Examination of Witnesses (Questions 54-59)
MR BRENDAN
GORMLEY
6 JUNE 2006
Q54 Chairman: If I can say thank you
for being so patient. I apologise because the consequence of this,
as you have seen, is that our Committee is drifting away because
we have gone past the time, although you will have heard a lot
and obviously there will have been discussion about it. We only
have about 15 minutes or so. I am just going to perhaps give you
one question and then I am going to call in Joan Ruddock and Ann
McKechin because I know they have got to go quickly to give them
a chance. On the basis of what we have just heard, the DEC was
set up to coordinate fundraising initially but now there seem
to be some expectations that it will develop its mandate. Can
you explain what it is at the moment and is there a case for it
becoming more of a regulatory body?
Mr Gormley: As you say Chairman,
the DEC has been around since the mid 1960s and has ebbed and
flowed in the public consciousness. We have a very clear and simple
mandate, I think, which is to assist those who are suffering by
raising more money in collaborative mode than the member agencies
can in competitive mode. If they could do what we do and "as
successfully" then we would happily bow out. Our bottom line
is to raise money. We do that though, we hope, by being accountable
so we have a strong strand within our mandate to say that we have
a responsibility to report back to donors and hopefully also to
report back to the beneficiaries of the actions undertaken by
our members. A third strand of that clear fundraising mandate
is to help the members improve so that we can go back to donors
and say we are learning, we are improving. Broadly, we are in
the business of creating a relationship with people and hopefully
strengthening their trust in the members' capacity to do things.
What we are not is a policy or advocacy forum, so I am not mandated
to take on advocacy or policy work on behalf of the members and,
as you heard from some of my colleagues, we are not operational
so in our jargon it is the members who are responsible for spending
the money; we are responsible for reporting back on how that has
been used. As you have said, clearly over the last two or three
years the profile, sadly, of the DEC and the members that we represent
in fundraising terms has gone up and therefore we have raised
over half a billion pounds in the last two years so there are
clearly huge new pressures on us, and the trustees are looking
hard at what those responsibilities might mean in terms of membership,
in terms of membership criteria, in terms of relationships with
other donors and with DFID. So how can we make sure even if we
have separate functions that we are talking effectively, given
that we all want to minimise suffering. There are key areas that
we are looking at, but I would be surprised in a way if we moved
away from our core mandate. Collectives are so difficult to manage.
If you keep it simple you have some chance of being effective.
I think we will stay as an appeal-based fundraising mechanism.
Q55 Ann McKechin: Mr Gormley, you
said you have been formed for a long number of years but the organisations
which form part of the DEC have radically changed in recent years
and many of them are now international, global organisations rather
than simply ones based here in the United Kingdom or within Europe.
As I understand it, the funds that the DEC raise are shared amongst
the various member organisations according to the size of the
organisation but not necessarily in terms of their actual existing
footprint in any particular country where a disaster may emerge.
It was put to me by someone who actually worked with one of your
members in Pakistan that when the crisis emerged after the earthquake,
funds were allocated simply according to the size of the organisation
rather than according to the size of their presence in Pakistan,
so in some cases a smaller organisation could have had a much
bigger presence already existing in Pakistan and be much better
able to deal quickly with the emergency, whereas other organisations
got a much larger share but actually had a fairly small footprint
in Pakistan and were struggling to deliver the amount of money
they received in terms of aid delivery. Is there a case now as
the membership of the DEC changes to actually allocate the funds
according to what their existing presence is in any particular
country where an emergency should arise?
Mr Gormley: I think you have put
your finger on probably one of the most difficult tensions that
I have to manage. I will be absolutely honest about that. The
choices are, does the DEC become a grant-making body and build
up, as it were, a bureaucracy that can make those decisions in
grant-making mode in those 48/36 hours or do we have some sort
of shadow indicator of capacity? We have gone down the path of
saying that we will have a shadow indicator of what our member
has spent over the last three years on humanitarian work and that
is the formula that we run. As you rightly say, that means in
some places Oxfam might be very large globally but for whatever
reason has moved out of Kashmir and has had no presence for the
last three years so should they be getting 18% of the funds? What
we have tried to do is compensate for that allocation. We are
only a five-person team, we have not built up any bureaucracy
but we basically say, "You have an entitlement to this,"
but the sting in the tail is to say, "Oxfam, do you really
need it?" I am empowered by the trustees to have what is
called a "robust" dialogue with my members. I know who
is getting DFID grants, I know who is on the ground, I have been
around the block a few times. It is now perfectly normal for our
members not to take up their allocation and to put the money back
in the pot. So we have a robust dialogue. The third bit is we
have a commitment to independent evaluation and if members have
taken money and then are shown not to have used it strategically
or wisely within the timeframe, that will be published, and it
is wonderful how that helps my job.
Q56 Ann McKechin: So transparency
is important?
Mr Gormley: There are checks and
balances. Every time we come back to see if we can find a cleverer
formula we lose patience and energy, but it is a reasonable challenge.
What we tend to do, because most of the members are partner-based,
is fund third parties, whether they are from the UK or nationally,
and that is how the DEC money then moves out through the 12 or
13 members. In answer to an earlier question, it is quite normal
for several of our members not to participate in an appeal. CAFOD[3]
did not work in Niger. They said, "We do not have the capacity.
We will put the totality of our allocation back in the pot."
So I prefer good behaviour, transparency and robust dialogue to
a formula; but we still need a formula.
Ann McKechin: Thank you.
Q57 Joan Ruddock: Obviously we are
very interested in your relationship with DFID. I wonder if you
can give us an example of a recent appeal made by DEC and how
you worked with DFID over that particular appeal and the disbursement
of funds?
Mr Gormley: I think my starting
point would be to say that DFID has a responsibility for taxpayers'
money and the DEC has a special responsibility for what families
want to give over and above what they have put in through their
taxes. So I am very clear with DFID that we have a mandate and
they have a mandate. We both want the same things but we have
a different way of achieving it. I am quite careful that the DEC
secretariat does not get between DFID and our members so we do
not take funds and funds are not passed through the DEC mechanism
from DFID. We do get Gift Aid from the Treasury. The major relationship
needs to be an operational one and that is done directly. What
we have is an informal relationship. I will phone up DFID, they
will phone me up if it is a sudden onset disaster and especially
if it is a slow-onset disaster to say, "Are you likely to
be doing an appeal?" We will share information and we co-host
meetings. We have just had two on Africa in the last month. But
when we move into fundraising mode we are quite careful to keep
that separate because you can appreciate that for governments
in the UK over time, in one sense a DEC appeal is an admission
of failure so a Secretary of State would normally want to say,
"We have solved that problem. We have put the funds in and
we have stopped the problem." In one sense if I have to go
to the public it is because the system has broken down. So sometimes
DFID is quite nervous about the DEC having an appeal because in
some senses it is an admission of failure.
Joan Ruddock: You surprise me.
Mr Gormley: Things have changed
partly because of the remarkable generosity of the British public
and, hence the nature of the debate now, certainly over the tsunami,
was that DFID got into some difficulties going public by saying,
"We are going to match what the British public are going
to do." Clearly that was not a sustainable strategy. I was
very careful in my interviews to say no, we are not going to get
into a trumping war. DFID has got different responsibilities.
We obviously work best when there is a very high-profile emergency.
We should not let DFID off. They should not try and trump the
British people on this one. What they should do is make sure they
are meeting the slow-onset or the low-profile emergencies. Again,
we have a dialogue about where we can work collectively together,
what are the political and immediate imperatives that the Secretary
of State has, just as we have in terms of choosing an appeal.
The bottom line is we try and keep the two instruments separate.
Joan Ruddock: That is very helpful, thank
you.
Q58 John Battle: A question on coordination
and particularly the role DEC has got in pulling together the
agencies and their partners in the field. I know that you do not
have many staff but do you think the remit should be expanded
to coordinate working between DEC partners and between the agencies?
Could you take that on?
Mr Gormley: Formally our role
stops at Dover so we are very proactive in enabling the agencies
to talk to each other—we run tele-conferences and we run
workshops—so that we are very hands-on in making sure information
at this end is being properly managed. The majority view within
the membership is that they have to look in so many different
directions at once. As we were saying, they have to look to their
families, their international federations. They have to engage
with the UN system, they have to engage with OCHA, they have to
engage with the host government. The consensus by the practitioners
is that artificially transporting the DEC mechanism to Banda Aceh
does not necessarily add value, ie, they already have enough fora
within which they should be coordinating. As you have probably
seen in our evaluations that we commission however, because coordination
is still an unresolved issue, it still needs working on, it does
come up that DEC agencies—because they are used to talking
to each other here, they come from the same culture, and most
of the money is coming from one place—they do like to talk
to each other. So informally there are DEC structures meeting
in most of the places. In Mozambique, which was picked up earlier,
there is still a DEC inter-agency meeting. That is what it is
labelled and it is invited to government meetings. So where it
adds value it probably happens but as a strategic emphasis for
myself and the team here, we do not insist that they have to work,
as it were, through a DEC collaborative mechanism. Our bottom
line is we raise the money by saying this situation is so awful
that the leading agencies want to work together to resolve it.
So what we evaluate is that there are demonstrable commitments
to coordination. If we see that there are members that are really
not playing the game in terms of liaising with the host government
or with OCHA or whatever, we think that is unacceptable, but we
do not go as far as saying that the solution is the DEC model
transposed.
Q59 John Barrett: You mentioned earlier
on about your responsibility to the taxpayer and your own responsibility
to those who have contributed funds and the need to be open and
accountable, but there are clearly concerns following the case
of the tsunami evaluation which ended up with two reports as to
what was going on circulating, one being leaked to the press and
appearing on Newsnight, and it did not give the overall
impression of openness and accountability. Could you comment on
what happened there and also how you hope to move forward and
reassure people, because there are substantial sums of money involved,
that things are open and transparent? Was that a hostage to fortune
that people could accuse the DEC of trying to cover up what was
going on?
Mr Gormley: This is a really important
issue. I was not sure that it came out in the sessions with the
media and their responsibilities. We have, as you say, an absolute
commitment to public accountability. The way we have practised
that in the past is to commission an independent evaluation which
we have plonked more or less into the public domain. For the last
two or three years what has happened is that in order to get on
the front page of The Guardian or Newsnight and
because it tends to be a news slot and therefore 20 seconds to
a minute and a half, what gets taken out of those reports is the
negative elements. We have had serious discussions with the broadcasters
about how they can help us be accountable without eroding the
reason for which we are being accountable, which is to sustain
and maintain trust with our donors, not hiding things that have
gone wrong but at least to give them a fair and honest report
back. Whereas five years ago we more or less led the world in
public accountability, we got patted on the back for more or less
an honest use of the material. Now we are finding that we are
having to manage that process and so, for better or worse, we
chose over the tsunami to ask the independent consultants to write
a report to the board that we would publish. That was a ten-page
thing that was on our web site. We also commissioned an internal
learning review saying to our members a bit like the pilots where
things have gone wrong, let us get the names, let us get the people,
let us get the incidents, and it was that report that was leaked
to Newsnight. So it was written for a different audience,
it was written for a different purpose but it was the one that
ended up in the public domain. We do not yet have a solution to
how we can be publicly accountable without unnecessarily eroding
trust. In fact, we have a trustee group working on it as we speak
to see whether we should separate out learning. Is there a way
of creating an environment so that the members can learn safely
and improve while having an independent contribution back to the
British public? How can we ask the media to come and report? That
is the other thing, although they are saying they go back it is
fascinating, 80% of our donors say their donation was triggered
by the TV but to get sustained follow-up for most of the crises
it is very, very difficult. We tend to have to find a celebrity.
It tends to be celebrity driven. It tends to be the sofas end[4]
as to whether you can persuade broadcasters to go back. So I think
that there is a lot more we could be doing with the broadcasters
to help us report back in an independent manner and at the moment
we are struggling to do that effectively, to be honest.
3 Catholic Agency for Overseas Development. Back
4
Note from witness: This phrase was intended to convey the
DEC's greater success in persuading celebrities to discuss disaster
response issues on chat shows, than in securing mainstream news
coverage for analyses of DEC expenditure. Back
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