The International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act 2015: Legislative Spending Targets, Poverty Alleviation and Aid Scrutiny
| Published date | 01 July 2016 |
| Author | Ambreena Manji |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12204 |
| Date | 01 July 2016 |
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LEGISLATION
The International Development (Official Development
Assistance Target) Act 2015: Legislative Spending
Targets, Poverty Alleviation and Aid Scrutiny
Ambreena Manji∗
With the enactment of the International Development (Official DevelopmentAssistance Target)
Act 2015, the United Kingdom has enshrined an aid target in law. It is now under a legal duty
to spend 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) each year on aid. This article assesses the
implications of enshrining a spending target for development assistance in law. It argues that
commentators have focused their analyses too narrowly on the legal target and that it is in
fact the mechanisms for scrutinising development assistance contained in section 5 of the new
Act that will be important in future. This is because judicial scrutiny of aid spending is a
remote possibility as a result of the International Development Act 2002. The article provides
an analysis of the new legislation in the context of the UK’s now detailed legislative framework
for international development aid and concludes that this framework is far from satisfactory.
‘Let our debate today be a message that there can be hope for the future, enshrined
in law.’ Gordon Brown, Second Reading, International Development (Official
Development Assistance Target) Bill, 12 September 2014.
‘ . . . as a 0.7% donor, the stakes for UK development assistance have never been
higher.’ Chief Commissioner of the Independent Commission on Aid Impact, 1
July 2015.
INTRODUCTION
On 26 March 2015, following its introduction as a Private Member’s Bill, the
House of Commons passed the International Development (Official Devel-
opment Assistance Target) Act 2015 (the ODAT Act).1The Act commits the
United Kingdom to spending 0.7 percent of Gross National Income (GNI)
on aid each year.2The UK had in fact reached this target, for the first time,
in 2013 when it disbursed an estimated £11.4 billion (0.72 percent of GNI)
∗Professor of Land Law and Development, CardiffLaw School. I am grateful to Gordon Cumming,
John Harrington, Urfan Khaliq, John McEldowney,Rachel Minto and Stijn Smismans for discussing
aspects of this article with me as it developed and to Daniel Cullen for invaluable research assistance.
1 Bill 14 of 2014-2015.
2 Gross National Income (GNI) is a measure which includes the value of goods and services
produced by residents of a country, regardless of whether the goods and services are produced
C2016 The Author.The Moder n Law Review C2016 The Modern Law Review Limited. (2016) 79(4) MLR 655–677
Published by John Wiley& Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
The International Development Act 2015
in aid.3The enactment of the ODAT Act means that the UK now has a legal
duty to meet this target every year.
What are the implications of enshrining a target for international develop-
ment assistance in law? This article takes as its starting point the Institute for
Government’s (IFG) observation that the relatively recent move to enshrine
targets in law raises ‘important issues about the relations between the executive
and the legislature and the executive and the judiciary.’4As the IFG points
out, this is ‘a development which had not been subjected to much scrutiny
and discussion either within government or more widely.’5Examples of targets
enshrined in law include a target to eliminate fuel poverty contained in the
Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act 2000; a target to reduce child
poverty contained in the Child Poverty Act 2010; and a climate change target
is the budget surplus law recently mooted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer,7
as part of a growing debate in the UK and more widely in the Eurozone on
enshrining fiscal policy in law.8The recent announcement by former defence
minister, Sir Gerald Howarth, that he will introduce a Private Members Bill
to guarantee two percent of GNI on defence spending is further evidence of
the growing importance of legislative targets.9There is however an important
distinction between the fuel poverty, child poverty and climate change targets,
on one hand, and the ODAT target and proposed defence spending target on
the other. Whilst the former may be described as policy targets, the ODAT Act
and the proposed defence spending bill are spending targets. Taken together,
these examples suggest that the concerns of this article are of relevance beyond
the immediate topic of development aid.
This article will explore the legislated target for development assistance set
out in the ODAT Act. It will ask: what is the purpose of this legislated target
and how is it likely to work in practice? Is the target likely to be an effective
mechanism for governing aid spending? Related to this, what is the framework
in the country or not. It differs from Gross Domestic Product which measures output within a
country’s borders.
3 To put this figure in context, in 1997 when the Labour Government came to power, spending
on development aid was 0.27% of GNI (£2 billion).
4 J. Rutter and W. Knighton, ‘Legislated policy targets: commitment device, political gesture
or constitutional outrage?’ Institute for Government briefing paper, August 2012 at http://
www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/Legislated%20policy%
20targets%20final.pdf (last accessed 18 August 2015).
5ibid.
6 Relatedly, the ongoing failure by the United Kingdom since 2010 to seek compliance in
certain zones with the limits for nitrogen dioxide levels set by European law under Direc-
tive 2008/50/EC was recently challenged before the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court
unanimously ordered that the government must submit new air quality plans to the European
Commission no later than 31 December 2015. See ClientEarth vThe Secretary of State for the
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs [2015] UKSC 28.
7 C. Giles and G. Parker, ‘Osborne seeks to secure his legacy with budget surplus law’ Financial
Times 10 June 2015.
8 J. McEldowney, ‘Debt limits in German constitutional law: A UK perspective’ in W. Ringer
and P. M. Huber, Legal Challenges in the Global Financial Crisis: Bailouts, the Euro and Regulation
(Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2013) 167.
9 See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-33265679 (last accessed 18 August 2015).
656 C2016 The Author. The Modern Law Review C2016 The Modern Law Review Limited.
(2016) 79(4) MLR 655–677
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