been here. It would be wrong for me to indicate how they would have spoken or whether, like me, they support the Bill, but I will put on the record one or two comments previously made by members of the Committee. As long ago as 2011, my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) said in a debate on the CDC:

  “It is extremely important that the Government should continue to support CDC.”—[Official Report, 14 July 2011; Vol. 531, c. 169WH.]

  An IDC report on jobs and livelihood in the last Parliament stated:

  “We are encouraged that CDC has followed our recommendations and has refocused on job creation.”

  A final Select Committee example is a recent report on the sustainable development goals, which stated:

  “The Government must ensure that the work it carries out to encourage private sector investment, through CDC…is focused on developing and fragile states”.​

  It went on to mention

  “a positive impact on the achievement of the SDGs”,

  which the CDC had the potential to achieve. It was interesting to note that in response the Government stated:

  “CDC’s mandate is aligned with achievement of the Goals”.

  Before I touch on a few of my prepared remarks, I would like to deal with some of comments made by another member of our Select Committee, the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty). He mentioned his concerns about the effectiveness, the poverty focus and the coherence of the CDC’s work, and I would like to respond to these.

  The hon. Gentleman said that there should be more emphasis on health and education. However, the CDC’s development impact is amplified by the billions of pounds in local taxes that are generated by the companies it invests in. These help to support the public services such as health and education in developing countries. Over the past three years alone, these companies have generated over £7 billion-worth of local tax revenue. It is important to remember the impact that these taxes can have on those kinds of essential services.

  The hon. Gentleman spoke about coherence, and he and others have mentioned transparency, but DFID works very closely with the CDC to ensure that it is at the forefront of global standards of transparency in development impact. Information about all the CDC’s investments is available on a comprehensive database on its website, with details of the name and location of every investment in the portfolio. I am sure that further information would be made available if members of the Select Committee requested it. If DFID is working, as we know it is, with the CDC on a new results framework, this will result in an even better capture of the broader impact of investments on development—even beyond job creation and tax revenue generated.

  Finally, the hon. Gentleman raised his concerns about investment by the CDC in a private, fee-paying hospital in India, stating that this might be at odds with DFID’s general approach towards the expenditure of UK aid. I have to say, however, that I clearly remember the Select Committee visiting a private, fee-paying school in Africa not so long ago, and Committee members agreed that DFID’s support for that school was, in fact, well spent, particularly when there was no other option for children in that area to obtain an education. I believe these issues need to be looked at in context, and I am not so sure that support for this hospital is so out of line with DFID’s general approach.

• Stephen Doughty

  
  The hon. Lady raises the issue of private fee-paying education and health. The issue is about where we focus our efforts. Does she not accept that if we continue to support the expansion of private healthcare and education as opposed to supporting public systems that enable free access to healthcare and education, we will effectively supplant countries’ ability to provide national healthcare and education systems that support all their citizens, including the poorest?

• Fiona Bruce

  
  As with so many of these cases, it is not an either/or. It is often both when the need is clearly there and the money can be well spent.​

  I shall move on to my few prepared remarks about the Bill. I absolutely support the Bill and speak in favour of it. It is essential to look at how to support capital investment in countries where there is a paucity of it. A 2014 report from the UN Conference on Trade and Development calculated a £2.5 trillion annual investment gap in key sustainable development sectors, so the CDC has a very important role to play. It is important to remember that the Bill will allow DFID and the British people, as the CDC’s motto states, “to do good without losing money” on an even greater scale than hitherto. I cannot believe that anyone, even aid sceptics, could really object to that.

  The NAO report, published yesterday, chronicles the many positive steps that the CDC has taken, and the many improvements that it has made. We have heard many references to the report. It says that through

  “tighter cost control, strengthened corporate governance and closer alignment with the Department’s objectives, CDC now has an efficient and economic operating model.”

  This morning I spoke to NAO officers who had produced the report over eight months and had visited many projects, including some in Africa. They said that DFID now had a really good grip on the CDC’s work, that there were good lines of communication between the CDC and DFID, and that DIFD’s in-country know-how was being utilised, while it was rightly not interfering in day-to-day management. They identified several cases of CDC investments in areas where the private sector would not have initially dared to go, but three years later private sector money had come in. Indeed, in several instances they saw the results of what they described as “catalytic” investments. They said of the 13 or 14 funds they had inspected in Africa that, with one exception, they were “transformational”. I think that we have a really positive report on which to act.

  Of course, there are views about previous investments, but I think it encouraging that 98% of investments are now in Africa and south-east Asia and 82% are in one of the seven priority sectors identified in DFID’s key objectives, which were devised in 2012 following the excellent review conducted by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell).

  Without further ado, I shall end my speech, although there is much more that I would like to say in praise of the CDC
  .