Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40
- 59)
MONDAY 15 DECEMBER 1997
SIR JOHN
KERR, KCMG, MR
PETER WESTMACOTT,
LVO, MR JOHN
KERBY, and MR
LEE BEAUMONT
MR JAMIE
MORTIMER
40. Do you know the cost maybe? Can you
tell me the cost of this whole exercise?
(Sir John Kerr) Yes. It costs, and the Foreign
and Commonwealth Office pay, £15,000 a year. They come expensive
in Kent!
41. The point I am interested in looking
at is to see the degree to which there is a significant problem.
Obviously in certain Dependent Territories there will be a significant
problem in terms of tackling crime but in others it may not be
significantly worthwhile to go to these great lengths of doing
that. Are you keeping these things under review generally?
(Sir John Kerr) Yes, I think we are.
42. Tell me about the problem you have also
had, and its implication for policing, with things that happened.
I think it is paragraph 3.14 which particularly deals with it,
talking about the Caribbean Dependent Territories and the problems
with an influx of Cuban and Haitian immigration and the implications
this has had for your resources there. Has this been significant
and do you foresee that there may be future ways in which you
will have to build in a contingency for further developments?
(Sir John Kerr) For the most part the islands
accept that these are costs that they must pay. In the case of
the Caymans, there were no costs at all to the United Kingdom.
The Caymans government paid for these British policemen who went
out. In the case of TCI and the Haitians, I cannot remember. Perhaps
somebody could remind me whether we stumped up on that.
43. It says in paragraph 3.14 at least for
the Caymans the United Kingdom provided 50 policemen for 18 days
at a cost of £½ million, borne by the Cayman Islands?
(Sir John Kerr) Paid for by the Caymans, yes.
I am not sure about the TCI. The Americans were helpful in the
case of the TCI Haitians and, indeed, allowed a lot of them to
proceed on to the United States, but I cannot remember whether
there was a cost to us. I am not sure there is a great deal we
can do in such cases. The existence of the guardship cannot really
prevent it. It may detect the risk of people moving in large numbers
in these kinds of situations, but I am not sure that there is
a great deal of advance preparation we can do to lower costs.
In the case of the Caymans there were no costs, and I am now advised
that in the case of the TCI as well there were no costs to us.
The boat people were looked after by the local government.
Mr Wardle
44. Chairman, I apologise for arriving late
but I was detained by Sussex farmers who were concerned about
their contingent liabilities. I wonder if I can begin by asking
the C&AG what happens when we come to resource accounting?
What happens about attributing values to some of these contingent
liabilities? Is it a practical proposition? Will it serve any
useful purpose? Can it be done?
(Sir John Bourn) Under resource accounting it
will be necessary to address this. If it just proves impossible
to put figures on it, it will be necessary to note in the accounts
that these liabilities exist even if it is not immediately possible
to ascribe a figure to them, but I would hope that with the year
or so that still remains assessment and consideration will enable
a figure to be given.
45. It is a very difficult task, I imagine.
Some of them will be practically unquantifiable, uninsurable risks,
to boot. Sir John, I was listening to what you were saying about
Gibraltar and bells rang in my head from long ago. What has happened
to the External Frontiers Convention so far as Gibraltar is concerned?
Does that still present a sticking point with some of our European
partners, one in particular?
(Sir John Kerr) It is still a subject of some
discussion with that partner in particular.
46. That is helpful. In that case let me
leap across the globe to Montserrat. I may have my arithmetic
slightly wrong here but looking at the numbers in the report and
the supplementary memorandum, is it really the case that it is
costing £25,000, C&AG, for a prefab building to be put
up in Montserrat?
(Mr Higgins) That is the information that we obtained
when we produced the report.
47. But even if you turned it into "Portakabin
City" it would not cost that kind of money even to get them
there?
(Mr Higgins) I cannot give you the detail but
I am aware that it is a distant place to take building materials
to, so I think the overheads and the transport costs-I imagine
others may know better than I-will be pretty severe.
48. Sir John, do you have on your team anyone
who can tell us about transporting prefab buildings in kit form
and popping them down on an island in the Caribbean? The figures
just seem high. It may be that I have done the wrong sum.
(Sir John Kerr) I do not know if I have on my
team somebody who can stand up the numbers.
49. I think do you because a note has just
appeared miraculously to your left!
(Mr Westmacott) I am not from the DfID, which
is the government department which is paying the bill, but having
had some experience of the need to provide emergency housing on
Montserrat, I would like to make a couple of comments. First of
all, that sounds a little bit higher than the roughly £18-20,000
per unit which was the last figure I heard quoted when talking
to contractors on the island. Secondly, although the number may
sound high, I must emphasise that one of the problems in trying
to provide emergency housing at short notice is that the unit
costs were that much higher than if one were able to ship the
stuff in more slowly by the cheapest method without having to
get everything there quickly. So it is probably a bit higher in
cost than it would otherwise have been.
50. The alternative to moving "Portakabin
City" into Montserrat is to move the people out, if they
will go, and, as I understand it, they are offered £2,400
plus their air fare, and assuming that is not too excessive, you
are looking at about £3,000 a person, yet we read somewhere
that £30 million has already been spent in this direction,
which suggests that of the original population of 12,000 some
10,000 have already moved and been paid. Is that calculation correct
or not?
(Mr Westmacott) There are several points there,
Chairman. First of all, the £2,400 was a payment for heads
of family resettling in the region.
51. It is heads of family?
(Mr Westmacott) Yes. The air fares were provided
instead, not as well as: the air fares were provided separately
for those choosing instead to resettle in the United Kingdom.
So that was a different cost. In terms of the overall take-up
so far, my colleague from DfID may wish to answer that but I would
like to say that we are a long way away from being down to 1,000
people left on the island.
52. That was my assumption. Then perhaps
you could take us through the supplementary memorandum by the
C&AG, paragraph 5, in which it says: "By October 1997
the UK Government had committed £45.8 million ... of which
£30 million has so far been spent." If it was only £2,400
per head of family plus air fares, how did the £30 million
get put together?
(Mr Kerby) Can I give you at least a flavour of
what that money is being spent on. If you visit the northern part
of Montserrat, almost everything you see in the way of basic infrastructure
and services that has been put up since the volcano started has
been funded from this programme. Thus, we have built an emergency
jetty, which is now the only means by which sea transport can
come in; we are funding a ferry service coming in from Antigua
every day; we are funding a helicopter service to provide an air
link; we have provided emergency generation for power; we are
upgrading water supplies; we are paying for the housing programme
that you have mentioned.
53. Let me stop you there because time is
limited. You have illustrated the point very well. So when I read
in paragraph 5, "This involved financial support of up to
£2,400 per person .... " in fact it is family head plus
the cost of air fare, etc., and then it goes on in the same paragraph
to say: "... the UK Government had committed £45.8 million
... of which £30 million has so far been spent," it
is for the larger budget?
(Mr Kerby) It is the total amount, yes.
54. I understand the point, yes. It is helpful
clarification. Can we stay with the Caribbean for a moment and
talk about drugs, a subject on which other colleagues on the Committee
have already raised points, and it may be that before I came in
the Chairman covered most of the points that I now wish to raise.
You have talked about certain tensions between, as I understand
it, the British Government and some of the governments of the
Dependent Territories. Is there any inter-island rivalry, as it
were, about managing the fight against drug trafficking?
(Sir John Kerr) I think if there is a rivalry
it is as much between neighbouring islands as among the Caribbean
Dependent Territories. It is probably the case that the fight
against drugs is taken less seriously in some independent Caribbean
countries than it is in the British Caribbean Dependent Territories.
The picture I was describing earlier, Mr Wardle, I think it is
quite encouraging the extent to which the governments of the Dependent
Territories see their interests as lying on the side of being
seen to be clean. I think that is the case in all five of the
Caribbean Dependent Territories and, of course, it is the case
in Bermuda, too.
55. Because presumably the temptation for
some people in some of those Territories to cash in on what looks
to be a lucrative business is considerable? Presumably there must
be all sorts of ancillary jobs that can be put on offer to people
who help move the product through the island and on, presumably
in the direction of the United States?
(Sir John Kerr) I think 50 per cent. is heading
for Europe, 400 tonnes a year coming through the Caribbean.
56. So far as the local drug problems in
the Territories themselves are concerned, has there been a growth
of hard drugs or is it predominantly ganja, cannabis?
(Sir John Kerr) I am afraid I really do not know
the answer to that.
57. Presumably the money is not there?
(Sir John Kerr) The trafficking is cocaine. The
trafficking is the hard stuff, going through the Caribbean from
Central and South America, heading partly for North America, partly
for Europe.
58. Did I understand you to say earlier,
Sir John, that the co- operation of the American end at Miami
is working well? Is that well received by these smaller islands,
these Dependent Territories? Are they prepared to work closely?
What actually happens? Is it information that is passed down,
"These people may be passing through your waters, on your
island, in the next month"? How does it actually work?
(Sir John Kerr) Our effort has been principally
to equip law enforcement agencies on the islands with real-time
intelligence by secure means-nobody else can hear it reaching
them-when we see a threat in their area. We believe that in most
cases they will actively try and do something about that intelligence.
Moreover, if one were to be really cynical, one would say that
they know that we have that intelligence and that the United States
has it, too, so they know that what happens to that intelligence
is being observed. I am not saying this is plausible but supposing
nothing happened to that intelligence, we would still be keeping
an eye on the ship in question or the people in question and would
hope to pick them up somewhere further down the food chain, but
the fact is that I do not feel cynical about this. I feel that
the island governments do believe that it is in their interests
to try and deal with the threat and be seen to deal with the threat.
Remember that for many of them the American tourist trade is very
important indeed, and the reputation they have compared to the
reputation of alternative resorts like the Dutch Antilles or Jamaica,
which are attractive to the American tourist, is very important
to their economies.
59. You mentioned the north coast of Jamaica
a little earlier and if the Chairman will allow me the swiftest
reminiscence, when I was a little younger I was held up at gunpoint
on an island which I have known most of my life and have worked
there and loved, by somebody high on drugs on the north coast
of Jamaica. I am pleased to say he merely hit me with the wrong
end of his handgun but a week later he tried to rob a bank in
the same part of town and the police shot him dead. So there we
are. I am here to be able to tell you that tale, which has absolutely
nothing to do with what is going on and I will be ruled out of
order. In the islands is it a big local industry? Are the "Yardies"
on the island of Jamaica operating in some of these Dependent
Territories in some of the smaller islands?
(Sir John Kerr) No, the problem is trafficking.
The problem is not penetration and running of the economy by such
people. The problem is through trade which touches the DTs or
goes through DT territorial waters.
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