Foreign Aid - How Can it Help the UK?
There has been enormous controversy over both the size of the Foreign Aid Budget at £11.5bn per year and over the effective closure in 2014 of the nationwide Remploy business that employed around 2,150 mainly disabled workers at a total cost of approximately £25,000 per employee per year.
This post is about the malignancy that blights our political ruling elite and about its lack of imagination. It is about my radical suggestion for using the foreign aid budget in a very different way, a way that will help to maximise the physical aid reaching those in greatest need overseas, minimise corrupt officials and individuals in countries receiving kick-backs or skim-offs from UK aid and one that will make a vast contribution to employment levels and the true regeneration of some of the UK's most economically deprived communities.
Remploy was originally established under the terms of the Disabled Persons (Employment) Act 1944, to directly employ disabled persons in specialised factories. It opened its first factory in 1946. Over the following decades it established a network of 83 factories across the UK making a wide variety of products. These were organised into a number of sub-businesses, such as Remploy e-cycle, which dealt with the safe disposal and re-cycling of electrical appliances. In the 2000's it also moved into service businesses, such as monitoring CCTV images.
In the later years of Blair's Labour Government, at the start of the 21st century, Remploy underwent a major change to its operation, and branched out into providing general employment assistance for disabled people, and others with barriers to employment. After the closure of most Remploy factories, the provision of these assistance services became Remploy's principal purpose.
In 2009/10 Remploy placed over 10,500 people into jobs across a range of sectors. In 2009 Remploy was selected as a prime- and sub-contractor to deliver the then Government's Flexible New Deal contract, which aimed to help the long term unemployed back into work. After the change in government, a year later, it became a sub contractor in the Coalition Government's Work Programme.
Further Coalition Government changes resulted in the effective closure of the remaining factories. Remploy had employed 2150 people at a total annual cost of £25,000 per employee (most earning between £7000 and £8000). A substantial proportion of its former employees are now unemployed, on benefits and struggling to enter the mainstream employment market.
Throughout my career, I have worked on some of the most deprived areas of the country where unemployment is stubbornly high, household incomes very low and where the lack of hope provides the conditions for a variety of social problems to grow deep roots. I remember a well meaning Labour City Council borrowing money from the then Conservative government under the Estate Action Programme and carrying out some modernisation and repair work to its housing stock on the most deprived estate in the City. I remember thinking at the time that although repointing the ridge tiles was necessary repair work (and one that my profession involves me in), was that really the best use of new money on an estate with so many problems? Would not the millions being spent have been better utilised providing a factory right in the centre of the estate where local unemployed people are trained and given work on a living wage making (for example) artificial limbs for land mine victims in former war torn-countries? A number of the workers could be given the chance each year to visit the people who they have helped to see the positive difference their work had made to the lives of others. By using public funds to run the factory, the following would be achieved:
Provide structure and purpose to the lives of the employees
Increase income levels in the locality
Transform the lives of the people receiving the artificial limbs
It is important at this stage for me to emphasise that I am in no way proposing that the whole or even largest part of the foreign aid budget is spent on subsidising related employment and production in the UK. I understand that a crucial function of foreign aid is to help people in need to help themselves so that they can prosper independently of future aid. However, it remains the case that a significant proportion of the foreign aid budget is used like a slush fund by our political ruling class to exert leverage on potential recipient countries as an extension of the UK's foreign policy. This is an outrage to the principle of foreign aid and has no place in an honest effort to help the most needy people in the world. Equally, siphoning off money, food or materials, by corrupt officials, groups or individuals especially in conflict zones is deplorable and more effort should be made to design it out of our system of aid.
I am proposing that the whole basis of foreign aid distribution has a root and branch reform. A part of that should be to re-introduce a Remploy type manufacturing model drawing on the considerable skill and knowledge base that Remploy offered. It could be tasked with manufacturing emergency shelters, water wells, pumps, composting toilets and all manner of other items needed in crisis situations around the world. The business could support a logistic operation to move materials from the point of manufacture to the point of use overseas.
As an illustration, if 25% of the existing foreign aid budget was used in this way for UK based manufacturing employment, up to 115,000 jobs could be created in the centre of the UK's areas of greatest deprivation. This could be a game changer and a way of providing a direct benefit to the donor countries most needy while helping needy people oversees.
This is only floated as a sketchy policy idea and hope that one day that it is examined in more detail by our political parties and put to work in some form. The benefits to our own people and those that need our help abroad could be huge.
