Examination of Witnesses (Questions 28-39)
MR MICHAEL
MOSSELMANS, DR
BARBARA HENDRIE,
MR PAUL
SCHULTE, MS
JOAN LINK
AND MR
GAVIN BARLOW
15 MARCH 2005
Q28 Chairman: May I ask a couple of boring
machinery of government questions? Is the Strategy Unit, looking
at countries at risk of instability, the same Cabinet Office bit
which deals with failing states or is there another bit which
deals with failing states?
Ms Link: It is the same unit,
but it is not a permanent body, it is just the strategy unit which
looks at all sorts of aspects of government which chose to do
a study coming out of the strategic audit on failing states and
it changed the study's name because there is a lot of controversy
about whether you should say a state is failing in terms of sensitivity
to the state concerned. Yes, it is the failing states study. It
started off as a study on failing states and changed its name.
Q29 Chairman: For us humble observers
of what is happening in Whitehall it is quite difficult keeping
up with everything which is happening in the Cabinet Office with
all these units. Not now, but could someone just send us an Orbat
of how you all relate to each other? My experience of Whitehall
is that inter-departmental things are great, except that you end
up with no minister taking responsibility for anything unless
there is a kind of Cabinet sub-committee which meets at some stage.
It sounds great until you then start rowing about the money and
who is going to pay. That is my usual experience. I do not know
about John and his experience when he was a minister in the Foreign
Office but that was my experience when I was a minister in the
Foreign Office. I do not want to take up time now, but could someone
kindly send us an Orbat of all the bits, who is answerable to
which ministers, which ministers take responsibility and how it
plugs into the Cabinet Office? Would that be okay?
Mr Mosselmans: Yes, we will do
that. No problem.
Q30 Mr Colman: You may have heard that,
when the Secretary of State for International Development came
to us last week, this question I am about to put to you ranked
high and there was a difference of opinion within the Committee.
How do you ensure that the various initiatives on conflict prevention
which are happening do not result in the squeezing of poverty
reduction as a priority? What safeguards are there to make sure
that the money that is spent through the various Conflict Prevention
Pools, some of which would previously have gone to DFID, has poverty
reducing impacts? Then we were discussing Iraq, but clearly there
is a wider issue and how do you make sure that the poor do not
lose out?
Mr Mosselmans: There are two things:
one is that I am not sure it is either/or. Much of the work that
the Government tries to do in a joined-up Whitehall way on conflict
contributes towards the Government's various different objectives
including poverty reduction, because obviously conflict is a major
impediment towards achievement of the Millennium Development Goals
and poverty reduction and therefore working in an as joined-up
way as we can to deliver conflict reduction through the pools
both contributes towards DFID's poverty reduction goals plus contributes
to other legitimate government goals of other ministries. Secondly,
we try to use our seat on these various mechanisms, like the Conflict
Pools and with our contributions to the Post-Conflict Reconstruction
Unit, to make sure that DFID's aims are given due prominence in
those mechanisms. So that is the objective and aim of the people
who represent DFID in these fora and then, when Hilary Benn represents
DFID in ministerial committees to talk about the Conflict Pools,
he will try to make sure that other ministers keep DFID's objectives
in mind when the decision is taken.
Dr Hendrie: I do not have anything
particular to add. If it is a question of what the impact is on
the ground in the countries concerned—
Q31 Mr Colman: An example could be Nepal
which two years ago under the conflict prevention pool was given
military helicopters and in the last 12 months was given an aircraft
which worked with very short take-off and landing and whether
this was in fact a pro-poor use of the conflict prevention pool
or perhaps had other uses. That is an example. Would DFID see
that as a pro-poor use of the monies?
Dr Hendrie: May I defer to colleagues
who run that particular part, who work on the global prevention
pool, to answer?
Mr Mosselmans: I think you are
right, that not every single thing that is funded under these
arrangements is pro-poor because there are a variety of government
interests that feed into the arrangements and a variety of money
from different government sources. The number of interventions
made by these pools which are not pro-poor is small.
Q32 Mr Colman: What are the safeguards
then, to make sure DFID money does not go down this route?
Ms Link: May I take this as I
am from the Foreign Office and not DFID? The way the pools were
set up, originally money came in from the three departments concerned.
The Treasury also added quite a lot of extra money themselves
and now the Conflict Prevention Pools do their own spending round
bid. So it is not actually money that is labelled for one department
or another, it is money that is bid for by each pool and it sits
in a separate part of the budget, in the DFID budget for Africa,
and in the FCO budget for the global pool, but we are not allowed
to vire the money into and out of the departmental budget. It
is actually a separate entity now and it means that some of the
aspects of the spending will relate perhaps to harder security
aspects of stabilising a country and some will relate more to
the development side of things. For example, in Nepal the programme
is actually quite an integrated programme with issues to do with
supporting the Nepalese government in stabilising the situation—and
there are problems, as you know, on the political side about that
at the moment—but also towards providing alternative livelihoods
for people in poor areas in Nepal, so that they have something
else they can rely upon rather than being coerced constantly.
It is definitely a mixture of areas that come together to try
to help stabilise and prevent further conflict.
Q33 Chairman: In that case who is the
accounting officer for all these pools?
Ms Link: The GCPP is accounted
for by the Permanent Secretary in the Foreign Office and the Africa
pool by the Permanent Secretary in DFID. There are overlapping
areas of work, but because of the need for absolute clarity about
where the money is spent, there has to be an individual accounting
officer for each budget.
Q34 Mr Davies: This is a question mostly
for Mr Schulte. What lessons have you been able to learn so far
from Afghanistan and Iraq?
Mr Schulte: We are in the process
of doing a fairly detailed and extended assemblage of past lessons
and that will not be complete for some more weeks. The main themes
which are already coming out and were not perhaps apparent before
we started our work are the desirability of prior planning, an
ability to bring people out to apply expertise within a plan rather
quickly and to maintain them and monitor them in a coherent way.
That forms the basis of what we are going to try to set up within
the PCRU and it is central to our mandate.
Q35 Mr Davies: In other words, it is
clear that in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq, we did not plan
the need for the reconstruction or the capacity-building effort
as early as we might have done.
Mr Schulte: I was not involved
in that planning.
Q36 Mr Davies: That was not an implied
criticism of you or anybody else. I was simply asking whether
that is the objective conclusion that you draw.
Mr Schulte: Our objective conclusion
is that we need to find ways of doing that institutionally better
in the future and the unit exists to do that.
Q37 Mr Davies: And incorporated into
the planning of any military operation of that kind, in a way
that was not done on those two occasions.
Mr Schulte: Yes, we have a very
definite understanding with the defence ministry that we will
work closely with their plans so they move seamlessly into ours.
Q38 Mr Davies: Does that mean that you
will have DFID personnel actually integrated into the planning
staff in the MoD when they are planning operations of that sort?
Mr Schulte: We will have staff
from the PCRU, who may or may not be DFID personnel, depending
on who is doing which specific job on the day.
Q39 Mr Davies: And you will be involved
in the operational planning.
Mr Schulte: Yes. We certainly
will be and our staff includes DFID as well as FCO and other departmental
personnel.
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