Stephen Williams' views on global poverty

The UK has a policy of non-conditionality on aid and debt-relief that it gives bilaterally and the Liberal Democrats were pleased to hear the announcement in September 2006 that the British Government would withhold £50 million of funding from the World Bank until it removed harmful conditions. Following a further report into the Bank's use of conditions, the government subsequently released the funds because it believed the Bank had made significant improvements to its practices. However, the decision to withhold these funds has set an important precedent and has shown that by taking strong action the UK government can influence the behaviour of international institutions such as the World Bank.

It is important to note that certain conditions will always be necessary to ensure that aid is reaching where it needs to, but these conditions must not be to the detriment of the developing nation involved. Conditions ought to be designed to improve transparency, accountability and aid effectiveness, not to force economic liberalisation and controversial privatisation programmes in developing countries. We support this form of checks and balances and especially where they are exercised by local people.

Violent conflict is an everyday reality for millions of the world's most vulnerable people and it continues to hamper efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals. We believe that access to justice and security should be treated as rights in the same way as access to health and education. We support growing efforts by the Department of International Development to tackle the causes of conflict and help to establish post-conflict reconciliation. However, we do not believe that aid money should be used for arms or weaponry of any kind.

We are always reluctant to withhold funds from multilateral institutions but we supported the strong stance taken by Hilary Benn and welcome the positive effect that this had on World Bank practices. And while the Government now accepts World Bank and IMF claims that they have changed and improved their attitudes on conditionality in fiscal and budgetary matters since the damaging days of forced privatisation and economic liberalisation, Liberal Democrats believe that the government must continue to monitor the World Bank's programmes to ensure that it lives up to the standards we expect. If cases arise where the Bank appears to be derogating from those standards, we would support the Government in withholding further funds.

Having said that, my Party and I were deeply disappointed by the feeble outcome at the Copenhagen climate summit and will continue to push for an ambitious international agreement which delivers the $160bn needed by developing countries to deal with climate change. We are the only party to commit to providing this funding on top of existing aid pledges. The Liberal Democrats have long led the debate on development polices among the main political parties. We were the first party to support the 0.7% target for aid spending and we are the only party committed to provide climate change funding to developing countries above and beyond current aid spending.

We recognise the importance of improving taxation and transparency and tackling corruption in the developing world. In our recent policy paper, 'Development in a Downturn', we set out plans to reform international financing systems by cracking down on tax havens, improving transparency and tackling corruption - particularly by making it harder for western banks and financial institutions to facilitate that corruption.

My Liberal Democrat colleague, Michael Moore MP, our Party's spokesman for International Development, has recently said:

"In a world of enormous disparities of wealth and life experience, we clearly have huge moral responsibilities to provide official development assistance. However, in a world that is increasingly globalised and interdependent, and where the consequences of poverty, conflict and climate change affect all of us, there is also a clear national interest in supporting developing countries as they tackle challenges of an unprecedented nature and scale"

I have recently been considering the 'Robin Hood Tax', a suggested measure to raise funds to tackle issues such as poverty by implementing a tax of 0.05% on certain banking transactions. I think that the concept of a financial transaction tax is a good idea and it is something which my Liberal Democrat colleagues and I would be happy to pursue. I am told that it would be technically possible to levy a small transaction tax on sterling transactions alone; however, I believe it would be much better to have a common approach by leading financial centres including the US, German, French and Swiss governments. The proceeds from a banking tax could provide a modest source of revenue but there are still some technical questions that need to be answered.

While the global recession has affected many here in the UK, the effects on developing countries have been even more severe - forcing 100 million people back into extreme poverty (defined as less than $1.25 per day). This comes in the wake of the recent food and fuel crises, which had already pushed 150 million back into poverty. Even prior to the global recession, the international community, and particularly the G8, failed to help developing countries and repeatedly broke its aid promises. This is why we are committed to supporting developing countries at this crucial time, although we are very conscious of budgetary pressures here in the UK.

Indeed, at our most recent party Conference we debated the issues affecting the developing world in the economic downturn and passed a motion which reiterated our commitment to meet the 0.7% aid target by 2013 and set out our support for additional measures to assist developing countries including, for example, reform of the international financial architecture to end illicit and corrupt capital flows from developing countries.