Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80
- 99)
TUESDAY 9 MAY 2000
SIR JOHN
VEREKER, MR
BARRIE IRETON
AND MR
PETER FREEMAN
Mr Robathan
80. May I first apologise for being called out
when you came in. You mentioned the fact that you are not responsible
for everything. We accept that entirely, Sir John. If we are going
to talk about having proper holistic government, and you mentioned
Whitehall departments, we had a Minister from DTI who said that
the question of human rights had not even been raised with them
over the Ilisu Dam. Surely who else? If not you, who?
(Sir John Vereker) I do not think I can answer that
question.
81. That is a fair answer then.
(Sir John Vereker) Here is an issue which, as I understand
it, at present does not involve this Government.
82. We are talking about ECGD cover.
(Sir John Vereker) If it is ECGD then it is a matter
for them, not for me.
Chairman: I think Sir John is correct
so let us move on.
Mr Rowe
83. The simple question is, could we make sure
that the country reports have a standard set of statistics at
the beginning, of the population and so on, because some of them
do not and Montserrat is the one that sticks in my mind where
it would be difficult to discover a single person living there.
If we could it would be very useful to have a standard first page
which stated the size of the country, the number of people and
so on.
(Mr Ireton) It is in annex 1 of the country strategy
papers in fact.
84. I am sure it was an error.
(Sir John Vereker) I think that we took a decision
some time ago — correct me if I am wrong, Mr Freeman, —
that although the country strategy papers, as they are discussed
in DFID, contain a sheet of data, we were not going to publish
the sheet of data because the data was so awful.
(Mr Ireton) There is an element of that.
(Sir John Vereker) The truth is that we were ashamed
at the fact that frequently we were producing population data
that was five years old and GNP data that was several years old.
I entirely appreciate what you are after but getting it on a consistent
and up to date basis is quite a difficult effort.
Mr Worthington
85. I want to make sure we are absolutely clear
about the implications of what you have been saying about that
dam in Turkey. I have been under the assumption that your views
are sought on ECGD issues so as to put in a human rights perspective.
If I have understood you correctly, you do not give any views,
unless it is a development issue, for the poorest countries in
the world which Turkey is not. There is a gap here. If we are
having joined-up government no-one is speaking for this Government
on human rights issues, no matter how many tens of thousands of
people may be dispossessed of their land, their property, in a
country like Turkey. That is correct, is it not?
(Sir John Vereker) I come back to what I said to the
Committee earlier, which is that Turkey, although technically
a country with which we have had a minuscule relationship, an
OECD member, cannot in any real sense be regarded as a significant
aid recipient or a country about which my Department is expected
to know. Realistically, if ECGD are looking for advice on human
rights on Turkey they would look to their ministers and their
ministers to the Foreign Office. I do not want to be unjoined-up
about this but I think probably it would be different if this
were Malawi, a country massively dependent on British bilateral
assistance, where we have large numbers of staff, where we pretend
to know quite a lot about the country. I would be hard put to
tell you who in my Department deals with Turkey.
86. But the point is we have found out something
that is malfunctioning. When we asked the Trade Minister about
that dam we could not believe that DFID had not commented on this
matter. This is something, would you agree, which has got to be
cleared up? Either your perception is right, that you should not
be commenting on that, in which case who is going to comment on
a major human rights issue, or your remit should be altered. At
the moment there is not clarity; is that right?
(Sir John Vereker) I am pretty clear about this. I
do not think we should bite off more than we can chew, and I repeat
that we do not pretend to know much about Turkey. It is not a
country with which we have any significant relationship and I
think there is clarity. The responsibility for advising ministers
about human rights in Turkey rests with the Foreign Office.
Chairman: The Committee really will have
to limit themselves if we are going to get through this set of
questions on the Departmental Report. Can I ask a general question,
Sir John? How satisfied are you that with DFID's performance during
this year in respect of the targets you have set for yourselves
and the results of your work to the end of the reporting period?
What are the priority areas, having considered achievements against
targets? What are the priority areas that you identify that DFID
needs to improve in order to aid its achievements in relation
to targets?
(Sir John Vereker) In terms of how satisfied we are,
I do not think any accounting officer can be satisfied with anything
less than an aspiration that all the resources that we apply for
the purposes of development meet their immediate purpose and meet
their goal. We do work, as the Committee knows and understands,
in a risky and sometimes high risk environment in which realistically
we know that not all our interventions are going to succeed or
not all of them in the short term. When you look at the report
on pages 23 to 26 you will see that in general we are well on
course for these intermediate targets of our PSA and we are meeting
virtually all of the quantifiable efficiency outcomes. I could
say to you complacently that we are satisfied with that. I do
not say that to you. I would say that a better measure is to look
at the data which is contained in our evaluation department's
summary of the project completion reports which the Committee
has received. The data in here is quite revealing about how we
are getting on, looking over a sufficient body of evidence over
a sufficient time span. What I was doing over the last few days
in preparation for this discussion was looking at how we did in
the 1990s compared with how we did in the 1980s. That may seem
rather a generalised level at which to do it but, given the business
we are in and the length of time it takes and the data around,
you probably need that kind of aggregation to get a significant
impact. What you will find in here is that in terms of achieving
an immediate purpose, that is to say for instance did we build
the health clinics, our performance in the 1990s went up to three-quarters
satisfactory or better from two-thirds in the 1980s, which is
not bad. It is a movement in the right direction. The cup is three-quarters
full rather than a quarter empty. In terms of did we achieve the
longer term goal, as it were not so much did we build the network
of health clinics but did we have the impact we were looking for
on infant mortality, in the same period the figures went up to
60 per cent in the 1990s from less than 50 per cent in the 1980s,
again a significant increase in the right direction, the cup more
than half full, but again 40 per cent not yet there. I would say
that I have a reasonable amount of confidence that these figures
mean something. We are moving in the right direction but we are
working in an environment in which it is difficult to achieve
a hundred per cent.
87. Would you like to pick out priority areas
for this year that we are in?
(Sir John Vereker) The Committee will expect me to
say that an important priority area is to improve the data. It
is not just the data that Mr Rowe is talking about, the hard country
data of what is the population and what is the GNP, but the ability
of the international system to measure the real world outcomes.
All the PSA architecture that I have described to the Committee
does ultimately depend on our ability to tell by 2015 or soon
after whether we have got universal primary education, what proportion
of women do not have access to reproductive health care and so
on. There is a very big effort which we are engaged in both to
build capacity within developing countries and to ensure that
the statistical capacity that exists within developed countries
is brought to bear on it, which I hope will improve the data.
That is one of our big targets for the year ahead.
(Mr Ireton) Going on from the data, the Committee
itself has taken a very strong interest in the HIPC phase two
programme. A key issue for us in the year ahead is not only to
help a number of countries get to their decision point on HIPC
but, importantly, in doing that to develop poverty reduction strategies
of a meaningful nature which we can then with other countries
participate in supporting. This is a major issue for the year
ahead. It is not just a question of getting interim debt relief
for a set of countries, important as that is, but in fact to take
forward the initiative with the Bank and the Fund and other donors
in helping countries really establish much more meaningful poverty
reduction strategies which will have an impact over time on the
international development targets in their countries. This is
a major opportunity and we see this on the programme side as a
key issue for the year ahead.
88. Statistics, poverty reduction, debt and
HIPC.
(Mr Ireton) Yes, but it does go wider than just the
HIPC countries. All the low income countries are being encouraged
to develop their own poverty reduction strategies based on wide
consultations with civil society as well as with donors which
are much more inclusive and meaningful than in the past, realistically
based on hard medium-term budget frameworks. We believe this is
a major opportunity over the period ahead. It will not be just
one year of course but a longer time horizon for achieving that.
That will also involve a major shift in the way that we manage
our own development assistance programmes.
89. Some of the figures we are going to come
to later on with other questions will illustrate this because
there is a shift in money which we can see from your report. Thank
you for that explanation. On statistics, Sir John, we in this
Committee, when reporting on women in poverty, found that the
disaggregation of figures on a gender basis was very poor and
I imagine that that is also one of your targets, to get that disaggregation,
is it not?
(Sir John Vereker) Yes indeed.
Mr Rowe
90. A former boss of mine once said that he
had found in his long experience that it was better to back the
jockey than the horse. To some extent you are already doing that,
having chosen three states in India, for example, which you regard
as being better than the rest to work with. Given that we are
looking at building capacity, to what extent are you able and
do you feel it desirable to back good performers, even if the
project they are on is not as inventive as some other projects
run by less effective people? Have you got a strategy for bringing
together effective performers from different places to strengthen
each other? The thing that comes out of quite a lot of the evidence
we have had is that with the best will in the world your in-country
resource development is slower than we would like to see.
(Sir John Vereker) I think there is a long term and
desirable trend towards two things, and I probably have said this
to the Committee before, first of all, the secular trend towards
backing good performing governments, good performing in the sense
of responsible economic management and accountability in governance.
I think there is a long term trend towards donors under those
circumstances being prepared to work much more closely together
in pursuit of common aims rather than working individually in
pursuit of bilateral aims. The process that my colleague Barrie
Ireton was describing of our supporting poverty reduction strategy
programmes in individual countries I think will bring that together.
Your analogy of the horse and the jockey is, if I may say so,
rather a good one and in both India, where we shortly expect to
open a relationship with a fourth state, Madhya Pradesh, and in
China where we are building close relationships with some of the
well performing very poor western provinces, this is very much
the approach that we are taking. Do we bring these people together
to learn lessons from each other? Perhaps not as much as we should,
but there is a good deal of lesson learning around the system,
particularly as a result of the involvement in international financial
institutions. Of course that does not help us with the less well
performing ones. A major part of our task consists of trying to
find an array of incentives that will bring back on to track those
countries who are performing less well.
Chairman
91. Sir John, in your study of the statistics
in the 1980s and 1990s which you have described to us as to how
effective DFID is being, have you compared that effectiveness
with other donors working in the same areas? Is DFID more or less
effective, getting better than the comparators or not?
(Sir John Vereker) The truth is, and here I am going
to sound a bit complacent, that we are ahead of the pack in developing
and publishing this kind of data. I do not think data on a comparable
basis is around. The Committee may have noticed that in the context
of the Meltzer Commission report on the World Bank there was quite
a public debate about what the World Bank's own independent evaluation
unit data actually meant because Meltzer said that they mostly
failed and the World Bank said they mostly succeeded. When I had
a look at it, it was clear that whatever they were doing they
were not using the same kind of approach or data as we are using.
The answer to your question, Chairman, is that it probably is
not there. I have also from time to time wondered how we compare
in the architecture I have described to you with other government
departments. The truth is that again I cannot find another government
department which has got this kind of approach, so embedded as
to enable us to make comparisons. The peer review from the OECD
Development Assistance Committee generally speaking puts us ahead
of the field.
92. I was wondering whether the OECD and the
DAC could be asked to provide such comparisons.
(Sir John Vereker) Why do I not ask the gentleman
on my left who, apart from anything else, is Chairman of the Development
Assistance Committee's financial aspects working party?
(Mr Freeman) Which is not the working party, I have
to say hastily, that conducts the reviews of aid donors. The DAC,
as members of the Committee will know, does undertake regular
reviews of the aid programmes of each of its members. We are currently
participating as reviewers in a review of the Swedish aid programme
which will be published in a couple of months' time and, while
the French review has just been published, the review that they
did of DFID is now a couple of years old. We are due for another
one next year. As Sir John said, we did come out pretty well from
that comparison. It goes beyond looking at the impact of individual
projects to looking at the way we deal with policies and strategies
and so on, but it certainly covers that area as well.
93. Certainly I read that and you did get a
very good report. One aspect of DFID's report which fell below
its target area last year was a delay in achieving Investors
in People accreditation. What problems were revealed by the
health check which led to the delay? Is the Department now likely
to achieve accreditation by the end of the year 2000?
(Sir John Vereker) I am not sure that "delay"
is quite the right word. We always planned that we would invite
an outside consultant to come and do what is known as a health
check on the Department as part of our Investors in People
process. As a result of what she — for it was a she —
told us about this, we concluded that we would be wise to go for
the accreditation in the course of the year 2000 rather than in
the course of the year 1999, although we had not committed ourselves
to doing it in 1999. On the substance of it the first thing is
to say that I do not regard Investors in People as being
what this is all about. We want to be a well managed Department,
a well managed, well performing organisation which invests in
its own staff and which develops rapidly as the demands placed
upon us change. I see Investors in People not as a prize
to be gained but as one of many indications of whether we are
that kind of department. It is being that kind of department that
matters rather than having a flag on the notepaper. What did the
health check reveal? The health check said loads of polite things
about the Department and its motivation which I will not go into,
and said that we had a number of formal management systems, including
those which surround the formal process of annual performance
appraisal and annual agreement on individual staff development
plans, which we were rather better at describing than we were
at actually operating. Although some of us at the top of the office
had always thought that in a well motivated and well performing
department probably that motivation would be sufficient, what
the health check told us was that actually staff at all levels
throughout the Department would rather we operated the procedures
that we had as well as telling them all about them, and I thought
we would be wise as managers to listen to that. We have therefore
taken quite a number of steps over the last year to ensure that
value is attached to these processes, not just that we tell everybody
to do the process because it is there but that we explain why
it is important and that management at all levels must spend more
time talking to staff about their jobs, their aspirations, their
individual development plans, and that that, we hope, will build
up into a better managed organisation. We do intend to submit
ourselves for IiP accreditation in the course of this year and
yes, I would be disappointed if we did not get it. But again,
if we did not get it, the disappointment would be not because
we do not have a flag but because it is telling us something about
the Department.
94. Can I ask you about DAC and perhaps Peter
Freeman can help us? Is DAC formulating common approaches to development
assessment or are you just doing it ad hoc country by country,
or have you got a graph on which you can judge one against another?
(Mr Freeman) In terms of performance by developing
countries, yes, the DAC is really building down from the international
targets to assemble a set of common statistical indicators against
which progress can be measured on a global scale; and it is also
building up from an analysis of poverty through a policy network
in which a number of people from developed and developing countries
sit and of which Peter Grant, one of our economists, is co-Chairman.
We are involved both in the DAC process of building down from
the overall global statistics and building up from the country
level within DAC.
95. I am glad to hear that, but it is a question
of whether or not you have got a common assessment of donors and
their performance and therefore leading to the capacity to compare
one with the other.
(Mr Freeman) This is very much a subject for this
week's high level meeting of ministers within the DAC, which is
improving the quality of the partnership among donors so that
we can work together better, because one of the problems, as you
are well aware from some of the Committee's overseas visits, is
that donors have tended not only to fall over each other in countries
like Tanzania for example, where there are a very large number
of donors, but also to distort the country's own priorities by
imposing their own systems for procurement accounting and auditing
and so on. There is a great need for donors to work together much
better in individual countries and harmonise their procedures,
which is really the area where the DAC can contribute some technical
work.
Chairman
96. There is the other aspect of the administration
on behalf, for example, of the Swedish development budget, which
you are looking at, and the performance of that, compared with
the Department for International Development's performance. Sir
John is able to say that he has got an improvement in several
targets within his departments. On the ground, can you say the
same and have you got the same analytical tools to say that that
has happened in Sweden and thereby compare donors with each other
in terms of their administration and their own targeting and motivation?
(Mr Freeman) I think the answer is, Chairman, not
yet. One of the attractions of moving towards a common endorsement
of the international development targets and of the development
indicators by all donors, which has not yet happened, is that
each donor agency will then be able to build from that a measurement
system for its own outputs which is consistent and coherent with
the measurement systems of other donors, but we certainly do not
have that yet.
Chairman: It will help coordination hugely
if you do. Tess Kingham is now going to lead us on some questions.
Tess Kingham
97. I notice in the report that DFID is leading
a move to produce an international executive national strategy
for sustainable development. Presumably this will be built around
the DAC target, will it not? If so, as the Chairman has just been
talking about really, are you tying in with that a nationally
accepted evaluation strategy too? If we are going to have a strategy
for sustainable development, will there be a common measurement
of evaluating the success towards that DAC target as part of that
process, and how far has that got?
(Mr Ireton) Firstly, of course, it is not one of the
DAC targets, that countries should have a national strategy for
sustainable development in place by 2005. We have taken quite
a strong lead internationally in the including in of DAC and trying
to get some agreement on what that actually means. It is not merely
producing yet another document separate from the other plans and
targets which countries are adopting. The approach we have taken
is that of almost an audit approach. When countries are looking
at the way in which they are going to move forward with their
own vision of development and how they are going to meet various
internationally agreed targets, they are looking at doing that
in a sustainable way. We have been seeking to develop and get
an agreement internationally for an audit check approach to that.
That has a good measure of agreement. We are particularly concerned
at the moment that if countries are to develop effective poverty
reduction strategy papers, they should also include within that
these issues of sustainable development and not see poverty reduction
strategies as one set of issues and strategies for sustainable
development as being quite separate. The key thing is that these
are integrated, and we are having discussions with the Bank at
the moment as to how that can be best achieved.
98. Will there be a common evaluation strategy
drawn up in parallel with the national sustainable development
strategy? It is all very well getting donors to coordinate on
that and trying to achieve the targets, but, as has already been
mentioned, there is no common way of measuring progress towards
those and then it is debatable how effective it is being,
(Mr Ireton) This is not an issue of measuring donor
performance, this is an issue of how we can help developing countries
integrate these issues of sustainable development into their own
plans. I go back to the previous point that Peter was making;
equally, when we are looking within the DAC, it is not so much
as to whether we can measure our performance against the Swedes
or the French— are our projects better than theirs? —
the key thing is how we can help developing countries develop
their own central programmes which are effective and produce measurable
outcomes, and how we collectively, as donors, can support that
process. So you apply the common endeavour, not the competitive
endeavour.
99. I am not suggesting it is competitive, but
we have, as one of our performance targets, to ensure that some
of DFID's top 30 recipients of ODA by volume hit certain of the
DAC targets within a certain time-frame. Presumably other EU States'
bilateral programmes will have similar targets, the World Bank
will have similar targets, and others might have similar targets.
So, we are looking at a nationally common strategy for developing
a country-wide programme for state development. It makes sense,
surely, to have a common way of evaluating the progress towards
those DAC targets, or else every country will claim, "Yes,
we have achieved 70 per cent towards state DAC targets",
but overall when they are amalgamated what are the real benefits?
For example, how far are we really moving towards the targets?
That is what I am asking. Is there any work going on to actually
pool that together?
(Mr Ireton) The best answer to that is that at country
level what we are looking at is, for example, the issue of universal
primary education as one target. We try to encourage countries
to develop clear central programmes to achieve that sort of aim.
This is not a quantitative issue, it is a qualitative issue which
involves all sorts of change management issues and increasing
the level of resources which have been devoted within some uniform
budget framework. As Sir John was saying a moment ago, we are
giving more priority to helping the country itself develop management
information systems and statistical systems which allow it to
measure its progress towards those targets in a quantitative and
qualitative sense. So we, collectively, as the international community
and the country concerned, will be able to measure progress towards
that end.
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