Examination of Witnesses (Questions 380-399)
RT HON
HILARY BENN
MP, MR MICHAEL
MOSSELMANS AND
MR PHIL
EVANS
24 JULY 2006
Q380 John Battle: I think in the
last couple of years DFID has taken the lead internationally in
responding faster than others, and we met that when we were in
Pakistan and elsewhere, and it is to be complimented. Can I ask
you about coordination with other donors and, indeed, leading
other donors. In the DAC Peer Review there was the remark: "DFID
enthusiasm for certain initiatives is not always shared by other
partners, and British advocacy can be perceived as promoting DFID's
own model rather than leading and encouraging complementary donor
action". I wonder if I can ask you about the Group for Good
Humanitarian Donorship. It is a good idea, but do you think the
others that are not in that group regard it as an in-house DFID
reform supporters group?
Hilary Benn: I am acutely conscious
of the fact that if you have ideas about how to reform the system
and you go out and argue for them, human nature being what it
is, there may be circumstances where it gets up people's noses
a bit, frankly, particularly if you have got a number of ideas
and you continue to push them. All I would say to those who feel
that emotion is put it on one side, try and forget where it came
from, and ask yourself, "Is this a good idea or not a good
idea?" Having pushed aid for CERF extremely vigorously, which
was the first of those, I am really glad we did because it did
not exist and we have got a quarter of a billion dollars now which
exist and can be used. That is not to say that this process of
change is not without tension. Indeed, some of the UN agencies
feel pretty uneasy about doing things in a different way. That
applies both to the CERF and the fact that money will go there
which would otherwise have gone to them directly. It applies to
the common humanitarian funds that are being piloted within the
DRC and Sudan. What the Good Humanitarian Donorship initiative
is all about is trying to be more effective as donors because
we know this is an area where getting your act together is really,
really important. If you get your act together, you can be more
effective in helping people when they are in need. What I think
we have achieved through that is we have got better and more effective
financing than was the case in the past. We have now got good
humanitarian donorship being part of the DAC Peer Review process,
I welcome that because it is one of the ways we can be called
to account, and we have got some progress on performance indicators
to measure how we are doing. We ought to ask the question, "This
is what you were trying to do. Here is a disaster, how did you
do? What lessons can be learned? Can we do it more effectively
in the future?" We would certainly like to bring others on
board. We would like to promote more effective work on disaster
risk reduction. We would like to see the performance indicators
used more effectively and we are aiming to pilot these new approaches
to donor coordination, I think I am right in saying, in seven
countries. I do not want it to be an exclusive club at all. I
want more people to be part of this so that we can work together
more effectively.
Q381 John Battle: If I may say, within
the confidence of this Committee, as it were, if I was to push
you on the Good Humanitarian Donorship initiative, its focus is
on needs-based approaches and independent humanitarian aid provision.
Do you think that has been undermined by DFID's association with
British military intervention, for example in Iraq, Afghanistan
and Kosovo? Do you think it undermines those principles and turns
away some donors who might otherwise be with us?
Hilary Benn: I do not think so,
and I hope not. That is not to say that people do not have very
strong views about what we and, in fairness, a lot of other countries
in the international community are doing. If you think of the
number of countries that are present in Afghanistan, there is
a country that was at the heart of the humanitarian disaster and,
frankly, if it had not been for the brilliance of the World Food
Programme three years ago, six million people were at risk of
not having enough food to eat. Even if other countries have got
reservations about some of the things that the UK is doing, and
people are perfectly entitled to even if we disagree with them,
I really hope that would not get in the way of being part of the
Good Humanitarian Donorship initiative which is about humanitarian
donors getting organised, working together and trying to be more
effective at bringing help to people. That is what it is about,
it is not about anything else.
Q382 John Battle: That is okay in
relation to the donors, but even in terms of internally in the
Department, do you think Iraq has received more or less than its
fair share of DFID's humanitarian aid according to those needs-based
principles?
Hilary Benn: If you are talking
about the strictly humanitarian systems in Iraq, it was relatively
small. Provision was made in advance of the military action in
2003. The humanitarian situation that then unfolded was not as
people had anticipated. The vast bulk of the money that we have
been spending there has been on reconstruction and redevelopment
of the central infrastructure in the south of the country and
capacity building with the government, which I was discussing
with the Iraqi Prime Minister this morning. No, I would not say
our humanitarian spend has been distorted in any way by Iraq,
not at all.
Q383 Chairman: Can I come in behind
that point. Do you think there is a case in that context for separating
out what is humanitarian aid in an intervention context from,
I was going to say pure natural disasters but I appreciate there
are other kinds of man-made disasters? Taking Mr Battle's point,
if there is a sensitivity of saying, "We would like to help
this programme, but if it is going to go into Iraq and you, Secretary
of State, say the money goes into infrastructure, but infrastructure
in certain situations might be destroyed again", is there
a case—this is the point I am trying to make—for suggesting
that there should be two separate pots, one which deals with things
where there is a military engagement, which are humanitarian and
can be defended as such, and those where there is no political
cause that is immediately apparent?
Hilary Benn: By and large there
is a mechanism for doing that already in relation to countries
where there is a humanitarian need and the UN issues an appeal.
That is a humanitarian appeal and that is the pot into which you
can put your money for humanitarian purposes. Then separate from
that, in the case of Iraq, is the money that we are putting into
development and reconstruction, and other countries are doing.
I must confess, I had not thought that those kinds of sensitivities
which Mr Battle referred to would in many cases be leading countries
to say, "We are not going to give money to humanitarian need
because we do not like the politics surrounding it".
Q384 Chairman: You have not encountered
that?
Hilary Benn: I have not encountered
that, no.
Q385 Joan Ruddock: I am going to
turn to the matter of civil and military co-operation. Looking
at the DAC Peer Review, they made it clear that although they
thought your Department had recognised the risks of compromising
humanitarian principles, they said: ". . . the FCO and MoD
could further define their respective roles in civil-military
operations and develop procedures designed to clarify such operations
and protect the principles". You followed that through in
your White Paper saying that you would, "develop clear arrangements
for using UK military equipment and personnel in humanitarian
crises". We would like to hear exactly what you are proposing
in that and to what extent you have taken on board the very serious
concerns frequently expressed by the NGO community about the confusion
between civil and military and the fact that often they feel there
are people affected by natural disasters who fear the military
and then the military, in many cases I would have defended, being
sent in to help with rescues, especially where military type skills
are required, but nonetheless, there is that very deep concern.
Hilary Benn: I am acutely conscious
of that. The humanitarian principles on which the humanitarian
community operates, that they give help to all regardless, they
are not parties to a conflict, they are not taking sides, and
they are going to help everybody affected, are of fundamental
importance and if we ever lose that we are stuffed, bluntly. Having
said that, the first humanitarian principle is to save life. Having
seen with my own eyes when I went to Banda Aceh eight or nine
days after the tsunami struck, as we landed in a military plane
bringing relief supplies that had come from Brize Norton via Billund
in Denmark, where we have some joint supplies with other donors,
so that was donor coordination in action, we picked them up and
flew there, on the patch of ground next to the airfield was this
extraordinary operation, helicopters in, pick up supplies, helicopters
out and down the coast of Banda Aceh to deliver the supplies.
It was the only way you could have got there because the road
had been completely destroyed by the tsunami, or, let us take
Pakistan, where, if it had not been for, in the main, the military
helicopters, how on earth do people think supplies would have
gone up and down those precipitous mountainsides to bring relief,
including the three Chinooks which did a fantastic job over a
month? It would be great if the International Emergency Service,
the UN system, had sufficient standby helicopter capacity so that
when those kinds of disasters strike they can get to work straightaway.
One of the things that DFID has historically done is to help try
and find helicopter capacity to charter, and we did that in the
case of the Pakistan emergency, but I know, because I talk to
the team on a regular basis, "Have we found any helicopters
yet?", that we found one Super Puma, I remember, that was
in Spain and in the end it was the military that were able to
fly it from Spain. This was in the case of the Pakistan disaster.
It is about needs must and in those circumstances I do not think
we should be sensitive. The tsunami and the Pakistan earthquake
both happened to occur in places that were militarily sensitive,
and if you had said in Aceh a year previously that the Indonesians
would agree to American forces and helicopters coming in and doing
something, people would have said, "You are completely mad.
Of course it will not happen". It did happen because the
circumstances demanded it and people would have died if it had
not happened, and the same is true in Pakistan. I think it is
about the right approach in the right circumstances. If you can
do it without having to call on the military, great. The second
point that I just wanted to make very briefly was this. I understand
the concern about confusion of roles but we need to recognise
that in some parts of the world there are people who just do not
care a jot about the difference between the humanitarian and the
military. Afghanistan will be one. After all, the people who have
attacked UN workers, Red Cross workers, NGO workers, are doing
so for political reasons and I have reached the conclusion—and
this is the same conclusion I have reached in those circumstances—that
it does not matter what you do; there are some people who are
not interested in those distinctions however you try and separate
them, and they are going to try and kill anyone who is doing anything
in support of a cause that they wish to defeat. I just think we
have to understand that as we try and grapple with the task of
bringing relief to people who need it.
Q386 Joan Ruddock: Secretary of State,
I would agree you could be absolutely right and Afghanistan is
a case in point, but it does give people more of a stated reason
for attack if there is a military involvement, and I think it
is quite hard to see the situation that we have in Helmund, for
example, where reconstruction is going on and differentiate between
those who are doing aid type work and those who are clearly engaged
in military action. I think it is extremely difficult to make
that distinction.
Hilary Benn: My point is that
there are some folk who—
Joan Ruddock: I agree.
Hilary Benn:— do not care
about that distinction and therefore one just has to recognise
in those circumstances it does not matter what you do. In the
case of Helmand, having been there briefly a month and a half
ago and having met Governor Daoud and members of his Provincial
Council and the Provincial Development Committee, what they want
more than anything else is some peace and stability and security
because that is the only way life is going to improve. There he
is just as much risk from those who are attacking the British
military, NGOs, who have cut off the heads of headteachers, who
have killed workers for NGOs who have been operating there for
quite some time, long before the British troops arrived, and the
blunt truth is they do not want any of that to succeed. I also
recognise that different bits of the humanitarian community are
going to feel comfortable about doing different things. Some will
in really dire circumstances reluctantly accept some military
protection for a convoy to get supplies through; others will take
a principled decision and decide not. It is for each party to
make that choice but in the end it is about getting help to people.
That is why we are doing this work. My view is that in the end
you have to find a means of doing it one way or another.
Q387 Joan Ruddock: Would it be desirable,
do you think, if such resource could be held internationally rather
than have to call on national armies in different situations?
Hilary Benn: Yes, it would be
desirable in an ideal world, but if you think of the number of
helicopters that came to the rescue in the tsunami and in Pakistan,
I think it would be pushing it some to think that the UN can have
all of that capacity on standby for those kinds of disasters.
I just do not think it is realistic and in those circumstances
we should call on them and accept the offers, but we also have
to recognise, both in Indonesia and in Pakistan, that the domestic
military did an extraordinary job, particularly in Pakistan, as
I understand you saw for yourself, because the fact that this
was an area of conflict meant you had a lot of troops and they
played a really important part in getting out there with the supplies,
tramping up the mountainside to deliver them to people who otherwise
might not have been reached. We should pay tribute to them because,
as in all these emergencies, the bulk of the work is done by the
people, the local authorities, the military, of the country concerned.
People tend to look at it and think that we are doing it all.
We are not. We are playing a part. We are helping those who are
bearing the brunt of it.
Chairman: We also found out in Pakistan
that the military helicopters were available immediately and there
was quite a considerable delay before the UN helicopters were
deployed.
Q388 John Barrett: If I could turn
to the involvement of beneficiaries, men, women and children on
the ground who actually received the humanitarian aid, we often
see teams in the field doing great work, reporting up to NGOs
who report up to donors, who sometimes then come to select committees
to say exactly what has been going on, but there has been criticism,
and we have heard it in this Committee in both written and oral
evidence, that there has not been enough reporting or finding
out from those beneficiaries on the ground exactly what is meant
and that DFID has been criticised also for needing to look at
this in some detail. Would you accept that there are failings
there and, if so, what are you going to do about it?
Hilary Benn: Yes, I accept that
we could do better on that front, frankly. There are different
forms of accountability. If someone has lost their home and is
out in the freezing cold, there is nothing to eat and nothing
to drink, the first accountability is to get tents, food, water,
blankets there as quickly as possible. You do not really need
to consult about that; you just need to get on and do it and do
it extremely quickly. Once you have got those immediate needs
catered for then, of course, there are issues that arise about
where people want support to be provided. This was a big issue
in Pakistan because some people were very reluctant to leave their
homes, even though they had collapsed, because that is where their
loved ones were dead inside, their animals, their possessions,
who is going to look after it, will it get stolen, all of those
kinds of things, the camps that were being provided down on the
limited amount of flat space on the valley floors. That is partly
about how we as donors are accountable but it is also about decisions
in which the local authorities and the relief organisations and
relief infrastructure of the country itself are concerned. There
is a job for all of us to be better at saying, "What do you
want us to do now?", and with all of these disasters, once
they are over, to reflect and to learn and to understand how we
can do it better in the future. I do think we have got things
to learn. My colleagues, who have been very close to this, might
want to comment.
Mr Mosselmans: I think you are
right: it is an issue that we need to do more about. What we are
trying to do is first of all we are looking at revising our guidelines
for agencies that submit projects to DFID for funding, so the
agency has to make it clear to DFID how it is going to maximise
the engagement of beneficiaries in that particular project. Secondly,
as you know, we fund the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership
that you heard from. We support their work and we will continue
to fund them so that they can develop for us better methodologies
of addressing this. Thirdly, we intend in our relatively new Conflict
and Humanitarian Fund for civil society organisations engaged
in the conflict and humanitarian aid sector, to make a priority
of that fund to support attempts by organisations to work on this
issue.
Hilary Benn: One other thing I
would add is that the proposals that I have made for a kind of
annual humanitarian report would also provide a means by which
the world collectively could ask itself the question, "How
did we do?", including, "How was it for beneficiaries
and can we learn from that?".
Q389 Ann McKechin: Increasingly DFID
is relying on NGOs and civic society organisations to deliver
this humanitarian response on the ground and the recent National
Audit Office report about your work with civic society organisations
found that "DFID assistance to CSOs largely achieves intended
benefits but assessments of the effectiveness of its assistance
are sometimes limited by its results measurement arrangements".
Perhaps, Secretary of State, I could give you one example from
the Committee's recent visit to Pakistan, where we visited a project,
largely funded by DFID, run by the Norwegian Refugee Council in
the North-West Frontier province. We visited a remote village
and when we arrived there we had been told by the Norwegian Refugee
Council that when they visited any of the villages they generally
went with three staff, one of which was a woman, so that they
could speak to the female members in the community. When I arrived
there, with the Committee Clerks, the first thing that the women
in the village said to us was, "Thanks very much for coming
along because you are the first person in nine months to ask us
how we feel and what our views are". It is no criticism;
they were very complimentary about the work carried out by the
Norwegian Refugee Council and the efforts they had made, but clearly
there are concerns, as you are giving more money to the civic
society organisations, as to how DFID can do more to ensure that
its partners are adhering to agreed codes of conduct and issues
such as gender awareness.
Hilary Benn: On the very specific
question of asking beneficiaries, "How was it for you and
how can we do it better in future?", one of the reasons we
fund the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership that Michael
just referred to is that they are developing some proposals as
to how those who are working on the ground can better ensure that
they respond to precisely the point that you have made. That is
the first thing I would say. The second thing is that the NAO
report, as I recollect, was looking at our relationship with civil
society organisations in general, not just in relation to humanitarian
relief. In deciding with whom we are going to work we are interested
in their reliability, their speed of response, what the cost of
delivery is, what is the quality of the work that they do, and
yes, it is true that increasingly the work on the ground in humanitarian
response is being done by NGOs. It is a point Jan Egeland no doubt
made to you when he appeared before you. I think this does raise
a really interesting and difficult question because on the one
hand NGOs guard their independence fiercely, as we know, but if
an increasing proportion of money for humanitarian relief is going
through them on the ground, I think the question is, and I think
it is one we are all grappling with, what responsibility and accountability
comes with that for NGOs about the way in which they deliver that
support on the ground? I think we have only begun, frankly, to
scratch the surface on that.
Q390 Ann McKechin: This morning you
have made calls for more benchmarking in terms of humanitarian
relief.
Hilary Benn: Yes. The reason I
made the benchmarking proposal was that we ought to have a reasonable
idea of what it is we are trying to achieve, recognising that
circumstances are different in different crises and it will not
always be possible to live up to all of those standards but that
we should apply that right across the piste, whether it is UN
agencies directly who are delivering or whether it is NGOs who
are funded either directly by donors or through the UN system,
because, of course, a lot of the money that comes through the
UN system comes through the UN to NGOs who do the delivery on
the ground.
Q391 Ann McKechin: On the question
of funding, in both written and oral submissions to our inquiry
NGOs have claimed that the extent and speed of funding flows from
UN agencies or donors generally remain a critical constraint on
their response, and some have even asked whether they should be
able to access funds directly from the CERF, although I understand
that the way the CERF has been set up that is not possible. I
also wonder what your own department's view is about how we could
better address the question of funding.
Hilary Benn: The first thing to
say about the CERF is that it is a small proportion, but a very
important proportion, and it is still relatively new and it is
asking OCHA to take on a completely different role, but that is
why I made the proposal in the first place, because it is no good
asking a body to coordinate when it has not got any levers to
pull. That was the problem of the system, no levers to pull whatsoever,
so the first lot of levers the CERF has given it in that case
is some money. If you have got money then with that comes some
clout and some decisions about how you are going to divide it
up. Exactly the same principle is operating in the Common Humanitarian
Funds in the two pilot countries, DRC and Sudan. In fairness,
it is still relatively early days because OCHA in the first case
and because the humanitarian coordinators in the second case are
undertaking jobs they have never had to do before. They have got
to build their capacity to look at all of these requests for funding,
take decisions about where they are going to do it in exactly
the same way as my colleagues here do and the wonderful team that
works on this in DFID. If I may I would like to take this opportunity
to applaud them because they are an extraordinary group of people
that I work with, and insofar as people look at DFID and what
we do and say, "You do a good job", it is down to the
colleagues with whom I have the privilege to work. They move very
fast in taking decisions and OCHA needs the same capacity. Humanitarian
coordinators need the same skill and capacity to take quick decisions
to get the cash out the door to the people who are going to do
the work on the ground. The other point to make is that for the
UN agencies they too in some cases are a bit reluctant to see
this change take place because they have good, established, bilateral
relations with lots of donors. A crisis occurs, you go to DFID,
you make a bid, you get a quick decision, and it is different
if you are having to compete within the UN system. However, I
am firmly of the view, provided the mechanism will work fast enough,
that it is a better way of doing it because you have got, A crisis,
X needs, Y amount of money, someone is going to have to take a
decision as to how to deal it out.
Q392 Ann McKechin: But would you
agree that the cluster system which is currently being developed
needs to be sure that it does not make the process overly bureaucratic?
Hilary Benn: I do accept that.
The cluster system has arisen directly out of the failure of the
previous system, which was that while there some needs that were
clearly covered, and WFP do a fantastic job in bringing food,
WHO healthcare and so on, there were other needs, shelter, water,
camp management, that no-one was taking responsibility for. It
was crazy, an absolutely crazy system. The clusters are a means
of trying to deal with that. How do I think they are doing? It
is an improvement on what we had before. I think their effectiveness
depends enormously on the quality of the relationships within
the cluster. Look at Pakistan. I think the health cluster did
a really good job. Shelter, to start with, did not work. I turned
up in Muzaffarabad and Balakot ten days after the earthquake.
The lead body on shelter, IOM, did not have a single person in
either place. In the end somebody else took it over, so in that
early test in that cluster it was not working. I suppose the second
question is, who is the provider of last resort? In the case of
shelter, for man-made disasters it is UNHCR. For natural disasters
it is International Federation of the Red Cross. I think we have
to make the cluster system work because if you do not have the
cluster system I am not sure what you would replace it with unless
you completely change the way in which the system works.
Q393 Richard Burden: Perhaps I can
press you a little further on the cluster system because there
does seem to be a reluctance from a number of agencies to in a
sense trace their accountability lines through institutions or
people that would be essential for that system to work, a classic
example being the UN Coordinator. How can agencies be encouraged
to do that more, whether that may be other UN agencies or NGOs?
Hilary Benn: First, to make it
clear, if all the people who are trying to work on a particular
area in a disaster, since coordination is at a premium and what
we lack in the system is enough good coordination, there really
is a responsibility on everyone to get round the table with the
other people who are trying to work in the same area, divide up
the work and make sure that all of the bits are going to fit together.
There is, if you like, a moral imperative to do that because that
is the best way of delivering most effective assistance. That
may involve people having to agree to work in areas where, if
it was left entirely to their own devices, they would not want
to, in other words, submitting themselves to a collective decision-making
process, but I think is essential if the cluster system is going
to work effectively. That is why I make the point about relationships.
If you enter it in the right spirit and you are prepared to work
together with others and contribute to it and say, "I can
do this, I cannot do that, can you handle it?", then it seems
to me that that is the best chance you have of making the cluster
system work effectively. For the UN agencies it is slightly different.
For the NGOs it goes back to my earlier point in answer to Ms
Ruddock: how do you get all of those NGOs to understand that they
have to be accountable too for their contribution to dealing with
disasters?
Q394 Richard Burden: From a lot of
the evidence we have had, and it has been mixed on the cluster
issue, if there has been a commonality it has been that everybody
acknowledges the importance of coordination through practical
experience and in theory they acknowledge that it makes a lot
of sense if you do what you do best and what somebody does best
they do and you pool your resources, but there also a warning
coming from a number of people saying, "There is a real danger
here that we spend so much of our time coordinating what we are
doing that we will not do the doing or we will not do it in a
way that is responsive to what people need on the ground".
How would you respond to that?
Hilary Benn: Clearly that would
be pretty useless if that was the outcome. The fact that we have
had mixed experience, we have seen some clusters work awfully
well in Pakistan and some not, shows that it is not the cluster
model per se that is the problem, it may be to do with
the leadership, that we have commitment on the part of the partners
to make that cluster work. Secondly, the benchmarks, having some
way of assessing how well it is done, will help. I think where
it does not work, explaining why and, if necessary, pointing fingers
at the things that did not work, would help too, so that in the
end it is clear why it has been successful where it has worked,
why it has not been successful where it has not worked, and how
we can fix it. In the longer term, if you are talking about what
encouragement you have got, if we go back to the organisations
that we are prepared to fund, reliability, speed at the point
of quality, economies of scale and willingness to make the cluster
system work are some things that we can take into account in those
circumstances because it is really important that the cluster
system does work effectively. It is still relatively early days,
that is the truth.
Q395 Mr Davies: On clusters, Secretary
of State, I rather share the impression that Mr Burden has just
expressed and, again, I think we are not alone, having been to
Pakistan, that the cluster system, whatever its attraction, is
not working very well in practice. I think part of the problem
is that one agency does not like to be given orders by another
agency, particularly where there are histories, as there often
are with United Nations systems, of rivalries and turf wars in
the past. Another problem is I do not think people brought up
in one agency are used to taking responsibility for the actions
of other agencies, or used to giving instructions to people from
other agencies. I think it is very difficult. Maybe we should
pursue it and see whether the next time round it works better.
In answer to your question to the Committee just now, if we got
rid of clusters what would we do because you do not want to go
back to the old sectoral system, my answer would be this, build
up OCHA and OCHA would be responsible for taking charge of any
of these situations and putting in the people who know the capacity
of the whole United Nations system and being familiar with dealing
with bilateral donors and also with NGOs, and they would appoint
the management structure to take charge in these areas and would
have to determine tasks, to allocate tasks and iron out conflicts
within the United Nations system at least. If they were doing
that, they would have the credibility, I think, to be able to
negotiate necessary degrees of co-operation with the host government
on the one side and with the NGOs on the other. That would be
an alternative structure. We are not going to solve this problem
this afternoon, but I put that forward in answer to your question
to the Committee.
Hilary Benn: It is very helpful.
Chairman: The Secretary of State is here
to answer our questions.
Q396 Mr Davies: I do not know about
that, Chairman, I think this is a dialogue between the executive
within the executive branch and Parliament.
Hilary Benn: I must say, I am
an enthusiastic advocate of that approach. I know that is not
how select committees always want to operate. I often sit here
and want to ask the question, "What do you think?" because
that is how we are going to do it better. I am a pragmatist on
this, having seen for myself at the famous meeting in Khartoum
when it finally dawned on me that there was a whacking great gap
in the system—I see I may have told the Committee before—asking
up and down the table, "Who is leading on camp management
or water and sanitation?", and the issue just bounced back
and forth as everyone looked to someone else to say, "It
is not us, is it you?" It went like that up and down the
table. I drew the conclusion from that, "Blimey, it is not
working, we need to do something". That was one of the motivating
factors behind the original reform speech that I made. I want
clusters to work, but if they do not work, and I still genuinely
think it is early days, then I am not at all averse to then looking
at what needs to be done to make sure the system does work. Again,
that is the test, does it work or does it not work to bring help
to people who need it? That is really the only thing we should
be concerned about. This process of change is a very difficult
one because you are asking the system to move from how it was
with all the individual roles and histories of agencies, and so
on and so forth, to a very different way of operating. Let us
be honest, not everybody likes the change. If we can get it by
encouraging people to work together, that is great. If we need
a more directive system, then I will not be averse to it if it
is required.
Q397 Mr Davies: Secretary of State,
you have told us this afternoon about DFID's contingency plans
for the necessarily unanticipated disaster emergency challenges,
and you have done a lot yourself to make sure there is an international
provision in it, in particular setting up the CERF. I think you
deserve a lot of credit for that one. At the same time, we are
providing long-term bilateral aid to many of the countries where
these disasters, it so happens, do often tend to arise, and there
are many multilateral and bilateral aid programmes in many of
these countries, the World Bank, the European Union and so forth.
I wonder to what extent DFID is trying to persuade multilateral
donors, other bilateral donors and, indeed, the governments who
are recipients of these flows of aid, to do a bit more about disaster
prevention. That is to say, maybe investing in seismic warning
systems, maybe investing in flood defence programmes, whatever,
there are many things you can do to provide for some of these
disasters, very few of which are done. Some of which are counsels
of perfection, like instructing the building industry only to
build according to earthquake standards as it would be much too
expensive for developing countries. What are you doing to try
to ensure that where possible provision is made in advance to
defend local people against these natural disasters?
Hilary Benn: Because it is a very
important issue, the first thing we have done is to say that we
will set aside 10% of the funding for each major disaster to address
precisely that question. I know that is after the event, but it
does then open up a conversation with the country in question,
"We are prepared to put in some money. Can we ally that with
some of the money that you will be putting in?" and they
too will be funding the reconstruction process.
Q398 Mr Davies: It is not just reconstruction,
it is defences against repeat disasters.
Hilary Benn: Indeed, but in the
case of would it be possible to rebuild schools, for instance,
in Pakistan in a way that made them less likely to collapse because
a lot of children tragically were killed when the structures just
fell on top of them. "You are going to have to rebuild a
school. Can we give you some support? Can we have some technical
expertise? In what ways can we assist you in taking decisions
about how you reconstruct which will minimise the impact?"
If it has been a flood, it is building shelters on higher grounds
so that people have got somewhere to go. It happens that I have
seen for myself some work that we have funded in Bangladesh because
there you know it is going to flood every single year when the
waters melt and the shorelines are inundated. In other more modest
examples, if you are building a new road system, do you build
big enough culverts to cope with the run-off of rainwater that
might otherwise accumulate and cause problems? I think we have
some way to go. As far as the multilateral system is concerned—I
do not know whether Michael or Phil would like to comment—I
would say all of us need to do more on this front.
Q399 Mr Davies: What DFID is doing
now, and we have been very precise, is we take 10% of our disbursements
in relation to a specific natural disaster and say we are prepared
to add that to a programme of long-term defence against that particular
natural disaster to which that country is vulnerable. The second
half of the question you have asked Mr Mosselmans' view on, is
what we are doing vis-a"-vis multilateral donors,
over whom we have some influence because we contribute, and the
other ones would be the World Bank and the European system, by
which I mean both Europe Aid and ECHO.
Mr Mosselmans: We have issued
this new strategy paper about how DFID is going to step up a gear
in disaster risk reduction, so it has become a more important
part of DFID policy and thinking. One of the things we are doing
with our own country programmes in disaster risk countries is
making sure that in our country strategy for those countries the
DFID country team articulates whether there is scope for DFID
to do more in disaster risk reduction and, if so, what. It becomes
a question they have to answer in our country strategy. With regards
to the multilateral system, we are stepping up our investment
in those agencies, like the UN's international strategy for disaster
reduction, which are active in this area, and like the ProVention
Consortium which is housed at the International Federation of
Red Cross/Red Crescent Societies. We are also advocating internationally
that multilateral donors should give more attention to this area,
particularly, for example, with the World Bank encouraging both
at a national level and at central level in Washington that disaster
risk reduction should form a bigger part of poverty reduction
strategies in countries that are prone to disasters. That is something
which DFID country teams will advocate when there is consultation
around the Poverty Reduction Strategy.
|
