Examination of Witness (Questions 100
-111)
THURSDAY 6 JULY 2000
THE RT
HON CHRISTOPHER
PATTEN
100. So something has got to give. Which would
you like to see happen?
(Mr Patten) I look at what we are doing around the
world and I hear what Europe's foreign ministers collectively
promise the world and it is difficult to see how we can do it
with less. Let us suppose that there is a Camp David settlement
next week. There are Council conclusions as long as your arm promising
more assistance for a Middle East peace settlement if it happens.
We have made tremendous promises to the Balkans and now the Council
is jibbing at the financial consequences of that.
101. Five billion euros, is it not?
(Mr Patten) Patten's first law of public spending
is that it is year one that counts. What we are talking about
is 800 million for next year, 350 million of which is Kosovo.
We promised at Rambouillet and elsewhere that we would pick up
just over half the tab of the Commission/World Bank estimate of
reconstruction costs for Kosovo, and those costs are front loaded.
You are talking about things like repairing power stations, putting
roofs on people's houses and building roads and so on. The 5.5
billion is what we proposed for the 2000 to 2006 financial perspective
and it included 2.3 billion ring-fenced for Serbia if, God willing,
Serbia gets rid of Milosevic, and that was based on economists'
calculations and on the assumption that we would be prepared to
pick up the same proportion of the reconstruction costs in Serbia
as we picked up in Kosovo. Some Member States say, "But we
do not need to think about that yet. We will do that when it is
necessary." We were trying to take some lessons from what
had happened in Bosnia and what had happened in Kosovo, where
we had not made any prudential financial provision and so we have
had to raid other parts of the budget and the assistance we provide
is much delayed because we had not made allowance for it earlier.
My general proposition is that if you are trying to translate
what has been promised from the Middle East to Central America,
then the funds are justifiable, but if you cannot manage them
with sufficient resources then you have to cut down both the amount
of funds and the length of your rhetorical remarks about the state
of the world and what Europe can do about it. On micro-management
and de-concentration, de-concentration is another of the elements
in the package we are proposing. It has consequences in particular
in two areas. First of all, while of course there have to be some
Brussels based staff involved, there also have to be quite a lot
of locally recruited staff involved, which we are doing at the
moment. We will shortly be producing a paper on our delegations
and our external services which will cover, among other things,
the balance between Brussels recruited staff and locally engaged
staff. The other consequence is, if we are going to devolve management,
de-concentrate, de-centralise, then we have to have in our delegations
not just the expertise but the IT. There is quite an investment
involved in that which we are applying for. There are all sorts
of areas where it is difficult to manage from Brussels but micro
projects are one of them. Micro projects become incredibly resource
intensive if you are doing it in Brussels rather than in the field.
Mr Colman: Clare Short—and I paraphrase
her—when we saw her on Tuesday said basically that she would
not want any more staff to be in Brussels to deliver these programmes
until she could see that there was in fact better quality of what
was being done by those who are there at the moment. We have just
left Constanza Adinolfi of ECHO. I see you called in your speech
on 4 July for the creation of a rapid reaction facility within
the Commission. In my view that seems to be exactly what ECHO
should be. Is that an example of what Clare is getting at, which
is that the people are there, the money is there, the mission
is there but people are just not delivering?
Chairman: Clare told us, incidentally,
that she would sooner die than give the Commission more staff.
Mr Worthington: Until the quality of
projects improved.
Mr Colman
102. I was toning it down, Chair.
(Mr Patten) First of all, I am not sure she is quite
as well briefed on what we are proposing as one might in an ideal
world like because we are not talking about taking on permanent
staff. We are talking about using our operational credits to have
people working for us to replace those at present working for
the TAOs in order to do the job better. I said to you earlier
that I am not sufficiently naive as to think I can go to the Council
and ask for hundreds more staff because then you get the Clare
reaction, though it might be put with a shade more—how can
I put it?— delicatesse? Secondly, if I had as many
staff as Clare has to run an aid programme I could run a very
good aid programme, and used to. Just do the comparisons.
Chairman
103. We have got them.
(Mr Patten) On your second question ECHO and the Rapid
Reaction Facility are doing different things. ECHO is providing
humanitarian assistance. The rapid reaction facility is meant
to be a limited amount of money, between 20 and 30 million euros,
which we have available to use for what? Example: last year, partly
because of the impact of oil sanctions in Serbia on everybody,
including the democratically controlled municipalities, the Council
asked us to arrange for the delivery of heating oil to a number
of towns in Serbia. With our existing procedures and with our
existing financial regulation this was extremely difficult to
do and took a lot of time to set up. A rapid reaction facility
would deliver a programme like that more quickly and more easily
until you were able to bring your traditional programmes on stream.
A rapid reaction facility would have been available for use in,
say, Montenegro in the run-up to the Montenegro elections when
we were actually having to find other financial bases for what
we wanted to do. A rapid reaction facility is not like ECHO for
humanitarian assistance. ECHO is spending hundreds of millions.
Poul Nielson is responsible for it. We are talking here about
between 20 and 30 million which would be a pot of money which
we could use in the event of a conflict prevention requirement,
preventative diplomacy, before we brought our traditional aid
on stream.
Mr Colman
104. You do not see the two things going together?
One of the things that appalled us was that ECHO talked about
a four to eight week reaction time, yet their target is in fact
four days.
(Mr Patten) Even ECHO, which is the fastest of our
operations, still has to do a great deal through Member States.
No other aid programme has 15 people looking over its shoulder.
If you are running USAID and you want to do a programme in country
A or country B you do not first of all have an argument with Georgia
about whether the headquarters for the project should be in country
A or country B or in Atlanta. You do not continue with arguments
between California and Georgia about the exact procurement requirements
for the project. You do it as well as you possibly can, so some
of the comparisons (and they are things we are trying to deal
with, as I explained to you earlier) are a bit unfair because
the red tape, the procedures, that people are having to work with
are far from ideal.
Mr Worthington
105. This is crude but we have a shortage of
time. It is about the structure that you have set up. I believe
setting up DFID and ending the ODA was a major step forward in
clarifying, purifying, getting targeted on poverty in development.
What it seems to me you have set up is the old British Foreign
Office with ODA attached where your foreign affairs is inevitably
going to skew development. That is too quick but do you know what
I mean?
(Mr Patten) I do not wish to be presumptuous, but
how often do you suppose that Robin Cook and Clare Short sit down
and talk about spending priorities around the place, and do you
suppose that for the parts of foreign affairs which go to the
British Council and elsewhere the programme of work is a shared
political responsibility of the Secretary of State for Foreign
and Commonwealth Affairs and the Secretary of State for DFID?
What we have done is to try to work together as Commissioners,
particularly Poul Nielson and I, in setting up a management structure
which ensures that the developmental arguments are fully taken
account of. We are going to share responsibility for programming,
we are going to share responsibility for the new organisation,
we are going to share responsibility for the outputs as well as
the inputs, and we are going to share those responsibilities with
our three colleagues who have external relations jobs as well:
trade, enlargement and economic and monetary affairs. We have
done all that without having any of the bloody turf wars which
have characterised all of this in the past. Until last year there
were four Commissioners dealing with external relations, doing
my job. In the mid 1970s there were six with bits of the empire.
We are actually trying to pull things together and to ensure that
those parts of our expenditure which are genuinely ODA have a
far higher poverty focus.
Ann Clwyd
106. One of the things Clare Short said to us
was that the proportion of spending in middle income countries
compared to low income countries was "a disgrace". Secondly,
I wondered how powerful an ally the Development Committee of the
European Parliament was. The last time we were here we came away
feeling that it was not particularly robust, vigorous, etc. I
wonder if you think that has changed. I have to say I am very
sympathetic to your points about staffing. When I was here as
a Euro MP it was always a problem for the Commission that they
were under-staffed. One of the comments made was that if you found
you had staff that were incompetent it was almost impossible to
get rid of them.
(Mr Patten) Yes.
Mr Khabra
107. You mentioned two issues. One is conceptual
and the other is management. You have said that political considerations
go far beyond the development issues, but do you not consider
that development issues are linked to a political agenda, ie,
the promotion of democracy, good government and human rights?
(Mr Patten) Let me go back to the conceptual point
that I made at the beginning which is the context for both your
questions and explains Clare's argument about middle income countries.
What Clare is doing—I do not say it is deliberately unfair
but it has that consequence—is comparing apples and oranges.
A lot of our external assistance is going, for example, to the
accession candidates to the European Union. I said earlier that
we are spending twice as much in Poland as we are in Asia and
Latin America put together. You can say we should not be doing
anything for Poland and the accession candidates. I would not
agree with that but you could make that argument. You could say
we should be spending all that money in the least developed countries.
But then you are missing the point I started with, that even though
we have the same implementing agency (I think quite rightly) for
all external assistance and traditional ODA, they are different
and it is wrong to fudge the two.
Chairman
108. The Committee has argued that in fact the
accession states should be totally separately treated.
(Mr Patten) It is not just the accession states. Where
do you put Russia and the NIS? Where do you put the Caucasus?
Where do you put the central Asian republics? Where do you put
the Balkans? Where do you put the better off of Magreb? What we
are trying to do in the Mediterranean, sure we are trying to help
poor people, is that we are also trying to develop the Mediterranean
equivalent of NAFTA, a free trade area of prosperous, politically
stable countries to our south. Perhaps I could let you have a
copy of a speech I made the other day[2]
in which I tried to say what I felt the priorities for external
assistance should be for our external affairs. There are three
things I feel very strongly about, although I will leave one out
because it involves the United States. First of all, we have to
be in the business of projecting stability and that is largely
projecting stability around the EU. It is the Balkans, it is the
Caucasus, it is the Mediterranean, and all those are not very
poor countries. But secondly, and vitally important, we have to
be in the vanguard of the fight for multilateralism, and in particular
the fight against global poverty which distinguishes us if you
like from the United States. The United States takes the view,
most of them, that you can invest in technology to protect yourself
from a dangerous world. If you are a European, first of all I
do not think you agree with that, but secondly, it is not an option.
In my judgment—and I think you should perhaps also have
the Cardinal Hume lecture I gave[3]—not
only is global poverty a moral affront, not only is it a moral
affront that African household incomes have fallen by 20 per cent
over the last 10 years, but it is also a source of political instability.
I think that the European Commission, if it organises itself properly,
can be in the vanguard on issues like preventative diplomacy which
bring together human rights, development assistance and poverty
alleviation, civil protection, all those other issues which, if
you deploy them properly, make it unnecessary for you to be bothered
about strategic air lift. There is a political agenda in development
as well. The middle income disgrace point is unfair because if
you look at what is our traditional ODA, as high a proportion
of it goes to the LDCs as for the OECD average. You can say quite
properly that more of it should be going to poverty alleviation
and Poul Nielson would totally agree with you, and we totally
agree that there should be proper targets for the proportion that
goes to poverty alleviation. The figures, if you want them, are
that EU aid for LDCs has increased by 20 per cent over the last
10 years. Recent OECD figures in 1996-97 show that the share of
EU aid for LDCs, at 33.6 per cent, is broadly in line with the
average performance of Member States, which is 34.2. Again, the
conceptual point I began with is an extremely important one. What
is part of the problem if you are an aid minister? A lot of finance
ministries in effect take all the money for external assistance
from what might otherwise be the development assistance pot in
their own country. I was exactly the same when I was an overseas
development minister. Even though I was not comparing like with
like I used to get miffed that a lot of external assistance in
the European Union was not as it were traditional ODA. It is a
different argument.
Ann Clwyd
109. The Development Committee's relationships
with the Parliament?
(Mr Patten) Yes, and then I must go, but Patrick Child
can honestly give you better answers than I can. I have spoken
to the Development Committee this week. I think there are the
same conceptual problems with the Development Committee and the
Foreign Affairs Committee and the Budget Committee. They are supportive.
We are trying to share much more information with them because
I think that the whole priorities exercise cannot be one which
is simply left to the Commission. It has to be one which is shared
between the Parliament, the Commission and the Council of Ministers.
I find myself dealing with three committees and they have different
priorities and within those committees there are people with different
priorities. If you get a largely southern European turnout at
a meeting you discover there is a lot more interest in what is
happening in Latin America.
Chairman
110. You have to go now and we will not see
you again, will we?
(Mr Patten) No, but if you have any questions or queries
as a result of this meeting please let me know.
111. On behalf of the Committee thank you very
much indeed. I know it has been difficult to fit us in.
(Mr Patten) No, no. I was very keen to do so. I am
just sorry that other things have intervened.
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