Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20
- 39)
MONDAY 29 JANUARY 2001
RT HON
CLARE SHORT
MP, MR DAVID
BATT AND
MR RICHARD
MANNING CB
20. The fact is that the skilled people who
leave countries like India or Pakistan or Bangladesh, wherever
they come from but particularly those countries, will never have
any desire to return to their own country with those skills. This
is a fact of life. Therefore it is practically a brain drain.
Either you force them to leave this country or you employ them
here on condition that they go back. I do not know whether any
such conditions will be imposed when they are allowed to come
into this country.
(Clare Short) I recognise the patterns you describe,
but you are slightly overstating the case you make. For example,
some weeks ago I was in Addis Ababa at a meeting called by the
Economic Commission for Africa which has a lot of trained economists
under K Y Amoako putting together strategies from much better
economic performance in Africa and they have been recruiting a
lot of staff. They had had masses of applications from Africans
of high skill levels in the diaspora. Callisto Madavo, who is
the Vice-President for Africa in the World Bank and is Zimbabwean
and KY who is a Ghanaian economist both said we should never underestimate
the pull of home. If there are jobs where you can use your skills
people will come back and want to contribute to their country.
Not all people of course. It depends on the age of your children
and the commitments of your life, but there are always people
who do want to go back and contribute to their country if they
get a chance to use their skills. I share your concern but we
should not overstate it to the point when there is no movement
of people, no sharing of skills, no enablement for there to be
fair trading in services because people from developing countries
are not allowed to move temporarily to countries like ours in
order to sell services, particularly like Indian IT where that
can be a real earner going back to India.
Chairman
21. It would be immoral, would it not, if all
the nurses and all the doctors were recruited by the National
Health Service, leaving none of those skills in countries like
Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and so on.
(Clare Short) Absolutely, and the National Health
Service has some special rules to take account of this before
it does any recruiting abroad, which were put in place by Frank
Dobson when he was the Secretary of State.
22. I hope all area health authorities hear
your voice.
(Clare Short) No, there are procedures. I have had
some correspondence with Alan Milburn about it recently. Procedures
are in place. We think it is a good model which could be applied
to other sectors. Perhaps we should provide details to the Committee
of the way in which it works.[1]
Chairman: Yes, we should like to see
that.
Mr Robathan
23. At the weekend there was a newspaper article
about developing countries complaining about their nurses being
nicked for the NHS. Obviously the message has not quite got through
yet.
(Clare Short) As we all know increasingly, you cannot
believe everything you read in newspapers. May I provide the Committee
with the details of how the National Health Service works this?
I agree very much with Andrew Rowe that that does not control
private agencies, so there may well be other problems. However,
it is an interesting and useful model.
Chairman: We should like to see that.
Ms Kingham
24. First of all I think I have to declare—it
is unclear—an interest here in that my husband is doing
work on globalisation and I believe a consortium of which he is
part may be approaching DFID for support to work alongside them.
(Clare Short) May I declare that I never involve myself
in who gets contracts, so it will not make any difference.
25. I thought I had better say that as it is
one of those grey areas. The question I want to ask is about labour
standards about which there has been a lot of debate. In its submission
to us the Commonwealth Trade Union Council state ". . . unless
there is much greater recognition of the need for all governments
to enforce basic labour standards the White Paper might well be
entitled `Making the Poor Work for Globalisation'". The key
word there is "enforce" labour standards. How do the
Government intend to ensure that the international community can
in some way enforce labour standards? Do the Government still
support the establishment of a joint ILO/WTO standing working
forum on trade globalisation and labour issues? That was the forum
which was suggested after the Seattle talks. If so, are we promoting
that in any way?
(Clare Short) I had a meeting with the Commonwealth
TUC in Geneva once. Obviously they have deep concern about core
labour standards but we do very urgently need to mature the trade
union debate on these questions in that the poorest of the world
are not in organised sectors and are not in trade unions. Trade
unions can be their allies very importantly in advocating policies
which bring benefits to the poorest people, but unionisation of
the very poorest in the world is very unlikely to be the remedy
which will improve the labour standards of the poorest. Secondly,
certainly the trade union input to the Seattle meeting, which
was led by the American trade unions but supported by the AFL/CIO
was calling for the World Trade Organisation to be used to enforce
labour standards. The logic of that is that any country which
has problems of child labour, of bonded labour and of labour which
is badly paid or badly treated, would have trade sanctions against
it. Every poor country has child labour. If you go down that road
you punish countries for being poor, you have trade sanctions
against them because they are not in a position to have all their
children properly in school and not in work and so on. These are
very, very important questions, but do they promote development
and enhancement of the life of people who are labouring for very
little return or do they actually make things worse for them?
In every developing country there is child labour: the poorest
countries have more. It tends to be concentrated in non-traded
sectors, lots of it in agriculture of course. Of course some degree
of children working for their parents in small subsistence farming
is a perfectly acceptable practice. The reason we have long summer
holidays here is that children used to help their parents, a long
time ago when we were a rural economy. We need to mature the debate
about how to get better enforcement of core labour standards.
That said, the ILO, which up until recently has tended to focus
on enforcement of labour standards in organised sectors and therefore
have little relevance to development, is now broadening out its
work considerably. We have the Convention on the most exploitative
forms of child labour and an agreement worldwide to do a big push
not to stop all aspects of child labour but the forms where children
are being very grossly exploited: the sex industry, children working
very long hours which prevents them from going to school. The
push to get all children into school and make school and some
work for their families compatible is a very important change
and we are working with the ILO in Andhra Pradesh and Tanzania
and in the Golden Triangle on resisting the sex trade, to try
to improve children's chance of having a childhood and get to
work. Similarly bonded labour. There is a declaration of the ILO
that we should all work together on the enforcement of the four
key labour standards, child and bonded labour, no discrimination
and the right of labour to organise. We need to interpret the
right of labour to organise, to include communities organising
themselves, not only trade union organisations, all forms of self-organisation
of people which enable them to protect themselves and put forward
their rights and standards. We are working in support of that,
particularly on bonded labour in Nepal where there are high levels
of bonded labour. Our own work with the ILO is going very strongly
now. Richard Manning has been negotiating with the ILO because
it has rather broadened its viewpoint and taken account of the
fact that most of the poorest of the world are not in organised
sectors. Then the standing working forum proposal, which we worked
very hard to get to be the EU position and it is the EU position,
to get it out of being a working party in the WTO, which all developing
countries absolutely oppose and so do we. We are opposed to the
suggestion of using trade sanctions as the mechanism of improving
core labour standards. Yes, we support this outside the WTO but
you can look at the contribution trade can make, the ILO can make,
indeed the World Bank and development strategies can make and
we need strategies to improve labour standards but not sanctions
against countries for their poverty.
26. My second question is about international
capital flows. War on Want state in their submission to us "One
specific aspect of globalisation which has caused poverty is the
growth and instability of capital flows. $2 trillion is now exchanged
every day on world currency markets . . . As a direct result",
of the East Asian financial crisis, "the ILO estimates that
10 million people were thrown out of work and poverty levels rose
dramatically". These are stark facts. The White Paper states
that the Government are prepared to countenance "specific
measures to help discourage excessive short term capital inflows".
I should like to ask first of all what is meant by that. Secondly,
what is the Government's position on proposals for a capital transactions
tax to impede financial speculation and provide increased tax
revenue. I am thinking here about the Tobin tax in particular.
(Clare Short) The first point I would make in response
to that is that the abundant availability of capital, its willingness
to move across the world, is one of the aspects of globalisation
which creates the potential for great benefits to developing countries
because beneficial investment, bringing access to modern technology
in infrastructure and other sectors, can really lift up economic
performance. So we must not be against investment from outside.
We all know that there is this disgraceful and worrying fact about
Africa in the White Paper: 40 per cent of its domestic savings
leave the continent. The same conditions of unstable banks, not
well regulated banks, mean that the savings of Africa are in Europe
and they should be the first call for re-investment in the continent.
The sort of reforms which keep savings at home are the same reforms
which attract inward investment: proper enforcement of law, properly
regulated banks and so on. We should welcome the availability
of capital to invest and seek to channel that in a way which is
beneficial. Of course if you take the east Asian economies, they
achieved in the past 30 years the fastest economic growth and
reduction of poverty for the largest number of people that has
ever been achieved in human history. They did it by attracting
inward investment and exporting and growing their economies and
investing massively in education. Without capital coming in and
investing in their economies, they would not have achieved that
enormous performance in reducing poverty. Similarly China. China's
improved performance recently has been as China has opened up
and attracted investment into itself and been able to grow its
economy more rapidly. Of course the east Asian crisis was short-term
hot money realising that it had been taken into banks short term
and then lent on long term to domestic enterprises in rather crony
suspect relationships between local banks and local companies
and that that was not viable. Then once the scare started all
the hot short-term money came out and threw the economies into
deep recession and big devaluations of their currency and did
do damage, but did not reverse the previous economic growth which
had been achieved in east Asia. Actually the evidence is that
it was more the middle classes who suffered than the very poor
because people were thrown out of employment in urban areas. We
do not want anyone to suffer, but as a matter of fact, that was
the result and the cause of it was partly bad regulation of banks,
untransparent relationships between banks and local investment,
things which need to be cleaned up in greater transparency and
better management of inward investment. Indeed a lot of lessons
have been learned from the Asian crisis in countries which are
opening up their capital markets. We say very clearly in the White
Paper that it should be phased sensibly, proper regulatory arrangements
have to be in place so that you cannot get this kind of abuse
and destabilisation of an economy. There are special measures
to restrict short-term flows which we refer to in the White Paper.
Famous examples have been used, like in Chile, which required
the depositing for no interest of sums of money to try to restrict
the inflow of hot money. It worked for a time but Chile has got
rid of it; it was a mechanism which was used and which is reasonable.
In the face of the crisis Malaysia used government controls and
then phased them out which was its way of getting through the
crisis. What the Treasury favour and what the reference in the
White Paper is about is that we think it is a good idea for countries
to look for taxing mechanisms and so on to make short-term flows
in and out, have some taxation and cost on them so that there
is a restriction on hot money that can cause a destabilising effect.
On the Tobin tax, the idea that there should be a very tiny charge
on hot money moving around the world which would go into a big
global development pool is a very attractive idea. The problem
is that we have to get all countries in the world to agree for
it to be able to work; obviously, otherwise it would distort flows.
It is a good thing to campaign on and it might come one day, but
I fear it might take quite a lot of time and we have to have methods
in the meantime of making progress.
27. I would add the debt crisis. When people
were first campaigning on that in the early 1980s people said
it could never happen, it was a long time, so maybe it is worth
looking out for in the future.
(Clare Short) I know and I find it an attractive proposal,
but we do just have to face the fact that it will not come in
until everyone has agreed, will it, because you would be disadvantaging
your own country as a destination for investment if you agreed
to a tax and other countries did not? It is quite a job to think
of getting the world to a point where everyone would agree.
Mr Rowe
28. It has been suggested that one of the subsidiary
causes of the Asian crisis was the fact that quite a lot of the
highly prestigious accountancy firms worldwide were pretty careless
about the way in which they carried out the audits. I wondered
whether your Department was actually really satisfied that some
of these famous worldwide names are as good as they ought to be,
because clearly they give a lot of comfort to moneylenders and
others, but if in fact they themselves are not behaving as scrupulously
or as presciently as they might it must actually compound the
problem rather than the other way round.
(Clare Short) That is very interesting. I do not have
enough information to comment. I do not know whether either of
my colleagues does. Let me say that we have really learned about
the need for transparency. You have big pension funds based here,
investing money because there is an historic high rate of growth
and therefore you are getting a good return, but into bad investments
which were taking in a lot of short-term money and lending long.
It was unviable in the end and there was incompetence in doing
those kinds of investments and the need for much more transparency
in where the investments were going, but much more scrutiny rather
than following the herd by really quite prestigious pension funds
and so on. That is part of the lesson of the crisis. Does either
of you have enough information to comment on whether accountancy
firms have let their standards slip in countries in east Asia?
(Mr Batt) I do not have that information.
(Clare Short) I shall enquire but no-one has ever
put that point to me before.[2]
Chairman
29. I am sure if you put that question to PricewaterhouseCoopers
they would say no.
(Clare Short) True and it may well not be, to be fair.
Mr Colman
30. May I take us back to the Tobin tax? At
the Social Summit in Geneva last June, there was agreement with
all the countries in the world that there should be an investigation
into the Tobin tax and other taxes of that nature. Just before
Christmas the UN Secretary-General made known the Chairman of
the Commission which would look into this and who would sit on
that panel. Perhaps it would be possible for the Secretary of
State to give us a note on how far the discussions have gone in
terms of the work on the Tobin tax and the report I believe this
Commission is going to be making to a UN conference later this
year on financing for development.
(Clare Short) This is a Treasury lead, not us. Obviously
it is a proposal for a tax on international financial flows. We
can ask the Treasury for a note[3]
but I do say to everyone, let us look at it with interest but
do not hold your breath. It might be out grandchildren who inherit
that.
31. I hear what you say. I understand there
is a world clearing system which is in fact coming in on this
in February and that will be a mechanism to be able to control
these flows. Clearly flows could be outside that mechanism but
the major centres in the world are working through the single
mechanism. There is movement on this and the French Government
and Canadian Government, as you will know, have particularly led
on this worldwide. I was pleased that the UK Government, certainly
with the Treasury lead, supported a full investigation into this
last June.
(Clare Short) I repeat that this is a Treasury lead
and I know that they see enormous difficulties in the likelihood
of it coming forward. I have never before heard that the French
and the Canadians are supposed to be fully in support; I shall
have to investigate that. I am not sure it is fully the case.
It is easy for people to be in generalised support of something
which is not going to happen.
Barbara Follett
32. The White Paper commits the Government to
the establishment of a Commission on Intellectual Property Rights.
What will be the Commission's terms of reference, its members,
whom will it consult, when will it report and will it just look
forward or will it have the ability to review existing agreements,
for example the TRIPs World Trade Organisation agreement?
(Clare Short) I cannot answer those questions fully;
I am working on it and shall make an announcement fairly shortly.
We say in the White Paper, and it is clearly our view, that intellectual
property protection is in the interests of the poor. This is another
area of campaigning. For example, new drugs and vaccines which
we need for HIV/AIDS, for malaria and so on, the killer disease,
and the greatest intellectual capacity in the world in this research
is in the private sector. We need partnerships with the public
sector to get the research done because there will not be a market
response, but you need some intellectual property protection if
you are ever going to achieve this. I just want to make clear
that there are those who say there should be no intellectual property
protection and we think that would prevent the development of
treatments or prevent investment in developing countries which
need investment. So the view of the Department is that some agreement
on basic commitment to some intellectual property regime is beneficial
to developing countries. Of course developing countries in the
Uruguay Round signed up to putting in place basic intellectual
property protection. I think there was no template; it was just
some basic framework of law.
(Mr Batt) Minimum standards.
(Clare Short) Countries have mainly found that it
is difficult in practice to do that. It is a whole other area
of expertise and the implementation review which is taking place
in the World Trade Organisation is looking at the difficulties
countries are having. The purpose of the Commission is to get
people with expertise who are knowledgeable about, and sympathetic
to, the interests of developing countries and the whole issue
of protecting natural property, indigenous plants and herbal remedies
and all that which is protected under the biodiversity convention
but which you need to protect in practice, not just in some theoretical
international convention. The purpose of the Commission is to
roll forward the detail of that debate, look at all the detail,
why countries are having problems, what kind of advice they can
be given about the sort of regime which might be most beneficial
to them, how natural and indigenous knowledge and plants and remedies
can be properly protected. As we look into some of that detail,
it may well be that with the implementation review which is taking
place in the World Trade Organisation there will be recommendations
for some modification of the intellectual property agreement in
the next trade round. It will depend where the work takes us on
that. The purpose is to help countries implement the agreements
which are there in ways which will be beneficial to the developing
countries and beneficial to poor people.
33. I want to touch on pro-poor research and
development. The Intermediate Technology Development Group and
ActionAid have expressed similar concerns because they say there
is "little evidence to suggest that global markets will deliver
improved technologies that the poor will find affordable, appropriate
and accessible". We should like to know whether you think
there is a role for development assistance to support the development
of poverty-focused research in areas such as information and communications
technology, medical research and agricultural research? I should
like to tie into that: what is DFID going to do to make sure that
in one particular area, which is medicine and pharmaceuticals,
there is early identification of emerging diseases and that the
research for drugs and vaccines necessary for them is undertaken?
(Clare Short) I do not personally think that we need
some sort of inferior technology for developing countries. There
is appropriateness of technology and clearly developing countries
have cheaper labour and more intensive use of labour is often
one of their comparative advantages but I do not think some sort
of backward forms of technology are going to be beneficial to
developing countries. I do think that a major research effort
needs to be focused on the needs of developing countries and indeed
we do that as a Department: knowledge, agriculture, medical research
I have already referred to. If you just take HIV/AIDS, the strain
which is in developing countries is different from the strain
in Europe and North America so if all the research for a vaccine
is confined to Europe and North America you would not get a vaccine
for Africa. There has to be some parallel research and there is
an international initiative to drive that research forward. The
market will not drive it because there are not enough people to
buy consequent drugs. We and others have contributed to some of
that research. For agricultural research there is an international
research institute, because there are different kinds of crops,
different needs, there needs to be appropriate agricultural research,
certainly medical research and so on and then ideas, knowledge
of what works in development, methods of consulting poor people,
providing them with credit, all sorts of knowledge which needs
to be spread around the international system and we and others
invest in that research and that is very important. On your final
question on vaccines, a lot of international effort now is going
on to find the vaccine for HIV/AIDS, where the science is optimistic.
In a five to six-year timescale we could have effective vaccines,
but also malaria remains a bigger cause of death and ill health
in Africa even now than HIV and that is suffering—a million
children lose their lives to malaria—but also a lot of loss
of work time which impoverishes families. Both better application
of existing treatments and getting new treatments are important
and we need to find new ways of building partnerships between
the public sector which can drive funding and guaranteed market
but will cause the private sector to put in research effort to
produce some of the new drugs and vaccines. The Cabinet Office
have these cross-cutting reviews taking place right now and in
our Health and Population Department we are doing a lot of work
on putting in place worldwide arrangements which will incentivise
much better medical research to produce better treatments for
the diseases of poverty than we have currently.
Mr Robathan
34. You acknowledge in the White Paper the importance
of environmental science, particularly by having a whole chapter
devoted to it. You also acknowledge the conflict between environmental
concerns and conservation and economic development. We have heard
from the World-Wide Fund for Nature that PRSPs have not adequately
taken environmental concerns into account in their opinion. I
heard today from Trevor Manuel at the World Bank conference, the
Finance Minister for South Africa, who said that when trade was
freed up the grain which was grown in Brazil should be able to
come here because they grow good grain in Brazil and they grow
it very cheaply. Of course in environmental terms one of the problems
with agriculture in Brazil is that it tends to go into the rain
forest and they cut down rain forest for ranching in particular
but also for growing grain and diminish the environmental bank
there. My real question to you is: what, if anything, can we or
the Government really do to ensure that environmental concerns
are better integrated into development initiatives?
(Clare Short) It is very important to get our thinking
right on this crucial subject. A lot of the international campaigning
is driven by a conservationist anti-development mindset. The planet
is under strain, we cannot afford to promote more development
and then it goes to romanticising conditions of poverty in which
people in Africa and South Asia live, which causes fury in developing
countries, that we developed, got all the benefits and are pulling
up the ladder behind us. If the argument goes that way we shall
not get international agreement on the new environmental agreements
we need. On the other hand in developing countries there is also
growing concern because forests are going, there are more and
more problems with floods and so on, there is a growing awareness
across Africa, across China, that the environment has to be attended
to, that it cannot just be taken for granted. We did a big review
in the Department of our work on the environment and realised
that we, like most others, the World Bank and everyone else, had
had an approach saying that we must promote development, but development
might damage the environment, therefore you have to monitor all
proposals to see that they are not environmentally damaging; a
sort of negative check. Whereas if you are promoting sustainable
development, what sustainable development really is, is that you
look at environmental resources, economic development and social
needs side by side and plan for growth which will be sustainable
in an economy and will not be eroding environmental resources
which cannot be replaced. It is a whole change of mindset, bringing
sustainability and environmental resources into the mainstream
of economic thinking in the future development of an economy and
its people. You know that one of the international development
targets is that there should be national strategies for sustainable
development in place in every country by 2005; this comes out
of the Rio conference and then reversing the loss of environmental
resources by 2015. We agree very much with what it appears the
World-Wide Fund for Nature said in their evidence that having
a separate national strategy for sustainable development in developing
countries, when they are meant to bring together all their macro-economic
and social planning in their poverty reduction strategy, is not
the right approach. We need to bring the environmental considerations
into the mainstream of the poverty reduction strategy, make it
longer term and take the focus into the centre. That is our view
in the White Paper and we have started working with the World
Bank and so on to try to achieve that objective. Obviously PRSPs
are very new but they are going round and they are popular in
developing countries and if they are to work we have to get environmental
sustainability into the perspective. Our view on your point on
trade and Brazil and so on, that we should not look for regulatory
arrangements to restrict trade in order to prevent environmental
abuse, and this is another issue which was very, very contentious
at Seattle, developing countries believe that those who call for
environmental provisions in the World Trade Organisation are again
trying to set such high standards that their exports will be excluded
from international markets. Our view, and it is the EU position,
is that the World Trade Organisation agreements and international
environmental agreements should mutually recognise. The Department
is putting more effort into, rather like trade, enhancing the
capacity of developing countries to be participants in international
environment agreements, thinking about their own interests, their
own environment, their own country, having more capacity to think
about their own needs and represent their interests in those agreements.
Like trade, that analytical capacity and negotiating capacity
just need building up in developing countries.
35. We have seen that natural disasters tend
to have greater impact on less developed countries than on more
developed countries. We were in Mozambique last year in the floods
and people who had next to nothing ended up with absolutely nothing
apart from a plastic bag. I think most people would agree that
natural disasters are being exacerbated by global warming. I notice
the laudable comments about renewable energy in the White Paper
but is there anything further that we, your Government, the developed
world, can do to create greater capacity for developing countries
to adapt to environmental change and climate change?
(Clare Short) There are two forces at work. One is
probably the growing instability in climate resulting probably
from global warming. The other thing is the growth in population
leading to more and more people living on more and more marginal
lands where they are more at risk. That is the other big thing
which has been going on which means more and more people are affected
by natural disasters. There is growing concern across the developing
world about these issues and more and more sensitivity to the
need to manage the environment in a way which minimises this.
Obviously in the case of global warming, the Climate Change Convention,
it is the United States of America who have been the obstacle
to agreement, not developing countries. Bangladesh stands to lose
one third of its territory, Pacific islands and so on stand to
disappear completely. There is a real will in developing countries
to get some progress. We are making progress.
36. I particularly wanted to know whether we
can assist developing countries to adapt to the environmental
change which is taking place.
(Clare Short) Yes; indeed. Getting the environmental
perspective to be part of the poverty reduction strategies, thinking
about environmental resources and sustainability and indeed strengthening
the capacity of countries to deal with natural disasters so that
they save their people more quickly and have more knowledge of
where the dangers lie and where not to develop the housing and
so on. We are working on those things too.
(Mr Manning) Two things to keep an eye on. A renewable
energy task force has been established by the Okinawa summit which
will be reporting its findings to the Genoa summit. We shall see
whether that produces any useful ideas in that area. Secondly,
we are planning to fund a study to analyse the extent to which
climate change will affect the achievement of international development
targets and how developing countries can mitigate or adapt to
such predicted changes.
Mr Rowe
37. I have asked you this question before but
it was some time ago and you might want to think about the answer
again. How much does your Department do to make sure that the
lessons you learn overseas are applied here? Community development
in England and Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland is pathetic.
Yet we go round the world preaching how communities should develop
themselves. That is just one example. They are learning a great
deal overseas. What mechanisms do you have in place for your Department
to spread the information you have gathered through the domestic
departments?
(Clare Short) There are few very good mechanisms.
There has been a sort of snobbery that is out there in the world
that developing countries have nothing to teach us, whereas actually
on community involvement in development we do have a lot to learn.
As we publish all our documents, like Human Rights Based Approach
to Development, we need to consult people and to listen to them,
to get people effectively buying in and also doing more effective
development. One bit of feedback I notice is that some of the
work of Professor Ruth Lister who used to be the head of the Child
Poverty Action Group is doing here was inspired by that document.
Starting to publish all our material is beginning to get more
consideration, but in general there are not good mechanisms. I
hope, as there is more recognition for quality effective development,
there might be more openness to learning from it.
(Mr Manning) I have been struck by the extent to which
DFID staff are increasingly being headhunted by Cabinet Office
to work on a whole variety of things, so there are obviously some
feedback mechanisms.
Chairman
38. We do have other questions, but perhaps
we may put them to you in writing. However, may I ask you about
the process of producing the White Paper which has fascinated
some of our academic interlocutors, so we need to put the questions
to you? How much did the Department spend on producing the White
Paper, both in terms of research commissioned, the consultation
process, internal costs and in the production and dissemination
of the White Paper? From what part of DFID's budget was it drawn?
Why was there no Statement in the House of Commons and why was
it launched before copies were available in the Vote Office?
(Clare Short) The total cost of the paper was under
£700,000. Just over £300,000 came from our Information
Department budget to cover design, print, translation, internet
site, The Independent supplement. The rest of the money was drawn
from a special budget set up for the White Paper: £161,000
was spent on commissioning research specifically for the White
Paper but we do commission a lot of research in general anyway;
the final £225,000 was spent on the staff costs of the small
team which was formed specifically for the exercise and on the
organisation of consultations, including a Round Table with representatives
of developing countries in Sussex. We would have paid the staff
working on the Paper anyway so there might be a bit of double
accounting there. Those are the figures. Why there has been no
Statement in the House of Commons is a matter for the "usual
channels" and the "usual channels" from both ends
decided they had other priorities. I noticed at the last Question
Time that some MP asked whether we could not have a debate on
these matters and I think that would be highly desirable myself
and I hope we might be able to persuade the House.
39. Is not the point that after your last White
Paper we were constantly asking for a debate and we never got
one? We do not even have a Statement on this one and perhaps the
Leader of the House should take note of the fact that she has
neglected these Statements and the work of your Department by
not responding to these requests.
(Clare Short) I share that view but I believe that
both ends of the "usual channels" have that difficulty.
On why the White Paper was launched before copies had been made
available in the House, that was some problem with the Vote Office.
It was delivered here but not distributed until later. I have
written to the Speaker. Did I send a copy of that letter to you?
If not I probably should have done.
1 See Evidence p. 14. Back
2
See Evidence p. 14. Back
3
See Evidence p. 13. Back
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