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CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1274-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE international development committee
Development Assistance in Iraq
Tuesday 16 November 2004 MR JIM DRUMMOND, HON DOMINIC ASQUITH and DR ROGER HUTTON Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 91
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the International Development Committee on Tuesday 16 November 2004 Members present Tony Baldry, in the Chair John Barrett Mr John Battle Mr John Bercow Mr Tony Colman Mr Quentin Davies Tony Worthington ________________ Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Jim Drummond, Director, Iraq Directorate, Department for International Development (DFID), Hon Dominic Asquith, Director, Iraq, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and Dr Roger Hutton, Director, Joint Commitments Policy, Ministry of Defence (MoD), examined. Q1 Chairman: Thank you all very much for coming to give evidence. As a committee our concerns over Iraq have been largely when do we - and I suspect as a consequence, when do DFID - engage? Our experience in Afghanistan - and many of us have visited Afghanistan - was that it is very difficult to do any development work without security and without stability on the ground. You can do a certain amount such as trying to get the electricity working again and get the sewage working again - they are all important things - but in terms of real development work which actually requires a civil society, NGOs, moving around, some interaction between representatives of state and a civil society actually does require a degree of security and a degree of stability. I think we would welcome your views as to whether or not that point has now arrived? Is there sufficient security on the ground for there to be meaningful development work or are we simply in a kind of sticking plaster mode still and trying to keep society moving as best we can? So it is some kind of huge humanitarian operation, not in refugee camps but a whole society in some sort of humanitarian situation just trying to keep water and food and everything flowing. Could you paint a picture of how you see the development space in Iraq at the moment? Mr Drummond: I think usually in these post-conflict situations one can move from the immediate relief to the reconstruction to the development with some overlap. I think in Iraq what we have at the moment is much more overlap than we would normally expect so that there are some immediate relief questions such as: How do you follow up in Najaf or Fallujah after a military action? There are some immediate reconstruction questions still there. We are dealing with a situation where there has been very little investment in infrastructure for 15 to 20 years so there are very frequent breakdowns of almost everything. I think what has happened in the last year is that the situation has stabilised due to the efforts of donors and partners here and the military. At the same time there is an opportunity to do development work. The Iraqi Government has recently produced a National Development Strategy which is very forward looking. We can make it available to you if you have not seen it[1], but it seems to me a pretty good document for a government that has been there for two or three months in terms of setting forward priorities, the political process and security, taking more responsibility for their own security and establishing a liberal market economy. There are also targets for reconstruction which have been set. I think you have these three phases overlaid in a way that perhaps you do not have in quite the same way in Sierra Leone or even in Afghanistan. Q2 Chairman: Is it post-conflict or post-war? Mr Drummond: Clearly in parts of Iraq there is still conflict going on. In other parts of Iraq - in the north of Iraq - it is pretty peaceful. In the south in the last couple of months since Najaf it has been pretty stable. People have been able to get out and around and do things again. Q3 Mr Battle: You mentioned the overlap and I was recently visiting Afghanistan and the case there was: Can we get onto development? It seems we are going to elections but when will development actually start? By that I mean on the ground, in villages, health clinics, education, projects for the agricultural economy. Some of the resources - including DFID resources - were going into basic security, not necessarily military to chase the Al-Qaeda network up and down the Tora Bora, but at least to employ people to have local presences of quasi military police presence. I wondered if, for all the talk of resources - and it is public resource, probably inaccurate - that money in DFID is being taken away from other areas and parts of the world and other programmes to go into the reconstruction and redevelopment of Iraq. I do not get the impression that much re-development is actually going on. Could you disillusion me and others of that and tell me that water, electricity, roads and agricultural development and, indeed, industrial and service development is being sponsored and supported? Mr Drummond: A lot of work on immediate reconstruction is being done. For example, DFID funded jointly with the Development Fund for Iraq - Iraq's own oil money - an emergency infrastructure programme in the south which has helped to restore power supplies, extend water supplies in Basra; there have been programmes to rehabilitate schools; the UN and World Bank trust funds are starting to operate in these areas. However, I think we are at an early stage of this. There is work going on that we are sponsoring at the centre to provide economic policy. Q4 Mr Battle: Is the electricity supply, for example, more secure now than it was under Saddam Hussein? Mr Drummond: The output is a bit higher than it was before the war. Q5 Mr Battle: The output by the power stations? Mr Drummond: Yes and the reach is better because the grid is now operating so that you can transfer power from stations in the south or the north to the centre, or vice versa. The coverage is better. Q6 Mr Battle: The reason I ask these questions is that in a sense Iraq started, in technical terms according to the World Bank some years ago, as a middle income country that is now desperately facing poverty; it has not got the basic supplies of energy and water. What percentage of rural and urban areas has clean drinking water now? Mr Drummond: We are in a situation where we need to gather more information about what is going on around Iraq so that we can monitor progress more accurately in what we are trying to achieve. There have been a number of studies of households now which provide information. I think the best one that we have seen is by an organisation called Fafo which I think is Norwegian based[2]. It shows that 93 % of rural households and 98 % of urban households are connected to the electricity network. Those people report that the electricity supplies are unstable but if you look at the latest maps for electricity supplies across Iraq what it shows is that the different governates are getting between 10 and 16 hours of power per day which is better than it was during the summer when the demand is much higher. There are economic policy issues that need to be addressed in all of this because power is virtually free in Iraq so there is not much incentive to switch it off. There is an issue for the Government for the future as to how it unwinds some of these subsidies because about half of its budget is spent on subsidies. Q7 Mr Battle: We only get impressions of the conflict and we only get impressions from films of Baghdad with one or two other city exceptions and if I wanted to compare - I do not have any experience of visiting Iraq but I have of Afghanistan - western Afghanistan where there was no conflict going on you could see the real potential for DFID (they were there with other agencies) working on rural agricultural integrated development projects, making sure an irrigation water supply where a river had dried up worked. It was a brilliant example where you could say that the security problems in Kabul and Kandahar occupied by the Americans really, but in western Afghanistan you could see the real potential for good sustainable economic development. Is that true in parts of Iraq now or is the whole place a security camp really? Mr Drummond: I think the main security problems are in the areas around Baghdad. If you go to the Kurdish areas in the north then they are pretty stable and secure and there has been a lot of development there. If you go to southern Iraq at the moment there have been phases where it has been very insecure but for the last couple of months it has been better and people have been able to get out more and do development work. As I say, we have been able to do things in the south; it has been stable enough over the last year to get out and do things. Q8 Mr Battle: I do not decry the use of security officers including police officers; I actually feel and believe they are a function of good integrated development work, but were DFID satisfied that they engaged in the appropriate planning with senior police officers in advance of the invasion and that since then enough support has been provided by the Home Office so that just as in Afghanistan there is support between DFID and the Home Office - and indeed in East Timor - to provide that basic level of ordinary security? Has that happened yet in Iraq? Mr Asquith: Let me try to answer that question. Certainly in terms of looking at it now I would congratulate the Home Office on the support they have given in terms of providing police expertise on the ground in exceptionally difficult circumstances. That is very true down in the area around Basra - which is under British Forces control - but it is also true in Baghdad. That includes both police officers on the ground and retired police who are mentoring the Iraqi police service in slightly more remote areas as well. Q9 Mr Battle: A police officer from my own constituency in Leeds has been in Iraq, but the question I am asking is: has there been enough planning and are there enough? Mr Asquith: Enough planning now, yes. I would say there is enough planning. Are there enough? One can always do with more. Q10 Chairman: Could you just say a little bit about the Global Conflict Prevention Pool? Who is in the lead on that and when does it come into play? How does it come into play? Is it something that sits permanently or does it become activated if there is a particular conflict in the offing? Can you just give us a feel about what the interplay is with the rest of Whitehall? Mr Asquith: It includes the Foreign Office, DFID and the Ministry of Defence. We each have in our ministries officials who follow this every single day and they are forever looking, each day, at projects (both monitoring projects that are existing and projects for the future). In terms of what the objectives are, they were in the initial period (after the end of major hostilities) focusing on security sector reform on governance broadly and at that period on discovering more about Iraq itself. We have now written a development of the strategy for the Global Conflict Prevention Pool which will retain the security sector reform element but will do more on the bridge building between communities and the capacity building of government. We try to work those three into each project so they are mutually re-enforcing. In terms of actual amounts spent, we would expect to spend by the end of this financial year roughly £20 million and will look in the region of £50 million for next year and about £121/2 million for the year after that. It is a rolling programme. Some of its most effective work goes into prison sector reform and on the policing side into supporting capability. Q11 Mr Davies: Can I just ask if that £12 million comes within the £70 million envelope of aid for Iraq or is it in addition? Mr Asquith: This is a separate fund. Q12 Mr Davies: What would be the total amount in this financial year that the British tax payer is contributing to Iraq, apart from the cost of military operations? Mr Drummond: The Global Conflict Prevention Pool contribution is part of the £544 million that was pledged at Madrid for the three years from April 2003 to March 2006. We cannot tell you exactly the amount spent this year as we are only part of the way through it, but I guess it will be £100 million to £150 million of the pledge. Q13 Mr Bercow: Mr Asquith, in response to my colleague Mr Battle you asked whether he meant is sufficient planning being done now. Obviously there is no point in living in the past but we hope we will learn from the past. I wonder if I could ask you, would it be fair to say that whereas there was very substantial military planning in advance of the invasion there was no - or next to no - civil police planning? As part of that, wrapped into that inquiry, am I not right in thinking - as we understand it - that the first approach to the Home Office and to ACPO came only after the fall of Baghdad? Secondly, are there enough police now in and around Baghdad or might it be the case that for whatever understandable reasons a decision has been made to spread relatively thinly the police presence across the country, partly to satisfy demand in different parts of the country, but that the effect of that is that provision is inadequate in Baghdad and finally, therefore, do you accept the view that I know Christian Aid (among others) has observed that there is still an enormous need to recruit, retain, train and protect police because, as ordinary Iraqis are saying, security is the biggest single thing and without it sustainable development is obviously going to be a mere pipe dream? Mr Asquith: Can I be honest and plead ignorance on precisely when the first request came to the police and try to tackle that first question in a slightly different way? The objective soon after the end of major hostilities was to put on the street as many police as possible to tackle the security conditions that then existed. A large number were recruited and a large number were put in place. The level of training and preparation for the police was not sufficient to withstand a very concerted attack upon them in April of this year. The lessons drawn have been to devote even more time to the training of the police before they are subjected to what are exceptional security threats which I suspect our police force would have great trouble in contending with. A lot of effort was initially put into trying to get them spread as widely across the country as possible but effort has been focused increasingly on increasing the training of those police forces that are recruited. I think that is the best answer I can give you. Dr Hutton: There was an issue after the conflict of the quality of the Iraqi police service. The one thing we found in training the police and all other aspects of the security sector is that you cannot rush these things. There is a tendency to want to rush because of the security situation but you only build in quality by taking time over it and training these people properly. I can give you some statistics if you are interested on police training. The Iraqi Police Service at the moment is currently manned to 87,000 of whom 50 % are trained and equipped. We have increased the ceiling which we are aiming for to 135,000, the plan being to have 40 % trained and equipped by January next year and 100 % by July 2006. Slightly complicating the picture is that because of the poor quality of some of the people originally in the IPS there is a redundancy programme so as the numbers go up some of the numbers also go down at the same time. Q14 Tony Worthington: Can I go back to what the Chairman was raising earlier with you? I think you said that the degree of overlay between your interests - that is DFID's interest - and, if I understood you correctly, the Ministry of Defence interest was much greater in Iraq than it was elsewhere. Mr Drummond: I think that is probably true. What I was trying to say was that what we are facing in Iraq is a lot of different development challenges all at the same time. In other countries we tended to face them more in sequence so that there is some immediate post-conflict relief required for places like Najaf or Fallujah. There is some next stage reconstruction of infrastructure - quick impact projects which the military tend to play a leading role in - required. There is also an opportunity to do some long term development stuff, although it is not an easy environment in which to do it. Q15 Tony Worthington: Is it not the case that that is the way it was planned? The Pentagon was put in charge of the humanitarian programme; that was the American plan. It is the American plan we are working to; the humanitarian plan was to be set up and we were invited to come to that effort and that that effort answered back this line of command which was still the Pentagon and to the President. It was planned to be overlaid. Mr Drummond: It is certainly the case that the US system planned to do some of the humanitarian phase themselves but it is also the case that there was a lot of planning done by development agencies with the UN system for the humanitarian phase. As it turned out there was a limited requirement for that. Q16 Tony Worthington: The central point I am getting at is this idea of humanitarian space, that following the military around in any case is a very dangerous experience and what agencies have tried to do over the years is to say that the people providing humanitarian assistance - food, shelter and so on - are not the same people as the people who are shooting up Iraq. What was very alarming to the NGOs - and I remember it well - and what they were protesting about was that it was planned without humanitarian space; the humanitarian bit and the defence bit were overlaid. Mr Drummond: I think that may be true to some extent in the way the US system approached that. I think it is not true in the way that we approach that in the sense that we planned with the United Nations system, with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), with the NGOs for the humanitarian phase. The humanitarian phase was actually very short. A lot of the humanitarian problems that were anticipated did not actually happen and we therefore moved on into the next immediate reconstruction phase quite quickly. Q17 Tony Worthington: What we have witnessed is this appalling identification of aid workers as legitimate targets - they are not legitimate targets - where they have been kidnapped and where they are seen as now fair game by terrorists. We did not help that by going into a war where, in fact, it was planned by the Americans that there would be this overlap between the humanitarian issues. The humanitarian assistance would follow in subject to the control of the military. That did not help, did it? Mr Drummond: I think what we have tried to do is to keep that as separate as possible. I do not entirely buy the NGO argument that because they have perceived an association between the military and the humanitarian that they have become targets. Elsewhere, in the Middle East for example, they have become targets unfortunately for terrorists just because they are associated with the West. Q18 Tony Worthington: I do not think that we can simply say that in the British sector we are doing it differently because our NGOs - the international NGOs - will be working in the rest of Iraq as well as in the British sector. That is true, is it not? Mr Drummond: Some of them are. There have been relatively few British NGOs very active in Iraq during Saddam's period and relatively few since. In a sense there was a gap there which had to be filled. Q19 Tony Worthington: But is this business - this precious separation of the humanitarian from the military - going to be more difficult in the future to recreate that space post-Iraq than it was before Iraq? Mr Drummond: We have seen the same pattern in Afghanistan of NGOs being targeted; we have seen it in a few other countries now. It is something that the UN is very conscious of. It has just produced new guidelines for humanitarian operations in Iraq which I think are very pragmatic. Again we can show you them if that would be helpful[3]. Q20 Tony Worthington: Can I just ask you to say a little bit about the use of civilian contractors and how that has affected the delivery of services. I think more than anything I can remember before there has been, as it were, the privatisation of provisions for reconstruction and has that brought in another issue in terms of being able to guarantee safe passage and so on? Mr Drummond: Are you talking about people who provide protection for the development workers? Q21 Tony Worthington: That is one issue. We have, as it were, private police forces working there. They are called security but they are doing police work and there will be private contractors as well who have been brought in for the reconstruction effort. Mr Drummond: I think the only way that one can do the reconstruction effort is through private contractors frankly. One normally might get more UN organisations on that, a few more NGOs, but unfortunately they are not there so the other option is to use private contractors to do that. Obviously in the situation in Iraq they would have to make some arrangements for their own protection and there are private companies that are providing security. Q22 Tony Worthington: The point I am trying to get at is that you have a situation of where that humanitarian space - in this case for reconstruction of the country - is not seen as divorced from the military effort and those people are targets as well. Mr Drummond: I think the humanitarian space argument is just about humanitarian agencies that are providing immediate life saving relief. The reconstruction effort is something that happens normally in a different way and with different principles and it is quite common for the military to be involved in quick impact projects. They have been in the Balkans and other parts of the world. Q23 Tony Worthington: Have any representations been made to the Americans about the lack of wisdom of sending in the humanitarian effort behind the tanks? Mr Drummond: We have talked to the Americans about the importance of separating. Q24 Tony Worthington: Can you say what response you have had? Mr Drummond: From the development community there is an understanding of that. Q25 Tony Worthington: From the Pentagon? Mr Drummond: I have not personally talked to the Pentagon. Dr Hutton: I have not either. Mr Asquith: Can I just add one thought to the important question of whether or not the humanitarian agencies have been associated with the military and therefore are targets as a result? From my experience on the ground in Baghdad for five months this year it is very clear what the intentions and the objectives of the insurgents or terrorists are. They are fundamentally nihilistic. The people who are targeted - and this is the point I want to make - are not just the humanitarian agencies, the western humanitarian agencies; there are a huge number of Iraqi professionals and NGOs operating who have no contact whatsoever with the multi-national forces and were being subjected to - and still are being subjected to - kidnaps and assassinations. There is one clear intent on the part of those perpetrating them, which is to cause as much chaos as possible. Q26 Mr Colman: I visited southern Iraq and Camp Doha in Kuwait in September as part of the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme. I met a number of senior American officers who were very complimentary about the work of DFID in terms of the way DFID was working with local Iraqi contractors, and the American officers were saying that they wished that the Americans on their side, in delivering humanitarian aid and development aid, were doing the same but they were bringing in contractors from the outside, from the United States. While the DFID projects tended to survive and not be subject to sabotage or be blown up, the American work was sadly harmed in this way and an enormous amount of military people were being required to protect the American contractors who were doing their aid effort in the areas of the country where they were working. Would you believe that is simply perception and has no basis of fact or is there a difference in the reconstruction and development work that we are doing because we are separating out, if you like, the military and the occupying power status from the delivery of humanitarian aid while the Americans are not? Are we having a better survival rate of electricity and works, as one example, in our area because we are using Iraqi contractors than perhaps the Americans are doing because they are using American contractors? Mr Drummond: I had not heard that story before. It is obviously true that we have been fortunate in having slightly more flexible procurement rules and so we have been able more easily in the early stages to use local contractors and contractors from the region. That made it easier to get jobs done. The American rules are becoming more flexible and they are certainly using more local contractors now. Part of the review that they did as a supplemental three or four months ago resulted in some greater flexibility for them to use local contractors. And that, as the security situation develops, is clearly the best way to go and also the best way to get local labour employed which is one of the objectives. Q27 Mr Colman: Is development work going ahead much faster in the region where we are the occupying power rather than where the Americans are the occupying power? Mr Drummond: The Americans have spent a large amount of money, a much larger amount of money than we have. They have spent something like $3 billion on immediate relief and reconstruction programmes. They face a bigger security challenge in the areas around Baghdad where they are working. They are also working to some extent in the south so I have seen myself programmes that they are doing with pumping stations along the Shat al Arab. They are achieving things. Mr Asquith: There are many examples that I saw in the Sunni areas around Tikrit where the local American commander was working directly and totally with the local Iraqi business and political representatives in defining what projects to go for and who to do them. They were invariably local companies who were chosen to do them. Unfortunately in that area there was the desire amongst a minority to destroy those projects. Q28 Mr Colman: Would Dr Hutton like to comment, because it was a military person who was saying this to me? Dr Hutton: No, I have not experienced that myself. Q29 Chairman: Before we move on to funding, this phrase "good humanitarian donorship" or GHD, does this ring any bells? It is one of these phrases that comes in development speak. Is this a text somewhere? Is it a book or a booklet? Or is it a process, something like the Geneva Convention? Mr Drummond: It is an agreement amongst donors when they met in Stockholm. It set out some principles. Q30 Chairman: We signed up to it? Mr Drummond: Yes. Q31 Chairman: And DFID is there to see that it is enforced, is that right? Mr Drummond: Yes. Q32 Tony Worthington: Looking at the immediate relief side, I think that has what has happened pragmatically on the ground in some places where it has been difficult for the ICRC and others to get to, is that relief supplies have been provided from time to time by the military. What would be useful would be to show what the UN has just come up with on Iraq because it takes the principles of neutrality and the rest and it goes through to how to apply them in Iraq. Mr Drummond: That would be useful. Q33 Mr Colman: In your memorandum to us in this inquiry you have identified the DFID development goal as an inclusive Iraqi-led reconstruction and you split that into three primary objectives: first of all, economic growth; secondly, accountable governance; thirdly, to promote social and political cohesion and stability. Could you describe how you are progressing against the three goals and how these in fact relate to your primary objective which, of course, is poverty alleviation? Mr Drummond: On the economic side there is some quite positive progress. The Iraqi economy is expected to grow by 60 % this year, largely on the back of higher oil prices, but there are signs of pick-up in agriculture, transport and some other areas of the economy too. A lot of the oil revenues flow through into public sector salaries and so get out in terms of extra demand into the economy. I think there are not very accurate measures of unemployment yet to show whether there has been a substantive change, but there is anecdotal evidence of improvement there. I think that is a reasonably positive story. Q34 Mr Battle: Oil prices have risen massively from $20 a barrel to $50 a barrel, but I was under the impression that production of oil from Iraq is still well down on what it was before the conflict. Mr Drummond: Production has been fairly consistent at around 2.5 million barrels per day which is more or less on target for where they expect it to be at this stage. There have been blips where pipelines have been blown up but I think over the last few months they have become more skilful at mending things. Q35 Mr Colman: What about in the other two areas, governance and social cohesion? Mr Drummond: On the governance side, we have various changes in government obviously over the last year. We have moved from an occupation government to the interim government which has only been around for a few months. We have seen a rapid growth in civil society, a rapid growth in the press; we have seen pretty good representation for women in the political process; we have seen the creation of the National Council - which Dominic may want to comment on - which is part of a process for trying to hold the Government accountable. Q36 Mr Colman: Could I ask how the DFID objectives fit with the Foreign Office objectives and the Ministry of Defence objectives? How do they come together and - and I suppose I am coming back to the question originally asked by my colleague Mr Worthington - to what extent is DFID really simply an add-on to what is a driven policy coming out of the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence? Mr Drummond: I think success in Iraq requires action on three broad fronts. On security we need to move from a position of security through to security section reform and that is primarily - but not entirely - the Ministry of Defence's responsibility. We need a political process which moves towards democracy and a new constitution and that is primarily - but not entirely - a Foreign Office preserve. We also need reconstruction moving in parallel with economic regeneration and that is primarily DFID's role in this process, but everybody else has an interest in it. Q37 Mr Colman: Dr Hutton, you were part of the triumvirate that sat down and agreed these objectives, were you? Dr Hutton: I think we have become much better at thinking of a concerted effort across Whitehall and, speaking MoD speak for a moment, we tend to think of lines of operation of which the military line is just one. What DFID do, what the Foreign Office do, the economic lines of operation, building stable institutions in Iraq, they complement our line of operation which is providing overall security. As Jim says, part of that is the security sector reform which we have taken the lead on. It is very much a combined - again in MoD speak - campaign planning approach that we take these days. Mr Asquith: The three strands that Jim has spoken of are quite clearly interwoven virtually every day of our working lives. We are always coordinating amongst each other to keep those strands together. Q38 Mr Colman: From the point of view of my experience in southern Iraq - again it is a Putney resident who is a consul general in Basra - I was very impressed to see how this was being done in terms of pulling them all together, but do you believe that there is a sufficient poverty focus in ensuring that the FCO and Ministry of Defence objectives are in fact linked in with this, or would you prefer DFID's focus - that is the FCO and the Ministry of Defence - to be on other issues than these three? Mr Asquith: I am very satisfied with the direction of DFID policy. It seems to fit very, very clearly and easily with exactly what we are trying to achieve on our side and I would suspect exactly the same from the Ministry of Defence, but I cannot obviously speak for them. Dr Hutton: We are at the hard end of providing security in Iraq, but what DFID are doing is equally important in providing a stable, secure Iraq. The two lines of operation are absolutely complementary and we wholly support DFID's approach to this. Q39 Mr Colman: We are obviously concerned where the DFID money is coming from for Iraq and I think it would be helpful if you could clarify what proportion of the DFID expenditure is humanitarian assistance, what proportion is reconstruction and where the money comes from? Which budget lines were used and can you assure us that the very poorest countries - which is where DFID should be putting its money - are not going to suffer? Is it all coming out of contingency? Is it coming out of the CHAD line (that is the Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance Department line)? Could you give us a background as to where the money is coming from and for what purposes? Mr Drummond: The money for 2003/04, £75 million, came from the contingency reserve which DFID holds and was allocated to humanitarian assistance and a bit a reconstruction work in 2003/04. In that year DFID had a £90 million reserve of which £75 million went to Iraq and some to Montserrat. The 2004/05 and 2005/06 DFID funding for the reconstruction of Iraq includes £50 million reallocated from the middle income country programmes and DFID contingency funding of £115 million. We have a public service agreement that requires us to spend 90 % of our bilateral programme on the poorest countries and we are sticking with that. Q40 Mr Colman: Therefore the split of this money that you have given us between humanitarian and reconstruction, what would that be for the three years? Mr Drummond: About £75 million for humanitarian assistance. We have not in the current year, so far as I am aware, provided humanitarian assistance. There will be some that was allocated to UN agencies in the previous financial year which is still being spent this year but we have not responded to new appeals this year. Q41 Mr Colman: Using all the money from the contingency allowance for Iraq, does that mean that the work in Darfur is under-funded? Mr Drummond: No, I do not think so. The Africa Division has its own contingency provision which has funded the work in Darfur. Q42 Mr Colman: I understand that your budget going forward means that you are reducing the amount going into Iraq over the next three years. Could you clarify which programmes you envisage stopping in the next three years? Mr Drummond: We made a pledge at Madrid of £544 million which will be spent by the end of March 2006. We have not decided on allocations for years after that yet but our expectation is that Iraq should not need large amounts of donor funding after that period because it should be generating enough of its own revenues from increased oil and other parts of the economy. Q43 Mr Colman: What is your bottom line in terms of the programmes you would in fact be funding? For instance, is capacity building - which all of us are concerned about - the area which you are going to concentrate on? Mr Drummond: We would expect, as I say, for Iraq not to need large amounts of donor grants for capital programmes; it should be able, if it gets a debt reduction, to borrow commercially to do things. It should be generating its own revenue in oil. It will continue to require assistance from outside on rebuilding the institutions of the state and we hope that we will be able to contribute to that. Quite what budget that will require I do not know. It has not been fixed yet but we will be going through a process during the next few months to do that. Q44 Chairman: At the moment we are there - to use the language of the United Nations - as occupiers. I do not mean that in a pejorative sense. Mr Asquith: No, the UN does not use that word. Q45 Chairman: I thought the reason the Americans describe themselves as occupiers was because it had to be in a UN resolution? Mr Asquith: That was up until 28 June. Q46 Chairman: So we have ceased to be occupiers. There will come a time, January hopefully, when there will be elections. Presumably then we will be giving assistance by way of direct budgetary support to the then government, will we? Mr Drummond: What we are trying to do at the moment is ... Q47 Chairman: No, what is the mechanism, not what we are trying to do now. After January there will be an Iraqi Government. Mr Drummond: There is an Iraqi Government now and what we are trying to do now is to work very much with that Government to build up its capacity and to support its policies, to help it develop its policies. It may be a different Iraqi Government in January and our role will be the same, to try to support them. Q48 Chairman: As Parliamentarians I think we would say there will be some democratic - hopefully democratic - authority after January, so will the mechanism be direct budgetary support as we understand direct budgetary support, or will DFID effectively be saying that these are the programmes that we think are in the best interests for the people of Iraq? Mr Drummond: What we want to do is work with Iraqi policies. We want to be able to debate those policies with the Iraqi Government, whether it is the current Government or the next one. The National Development Strategy that I mentioned at the beginning is the first sign of Iraqi Government policies and setting of priorities. We think it is a pretty good document. It was presented to the donors at the Tokyo Conference in October and it provides a fairly broad framework for us to work within. Whether we will be providing direct budget support is something that we will have to discuss with the new Iraqi Government. My guess is that with the oil price where it is that may not be a high priority. Mr Asquith: There will still be a developing political process. The Government that is elected in January will be termed the transitional government rather than a full government. I know this is playing with words but it is important in the context of the transitional administrative law which the Iraqis wrote themselves, signed up to themselves in March, and it is also important in the context of Security Council Resolution 1546 which set out the political process which ends after these elections and the drafting of a constitution and a referendum on the constitution by the middle of October and the constitutionally based elections at the end of next year. At the end of that process - that is the end of the political process - we will have the fully fledged Iraqi Government, but you will still have a transitional government for this coming year which has yet to define for itself its powers. Q49 Mr Davies: While we are on the funding, since you say that Iraq is potentially a wealthy country and thinking of the rise in the oil price, why did we not consider making some of this money available - which was necessary to fund the reconstruction you are describing, the £540 million that you are talking about - by way of a loan which could be repaid when these oil revenues come on-stream? Then maybe you could use this money for some of the middle income countries from whom we have withdrawn programmes in order to pay for Iraq because money would flow back into DFID's coffers, or at least it would flow back to the British tax payer. Why is it all given in the form of an apparently irrevocable grant? Mr Drummond: At this stage we judge that Iraq needs grant aid and Iraq has large amounts of debt. DFID does not, so far as I know, provide loans to developing countries. Q50 Mr Davies: That is just a sort of procedural rule, a bureaucratic obstacle. It does not address my point of substance as to whether or not economically there would be a good basis for a loan because what is a loan? It is advancing cash flow and you say that Iraq does not have a cash flow now but they are going to have it in the future. That, all things being equal, is a good basis for a loan, is it not? Mr Drummond: Where Iraq is at the moment with $120 billion of debt which it cannot repay that that is not a sound basis for moving to loans. I think in a few years' time Iraq should be able to borrow commercially but all the donors are agreed that for the moment it justifies grant assistance. Q51 Mr Davies: How much of the £150 million that you are spending of British tax payers' money in Iraq this year - apart from the cost of military operations - is being spent on security and how much on insurance to protect the deliverers of those projects and those programmes, whether those deliverers be employees of DFID, NGOs that we are supporting or contractors we are hiring whether expatriate or Iraqi? How much for security for them? How much for insurance for them? Mr Drummond: Where we are providing bilateral projects where we are putting staff on the ground, the costs of security adds roughly a third to what we are doing. Q52 Mr Davies: So two thirds is the cost of the actual programmes and one third is the cost of security. What about insurance? Mr Drummond: I do not have a figure for insurance I am afraid. Q53 Mr Davies: Why do you not have a figure? Because it is not material? Mr Drummond: It will be part of contract; I am afraid I just do not know the figure. Q54 Mr Davies: Is it material in relation to the total cost of this exercise? Mr Drummond: Insurance will obviously add to the cost of what we are delivering and insurance in Iraq will be a bit higher than elsewhere. We can provide you with an estimate of what it is but I am afraid I do not have it in my briefing. Q55 Mr Davies: I have a note here from our own advisers which estimates that the insurance premia have reached 30 % of company pay rolls and the security costs for two travelling foreigners can amount to US $5,000 per day, for example. If that estimate is correct it adds up to quite a large amount of money, does it not? It does seem to me that decision takers in DFID like yourself should be aware of what that amount of money adds up to. Mr Drummond: What I need to check is whether the security includes insurance or not. What I am being told is that the figure of £5,000 per day is for the very short term contractors and for longer term it is significantly less than that. Q56 Mr Davies: Is that £5,000 or $5,000? It makes a big difference with the present rate of exchange. I put to you $5,000. Mr Drummond: It is dollars. Q57 Mr Davies: I am asking the questions, you are supposed to know the answers. Mr Drummond: As I said to you, I do not know the precise costs of insurance; we can find that for you. Q58 Mr Davies: Would you be kind enough to let the Committee have a note on the question I have asked? Mr Drummond: Of course[4]. Q59 Mr Bercow: "Is" does not equal "ought". As my colleague Mr Davies was suggesting, the fact that it has not been policy to provide loans is just a statement of what is; it is not in any way a judgment on what ought to be. It does seem to me to be a perfectly legitimate line of enquiry. Many of us are fully cognisant of the need for an Iraq spend, Mr Drummond, and our questions must not be taken to imply that we do not think it is necessary or a priority, but equally quite a lot of us believe in specificity, value and accountability for the spend. Therefore, I wonder if I could ask you, consistent with what you said about the decreased need for substantial capital programmes over the next couple of years as reflected in the figures, whether at least in broad but reasonably specific terms you can tell me - because I would like to know - what the £86 million in 2005/06 will embrace. I may be wrong, but I am very concerned about what seems to me a lack of specificity about where the money is going and what exactly is being provided. Do we know that that is precisely what is needed? Will it all be reliably spent? Who is charged with the responsibility for overseeing its efficacy, et cetera, et cetera? These are very, very substantial sums of money, albeit decreasing sums, on the Iraq spend over the next couple of years and I would like to be clear that you - whom I am sure are master of all you survey and certainly the person giving evidence to us today - can tell us what the £86 million is delivering. What are we getting? What if my constituents in Buckingham say to me, "Well, you're on this committee, Mr Bercow, it's a very important committee and we are all frightfully pleased you are representing us, but what we want you to get out of Mr Drummond is what this £86 million is getting us?" Mr Drummond: Can I answer that in 2004/05 or do you want to focus on the next financial year or both? Q60 Mr Bercow: I am going to be greedy and say both. Mr Drummond: In the current year what you are getting are improvements to infrastructure in southern Iraq. You are getting advice to establish the procedures at the centre of government. In Iraq you are getting advice on economic policy. There is a substantial amount of money provided through the UN and World Bank Trust Funds which will be spent in the current financial year and that will go on a variety of education, health, electricity supply, water supply programmes. Q61 Mr Bercow: When you say "advice", do you mean consultancy costs? Mr Drummond: Advice is mostly provided by the consultants, yes. We have to go to the market to acquire the expertise. So those are some of the things you would be able to tell you constituents for this year. For next year we have not made decisions yet and we will be reviewing Country Assistance Plans over the next couple of months to decide on priorities for the next financial year. Q62 Mr Bercow: But £86 million is very precise. It is not £85 million, it is not £90 million; it is £86 million. Is it costed? What I am getting at is has it been chopped on the basis of a percentage calculation of what ought to be chopped in order to furnish other parts of the Department with a potential spend? I am sorry if you think I am being very finickity; I am being very finickity about it but I believe rightly. Have you made a judgment that £86 million is what is needed not because you have anything like budget support in mind, but a very specific set of identifiable projects with yardsticks for measuring their achievements? Mr Drummond: The money for next year is the balance of DFID's contribution to the Madrid pledge. There will also be money through the Global Pool next year which will be on top of the £86 million, so I do not expect for the next financial year that there will be a significant change in the overall UK contribution on the civilian side. In terms of what we spend it on next year, as I say we will review over the next couple of months what we should be doing with it. I would expect that we would want to make more contributions to health, education, employment generation in the south and we will want to carry on with our capacity building programmes at the centre and see some of these economic reform issues that we are working on now translated into policies which are then implemented. Mr Bercow: I trust that will be clearly itemised and explained in the next annual report. Q63 Mr Battle: I am still not that much clearer about the process - immediate relief, reconstruction and development - and I know it is difficult but I am looking for a clear plan in my mind of how Iraq is moving through all the stages. I am under the impression that everyone in Iraq is still receiving food daily from the World Food Programme, including the president. Is that right? Mr Drummond: There is still a food ration. It is not provided by the World Food Programme; it is provided from the Iraqis' budget. Q64 Mr Battle: So everyone gets a daily food ration. Mr Drummond: I think about 60 % of the population are dependent on it. Mr Davies: We heard it was a 100%. Q65 Mr Battle: I was under the impression that it was a 100% because I think one of us asked the World Food Programme if even the president gets a ration and we were told yes, because that is the situation. I just want a clearer impression in my mind of when people will come off rations in Iraq, including the president. Mr Drummond: We would like to see the public distribution system wound down and one of the pieces of work we are involved with is how you wind that down sensibly so that you protect poor people but you do not use Iraqi oil revenues, tax money to subsidise the wealthy people in Iraq. In the current political situation with a government that is going to be facing an election in January and a new government thereafter, I do not think we are going to see movement on that in the next few months but this is an opportunity to plan for making that change. Q66 Mr Battle: Is the difficulty the distribution because of security or is it production of food and ability to buy it in? Mr Drummond: As you move away from the current system then you need to have a private sector system which is going to replace it and that takes a bit of building. We also want to send the right price signals to Iraqi farmers. At the moment my understanding is that they do not get the right price incentive. Mr Asquith: Your question is directed at why there is still a food distribution system? Q67 Mr Battle: Yes. Mr Asquith: Because there are large sectors of the population who do depend on it for economic reasons. Mr Drummond: The 60 % that I mentioned are people who are judged to depend upon this. Q68 Mr Battle: So if we go through the stages from immediate relief to reconstruction to development, if we are looking at places like Malawi that faced drought (the Southern African drought), providing the rains did not completely dry up the following year there were seed packages to make sure people could grow, and therefore became self-sufficient in, food. There was at least a timeline and a progress report of when people could come off dependency on hand-outs of food but we have not got to that stage at all yet in Iraq, have we? Mr Drummond: They are working on that at the moment, but they have not got to the stage of a definite plan for doing it and I do not think they would want to announce at the moment, for understandable reasons, a definite plan for doing it. Q69 Mr Battle: How does DFID view the balance between strengthening the Iraqi interim government and strengthening civil society? Mr Drummond: DFID is trying to work on strengthening government systems which will be sustainable after the interim government has moved on and there is a transitional government in the next phase, and thereafter a general election. What you have is a situation where Saddam Hussein used a lot of systems outside the normal government processes and so there was not a system round the prime minister for running the Government in the way that we would recognise and so what we are trying to do is to help him generate those systems in a way that will be sustainable through the various elections. That is an important part of what we are doing but we have also set up funds for civil society development and to help poorer people or marginalised people get involved in the political process. Most of those things will be through civil society organisations, so we are doing both. Q70 Mr Battle: Are you helping the reconstruction of those participatory structures, perhaps at the local level, small village and town organisations and that kind of thing? Mr Drummond: The proposals that we are getting from civil society organisations both in Iraq and from international and UK organisations that can still work with Iraqi partners do involve some of that, yes. For example, there are quite a few proposals for voter education coming through at the moment. Mr Asquith: We do a lot of work with civil society organisations from our missions in Iraq. The problem is not so much finding them because there is a surprisingly large number. The problem is determining which are the effective ones and which are the ones who are actually taking you for a ride or see an opportunity for remuneration for work which is not really what we would call NGO work. There is no shortage of people but it does require a high degree of caution and circumspection about whom you are dealing with, which does inevitably take a little bit of time. However, we are working very, very closely with them, and that includes increasing the capacity of the good ones to function. Mr Davies: Before we leave that, Mr Battle's questions have opened up a very major significant contradiction. In a testimony we had only last week from the Deputy Director of the World Food Programme, Monsieur Graisse told us that a 100% of the population of Iraq were receiving food distribution. That testimony was so surprising that you will recall I asked him specifically to confirm that and asked if Mr Alawi, for example, was also receiving or entitled to receive that and I was told yes. Mr Drummond, in his testimony just now, said that it was 60 %. If it is 60 % all sorts of questions arise about how the selection is made. However, it is an extraordinary matter that there should be such a different perception between two agencies so intimately involved and so responsible for the future of Iraq as the World Food Programme and DFID, that I wonder if I can ask Mr Drummond to let us have a letter in due course either confirming the testimony he has given us today or correcting it in the light of Monsieur Graisse's testimony to us? Q71 Chairman: What I think we will do, Quentin, is let Jim have a copy of what WFP said last week and then he can see whether there has been some misunderstanding or it can be clarified because it is an important point. Mr Drummond: I think I can probably clarify it now, Chairman. I think the entitlement is close to a 100%, pretty much everybody. Q72 Mr Davies: Pretty much everybody or everybody? Mr Drummond: In terms of the people who need and depend on it - which is what I said - that is around 60 % in our judgment. Q73 Mr Davies: If they are entitled they probably claim it even if they do not need it. Mr Asquith: I am pretty confident they do not. At least I am pretty confident that the President and the Prime Minister do not. What does happen is that the food distribution system is based upon a registration process. You have to go and register and it is done by families. There are some people in Iraq at the moment who will not be on the register. Chairman: This is very interesting but I wonder whether from the Foreign Office or DFID we could have a note because I think it is very important to have an authoritative view[5]. I think we are going to have to adjourn for this division and I think the best way is just to have a note on this one. The Committee suspended from 3.44 pm until 3.56 pm for a Division in the House Q74 Chairman: As I understand it, most of DFID's programmes are being managed remotely from Amman, is that right? Mr Drummond: No. The UN manages quite a lot of its work from Amman because its international staff are not in Iraq, they are in Amman. I think the Japanese Government has some people in Amman as does the EEC. Q75 Chairman: Where is the international reconstruction fund facility for Iraq managed from? Mr Drummond: That is managed by the World Bank and the UN and the UN part of that is in Amman. The World Bank has one or two staff in Amman as well but does most of the work from Washington. Q76 Chairman: Where are the DFID team? Mr Drummond: The DFID team are in London, Baghdad and Basra and visit Amman for liaison purposes but we do not have people based there. Q77 Mr Battle: How many staff are in the DFID team in Baghdad? Mr Drummond: DFID core staff, about half a dozen. Q78 Mr Battle: Do you have other staff in other parts of Iraq that are out in the field or are they all necessarily in Baghdad? Mr Drummond: They are in Baghdad and Basra. Q79 Chairman: You are confident that there are sufficient DFID feet on the ground to make sure that the money spent is accountable and it is being spent effectively and all that kind of stuff? Mr Drummond: I am satisfied with that, yes. I would like, for the purposes of broadening the programme, to be able to post more people to Iraq but in the current circumstances we have to be quite careful about our numbers. Q80 John Barrett: I feel that one of the advantages of being on this Committee is that we are able to make sure that we get good value for money, that DFID spend their money wisely, the programmes are efficient and well-coordinated and I would like to go on to that. However, can I just grasp what you have said already? You have said there is a stable flow of oil and oil prices have increased so we have an increased source of income; at the same time you talk about grants, not loans. You were talking about free power still existing in the country and you were also talking about the World Food Programme maybe supplying 60 % or even more. Mr Drummond: Not the World Food Programme; the Iraqis' own budget. They are using their oil revenues to buy food, which is then provided pretty much free to people. Q81 John Barrett: One issue that has cropped up is, is there a detailed plan or was there a detailed plan in advance of the conflict and what stages are we at so far as coordinating what we do for the future now? Bearing in mind that this is a country that potentially has a reasonable source of its own income, but at the same time there are a number of donors - including ourselves - what mechanism is there in place for coordination between the donors at national level and also looking at coordinating with the future Iraqi interim government and then longer term the new Iraqi Government as to how best and how most efficiently can funds, development and that long term plan be implemented then unfold in the years ahead? Mr Drummond: Can I just make a point about the income levels because the per capita income level in Iraq last year was estimated at $400 to $500, which is pretty low. It is going to rise this year, we think, to around $700 but this is still actually pretty low. Iraq in two or three years' time ought to be - security and other things permitting - on a path upwards and well back into the middle income category. It is still formally speaking categorised by the OECD as a middle income country because they do the calculation every three years. It is not a rich country and there are a lot of poor people, particularly in southern Iraq. I do not think it is ready yet to be moving onto commercial loans but in a few years' time, sure. On the donor coordination question the Ministry of Planning and Development Cooperation in Baghdad is at the moment in charge of coordinating the donors locally. There are relatively few donors with development experts on the ground in Baghdad. We have them; the US has them. We are providing liaison people for the World Bank and the UN. There is quite a tight knit donor community in Baghdad which meets regularly informally as well as formally with the Ministry of Planning. Internationally there is a wider donor community. We talk to each other every month in telephone conferences and we meet every four to six months at a suitable place, usually in the region. Q82 John Barrett: Can we move on from the coordination at national or international level to coordination at a more local level. What has DFID planned to ensure that this coordination down through civil society, through local governments and through what remaining NGOs there are there (because obviously with the security situation a lot have moved out)? For this money - and as we said before they are substantial sums - not just the money we have donated but the international community has given, it is absolutely vital that there is an effective and coordinated system at local level to make sure this is also effectively spent. Is there a plan in place to make sure that through to more devolved levels, there are systems in place for efficient use of the resources? Are these being developed and if so, what is DFID's plan for this? Mr Drummond: We are involved in this in the south in Basra. We do not have staff in other parts of Iraq apart from Basra and Baghdad at the moment. In Basra there is a coordination mechanism which is run jointly by us and the Americans which includes the UK military and includes Iraqi representatives of course. There are separate regular contacts with NGOs, particularly around the political participation and civil society funds that we mentioned. I think there is good contact locally. I can only speak for Basra, as I say. Q83 John Barrett: Is there a plan B in place? Plan A is obviously that the security situation improves dramatically in the years ahead but is there a plan B if that is not the case? Are there alternatives where people can say that after the election the security situation would improve and troubles would cease, but if it turns out that this does not quieten down in the year head is there an alternative scenario able to be rolled out? Mr Drummond: The alternative scenario is that we have to do more immediate relief or immediate post-conflict reconstruction and that the development process is delayed. What we have tried to do in designing our programme is to be as flexible and as quick on our feet as we can with that. We are adjusting at the moment what we are doing in southern Iraq so that we are helping a bit more on the quicker impact stuff than we thought we would need to do five months ago. Q84 Mr Battle: One of the questions I asked at an earlier session just after the military action in Baghdad was about the policy of de-Ba'athification - it is an ugly phrase but I think we all know what it means - of Iraq, that everyone who had been in the Ba'ath party should be sacked from their job which meant that we cleared out most of the, quote, civil service. I was a little bit sceptical of that policy because I thought (a) we would lose the capacity of people who were trained and (b) we would alienate people and they would turn against any plans of reconstruction. I just wondered whether that policy has been reconsidered; whether that was the effect of that policy. Where is the capacity in providing essential services? Where are the personnel and what is the present situation? Or are people who were de-Ba'athicated being allowed back in now and encouraged to join in? What is the present situation? Mr Asquith: That whole issue was very much in the forefront at the end of Coalition Provisional Authority days when it was indeed reconsidered and it was left open very specifically in the education field for teachers to come back in; not just teachers but across the whole educational spectrum. The level at which you had to reach in the Ba'ath party in order not to be readmitted into the system was set and it was set quite high. Those below that were allowed back into the employment pool. That remains so in terms of, as it were, lower level Ba'ath party people; they are still employable. The de-Ba'athification became increasingly targeted on those who were senior members of the Ba'ath party. In terms of the effect, speaking from personal experience, I was always surprised how many people there did seem to be still in the civil service but it is a capacity building problem; they were there but, with the greatest respect, they were not the most effective. That was because of the circumstances in which they had been operating for thirty years. Q85 Mr Battle: So there are not thousands of people who were, put loosely, made redundant who are standing around unemployed and disgruntled by the whole project. Mr Asquith: There are, of course, a large number of people who were in the security forces with whom there have been problems in terms of amalgamating them into or allowing them to re-join civil society. That is, as you are all very well aware, the pool in which there are some disgruntled people operating. In terms of employment, one of the predictions, particularly as the American supplemental funding has started to increase, is that the employment pool will begin to shrink quite dramatically. Q86 Mr Battle: In the end if people in other parts of the world collaborated in any way with a regime that has been oppressive and has abused human rights, those people would hopefully either be brought to trial or a line is drawn and they can come back productively to cooperating in the economy of that society at the appropriate level. Is there a plan for that or are these people just locked out and stood on the street corner throwing bricks - if not worse - at the military forces? Mr Asquith: I should be clear that it is an issue since 28 June which the Iraqi Interim Government is responsible for in determining the policy and has been debating amongst themselves quite extensively and is one which will be taken up by the transitional government after January. Q87 Mr Bercow: We are told that unemployment stands at somewhere between 40 % and 50 % but the figure for women is much higher than that. What is the rate of unemployment among women? Mr Drummond: There are not actually any very good measures of unemployment across Iraq. There is not a system so we are dealing with estimates. The most recent estimate I have seen - which may have come after the submission that we put to you - was that women's participation in the labour force is 13%, so very low. That same study produces unemployment rates of 12 % in urban areas, 6.6 % in rural areas with some differentiation across the poorer governorates where the unemployment rate is much higher. As I say, there are no accurate figures for this. Q88 Mr Bercow: I think it might be quite useful to know - pursuant in a sense to the sort of line of questioning that my colleague Mr Davies was developing earlier - to what extent that unemployment is the result of a cultural pattern and possibly even a specific choice not to work, and to what extent is the result of lack of skills or training, and to what extent it might be the consequence of displacement or other features of the conflict. What I am getting at here is that I think a lot of people would say that if we could provide development assistance that will bolster the economy and extend opportunities for women, then up to a point that is certainly something that we should be prepared to consider. Nevertheless there is a total pot and it is not infinite for development assistance from this country and indeed multilaterally for that matter. In the context of what is - or should be - again a middle income country with a substantial revenue stream from oil not very far away on the horizon, we obviously cannot sign up to some holistic goal which says that all women should be employed or our cultural preferences dictate that they should be. What I am really getting at is, amongst people who are or could relatively inexpensively be trained and who want to work in the category of Iraqi women, what proportion are not able to do so? Mr Drummond: I do not think we have the information to answer that question frankly at the moment. I think a lot more studies are needed to get a good statistical base for Iraq. Q89 Mr Bercow: In that case, could I just say as somebody who is massively sympathetic to these objectives - and of course empowerment of women and general equality is a very important Millennium Development Goal (MDG) - an MDG I support - that we do need precisely that wealth of information. Can I put it to you that there is a concern otherwise that we can find ourselves going along with declarations of good intent that are entirely laudable in themselves but to which potentially there is an unlimited price tag and that is not something that we can credibly do in development policy, given that there are other countries around the world perhaps a great deal poorer. Mr Asquith: Could I just add, although I am not sure whether it is relevant or not, in the case of the elections for the national council we set ourselves a target for a percentage for women which was exceeded. In the case of the transitional assembly for which the vote will be taking place at the end of January this coming year, the target is that 25 % of the national assembly will be females. For that reason in the electoral arrangements every third candidate has to be a woman. In certain areas, certainly on the political side, there are targets set and arrangements put in place that are kept. Mr Bercow: That is helpful. Mr Drummond: On our side quite a lot of the civil society and political party participation funding that we are providing will go towards organisations that are promoting women's engagement. Q90 Mr Battle: In the light of the evidence you have given us today some of us will hopefully be visiting Iraq in the New Year and I was wondering if it were possible to have a map, as in my constituency there are rough maps showing us the areas of high unemployment, areas of economic stress, I am looking really for a development map as opposed to a military strategic map. Could we, as a development committee, have a development map so that we would have a clearer idea of the areas where good work can go on, where work is going on and where the needs are in Iraq? I do not think I have that pattern yet. I accept the points you make about the difficulty in getting the data, but I think if we could get somewhere closer to that it would enable us to say that the focus is on development in the wake of the military and security questions rather than we are trying to second guess where we move the troops all the time. Mr Drummond: The data is incomplete but we can put together what we have for you[6]. Chairman: Thank you very much for helping us with our understanding of these issues. [1] The Iraqi Strategic Review Board: National Development Strategy 2005-07, The Ministerial Committee on The National Development Strategy, September 2004 [2] Iraq Multiple Indicator Rapid Assessment, Iraqi Central Organisation for Statistics and Information Technology, FAFO and UNDP. To be published late January/early February. [3] Guidelines for Humanitarian Organisations on Interacting with Military and Other Security Actors in Iraq, 20 October 2004 [4] Further information to follow - IRAQDEV04a [5] Further information to follow - IRAQDEV04a [6] Further information to follow |