Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160-169)
RT HON
HILARY BENN
MP, MR MICHAEL
ANDERSON AND
MR DAVID
HALLAM
10 MARCH 2005
Q160 Mr Battle: I welcome the comments
you made about the trust funds because it may be the case of making
other suggestions. If the UN cannot use the money perhaps you
could get it back from them and spend it yourselves. If I could
come to one other area of budgeting. DFID, as well as giving a
substantial amount to the UN, also gives money to the British
Council and has given them the task of administering the Civil
Society Fund and the Political Participation Fund. Are you confident
that is—how shall I put it—reaching the parts that
it ought to reach and that some of the poorest groups which are
trying to build up capacity are getting the benefit of that money?
Are you confident in the distribution system of the British Council,
if you like, to make sure that funding is spent well?
Hilary Benn: If you look at the
list of projects that have been supported[1],
I think that money is being used to very good effect. There have
been some difficulties in getting it going and running right,
to be very honest with you, which I think we are in the process
of overcoming. That was partly to do with having the right people
in the right place in order to make sure that happened for some
of the same reasons I have alluded to that created difficulties
for other organisations. It was not perfect to start with but
I think it is getting better. If you look at the list of organisations
which are getting supported, I think that is very good use of
the money in helping organisations on the ground. In this thriving
civil society, which there is now in Iraq, and we tend to focus,
understandably so, on all of the bad things that came out when
the lid came off, there is a lot of fantastic good stuff coming
out as people adjust to a new society in which there are things
they are worried about but they do not have to be terrified about
what traumatised them for 35 years.
Q161 John Barrett: You mentioned in relation
to the tsunami that one of the key things DFID had to do was to
make its commitment based on an assessment of needs. Obviously
there are different issues in relation to Iraq but one area that
there has been a lot of controversy over is the counting of Iraqi
casualties. There was a report in The Lancet which the
Government dismissed because the Government said "We get
our information from the Iraqi Ministry of Health", but is
it not the case that there has been no great effort put into assessing
the number of Iraqi casualties which is something DFID should
have done in order to calculate just what impact DFID needed to
have on the ground? Without that information DFID are not able
to assess what would be their priorities.
Hilary Benn: Of course there has
been a great debate about that but I would not say that DFID needed
to try to do that. It is a very difficult task for reasons that
others much better qualified than I have explained. I do not think
I would agree that this was a necessity in order to enable DFID
to make a proper assessment of how we were going to spend our
money. Regardless of the number of casualties there have been,
and there have been a large number but nobody knows for sure,
the need to get the water and power supplies back up and running,
to provide employment, although there is good economic growth
in Iraq and that is one of the other things one should note, putting
money in to help schools and hospitals get back up and running,
build capacity, all of those things are required regardless of
whether there is an accurate count or not.
John Barrett: Without an accurate count,
apart from the Iraqi Ministry of Health, there is no indication
of the scale of that particular problem. Whether it is DFID pressure
from the UK Government or the UK in conjunction with the US government,
there seems to have been a lack of drive to pursue that particular
issue.
Chairman: I think the Secretary of State
has answered that question.
Q162 Mr Colman: Before I ask my substantive
question, can I briefly return to John Battle's point. Ann Clwyd
is not able to be here this afternoon, but she is immensely experienced
in terms of Iraq and she has expressed to us again and again her
concern that perhaps the British Council either were not the appropriate
mechanism for disbursing aid, or that they could adopt new practices,
particularly to ensure that Iraqi based NGOs were able to apply
for help for their organisations. Secretary of State, could I
perhaps ask for a paper to review this mechanism and you might
want to come back to us before we publish our report because this
was something which we pursued and were concerned that lessons
should be learnt on[2].
My question is about donor co-ordination. After the United Nations
withdrew from Iraq, what mechanisms did DFID develop to ensure
co-ordination between itself and other donors in Iraq? What lessons
have been learnt about donor co-ordination from DFID's experiences
in Iraq? The example that we had when we were there was that DFID
particularly did not work in a major way within the justice and
human rights sector because previously they had been told that
the Americans were going to put $20 million into this sector and
subsequently they did not. Do you believe there are lessons that
could be learnt in terms of how donor co-ordination should go
forward?
Hilary Benn: There are always
lessons in those circumstances. There is the International Donor
Committee, those are the meetings set up under the trust fund,
and we are part of that. There is the core group of donors, those
who pledged $150 million or more at the Madrid pledging meeting.
There are the co-ordination mechanisms in the south, in particular
the Southern Iraq Reconstruction Steering Group, and then there
are the Iraqi mechanisms that have been put in place. They have
worked reasonably well. Of course there have been some difficulties
and I have referred to the problems within the Iraqi system of
making sure that all parts of Iraq understand how the international
donor assistance works and where you need to go to try and get
hold of some of that money, and that is about internal politics.
We have done quite a lot on human rights.
Q163 Mr Colman: Justice and human rights,
the training of judges, the training of magistrates.
Hilary Benn: Yes, we have done
quite a lot. I did not quite understand the premise that somehow
we had steered away from there because we thought somebody else
was doing it.
Q164 Mr Colman: This has come up in our
discussions.
Hilary Benn: We have gone along
and done quite a lot. I am sure you have a list of what we have
done.
Q165 Chairman: I know there are some
Iraqi judges in the UK this week, are there not?
Hilary Benn: And they are being
trained.
Q166 Mr Colman: Secretary of State, previously
we were informed that $20 million was committed from the US but
they withdrew that funding for that sector and that was the reason
I brought it up. Perhaps you could ask your officials to look
into this because clearly if we were wrongly informed then that
is something we need to correct in our report.
Mr Anderson: I can give you an
answer now. The US has done quite a lot of reprioritising driven
largely by security concerns and the inability to get people on
the ground, so they have made an attempt to move money from programmes
that are more difficult to implement to programmes which they
can implement and this was part of that process. $20 million is
quite a substantial sum when compared with the DFID framework.
In our view, the amount of money we are putting into the justice
sector and human rights at the moment is appropriate in the larger
strategy we are pursuing. The decision by the United States to
change their strategy did not invalidate the strategy that we
were already pursuing.
Q167 Mr Colman: I have to ask, were you
consulted in terms of this change in the US strategy to be able
to consider whether you wished to change our strategy as a result
of that?
Mr Anderson: We were in the core
group, and there are telephone conversations every month among
all of the larger core donors, and we were informed of the US
changes in prioritisation. We did not go into detail in all of
them because there were quite a large number but we knew that
the decrease in funding for the justice sector would be one of
them. We chose not to change our thinking because we did not feel
that we had the extra funding to fill that gap.
Q168 Chairman: Secretary of State, this
is clearly unfinished business for us all. We have not really
asked any questions about the Post Conflict Reconstruction Unit
which I understand is not yet operational, so to speak, we would
hope that the Committee in the next Parliament can focus on this.
I think there are some issues we have not explored this afternoon,
like what is DFID's role in Geneva Convention type stuff and after
occupation and all those kinds of things but those are issues
we can discuss later in the year, hopefully, depending on where
we all are.
Hilary Benn: Okay.
Q169 Chairman: Secretary of State, thank
you very much for having been here this afternoon.
Hilary Benn: Thank you very much.
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