Examination of Witnesses (Questions 320-339)
MR GARETH
THOMAS, PROFESSOR
SIR GORDON
CONWAY AND
MR JIM
HARVEY
25 MAY 2006
Q320 Mr Vaizey: Is there an opportunity
for you to out-source some of the work to other existing government
agencies? We had the Environment Agency in, and while they did
not explicitly say "Can we have the work?" they gave
the impression they are doing a little and had the capacity to
do more.
Mr Thomas: I think the answer
to that is maybe, because we already use and receive advice and
support from a whole range of other organisations, be they civil
society organisations, be they research institutes, etc. In the
wake of the Commission for Africa, a number of government departments
have looked at how they can contribute to the Government's agenda
on trying to support Africa better, so it may well be that there
is a role for more organisations to support us in that way. We
have these reviews under way. I think it is important for us to
address first the question of environment capacity within the
Department, and perhaps as part of that we may need to look elsewhere
at what other expertise we can bring in. I think you will be aware
that we have a relationship with the IIED to take advantage of
some of the expertise that they have available to us. In future,
other partnerships like that might potentially be quite attractive.
Q321 Mr Caton: Professor Conway,
you were appointed as Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department
in 2004. How easy have you found it to influence policy as an
outsider and what do you think you have achieved?
Professor Conway: I will be appearing
before the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology
in June. Obviously, that is where I shall make a full answer to
that question, but I can say in all honesty that I have been very
well received within the Department. I have excellent relationships
with the Permanent Secretary, with the Management Board and with
the Ministers. I meet them on a really regular basis. I have had
considerable influence in whole range of areas, some of which
are environmental, some of which are not. I have been involved
in issues over Tsunami with the Minister. I have been involved
with the funding of avian flu work. Most recently, I have been
working a great deal on climate change. I have spent the last
year travelling; I have been to eight or nine countries in the
last six months. I was in Ethiopia and Malawi just recently and
in Tanzania just before that. So I have worked on the ground with
people in the offices. I have been to see many projects which
are in the broadest sense environmental: the watersheds in Orissa,
the forest work in the Sunderbands, I have been up to the Loess
plateau in China, I was recently in Tanzania on Mount Kilimanjaro,
and so on. So I have seen a lot that goes on on the ground, and
I have to say that much of this work you would not narrowly define
as environmental, but it has a great deal of environmental content
to it. I have been able to advise, and I find that in particular
the heads of the offices overseas want me to come back. They say,
"Please come back soon. We benefit from your words."
I think we will have to wait and see the White Paper and what
will come out of the White Paper and also when I give fuller evidence
before the Select Committee on Science and Technology, but I have
been very pleased with the progress.
Q322 Mr Caton: Until April you did
not have responsibility for environment and climate change. Is
that right?
Professor Conway: No, that is
not true. I have responsibility across the whole board in terms
of science and technology; anything that has a science and technology
component to it I have responsibility for. Agriculture, environment,
water, climate change is part of the work plan and has been all
along. I am probably going to be spending rather more time over
the next few months on the inter-relationship between agriculture,
environment, livelihoods and climate change than I have in the
past, but that is what the shift is.
Q323 Mr Caton: So that shift happened
in April, did it? We have information from officials that up until
April your remit did not cover environment and climate change.
Professor Conway: There is a distinction
between the job description and the work plan. The work plan was
agreed about a month ago and the work plan has a high emphasis
on agriculture, environment and livelihoods.
Mr Thomas: What we have done is
to formalise what has become clear in terms of the nature of Gordon's
work by formally including in the work plan that we have agreed
with Gordon for 2006 a greater focus on environment and climate
change in particular within that work plan. That is not a dramatic
change; it is more a reflection of the nature of the work stream
that Gordon has been doing and how it has been evolving.
Q324 Mr Caton: How is that work plan
put together? Who draws it up?
Professor Conway: It is basically
a dialogue between myself and the Permanent Secretary, with inputs
from others. But, just to go back, I was giving speeches on climate
change last August and was working on climate change in Bangladesh
last August.
Q325 Mr Caton: Does DFID have, in
your view, firstly, the expertise, and secondly, the institutional
capacity to give the environment the priority that it needs and
deserves?
Professor Conway: My answer is
the same as the Minister's. I think we are looking towards expanding
our capacity and expanding our work. That is what the White Paper
will signal. I think the biggest challenge, if you want me to
put it more clearly, is that when we think about the environment,
we have to think about environment in the broadest sense. We have
to think about environment being land and water and forests and
fish, and about how people utilise those. So it involves environment
in the narrow sense, it involves livelihoods, it involves agriculture,
it involves water resources, and of course, it involves governance;
you cannot actually manage the environment and natural resources
unless you have decent governance. The challenge is really to
get all those to work together, to get "joined-up government"
but within DFID, across the Department.
Q326 Mr Caton: Thinking about that,
and from your experience, do you perceive a willingness in DFID's
country offices to mainstream the environment, or is the picture
varied?
Professor Conway: It obviously
varies from country to country. It is not so much about mainstreaming
the environment; it is about mainstreaming the different components
of an environmental approach within a development approach. It
is about sustainable development, if you like. That is a crude
shorthand term for something that is much more complicated.
Mr Thomas: If I could in a sense
as well, Mr Caton, just challenge the premise behind the question,
and if I may crudely suggest that the premise behind the question
is that the work, in a sense, that our countries do is the only
part of the equation. One of the reasons why, when we made our
changes to policy division, we set up a dedicated sustainable
development group within the policy division with a number of
dedicated teams on specific aspects of the environment there was
because we recognised that not only did we need to support our
country offices better but also that there were a whole series
of international opportunities to make progress on environmental
issues, be they influencing other donors such as the World Bank
or other bilateral donors with whom we work, but also in international
negotiations, the biggest of which that has made most progress
most recently has been around forestry. There are opportunities
opening up for similar work on fisheries. There is a dialogue
taking place with the World Bank around a clean energy framework
and indeed similarly with regional development banks. So I suppose
one of the differences over the last five years or so has been
the growth in those global opportunities to influence the development
community as a whole as opposed to just what we do as a Department
at country level ourselves.
Q327 Chairman: Professor Conway,
when David King said, I think last year, that concentration of
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at 550 parts per million would
be politically acceptable, he was criticised by environmentalists
for confusing his detached scientific opinion with what he thought
was politically expedient. Have you had any kind of experience
of that in your role as the Department's Chief Scientific Adviser?
Professor Conway: No, I do not
think I have. I cannot recall any situation like that.
Q328 Chairman: So you would give
advice, purely detached scientific advice, which may or may not
be acceptable to Ministers?
Professor Conway: Yes.
Q329 Chairman: When the Government's
Chief Scientific Adviser said, "This is what I think is politically
expedient," he was criticised for that. Do you think that
is a thing that chief scientific advisers should be involved in?
Professor Conway: I do not want
to comment on him or on what he said but, in answer to your question,
within DFID I have been very free to have a challenging role.
In fact, it has been said quite explicitly to me that I have a
challenging role within DFID, and the Chief Economist has the
same role. We use that in Development Committee, for example,
and elsewhere we frequently challenge what people are saying and
that is accepted and, I think, welcomed.
Q330 Mr Vaizey: Is there a recent
example of you challenging DFID?
Mr Thomas: Let me just be clear.
I would expect all our officials in a sense where they think strong
advice is needed on a particular course Ministers want to pursue,
either where they have concerns or where they have suggestions,
to offer that advice. We try as Ministers to encourage that advice
to be offered. We do not always accept it but that is the job
of Ministers, to in a sense take a view about the advice that
we are getting. One of the advantages that we have as a Department
is the quality of our staff and frankly, if they were shrinking
violets, it would not be very helpful to us as Ministers. I welcome
the fact that they are not.
Q331 Ms Barlow: I will move now to
environmental screening. The Department is committed to environmental
screening, which of course is welcome, and you published guidance
notes in 2003, but it is only recently that you started assessing
the effectiveness of this process. Do you feel it fits in with
the ethos you have stated today, which is that the environment
has a high priority in your projects?
Mr Thomas: I think environmental
screening does fit in with the ethos of the Department, but one
of the reasons why a review is taking place is because we want
to make sure that our performance across all our programmes where
environmental screening takes place is of the same high quality.
If I am honest, I think some of it is patchy, and I think there
are examples where environmental screening has been done extremely
well, and I am sure we will find examples where it has not been
done as well as it can be. That is the reason for the review.
What we are clear on is that we want to improve the quality of
the screening that we are doing. That is one of the outcomes I
expect to come from the review.
Q332 Ms Barlow: Why not earlier?
That is really what I am asking.
Mr Thomas: We need to give time
for processes to take place. We need to give time for projects
or for programmes to have been tested. There are training programmes
that take place across departments in the use of environmental
screening techniques. I think the three-year review point which
we are now at is a reasonable time frame. I suppose we could have
done it earlier. Some, I am sure, could argue we should have done
it later. The review is taking place, I think it is the right
thing that it is taking place, and I hope and I believe it will
help us to improve the quality of our performance.
Q333 Ms Barlow: We have been told
that the review is being undertaken by untrained staff and that
there is no requirement for these staff to consult the DFID special
advisers. Is this correct, and if it is correct, is this satisfactory?
Mr Thomas: The special advisers
who work to the Secretary of State I would not expect to be consulted
in a review of environmental screening. No. They are political
appointments, they are designed to give political advice to the
Secretary of State, and I do not think they should be involved
in a review of environmental screening. I think it is quite appropriate
that they are not being asked in that way. We will see the outcome
of the review and we as a Department will need to make some changes,
I am sure, to make sure that we learn the lessons from that review,
and I welcome that.
Q334 Ms Barlow: But who is actually
carrying out the review?
Mr Harvey: We have brought in
a consultant under our enabling agreement with the company that
provides back-up environmental advice, and this person is doing
an in-depth review based on a sample survey approach across a
whole range of ESMs, using our system, sampling from different
types of projects, different divisions, and looking at the results,
actually looking at every process. This person has also visited
one country office, DFID India, which is one of the larger programmes,
to talk in depth about how these procedures are used and to find
out exactly what are the pitfalls, what is going well, what is
not going so well. That report is due next month, in June, and
I think it is going to give us a lot of really in-depth information
on how to improve the system.
Q335 Ms Barlow: Do they have an environmental
background?
Mr Harvey: [The consultant is]
from a specialist environmental consulting firm, one of the largest
environmental consulting companies in Britain. The individual
is also very familiar with DFID procedures, having once worked
as an implanted contracted-in person in the Department.
Mr Thomas: Let me just be clear.
Our special advisers may well want to comment and give advice
to Ministers on the basis of what comes out in both the skills
reviews that are taking place and the review of environmental
screening, but the review as such is not going to report to them.
Q336 Ms Barlow: You say the review
may have a challenging outcome. If it feels that the screening
process is not satisfactory, will you be able to put in more specialist
staff at regional level, for example, and at country level to
implement a changed screening process, and how will this fit in
with the Gershon review?
Mr Thomas: If the review is not
satisfactory, then we will have to make some changes to improve
the environmental screening processes that we have within the
Department. On the question about additional staff to support
that, I think that will be something that we look at in the context
of the review of advisory skills that is taking place at the moment
to support the implementation of the White Paper. As I indicated
in my opening remarks, I expect there to be an increase in environmental
capacity ultimately as a result of that process.
Q337 Ms Barlow: Your officials told
us that they are doing their best to bring the attention of the
heads of office programmes to the importance of environment so
they can spot opportunities. Is this not rather a haphazard approach?
Could it not be improved?
Mr Thomas: Let me, if I may, return
to the example of forestry, where we have had a very clear ambition
in terms of the international agreements that we wanted to see,
both at European level and in a series of regions of the world,
and then at country level supporting those international agreements
being implemented at ground level. We expect our staff at country
level as well as our staff in policy division to look for the
opportunities with Ministers to move those processes forward.
On forestry, we have had a series of very positive outcomes, both
at European level, where we do now have a regulation—we
got that agreed during our presidency—to better control
the sourcing of the timber that comes into Europe, and now at
country level we have committed money. The European Community
has committed money, a number of other donors have committed money,
and we are dividing up the responsibility for working with the
developing countries that want a voluntary partnership agreement
in forestry and supporting them in that process. The other example
that I would give you to demonstrate that we are taking a strategic
look as well at the opportunities around environment is that we
are currently doing a mapping exercise across Africa to look at
which donors work on environmental issues to help guide us in
terms of where we need to put potentially additional support into
our country offices to enable them to plug the gap within the
donor community. What we seek to do is more closely align our
support and our work plans in-country with those of other donors
so that we have a joined-up approach from the international community
to support the developing country. Other countries do do work
on environment. On occasion it is appropriate for them to take
the lead on the environment, and for us to take the lead in other
areas. On other occasions it is the reverse. That is why we are
doing the mapping exercise, and that will obviously help to inform
the skills mix reviews that are taking place.
Q338 Ms Barlow: You just mentioned
that the environmental screening you felt in some cases was good
and in some cases you expected would not be. By chance, we had
here a couple of screening notes, one on Tanzania, which is five
pages long, and one on Zambia, which is seven lines long, and
which states merely, "There are no direct adverse or beneficial
environmental impacts resulting from this project" despite
the fact that there is a national environment action plan drawn
up for the country. These two examples I think do show in some
cases the process is working, in others it absolutely is not.
Have you confidence that this review and other measures that you
have mentioned will actually improve the process in the future,
particularly if, as you say, the consultancy is only making one
overseas check?
Mr Thomas: I have confidence that
the process that we have started to learn the lessons from the
environmental screening process is the right way forward, yes.
What we will have to do is obviously look at what conclusions
the review draws and make sure that we take on board those conclusions
properly. At this stage, until I see the recommendations of the
review, I am not clear what else as a Department we would need
to do. There may well be issues around staffing, in which case
I hope they will be picked up by the staffing reviews that are
in train. There may be issues around training and other support
that is necessary, and we will have to look at those conclusions
to make sure that they are acted upon. But I think we have done
the right thing by commissioning a review and I believe we have
the right people in place to do that review. We will have to make
a judgment, or you as a Committee may want to make a judgment
a year, two years on from here as to whether or not the lessons
from the review have been properly learned but I believe there
is the appetite to learn the lessons from that review and to put
in place improvements.
Q339 Ms Barlow: Will that review
be completed before all the additional staffing decisions are
made?
Mr Thomas: I am expecting it to
be completed by the end of June.
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