Examination of witnesses (Questions 80
- 99)
TUESDAY 28 APRIL 1998
MR J VEREKER,
MR R MANNING
and MR G STEGMANN
80. How much of it? I am trying to get a
feeling for how much we are giving direct government to government
support to Indonesia and how much is going to independent NGOs.
(Mr Manning) We will have to give you a figure
for what the spending is on NGOs in Indonesia[12]
but it will be of pretty modest proportion of the total because
the total is dominated by ATP projects, signed up over many past
years and the bulk of the expenditure you are seeing in the table
at the back of this is in respect of either the ATP or in respect
of technical cooperation projects with Indonesian government authorities.
The programme is very substantially in the past through those
channels. What is new about it is this move towards working directly
with NGOs in East Timor, working directly with trade unions.
81. Do you have any idea of percentage?
Is it 50 per cent by government, 60 per cent, 70 per cent?
(Mr Manning) Historically it has been very predominantly
with government. Because the ATP expenditure will run on for years
because of the way the ATP was financed, the figures we produce
year by year will keep appearing to have a high proportion of
work directly with the Indonesian Government. Much of that will
reflect decisions taken over the last ten years.
Ann Clwyd
82. Looking at the table on page 79 on bilateral
aid by region, could you tell us how you decide the distribution
of resources between the various regions? What is the process?
(Mr Vereker) The process starts from the aggregate
available to the development assistance programme which in a normal
year derives from the public spending discussion among Ministers,
although in the first two years of the new Government derives
of course from inherited plans which the new Government decided
not significantly to change. I say "not significantly to
change" because there is some complexity about rolling over
money between one year and the other. We start from that aggregate
figure and there is then a resource allocation process which looks
at the existing plans, looks at the overarching strategy, looks
at the opportunities developed in the course of country strategy
papers, engages other government departments and then puts a product
to the Secretary of State for her approval and then publication
here.
83. How do you decide which programme and
projects to support in a particular region?
(Mr Vereker) In the course of this process we
do not decide on particular projects. We are making allocations
typically to a country department: as it might be DFID East Africa,
which embraces Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, has a single allocation,
DFID South Africa has a single allocation. We are looking very
largely at aggregate priorities and whether we are giving enough
to Africa will be a key question. One of the things that I hope
you will see, not so much from this table but from Table 3, which
shows our plans for the current year, is the way in which the
Prime Minister's commitment at Denver to increase by 50 per cent
our commitments to basic health, primary health care and clean
water by 50 per cent is already being implemented with a substantial
increase in the amount available for Africa.
84. Can you give us a breakdown, not now
possibly, of the money which will be spent in 1998-99 in China,
Indonesia and Nigeria plus ATP projects?
(Mr Vereker) I am just pausing because it is always
difficult to predict at the beginning of the year how much we
are going to spend on a particular country at the end of the year.
There is a variety of factors which will affect that. China, Indonesia
and Nigeria and disaggregating ATP projects from China and Indonesia;
there are none in Nigeria. We can come up with something. We will
do our best.
Dr Tonge
85. I want to go back briefly to the British
Council. You spend £30 million a year on the British Council.
How does that directly contribute to poverty development? Who
is it who is accountable for the expenditure on the British Council?
Is if the FCO or is it DFID?
(Mr Vereker) The arrangements for funding the
British Council are as follows. We provide just over £30
million at present as grant in aid to the British Council's core
budget. The Foreign Office provide roughly three times that amount
to the British Council's core budget. As a result, the British
Council as a non-governmental organisation has two sponsor departments
but one of them is three times more important than the other and
although of course I account for the funds for which I am responsible
and give to the British Council the lead responsibility for the
British Council as an institution, as an NGO and in its relation
to the Government, rests with my colleague, Sir John Kerr, the
Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office.
86. That is as clear as mud.
(Mr Vereker) Can you elaborate what you are after?
87. I am very fond of the British Council
as an organisation but I wonder when the money comes out of DFID
budget how it actually contributes towards the eradication of
poverty which is your major aim.
(Mr Vereker) In the course of the comprehensive
spending review, which within our Department is called the departmental
spending review, which in its turn is feeding into the public
spending process, the British Council is among the areas that
we and our Ministers have been looking at. One of the reasons
we have been looking at it is precisely for the reason you suggest,
to ask ourselves whether we are satisfied that what it is doing
is consistent with our overarching aim. We have a pretty good
idea, because of our close and productive relationship with the
British Council, what they are doing with the money. Undeniably
that question is there and the most I can say to the Committee
at this stage is that Ministers are still considering it.
Mr Rowe
88. I am a great friend of the British Council;
I think they are an admirable organisation in many respects. I
just wondered to what extent your Department feels any responsibility
for ensuring that the staff in the British Council who have development
responsibilities are trained to evaluate and to improve the performance
of that bit of their sponsorship.
(Mr Vereker) I too have to declare an interest
in that I am a member of the board of the British Council. In
that capacity I have some collective responsibility for all the
Council's activities. However, the Council is a separate organisation
both from my Department and from the Foreign Office. It is separately
managed by a director general and it is the director general and
his board of management who are responsible for ensuring that
the staff with the Council are appropriately trained. We do have
another relationship as a government department with the British
Council in that we contract with them for management services
provided by the Council to the aid programme. In that capacity
we will certainly ask ourselves the question: does the team which
is working with us from the British Council have the skills and
experience necessary to do this bit of the aid programme? This
contracting process over recent years has increasingly been a
competitive one in which there are competitors to the British
Council out there in the country, many of them growing up as a
result of the competition policy and the Council are increasingly
aware of the need to ensure that their staff are appropriately
skilled and trained.
Ann Clwyd
89. In the past I have visited projects
which have been managed on your behalf by the British Council
and had praise for some of them and criticism for others. One
of the criticisms was that sometimes British Council staff are
located a long way from the projects which they are supposed to
be supervising. I think particularly of India where they were
many thousands of miles away from some of the projects. I wondered
whether much has been done to sharpen up their management supervision
of some of these projects.
(Mr Vereker) There is quite an array of feedback
to the British Council from our programme managers; where they
are contracted to us they will know whether we are satisfied or
not with their performance on a particular project. I am not familiar
with the particular case although Mr Manning is. In all fairness
I would repeat the point I made earlier on in my evidence which
is that we are working in quite a difficult business, often in
areas which are remote, in an institutional environment which
is fragile. It is not easy to operate effectively and we cannot
always blame the vehicle we are using.
90. There were some projects I saw where
I was quite ashamed to think that Britain was involved with them.
I am just asking how you have tightened up the practices to ensure
that the British Council staff acting on our behalf actually do
manage the project properly.
(Mr Manning) There has been quite a significant
shift since the period you refer to, not least because you saw
a situation in which the British Council effectively had a monopoly
of managing aid projects in certain sectors in India. We are now
in a situation where the British Council is expected to compete
for most of its business of this kind and my own perception is
that the Council has responded rather well to that challenge and
that the Council has become rather sharper and better focused
as a result.
91. Are there any instances where you have
actually divested the British Council of control of a project
because you are dissatisfied?
(Mr Manning) Certainly; not during the course
of a project but when we got to a new phase there have certainly
been cases where the British Council did one phase and somebody
else has done another.
Dr Tonge
92. In 1996-97 £167 million was actually
spent on bilateral aid through the UK NGOs. Where are we told
what the figure is going to be for next year? Pages 55 and 56.
I do not see where the figure is for next year.
(Mr Vereker) The answer is that you are not told
what the figure for next year will be. There are two reasons for
that. One is that the format of this report does not lend itself
to forecasting detailed breakdown in the future. The other one,
perhaps more importantly, is that we are currently looking afresh
at our support for the development of civil society more widely
and the NGOs in the traditional sense of British development are
only a part, a very important and effective part but only a part,
of that wider effort to develop civil society. Our Secretary of
State is very anxious that we ensure that as well as using NGOs
for their skills and experience, project management, humanitarian
work in our programmes abroad, we also develop local civil society
organisations, both NGOs and civil society more widely and that
we are alert to two possible dangers. One that excessive use of
western/ northern NGOs could inhibit development of local NGOs,
local civil society, and the other that even by supporting local
organisations we might be inhibiting the development of community
effort. We are only beginning to scratch the surface of understanding
these dynamics within developing countries. We announced on 25
February a process of review and consultation of this whole area
which we are now taking forward. We hope to publish a consultation
paper as a further illustration of the openness with which we
operate in the course of May and allow a little time for people
to respond saying what they think about it. For that reason I
suspect that my Secretary of State would want me to say that we
should not really be picking out of this report and highlighting
and praising ourselves for the amount of money we spend on NGOs.
It is a subset of a much more important issue.
93. This financial year has started already
so you have no idea how much you are going to be spending on NGOs
as from 1 April this year.
(Mr Vereker) I dare say we could take a shot at
aggregating how much we are going to spend in various categories
but a very substantial part in the past has been in response to
humanitarian emergencies. Mr Canavan started this session by asking
about Sudan. I cannot predict whether Sudan will develop in such
a way that we might make large allocations to NGOs working in
the south of Sudan; we might.
94. So that £167 million included all
the emergency aid you had to throw at various parts of the world
during that year.
(Mr Vereker) Yes, it does. It includes all the
humanitarian operations, most of which go through NGOs.
Mr Grant: Surely there
must be an overall budget figure allocated for aid.
Dr Tonge: Without
including emergency aid.
Mr Grant: Is there
not?
Mr Canavan
95. On page 56 you refer to the Joint Funding
Scheme and Volunteer Programme.
(Mr Vereker) We have separate allocations for
the volunteer programmes which we have not yet announced to the
volunteer societies.
96. When will they be announced?
(Mr Vereker) We have a separate allocation for
the Joint Funding Scheme. It is very difficult to say how much
we will spend on emergency aid. We do not manage the NGO budget
as a whole, we manage individual elements of it. There is no particular
rationale to seeing the NGO budget in that way.
Mrs Kingham
97. I should like to question how you decide
which NGOs you are going to be working with. I do welcome what
you have said about trying to strengthen local NGOs and local
civil society because I strongly believe there are some really
excellent NGOs, particularly working out of Britain; there are
also some who do a lot more harm than good. I have been a bit
disturbed. I was a little disturbed in our visit to east Africa
to see a fair amount of emphasis being put on some quite evangelical
Christian NGOs who obviously have a different agenda, going beyond
development issues I would suggest. A code of conduct has been
drawn up by a lot of NGOs about how they operate. I should like
to know what criteria you use to select which NGOs are getting
our development money.
(Mr Vereker) There is a handful of NGOs to whom
we make core grants for their budgets because they are or have
become or need to be heavily dependent on us.
98. Is it possible to have a list of which
NGOs are supported and with how much?
(Mr Vereker) Yes, indeed.[13]
A list of those who receive a core budget regularly, by all means.
It is a short list and it is dominated by the volunteer sending
agencies. For instance we provide, I would guess, round about
70 per cent of VSO's core budget. They are very good and very
effective. The Joint Funding Scheme operates on a competitive
basis. There is a budget held by a programme manager who receives
proposals from NGOs who provide some of their own resources, seek
some of our resources, have a proposal for operating in a particular
area for a particular purpose. That is competitive. We decide
it on the basis of taking professional advice from our technical
advisers and our own core of knowledge about the effectiveness
of that particular NGO. You are quite right and it is extremely
important that in each case there is a code of practice and a
standard contract which requires the kind of things you would
expect in terms of reporting back to us and evaluation of effectiveness
at the end.
99. What about ethos? Does that come in
to it anywhere?
(Mr Vereker) We do not support NGOs for the purpose
of proselytising a particular religion. We would not do that.
We might be a bit nervous of the kind of case you have mentioned
if we supported an NGO for the purpose of development and there
was in practice a particular religious ethos being driven on the
back of it. These are delicate areas and would have to be handled
case by case.
12 See Evidence, p. 25. Back
13
See Evidence, pp. 26-28. Back
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