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CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1188-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
HUMANITARIAN RESPONSE TO NATURAL DISASTERS
Tuesday 6 June 2006 MS LYSE DOUCET and MR DAVID MUNK MS JANE COCKING, MR MARCUS OXLEY and MR TOBY PORTER Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 63
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the International Development Committee on Tuesday 6 June 2006 Members present Malcolm Bruce, in the Chair John Barrett John Battle Hugh Bayley John Bercow Richard Burden Mr Quentin Davies Mr Jeremy Hunt Ann McKechin Joan Ruddock Mr Marsha Singh
________________ Witnesses: Ms Lyse Doucet, Presenter and Special Correspondent, BBC World television and World Service radio, and Mr David Munk, Deputy Foreign Editor, The Guardian, gave evidence. Q1 Chairman: Good morning. Thank you for coming along. Unfortunately Leonard Doyle appears to have forgotten that he is due to be here, so he may or may not arrive. If he does, we will slide him in and draw him into the conversation. Thank you to both of you for coming before us. This is the first formal evidence session that this Committee has had on this inquiry into humanitarian disasters. There was an informal briefing the week before last, which I was not able to attend and which John Battle chaired on my behalf, which gave us some useful background. Obviously this immediate session is on the role of the media in focusing attention and accountability in relation to humanitarian disasters. From the perspective of where we are, a developed western economy, it is interesting to determine what it is that makes people respond to particular disasters. What is the issue? Clearly the media has quite an important role to play. Is it perceived national interest? Is it feel-good factors? Is it political issues? What is it that makes a disaster one which people respond to, given that there are many that go unnoticed? Perhaps the question to both of you, first of all, is: When you are making these editorial decisions, what are the factors that you think determine the kind of coverage you give to humanitarian crises? What are the kinds of crises that grab your attention? How do you make decisions determining both whether you are going to cover them and the extent to which you are going to cover them and how? Mr Munk: I guess, to begin with, as an editor sitting on a desk, your information is coming in, whether it be from TV, radio or on the wires, and the first thing you see of a disaster is the scale of it. You try to determine the scale as quickly as you can. Once you determine the scale, you also then figure out the location. The location is important mainly because of the logistical problems which you will face getting people on to the ground, whether the problems are the physical problems of getting from A to B, or political problems: visas, getting to countries which sometimes do not necessarily want journalists in. I would say another factor would be the resources you have, where they are, scattered around the world. When you have looked at all those things, you also take a judgment on how important you think this story is. There have been, I guess, five or six pretty major disasters since 2000 - I mean, natural disasters - and with most of them - most of them - I think we would react in a similar way. I think the process is pretty similar for newsdesks and TV and most national newspapers in this country: you have to start off just relying on what you are hearing from the ground, and that may be a reporter on the ground. I would say, in that order, it is scale, location, resources. Those are the key factors. Q2 Chairman: One thing you did not mention was who is involved. The broadcast media is often the first thing that people get, before the print media - not necessarily, but often - and the initial report is: There has been an earthquake - or an eruption or a tsunami, or whatever it may be - how many Britons are involved? That is the impression one gets. To what extent do you think that is a factor, as opposed to: How many people? How bad? - in other words, a straight humanitarian response. Mr Munk: Without a doubt, it is in your mind. I think most people would say that a ferry disaster ... Actually, I suppose that is more of an accident. A natural disaster on the shores of France, where many Britons live, sometimes is different from a natural disaster 10,000 miles away. That is because, to some extent, we are all quite parochial, in the sense that we know people who live there; we have family connections; we are a society which is quite tightly knit. Newspapers do, without a doubt, treat disasters in slightly different ways, but I think you start off and you try to treat them in exactly the same way. It is quite difficult to some extent. The tsunami was an interesting case in point, because it was so widespread and so huge that the question was not: How many Brits are involved in this? You are having tens of thousands of people who are dying here across the world, and it is from Sri Lanka to Somalia to Southern India, the Andaman Islands, Thailand and Indonesia. There was quite a concentration on Thailand at one point by a lot of the media and we concentrated on it as well because thousands of Brits were on holiday there. A lot of people here go on holiday to those islands; we have a connection with it. In that sense, I think it is a duty to look at that connection, but you do not look at it exclusively and you have to keep it to some extent in balance. That is what we do, I think - certainly on that occasion, by the resources we allocated to those specific areas, those six countries, how many reporters we sent out there, photographers, how many times we went back to the place. I am not sure what you think, Lyse. Ms Doucet: First of all, I should say it is very nice to be here. I recognise some of you - some of you I have seen on the ground in disaster areas or in areas of political conflict, so it is very nice to see you here, in this setting. Let me take a step back before I answer that question, to understand the context in which editorial decisions are being made. As the United Nations put it, 2005 was the year of disasters. More and more journalists, like myself, who often cover political conflicts, political earthquakes, found themselves going to natural earthquakes, to tsunamis, to floods. I think all of us had a very acute understanding that our world was changing, whether it was through climate change, whether it was through a greater sense of our globalised world and how things which happen far away are immediately on our doorstep. There was a sense in which this was now on our agenda in a much bigger way than before. Now, 2006, thank goodness, has not been as bad in terms of natural disasters, although, last week, when the Indonesian earthquake happened, again we were back at the decision: Do we cover this earthquake? Must we be there? How should we be there? Of course the BBC is a huge, vast organisation. I work for BBC World television; BBC News 24 when there is a breaking story in the field; for BBC World Service radio, which, as you know, is funded by grant in aid from the Foreign Office; and then there is the massive side which is the licence-fee funded part of the BBC. But when we go on big stories, we all work together - separate budgets, of course, but we all work together. So how does it work? Six o'clock in the morning, seven o'clock in the morning - it depends what time you start listening to the radio - the first reports start coming in: There has been an earthquake: so much on the Richter scale, so many people are dead. This happened ten days ago, on the Saturday. I thought, "Oh, my goodness, 300 dead. Am I going to be sent?" I spent the next few hours wondering: "Am I going to be sent to Indonesia?" What process did my editors go through? First of all, they asked, "What is going to be the impact of this earthquake in Indonesia?" Of course we covered the tsunami in Indonesia, so we already had experience of covering it: we know what the impact can be. In some senses the BBC is in a different category, because of the resources, because, with our global position, we basically cover the world and we have offices all over the world, and we say, "Do we have enough of our own journalists in Indonesia who can cover the story? How quickly can they get up into Java? Do we need to send from Singapore, where we have our regional bureau, our South-East Asia bureau? Do we need to send from London? Do we need to send a presenter?" - I would be one of the people considered, along with other colleagues. "Do we need to send some of our other reporters who are dispatched out to these sorts of stories, who have the kind of experience? What is the level? What are the resources we are going to put to it? What is the magnitude of this story?" In the case of the Indonesian earthquake, we had our Indonesian correspondent, we had Andrew Harding who came from Singapore, and we had our local reporters, and we felt that was enough and we covered the story. It was a question also of how quickly could we get there. In October last year, early in the morning, we heard the first reports of an earthquake in Pakistan. The same questions asked by the editors, calling each other as soon as it happens: "What is the magnitude of this story? Does it matter?" And the question all of us asked, were supposed to ask: "Why should anyone care? Why should anyone care that something so terrible has happened in Pakistan?" The Pakistan one was different. You asked the question about are any Britons involved, and of course the Britain of today is different from the Britain of 20 years ago. People are very aware that Britons come from all walks of life and from different parts of the world. There was an understanding that a great percentage of the population are of South Asian origin and they would be affected directly, and it was the case. By ten o'clock in the morning we heard: "About 19 people are dead." Nineteen. You would say, "Well, that's not a very big earthquake," but our editors said, "This has the possibility of being something much bigger," and they took a risk. It is a risk, because, when you deploy presenters and engineers and satellite dishes and correspondents, it costs a lot of money and it means money not spent on other things. We got on the plane - interestingly enough, the plane we got on was the same plane as that of the search and rescue team that was sent out, dispatched like this, to be Britain's effort to try to help find people trapped under the rubble; it was the same plane on which Oxfam and other agencies had sent their media officers and more people to be on the ground - and when we touched down in Islamabad the next morning it was 19,000 dead. And it kept going up and up and up to 70,000. In that one, the BBC we can say was lucky or they planned well. We got our dish on the ground in Islamabad, the first of the broadcasters; we got our dish up to Muzzafarabad, the first of the broadcasters. Those were the decisions we made then, but it is the same kind of decision every time there is a natural disaster: What is the level of deployment? How big is it? Does it matter? Does it matter to the country? Does it matter to the region? Does it matter to Britain? Does it matter to our understanding of the world? And what are the knock-on costs, if we do not cover this one? If we cover this one, what else can we not cover? All of us, be they governments, be they aid agencies, be they journalists, have finite resources. That is the kind of thinking that goes into our decision. Q3 Chairman: One thing which occurs to me on the basis of what you have said, which is very interesting, is that there is a competition as well to be there first. Is there not a danger that the media react like a shoal of fish, so they will all go to this one. What about the idea that maybe this is one that will not get covered and somebody should do it? Ms Doucet: I think in those first hours, when you are thinking of the story, perhaps someone might say, "Oh, well, Sky will be there or ITN will be there or CNN will be there," but I think, first of all, it is: "Is this the story that we should cover?" - that this is part of what the BBC is meant to do. In the same way that Members of Parliament will be happy when policy goes right and you achieve what you want, be it with your education policy or your immigration policy or whatever, similarly, when journalists go out on an operation, we like to get it right. We like to get as close as possible to the truth, we like to cover the story with the resources that are deserving of that story. On the Pakistan earthquake, in particular, I think the BBC did a very good job, if I can say so. I think we put in the right amount of resources. We were in - and it is that classic phrase - the right place at the wrong time. It was a terrible story, but to this day I would say it was a privilege to be there to cover it and to tell the world about it. Q4 Mr Hunt: I wonder if I could ask you both about some of the anomalies which seem to have occurred in terms of the amount of coverage you have given to different disasters. If you take, for example, two conflicts, the conflict in Rwanda and the conflict in the Congo: the Rwandan conflict has had huge publicity, it has had two films about it in the last couple of years; the conflict in the Congo, which has seen many more casualties and is still going on, seems to get much less coverage. I just wonder: is it to do with the fact that one is a kind of slow-burn conflict and one is something which had instant impact? Is it to do with the fact, as one cameraman told me when I was in the Congo, bluntly, that the public are bored of seeing pictures of starving and dead Africans on their screens, and that therefore you are looking for a new angle? I appreciate that both the organisations you represent, BBC World and The Guardian, are quite good at covering forgotten conflicts, but I wonder whether you could address why it is that your immediate colleagues seem to have such inexplicable priorities in terms of the conflicts to which they choose to give huge coverage. Mr Munk: To take your second example, the Congo, we were talking about it just before we came in. We were both saying that TIME magazine has the Congo on its front cover this week and we were wondering: "Should we be there?" We are there. We have been there for the last two weeks looking at the Congo again. There is, to some extent, a slightly artificial reason for being there - which we journalists do create, what we call a 'peg' - and the reason is the elections which are in July. It gives a chance, I guess, to revisit a story which, as you say, has been a slow-burn story. It is one of the most atrocious losses of life - in fact it is the worst since the Second World War, I believe - and in quite a short period of time. I think the UN - was it Jan Egeland? - was saying that it is a tsunami every month or every week. Ms Doucet: Every few days. Mr Munk: It is absolutely horrendous. You ask yourself, "Why should this not be on the front page of every newspaper in this country every single day?" because it is that bad. I guess the answer to that is that you cannot shout all the time. If you shout all the time people are not going to listen to you. To some extent, you have to measure the way you approach a story. I think your readers will respond to it much better in that way. I am not being crass by saying that they cannot understand or cannot take on board the complexities or the scale of it. It is that, in the end, we are a newspaper and we have to have a variety of things going into our pages. I mean, the Congo is so horrendous that you could say we should do a Congo year - almost to batter people over the head, and say, "Look, this is just so important" - but I do not think shouting is the way to do it. We have gone back to it on numerous occasions, through this year, last year, and we intend to do it until there is a resolution, if there is a resolution in the near future. I do not think it is a particularly easy question for journalists to answer, because sometimes the answer you give is not particularly palatable, I guess. Ms Doucet: What is interesting too is, ironically, the fact that they are forgotten is the story now. The front cover of TIME magazine says "Congo - the forgotten crisis." If you read some of the international media, they are saying: Why have we forgotten Darfur? Suddenly, in a sort of obverse kind of way, the fact that nobody is paying attention, suddenly, everyone is saying, "Why aren't you paying attention." You are getting a spate of articles in which there is virtue in saying, "Nobody is looking at it, so I'm going to look at it." We talked about it. When I first met David, I said, "What is the answer?" We all wrestle with this. Again, back to the logistics, it is much easier to cover an event, something which happens, partly because it grabs the world's attention. It is the concern that day, whether it is world leaders, policy makers, the UN, the aid agencies. As journalists, you focus on that point. It is not to say that the other one is not more important but it has just been there a long time. It is an emergency situation, let us say - a 'complex' emergency, is the word used - and it may even be a worsening emergency, but the logistics of it are more difficult - the 'peg', as David says - and, if it has always been that way, when do you then go in? The BBC now has these things where they have a week of attention to something or a day of attention, where they will concentrate resources on one area and not another, to try to bring attention to ones which have not been covered before. But I should say that the research in the BBC, whether it is for domestic outlets or for the international outlets, is that our audiences want to hear more about stories of what happened in a disaster: "You covered a lot last year on the Pakistan earthquake or the tsunami. What has happened since then?" in terms of staying with stories. Staying with stories is the other thing we hear a lot in the BBC: "Don't let the story go away" and so we have this thing now where we go back. With the tsunami we went back a month after, 100 days after, six months after and a year after, going back and checking on it, because people want to know what has happened since then. Congo is the best example. The Jan Egeland thing is interesting too, because it goes to that other question which I think is something you are going to be addressing today: What is the relationship between the media and journalists? Someone like Jan Egeland has found a very creative and truthful and powerful way of representing these disasters, in a way in which, when journalists hear the words, they do not think, "Oh, this is propaganda. Oh, we have heard this before." He finds a way to phrase it such that it catches your attention. It is not to say he is using clichés. I remember standing on a beach in Tamil Nadu, covering the aftermath of the tsunami, and listening to Jan Egeland down the satellite line to New York talking about the unprecedented response to an unprecedented disaster, which was the tsunami, but then he said, "What about all the other forgotten crises?" I was sitting there, thinking, "What about the Congo? What about Afghanistan? The resources for one thing mean less resources for another." Aid agencies too can find creative ways to keep it on our agenda as well. Q5 John Bercow: Like Jeremy Hunt, I am interested in the question of why you choose to focus on one natural disaster - as opposed to a conflict situation, perhaps - rather than another. I wonder if I can probe you as to whether the type of government in a country, and, as a consequence of that type of government, the sort of culture that is created, can influence your thinking. The example I have in mind which is relatively recent, perhaps 18 months or two years or so ago, is the disaster that occurred in North Korea. I think it was a train disaster, if I remember rightly. I was struck at the time that, although the Secretary of State did issue a statement and there was talk of providing help, the North Koreans did not seem to want any help and almost regarded it as an insult to be offered it. I just wonder, given what we all know, that North Korea - perhaps like Burma, but even more so - is a massively closed society, does that have an impact? Ms Doucet: Have you ever tried to get a visa to go to North Korea as a journalist? Stories. Faces. Images. Sound. If you cannot put a human face on a tragedy, nobody - none of us in this room - is going to plough through statistics and press releases. If the journalist cannot get there and tell the story, the story is not going to get told. That is the problem. I think journalists would love to go to North Korea to tell the story. If you want to talk about forgotten, that one is buried. At least we can get into Congo - with great difficulty, but at least we can get there. Burma. Zimbabwe. More journalists are pretending to be going on safaris than any other occupation for the journalists, because they simply cannot get in. When you started raising this, I was thinking that I was reading some of the studies that have been done on the difference in media reaction and they were talking about what had happened in Orissa in 1999 and what had happened in Mozambique in 2000. In Orissa, in a cyclone, 10,000 people died and 12.6 million were affected. In Mozambique, 800 died, 1.5 million were temporarily displaced. Mozambique received seven times more aid and five times more coverage. Why? Because the Indians would not let the journalists go to see the impact of what had happened in Orissa, whereas, in Mozambique, we have all seen the pictures of the helicopters going out. To this day, the story of the woman giving birth to a child in a tree in Mozambique is mentioned. Everybody remembers that story. If we could get to North Korea, if we could tell the stories, I am sure we would get ----- Q6 Hugh Bayley: But, with the greatest of respect, that was not the story. I mean, why in Mozambique was the story helicopters, when boats were doing the saving of the people on the ground? Ms Doucet: We did boats too. I saw pictures of my colleagues in boats. Q7 Hugh Bayley: But, with great respect, one woman having birthed in a tree is not the disaster story, it is not the development story. It is a public consumption story, it is a tabloid story. It is a very, very strong story, but are you there just to provide stories, just to provide entertainment and fix audiences around the world, or are you there for something deeper? Ms Doucet: Is it entertainment? Why do we care about humanitarian disasters? We do not care about them because 10,000 have died or ten million are displaced, we care about them because individuals, like our brothers and sisters and children, are affected. If it is not a human tragedy ---- Q8 Hugh Bayley: What has happened to the mission to explain? Ms Doucet: It is explaining. But how do you explain? How do you get someone in Clapham or someone down in Kent to care about this story? Q9 John Bercow: Are high-tech gizmos, helicopters, satellite predictions of weather patterns the answer, or are there longer term disaster prevention solutions ---- Ms Doucet: But we are talking about different things. You need to get somewhere, and, unfortunately, sometimes you need helicopters, sometimes you need a boat, sometimes you need a very good pair of walking boots. You have got to get there. I mean, that is not the story. We do not want to have exclusive focus. Some papers may go in and just do the story of the woman in the tree - here we are, again, using the woman in the tree - but I think there is a broader mission to explain. I agree with you absolutely: Why did this happen? Was the relief effort the way it should be? Did we respond at the right time and with the right aid? I completely agree with you, but it is also about telling a story. Q10 John Battle: Jan Egeland himself has stressed for a long time that there is not a clear pattern of which disasters or emergencies or humanitarian crises get coverage. It is very, very uneven. He stressed all the time that if we go on the tsunami, in particular, and even the Pakistan-India earthquake, they distort what is actually going on in the world massively. We had a private session where Paul Harvey from the Humanitarian Policy Group of the ODI gave us evidence. He gave us this sheet, and there were on that sheet 37 other disasters, and they are not all in places where journalists cannot go. Surprisingly, a lot are in Central and Latin America and a lot are in Central Europe, where you can get now. I welcome the refocusing on Africa, because Africa was the forgotten continent for a long time. I was incredibly impressed by the number of people who turned up to Oxfam shops that Christmas. Because the coverage was so massive, it touched the people to go and respond. Marsha and I, from our neck of the woods in Yorkshire, would say in relation to the response at the early times, in the early hours and days - and I have to say that one of my neighbours was stood next to me when he got a phone call from a man under the rubble in Pakistan, and that woke me up to the earthquake big time - that there was a delayed reaction and there was not the response of the people. What about all those other disasters, the other 37? Do you think the media have a humanitarian responsibility to give publicity to those emergencies? Is there a value in the media being there first in order to waken up the rest of the media? I am not necessarily saying newspapers but television as well. How do we handle that, to waken the world up? My second question would be: Could you make some comment on how you see your role in wakening up the readers, the listeners, the viewers and the audience to respond appropriately? I think that follows on from Hugh really. Is it just to say that there is nothing we can do about it and these are terrible circumstances, or do you see yourselves as having a role to steer people? Sometimes there are inappropriate responses, such as people rushing in with blankets and equipment that is not needed, in some cases to the wrong places, when the best message is to send money to DEC or the local Oxfam collection point. What is your view of that nexus of problems? Mr Munk: You talk about the 37 other disasters. I would go back to what I said earlier about measuring your coverage. I think it would be irresponsible if you did not cover some of those 37 disasters, and you have to make a judgment on which ones you do. However, I think it would be irresponsible as well if you covered all of them to some extent, because effectively your paper or your magazine would be absolutely full of disaster. No one is going to pay attention if day after day you have disaster in your pages. I mean, you read newspapers, most people probably read newspapers - or maybe on the web now as well - and, if it was unremitting disaster in a newspaper, you would eventually not buy it. You would buy something else which gave you a slightly more rounded view of the world - because the world is not full of disasters. There are disasters out there, but that is not the only thing going on and we have to reflect that. Q11 John Battle: Do you subscribe to the compassion fatigue thesis: that, if we tell too many people too much about what is going on, nobody will give anything because they will all be burnt out by worrying about it? I think that expression was a media construct. I have never heard a constituent come up to me and say, "I'm suffering from compassion fatigue" but I have read in the newspapers quite a lot that they might be. Mr Munk: I do not know who first used that phrase. I think it was probably quite a clever phrase to use. I think there are people who would say that, given too much of a bad thing, they do not want it any more. They will hold their hands up and go, "I know it is a terrible situation, but save me." As editors we have to find different ways of telling what sometimes is the same story. I think the recent earthquake in Java was such an incident. There, 5,200 people died. On our new scale of things - because things have got bigger, or they seem to have got bigger: 232,000 people dying in a tsunami, which was so wide across the world, and now we have 5,000 - where does that lie? In the case of Java I think it was a slightly different story because you had a lot of aid agencies and a lot of relief operations already there because of the imminent or otherwise eruption of the volcano. I guess that sort of tightened the story; it was not as long. We were not there as long as we normally would be on a disaster like that, because people were being helped, things were obviously happening there. After three or four days you thought to yourself, "We are telling the same story again and we are trying to find ways of telling the same story - which is that there are a lot of people out there who have lost loved ones. There are still people who need some help, but, in general, given what has happened, things are looking okay." Is it because the media only feeds on things when things are bad? No, I do not think so. I think it is because the media go there, to begin with, and sometimes - like in the tsunami, or you mentioned North Korea earlier on - is unable to get to places. One place which was not covered in the tsunami was Burma. We sent somebody up the coast, sneaked in there, because we were hearing stories that lots of people had died. It was not the case, so we came back and we reported elsewhere. But, I think, generally, as an editor, it is difficult but you just have to keep on finding different ways to tell the same story. Once you find that things are okay or you perceive them to be okay, you move on. Q12 Richard Burden: Could I return, Lyse, to something you said a bit earlier on about decisions around days of attention or weeks of attention. I completely understand about the need to respond to events and that to some extent dictates the agenda. I also understand, if you like, the Burma/North Korea issue of not being able to get to places and that limits you. You described in some detail that you get a phone call at six or seven in the morning about the earthquake and the process that is then gone through in terms of determining the BBC's response to that. What would be the equivalent sequence around decisions on: Are we going to do a week of attention, a day of attention, on something that has not had a profile? How are those decisions made? Ms Doucet: It is a variety. There is no one reason which goes behind it. Sometimes it is because a particular journalist will say - which I have started to say to my bosses - "We should go to Congo. We really have not done enough in Congo, so we should." Sometimes it is a question of where, in terms of world television, because we have a big audience there. So we want to go and do a lot more coverage, look at stories which are not in the news all the time, do culture, do entertainment - do something different, if you like. Sometimes it is just a question of doing something different. We did an Afghanistan day because we wanted to give people a sense of what happens outside the capital. We asked the question: "What is life like if you are in Afghanistan today?" We did the same thing in Iraq: "What is life like? It is not just suicide bombings every day in the capital; there is another story that isn't being told." It is usually to say, "Let's complement, let's broaden our coverage. Let's give people something they have not heard before." That is something we also ask of ourselves, aside from: "Why should anybody care?" It is to tell people something they have not heard before, something which surprises them, something which makes them think either, "Oh, my God," or "Well, that's interesting." It is a variety of different calculations, if you like. Mr Munk: You are also relying on what people are telling you. Ms Doucet: Yes. Mr Munk: Absolutely on the ground. The Guardian has three correspondents in Africa. Obviously it is a massive continent and you cannot cover the whole continent with three people. We rely on agencies, on stringers, on various contacts which we have within countries to tell us, whether it be through the wire feed, which is basically the thing we read every day, or ... Just to give you again scales, the volume that we get through, just on the AP, the Associated Press wire, you will get about 600 stories coming through on your desk a day, on the Reuters wire you will get about 350. Some of those are repeats. On top of that, you have radio, TV, the internet now - which is far more a source of news for us and others: you have all the other papers around the world which you can access by the internet and find out what is going on in different countries. The Washington Post may be in Congo or they may be in Nigeria for a certain reason. You will read their story and think, "Have they got a point there? Should we be going there?" As well as that, you are all relying on agencies. Oxfam is an agency we work quite closely with at times. Save the Children. Action Aid. They have more resources than we do and they have more people on the ground than we do on an international level. So you have to rely on what people are telling you and you have to have your ears always open. A temptation is sometimes to close them because there is so much coming in, but, as long as you are able to keep your ears open, you will be all right - hopefully. Q13 Hugh Bayley: The Chairman started off by asking you why you cover what you cover. I do not think you answered the question. You talked about how you choose what it is you cover in terms of news value, immediacy, and relevance to the audience that you are speaking to, but not why. I would like you both to say a little bit more. Is it to save lives? Is it to change public policy? Is it to shock or to surprise or to entertain the audience? Or is it just to attract readers and viewers? Ms Doucet: I am really glad you asked that question because this has now become a subject of discussion for journalists, where they say, "Should there be good news journalists? Should journalists be messengers of good? Should journalists have another responsibility than that which is trying to tell the story?" I cannot speak for all my colleagues, but I have noticed a certain resistance in Britain to any sense that journalists have this other role, that they should be somehow like an aid agency or like a vicar or like a government official. I think it is very important that we remember we have our job to do, government has its job to do and aid agencies have their job to do. When John says, "What is your role in waking up the readers?" it is that sometimes The Guardian will say, "Look at this. Look what is happening," but for something like the BBC, which I would regard as a media of record, it is not our job to say things are really terrible. It is the aid agencies' job, who are working there on the ground, day in and day out, to try to tell us what is happening there, and for the government also to say, "This is our response, this is our policy, this is our aid programme," et cetera. I think we have to be very clear about what our mandate is but we also should be clear that we have to break down who are the journalists. You do not need telling from me that the business of some newspapers is to sell newspapers. They are going to have a different look at the news from us at the BBC, who have a different approach to how we cover news and how we cover stories. We can do weeks and "Let's bring attention to Africa" and that is because we have a different funding structure and a different sense of what our relationship with our audience is. I think it is very important not just to say "the media" but to break down what kind of media we are talking about - radio, television, tabloids, internet, whatever. I would hope the BBC's job is never to shock but, sometimes, when journalists are on the ground and it is so terrible and nobody is paying attention, they might say, "Don't you understand how bad this is? Please, sit up in your living rooms and take notice." Mr Munk: You asked: "Is it our job to shock?" No, but you will shock people because what you are reporting is shocking. Is it your job to save lives? I do not think your job is to save lives. It may be a consequence of what you report. As for changing public policy, this question could apply for international as well as domestic journalism, anyway, but you cannot go in with an agenda. If you go in with an agenda, you are not going to get a story. You will be turfed out in some places, for certain. You will not be trusted. People will always see you as: "The Guardian has turned up. They want to increase DFID's budget by £40 million next year and this is why they are here." People look at you differently if you go in with an agenda. You just tell the story straight. If you tell the story straight, you let other people make up their minds. That is really the only thing you should be doing. Q14 Hugh Bayley: If you think back to the 1983 Ethiopian famine, the public generally thinks it was about a food crisis, a harvest which did not come, when in actual fact we know it was a genocidal government which did not move food around in the country. It seems to me you cannot avoid public policy. Perhaps I am saying that you are news reporters, your job is to tell people what is happening, but there are other journalists whose job it is to write features, to analyse, and there is also a news job to follow through. How would you move the story from information to analysis and from analysis to a reporting of outcomes? Mr Munk: In many ways they are seamless, in the sense that from news you can get analysis. Once you know what is going on on the ground, you can analyse the facts as you see them. However, you should try to split them up. You tell the story in facts, as the way they are and the way they are seen by the reporters on the ground. If you want to comment on those facts, if you want to make decisions of people on those facts, you separate it. It is what the BBC does and it is what The Guardian does in terms of: "Facts are sacred; comment is free". What was your last category? Q15 Hugh Bayley: Through to an assessment of outcomes. I suppose, at the crudest level, the tsunami is still a story three months, six months, nine months later. Mr Munk: It is. As Lyse was saying, the BBC has been back to various places, whether it be Sri Lanka or Southern India, the Andaman Islands, Thailand or Indonesia. Likewise, we adopted a village in Indonesia and we saw their lives develop over a year. I think that is a valuable thing because it is a slightly different way of reporting the story and it engages people still in the story. Hugh Bayley: I think it is very valuable. Mr Munk: Likewise, with the money aspect of things, when your government is spending lots of money in a certain area, perhaps you want to know where your money is going, and that is one way of doing it. Q16 John Bercow: I wonder if I can ask you about the current balance that does or does not exist in disaster reporting. Specifically, I am quite interested in the balance and the distinction between analysis of the immediate circumstances, that is to say, the prevailing human context, on the one hand, and analysis of the political dimensions on the other - possibly political problems which might have even, if not caused, certainly exacerbated the crisis, or political problems which, over a period - again thinking to the medium and long term - could slow up the process of recovery. I ask this question in no pejorative sense, I am simply making the point - which is probably tedious from your point of view, but I think it is valid - that it is in the nature of your work that you have a very short attention span; in other words, you are focused on the here and now and it is your responsibility to be. I thought it was rather interesting, Mr Munk, that a moment ago you resisted what might have been a temptation, if not for you then for other journalists, to say, "Oh, yes, saving lives is very important, very important." I was rather pleased that you did not tick that box but said, "Well, no, that may very well be a beneficial consequence, but it is not our job." So, let us face it, you do not see it as your role to save the world. One of the problems - and, as I say, this underlies my question - is that you are interested now, but medium term - six months - or long term - a year, two years, five years - are you? Probably not. Therefore, what are the effects of that on the reporting? Ms Doucet: I mentioned earlier this whole thing about "staying with the story". This has become one of our phrases that we use in the BBC, partly because, as I mentioned, our audiences do want to know what happened in a certain place, but also, when you ask this question about our short attention span, it is very interesting. In countries I go to on a regular basis, like Afghanistan, I often think: "What is the attention span?" - but not as a journalist. The question you ask, especially when it comes to humanitarian disasters or complex emergencies, is the same question we can ask of you as MPs. In Afghanistan they will say, "Why do the journalists not pay enough attention? Why does the British Government only give one year of funding, or year on year funding? We need long-term attention, from journalists, from the military, from the aid agencies and from government aid programmes." We are all facing the same problem. When John says there are 37 emergencies you are not covering, there are probably 37 emergencies the British Government is not funding and the aid agencies. How I wish it were different - I really do - that we could cover them all, but all of us are confronting the same problem. I do not think it is something particularly with journalists. It is true that the media with more limited resources will send out one reporter - possibly a reporter who has never been to that country; let us say to Pakistan or Indonesia - they will do a series of features, and then they will not go again and the story will disappear from the newspaper. In our case, after our team which was sent out to report on the Pakistan earthquake went away, we had our office in Pakistan to do it. They had Declan Walsh there to do it. People who have the resources, have bureaus on the ground, will continue the story, and that is how the attention span continues. But I agree with you that the problems will continue to manifest themselves and we will not be able to give it the same kind of attention. But then, of course, the attention span of audiences goes away too. There will be another earthquake; there will be something else as well. Mr Munk: On the political dimension, the tsunami was pretty unique, I guess - well, it was unique, anyway, but in the sense that it managed to hit some of the most politically fraught places in the world, whether it be Banda Aceh or Sri Lanka. Likewise, with the Pakistan earthquake. Kashmir, with the problems there. Iran, the Bam Earthquake back in 2003 was particularly difficult, because having a reporter in Iran is a luxury, and then getting a reporter back into Iran to do a follow-up six months later is an even greater luxury. We are lucky, in that we have effectively a staff reporter there now. Q17 Ann McKechin: You have both mentioned the sheer size of the multiple range of media that covers these sorts of stories and it is a very competitive market. When you are covering humanitarian emergencies, do media representatives operate on a "do no harm" basis; that is, not using helicopters and aircraft which emergency services who have to go out at the same time to assess the story may be able to use? Or recruiting staff where they may have better uses for humanitarian purposes? I am not criticising your own agencies, which clearly have very good standards, but I think just in the age of more multiple media, with more and more people trying to cover the same story, is there not a risk that they are going to take over valuable resources? Mr Munk: I would say TV probably takes more resources. The press, more and more now, is effectively one person, with a camera around his or her neck, whereas, with the problems of getting television coverage of certain disasters, you need a minimum of four, I guess. Is it a team of four people just going to a place? Ms Doucet: You could send one, with a camera. I have been in situations like that, where you are with an aid agency and the helicopter is full - or the plane is full of sacks of flour, sacks of wheat, is there room for a journalist? - and you make decisions. Aid agencies make decisions. Aid agencies also have to raise money. Let us be clear about this too. They have to make a calculation. It is a terrible thing to do, but unfortunately that is reality. If I put a cameraman - let us say a pool cameraman, who will go for ITN, BBC and Sky - on this plane instead of five sacks of wheat, there will be greater attention in Britain, we will get the story, and maybe that will be better, because in the end we will get more money and that will be better for the victims. Sometimes they say, "No, no. No journalists now. The most important thing is to get the food out there immediately." Those decisions are made. Sometimes they are split-second decisions. I have also seen situations where the helicopter is cleared of everything and all the journalists pile into it, and also when journalists have pooled their money and paid for the helicopter themselves. Of course, for us, that is then a question of our resources... There is no one answer to it. It is a question of: Do you put your money for aid agencies or do you put your money into a press release or into a sack of flour? The aid agency business is changing too. The aid business is now much more sophisticated. They are much more savvy about the media. It is interesting, reading a lot of the studies about the relationship between the media and journalists, that they still all point out that we do not really understand each other very well and that we do have to do more to understand each other better. But I know, whatever disaster I go to now, if I interview somebody from an agency, they have the t-shirt on with something across the t-shirt, they have the hat on, the button on, and hopefully they have something behind them with their label on it. Sometimes I look at that, but then I think, "That's part of what they do. Maybe the Disasters Emergency Committee has to be organised differently so that they do not have to raise money every time there is a disaster." It is complex but your question is a very good one. Ann McKechin: It is a different response from the one you would expect if a disaster occurred here in the United Kingdom, where the media would be put in a certain place but not a place which would interfere directly with humanitarian or rescue efforts. I think there is concern that we have a lot of agencies coming in from abroad, seeking funds from their partners and their home countries; that, yes, there is a competition to get a story across, which would not occur in the same way if it was happening here in the West - although, perhaps Hurricane Katrina last year may have proved the opposite of that scenario, where there were obviously a lot of media pouring into the area. Chairman: That may be a question we can ask the NGOs as well. Q18 John Barrett: You mentioned earlier on logistical problems and editorial decisions. Is it also down to getting the image with the impact, or the story will not be read in the paper and will not be seen on the television? You have mentioned agencies. They also want to see the image with the impact. Is that where it all joins together, the demand of the image - getting it on to the news, getting it on to the television? Is it all about image? The danger of that is that the image with the impact can be something quite different from what is the most important thing. Mr Munk: Images are important, sure, but they are not the be-all and end-all, especially for a newspaper. You only have to listen to a radio broadcast as well: you create images in your mind, and you have an extraordinary powerful dispatch from somebody around the world. Q19 John Barrett: Will the strong photograph that goes with it drive it on to the front page or drive it on to the television screen when there are other more complicated or detailed issues that could have taken more text or taken more analysis. Mr Munk: I think we are sufficiently flexible in order to cope with a lack of an image on our front page. We have ways of doing things slightly differently. You do not need to have a stunning photograph in order to splash a story of certain importance. Again it is an editorial judgment. If it is an important enough story, it will make the front page and it will make inside spreads or whatever it may be. If there was not a single photograph or a single image coming out of Pakistan or of the tsunami for two days, it would still have made the amount of space in our paper. Ms Doucet: This is such an interesting field. If we look at British media, we have all seen and been touched by the story of one child, the one child in Iraq with all their limbs torn off. Cynics would say "the poster-boy of Iraq" became the story which galvanised people in Britain to pay money. Get this boy into a hospital. Get him some new limbs. It touches the whole country. Sometimes journalists go and look for that story, that one Ali or Mohammed, or Ayesha or Jane or whatever, to put a face on it. Sometimes, getting into all the complexities and things just does not work. People do not sit up and say, "Oh, my God, look at that little boy or look at that little girl." Either you can say that distorts it, because we are not getting into the complexities of it, we are not telling the whole story, and because that one little boy is going to get all the attention, the sympathy or the money, and the others are not going to get it - and that is what was said about Ali in Iraq - or do we say, "Great. One boy was helped. At least one boy was helped, and maybe other boys and girls will be helped as well." But this is sometimes the image people look for. Some journalists do it cynically - you know, neither of us are going to sit here and defend all journalists - but some journalists do it because of: "How am I going to make people sit up and care about this story?" I covered Tamil Nadu. What do I remember? I remember the story of the woman who held on to her two children and then had to decide which one she let go. That is what I remember about Tamil Nadu. Hugh and I had this little thing about the story. Some things stick in your mind because they are human dramas. At the end of the day, journalists, as terrible as we are, we are human beings too. We want to know the human cost to this as well - in individual terms, sometimes. Mr Davies: Is it not the fact, Chairman, that there has been in this morning's discussion a quite large element of humbug, self-deception and simply blarney. Nobody wants to mention the fundamental reality - and no doubt it is extremely tasteless and tactless of me to do so - and that is that you guys are in the competitive circulation business. I do not doubt for a moment your objective sincerity and that you are pleased to be doing your profession because you believe you are already doing good in the world as a result. I am sure you are doing good in the world as a result, because you are actually being employed by people who intend that you should improve your circulation at the expense of competitors. To take readers away from The Times or The Independent, to take viewers away from Sky or CNN: that is your professional skill and that is why you are being paid and that is what you are expected to deliver. You therefore have to be an expert in human psychology - and no doubt you are - and you know that people will pay for dispassionate information only, generally, where that helps them plan their own lives. You can have in your newspaper good advice about people's pensions or surveys of local schools and hospitals, and people will be happy to pay for that, but, when you are going further afield, you have to use other methods, and they are all classic things. The human race will pay to be titillated - we all know that - the human race will pay to be shocked - that is why people pay to go to disaster movies. The human race will pay for sentimentality and to be tear-jerked - that has been the major raw material of the Hollywood industry for the last 100 years, we all know that. And so you guys are actually looking for the story of the poor child having lost its limbs or anything to do with children or animals. Chairman: I think you are saying it is all about money, are you? Q20 Mr Davies: I am simply saying it is very hypocritical to ignore that whole dimension, which is what has been happening in this morning's discussion. I believe in a free press and I believe in the invisible hand, and, therefore, if everybody pursues their own commercial interest, at the end of the day we probably would have a better world than if they do not, but there are these commercial interests there, are there not? Ms Doucet: I did say that the business of some papers is to sell newspapers. That is the reality. But I will let the newspapers respond. Mr Munk: You could have picked two better targets than the BBC and The Guardian when it comes to that. Certainly at The Guardian, although we are run commercially, obviously, we are run by a trust. We are in a slightly different situation than a ---- Q21 Mr Davies: Mr Munk, I wish I had had the Murdoch press in front of me. I agree, you are among the most high-minded people in the media, nevertheless, you this morning are representing your industry. Mr Munk: I would not claim to do that. Having worked on a tabloid as well, I do think the tabloids do a brilliant job in some instances, and obviously they fall down, like we all do, in other instances. However, I would say that our job is not to bore our readers. It really is not. We have to have in our minds the fact that what they are going to read in the morning is going to interest them to some extent. It may not be everything. It may not be 40 % or it may not be even 10 % of what is in our paper that they are actually interested in, but there will be something that will interest them, that will make them buy the paper the next day. Of course, that is a commercial decision to some extent, but if the question is: "Do you put stories in the newspaper which you think are commercially far more popular than other stories?" the answer is: "Absolutely not." Q22 Mr Singh: You touched slightly on this a moment ago; the relationship between the media and the humanitarian agencies and the NGOs. What kind of relationship is that? How closely do you work with them, if you do work with them? Is it a one-way relationship where they need you or is it more symbiotic than that? Ms Doucet: My feeling is that by covering more and more humanitarian disasters we need each other. We need them for information of what is happening on the ground and we need them to give their assessment of the importance of the disaster. In my position as presenter I need to talk to someone and my colleagues need to do stories, so we need them. They need us because they also have to put their message out and they want the world to know about this disaster. They need to raise money so they need a voice; they need someone to convey their message, and that is why, as I mentioned earlier, it is in everyone's interests that we understand each other better. We have to understand how they work; they have to understand how we work. It is very imperfect and I know they sometimes call us parasites and cynics and we call them the same things, but what we are also seeing, and I notice it in the BBC where we have a developing world correspondent and we have people who are more specialised in these things who spend time with the agencies getting to know them better, a better understanding of how they work or do not work. It is a process. We are both part of the same problem, if you like. Mr Munk: I would pretty much agree with that. I would say that we have a good relationship with most agencies in this country and I think they provide us with very valuable information. It is not information that we just take and we bung into the newspaper; it is something which we would use as a foundation or as a start of a process. We then look at what they are saying and if we think what they are saying is valid and it is not being reported then we will go after it and see what we get out of it in terms of a story, ie, is there a story to be told there! You now have agencies working a bit like the media anyway. Many of the people who work for them are former media workers, former press workers and journalists, and they do tend to know what newspapers would want and they do provide you with a certain amount of information which is easily understandable for some journalists, especially on complex subjects, and they can point you in the right direction. At the end of the day, however, you have to take that information and put it through your own processes, and I am sure that the BBC would do the same. Ms Doucet: Can I just mention one point because it is part of the question. We should bear in mind when we are looking at this in the year 2006 that technology has transformed the way humanitarian disasters come into our living rooms and be conscious that we can now take a satellite dish right into the heart of the disaster, which means people will know what is or what is not happening. Similarly with the Internet the BBC now has call-in programmes where we bring a satellite to an area and we get people who have been affected by the disaster to come and talk to us and to talk to other people around the world, so it is not just us covering the stories, people will tell their own stories through cyberspace, through satellite technology. I think this is transforming. It puts greater pressure on aid agencies to also be on the spot; it puts pressure on journalists to try to get as close as possible to what is happening. This is the background to the kind of discussion we are having today. Q23 Mr Singh: Is the relationship in any sense critical in that we all assume that what aid agencies are doing is good but is it necessarily good? Are they overlapping and wasting money or wasting resources? Ms Doucet: We do not assume it is good. We assume that they have a job to do and part of our job is to see how well they are doing the job they are doing. If they stand up and say, "Oh yes, we brought all the blankets", and we go and see the blankets are not there, we have to report that. That is our job. Chairman: Joan Ruddock? Q24 Joan Ruddock: I was going to ask you that very point really because I think David said, "We want to tell the story straight," and Lyse said, "We like to get it right." I was really going to ask you, not everything goes right. You sound very much as though you are reporting the facts and that is all there is to it, but there are judgments to be made about how the various humanitarian actors have performed, what have they done that is right, what have they done that is wrong and you can be a serious force for their accountability if you report in that way. I wonder whether you think you have that responsibility and whether in all that is going on you ever have the real time to ask yourselves those questions? Mr Munk: We do not have much time, but I think you are right and it was something which was raised at the time of the tsunami. I think Kofi Annan said, "Look, all these donations, all this money has been promised, billions of it, but how much of this will ever get through?" whether it be through agencies or whether it be through governments or whether it be through the UN. It is obviously an interesting idea to track that to see what has happened to it. It is a process which we followed. I think in the tsunami, especially in Indonesia, those promises were far better observed. I think you are absolutely right, on the one hand, if you use agencies you cannot be uncritical of them, otherwise you fall into the same trap of somebody is telling you a story and you are just bunging it into the newspaper. If there is criticism to be made I think we should be there criticising them. I think there was an example a few weeks ago where something had happened in Indonesia with Oxfam and Oxfam had a local staff problem with donations. I am not quite sure what the story was but they put out a press release saying, "We have seen a problem here and we are going to sort it out," which I think they did, but I think that is something which should be reported as well. Q25 Joan Ruddock: It is not just the one agency that maybe does something wrong and has a problem. There is also the big question of 300 agencies in one place, does that make sense? Is this an issue? It is not a story that has been told in the media. Ms Doucet: In the tsunami there were cases where agencies were rushing to help, wanting to be there and in some cases wanting to be seen to be there. Journalists cannot be everywhere so they have to report on what is around them, what they have access to, what they hear about, and sometimes these are just cameos. It might be just one agency but it may be reflective of a broader story which if the journalist had time and could stay there they could see this agency was not doing what it said it was doing but also how many are in that same situation. Does this tell the story of what is happening across the territory or is it just an isolated incident? These are questions that the journalists have to ask. Of course, there is a difference between the news of the day, which is observational, then there is the news of the week, and then are the documentaries and then there is going back, as David said, and they have been there for two weeks in Congo gathering material and they will have more considered pieces than when just arriving and seeing what is in front of them. Q26 Joan Ruddock: Have either of you got an example of where you got it wrong? Mr Munk: We get it wrong every day, I am sure. Q27 Joan Ruddock: But an example where you know you can say, "We got that wrong. That was not like we said it was"? Mr Munk: I cannot think of something off the top of my head. There was a story which I think was wrong generally. The perception of Niger was slightly different from the reality and I think the famine/disaster in Niger was perhaps more of a political story than it was an environmental story. I am not sure that everybody picked up on the nuance of that. I am sure there must be plenty of occasions where newspapers and the media have got things wrong, they have misread the situation but not, I do not think, to the extent it has fundamentally changed the story and changed what has actually happened on the ground. Ms Doucet: The first draft of history goes through a lots of drafts before it gets to the encyclopaedic truth. Q28 Chairman: Can I thank you very much. You can see that when you get journalists and politicians together the time-frame expands! Thank you for sharing with us how you do it. The reality of this report is that we have to get our information from you and from the aid agencies. We will be visiting Pakistan, interestingly enough, and we had a discussion about what we should do and where we should go. Whether we have done the right thing is for others to call, but hopefully we will be able to see something in the way of follow-up. I think what you have said to us will at least help us out on the right kind of questions to inform our report. We really appreciate you both coming here and being so frank and responding to Quentin's challenge, which really was addressed to people who are not --- Ms Doucet: All the points were very valid and I think it is very good to have this exchange. We all are actors in these situations working together and the better we understand how we do what we do rather than just having slanging matches, the better we will all be able to do our work. In some ways we are doing very similar work but so long as we understand what each of our roles is then we can all get on and do them, as bad as some of them are! Chairman: Thank you very much.
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Ms Jane Cocking, Deputy Humanitarian Director, Oxfam, Mr Marcus Oxley, Disaster Management Director, Tearfund, and Mr Toby Porter, Director of Emergencies, Save the Children Fund, gave evidence. Q29 Chairman: Thank you for being so patient. I trust that you found the last session interesting and there will be questions that may arise out of it directed at you. You will appreciate that we are just getting stuck into this and we are really looking for information from people who work on the ground as to how they perceive these things. I guess what is of interest to us is that we have had a long discussion about the high-profile disasters and the impression one gets sometimes is that everybody wants to be in the high-profile ones, to the point where people argue that agencies trip over each other and get in each other's way. I would like to know, first of all, the extent to which that might be true but how do you as agencies in the field resolve the issue of, "It is high profile and everybody will be there but how important is our role and how necessary is it for us to be there or could we be doing something more useful? Do we all have to be there? Do we all have to focus on that?" I do not know who wants to take it first. Ms Cocking: As our journalist colleagues were saying, it is a perennial problem, how we get the balance right, and it was very interesting to hear Lyse Doucet's assessment of what happens on a Saturday morning when there is an earthquake. It is remarkably similar to the process that goes on in most aid agencies, I think. The word, though, that is very high in the conversation in our discussions which did not come from Lyse (which is probably right) is need. That has to be and quite genuinely is the first priority that feeds into our decision-making. Are we talking about a crisis which will unfold and affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of people or are we talking about a crisis which will unfold and gather many column inches or television time? That is the basis on which we would make our decisions and that would very much influence the scale of what we do and also the nature of what we do. However, it would be invidious of us to pretend that it is not difficult to get the balance right between responding to the earthquake in Pakistan on 8 October and maintaining a presence and an impact in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Both of them are happening in chronic and very deep-rooted crises and both of them are places where organisations like Oxfam have been for many years and we maintain a commitment to be there, but it is easier to raise money to respond in the first days following the Pakistan earthquake than it is to continue doing the work in Eastern Congo that we have been doing for many years. Q30 Chairman: I do not know whether it is a fair question to you but it must be a question that relates to some agencies, which is if something happens which is clearly going to be big; is there not going to be a discussion that says, "We will not get our share of the money unless we are there, even if we are not the best agency to do the job and we are not the best equipped to do it." How easy is it for an organisation to say, "Actually we have not got a huge amount to add to that. We are just going to pass it up even though we know it might affect the fundraising"? Ms Cocking: You are right it would be very difficult for an organisation like Oxfam to say, "We are not going to respond to a high-profile emergency." It would be very difficult in terms of our global profile. What we have done to guard against that and also to put it positively to ensure that we do have something that we believe we can always bring to the table is invest in particular competences and particular expertise. In the 15 years I have been working in humanitarian crises, I think we can say genuinely that we have got much better at that. For example, nine years ago - as long as that - we took a decision that we were not going to work in curative health, that there were others who were much better at it, that it took a huge amount of investment, both human and financial, to be good at that, and we were simply not going to do it. What we would do and what we have done is we have invested in developing our capacity to respond to water and sanitation needs and so we will bring that to the table on all occasions, and that is how, if you like, we answer your question in saying are we going to always respond. We always will respond if we can but in a way we have sidestepped your question by saying we will make sure that we always have something to bring to the table. Q31 Chairman: I wonder if either of your colleagues wanted to add anything, particularly if you have been faced with that decision at any time; should we not respond, should we opt out of this one? Mr Oxley: Tearfund is a much smaller organisation than Oxfam and that is a decision that we have to make all the time because we have only got limited resources ourselves and so we are constantly challenged by this question of where do we respond, where do we not respond? We have quite well-established internal procedures. We have a flow chart and on the left-hand side of the flow chart we are looking at what the humanitarian imperative is, what the need is, what the external environment is. On the other side, we are looking at what the capacity and the added value of the organisation is and, all the time, as you make that decision, as the management team comes together, essentially it is a needs niche equation. You are trying to say, first of all, what is the scale and the scope of the crisis? How many people have been killed? How many people have been affected? How many people have been displaced? What is the level of loss? Has the government actually requested external assistance? Have they declared a state of emergency? If you like, that is the official request then for external assistance to come in. What is the level of need? What are the sectors involved in that? Is there unmet need? That is really what you are trying to cut it down to; what is the level of unmet need? What we mean by that is we are looking at what the internal indigenous capacity to respond is, both within the community that has been affected, within the national government of the country that has been affected, what is the unmet need within that and then we are looking at what the external response is to that from the UN agencies, from the Red Cross organisations, from the non-governmental organisations, and that is all trying to define what the unmet need is. Then on the other side of the equation we are faced with issues of do we have sufficient capacity ourselves? Do we have an historic presence in that country? Do we have local partners that we have a relationship with in those countries? What is the level of financial resource we are going to get for that? That is related to the degree of media attention that it is going to get. Will the DEC do an appeal? Q32 Chairman: That is helpful in terms of the criteria but can I press you - and perhaps Toby as well - have you actually been in a situation where you have concluded that this is a high-profile emergency but Tearfund is not going to be there? Mr Oxley: In Java just recently. We have made a decision that we are going to have a very minimal response to the Java earthquake for all those various reasons that we feel it is not the role of Tearfund to go in there. Q33 Chairman: Toby? Mr Porter: No. And the reason for that is because with all of the inconsistencies and vagaries that the last group before you explained, the high-profile emergencies tend to be quite significant emergencies, so if you are a global organisation with a global mandate to respond, finding yourself, except for operational reasons, in a situation where you were not going to respond to a high-profile emergency would be a very odd thing in view of mandate. That said, security is obviously a factor. I think a lot of agencies still are very uneasy about the current drought in Somalia because that is not really a place where people want to scale up and have to start huge programmes. Many of us are already there, but I am talking about the last group, and there is Chechnya and earthquakes or other natural disasters in places where access is difficult. Of course for the Bam earthquake in 2003 there was a very substantive response and UK agencies, my own included, had a very prominent role there then. Iran is the most earthquake-prone country in the world. Would we be allowed in there now if there were a similar event given the way that political relationships have gone in the last two years? Almost certainly not. Q34 Chairman: That is not a decision that you would be taking. It would be taken on your behalf. Mr Porter: That is true. What I would say in summary is that NGOs are not a homogenous group and I would acknowledge that, it has been a feature of my career, indeed I think a phrase was coined for it years ago of "briefcase NGOs"; there are a lot of NGOs whose entire mission and raison d'etre revolves around going to well-publicised crises and the moment the publicity has gone and the funds have gone that they retrench and go off somewhere else. I would say that the professional agencies represented here and through the DEC are not like that. Q35 Mr Davies: There has been some criticism recently that too many agencies have responded and there has been great duplication and confusion. For example, 300 agencies were involved in the Pakistan earthquake and about the same number in the tsunami. That indicates that co-ordination does not seem to be working very well. Is the DEC working satisfactorily? Is it inadequate to try to co-ordinate on a purely national basis? Are there international co-ordination mechanisms? How do they work and is it the International Committee of the Red Cross or OCHA or ECHO in this business? Is it excessively bureaucratic to try to fund some sort of international co-ordination mechanism where people spend weeks arguing about co-ordination before there is any response at all? Could you let us have your views about the present state of the workings of the co-ordination mechanisms in this business? Mr Porter: Firstly, it is very rare to get too many NGOs working in a place. Take the Pakistan example; you may have had 300 NGOs but, two months in, probably less than 50 % of the affected families had received minimal shelter and support; it was such a huge emergency. It is not impossible but it is quite rare. Possibly it applies to the tsunami and possibly, in particular for European agencies, the Balkans crisis, the Kosovo crisis in 1999, where you really did see an enormous plethora of groups because it was within range of the white vans from the UK and other European countries, so people who had never done anything like that just loaded up a truck, all of which is a marvellous humanitarian impulse and everything else, but which led to problems in the field. There are co-ordination mechanisms. They are usually founded around the host government leading on co-ordination with the support of the UN, or in places where the host government is unable or unwilling to avail its co-ordination function, then done directly by the UN. I think it is well-known that the role of the UN and the performance of the UN in their co-ordination role has been patchy. I think there is wide consensus amongst both donor and recipient governments and most serious humanitarian agencies that it is worthwhile to try and support the strengthening of the UN to enable them to better fulfil their co-ordination role. That does try our patience sorely at times because it can be pretty dismal. I do not think there is a need to overhaul or introduce a new way of doing co-ordination. I think the systems are there, the structure is there, they just need to be better. Just a final point; DEC is not a grouping that extends itself operationally to the field as a co-ordination mechanism. It is a fund-raising group and Brendan will tell you exactly what it is. Q36 Mr Davies: Do you see a greater role for ECHO in co-ordinating EU-based agencies? Ms Cocking: To be honest, probably not. I think, as Toby has said, the key thing is to ensure that host governments, which have a legal responsibility to ensure assistance to their citizens, and the UN system which has a similar mandate, are able to fulfil that role. Q37 Mr Davies: It would be very nice if they were. We have just heard evidence that the UN is not and we all know the problems about UN reform and the inefficiencies of OCHA, and it would be very nice if host governments could, but in most cases in the third world these bureaucracies are over-stretched and often ineffective and corrupt anyway. When they have a disaster hit them they are even less likely to be able to perform efficiently. You are rather wishing for the moon, are you not? Ms Cocking: If I could perhaps share a personal experience with you on that. First of all, let us state the truism: you can only co-ordinate the willing; you cannot co-ordinate those who do not and will not come to the table. How you do it and whether the UN is doing it adequately is, as Toby has said, very patchy but I think there are examples of when it works. I was in Pakistan shortly after the earthquake struck for some weeks and the co-ordination of the water and sanitation sector was an example of both the good and the bad. For the first few weeks when UNICEF, the lead agency, had a forceful personality and organisational commitment to really pull together information and to ensure that duplication of effort did not take place and that the right priorities were set, it worked, and the attendance at those meetings was very high and very positive because people felt they were getting something out of it. To be honest, the quality of that slipped when the chair of the group changed and the barometer of number of seats around the table filled rapidly demonstrated that even those such as ourselves who are wholeheartedly committed to co-ordination, and even I had difficulty in persuading some of my colleagues to go to some of those meetings. So I suppose I am challenging you that it never works. It does work and it can work, but I think what our role as agencies and the role of donors particularly (and DFID plays a very positive role in this) is to set very clear markers where we expect to see delivery on the UN's co-ordination mandate and to ensure that they are resourced appropriately. If that means simply putting the right people in the right place at the right time, then they need to be able to do that. Q38 Mr Davies: Thank you for that. Let me challenge Mr Porter on what you just said about the fact that over-provision or over-subscription is unusual and unlikely, except perhaps in a special case of when a disaster occurs within easy driving distance of EU capitals. I would draw his attention to the latest DFID report on the earthquake in southern Java in the Yogyakarta area where it says: "There appears to be a significant number of pledges coming from donors in either money or material support. Over-subscription is a potential reality given the apparent and relative scale of the disaster[1]." So I put it to you, Mr Porter, that over-subscription, over-provision is not as unusual or as unlikely a phenomenon as you have just been telling the Committee. Mr Porter: I have not spoken to DFID in the last couple of days about Java but I think in Java there is the fact that so many of the tsunami agencies were in Aceh anyway and there are very thickly staffed UN offices in Jakarta, far more than anywhere else, so I think there are some slightly unusual variables impacting on this. Q39 Mr Davies: This note specifies the pledges that have been made in relation to the recent earthquake. Let me give you a copy of the note. The note may be right or may be wrong but you should perhaps read it and if you think it is wrong you should let us know it is wrong. Mr Porter: Let us put it in the context of one country. The current range - and it is still far too wide a range to be satisfactory - coming out of the government is between 200,000 and 600,000 people have been left homeless effectively by this earthquake. This Government, which is a generous government, has pledged in total now five million pounds for that. So that leaves each family - and someone will be better at maths than I am- depending on the range, with somewhere in between 10 and 15 --- Q40 Mr Davies: It is all listed in this note which I had better pass to you. Germany, Ireland, USA, $5 million pledged; Australia, $7.5 million; Japan, $10 million; the Netherlands, $1.2 million; Norway, $5 million; Canada, $1.7 million; European Commission, $3.7 million; China (that is an interesting one), $2 million in bilateral assistance. It is all set out here. It amounts to a very considerable amount of money. Of course the disaster is appalling --- Mr Porter: The total is what? Q41 Mr Davies: The total from the figures I have just read out must be in the order of way over $40 million. Mr Porter: That would be $50 per family for people --- Q42 Mr Davies: It simply says: "Over-subscription is a potential reality." If DFID says that over-subscription is a potential reality, I take it that was not said frivolously and it is quite likely there will be over-subscription. Mr Porter: As I say, I have not --- Chairman: This raises the other issue of promises made and not delivered so outcomes can vary. Anyway, I think Quentin has made his point. John Barrett? Q43 John Barrett: To follow up on a slightly different angle from that, I am sure there is always more work to be done than can be done when individual emergencies or calamities or whatever happen. As you said, there needs to be better co-ordination, whether it is amongst the donors, the NGOs, or whatever. We saw that for ourselves in Mozambique. It was mentioned by one member of the Government that they have had to try to co-ordinate 400 groups in the fight against AIDS alone. There is plenty of work for everyone to do but if the donors are not co-ordinated, the NGOs are not co-ordinated, and other groups are not co-ordinated, you are not getting the most efficient use of the money or resources that are there and the people who are working at the front-line are not being the most effective. We have seen excellent co-ordination happen but do the leading NGOs have a specific role to help get this sorted out because we hear it again and again? I would say that as the years go past it seems to be getting worse because more donors are joining the field, more and more varied NGOs are appearing, so it is actually getting worse rather than better. Do you now have a key role because in your own submission[2] you say that we have got to get a grip on this? Ms Cocking: I think we do. I think the agencies around this table step up to that role. For example, just speaking for my own agency, we frequently offer to take the lead in co-ordinating sectors that we have particular competence in, so again to pick up the Java earthquake, we are co-ordinating water and sanitation. We were asked if we would also co-ordinate shelter and we said "sorry, no". That was not because we did not feel that shelter required co-ordination; it was simply that we did not have people to put on the job and we also did not feel we were particularly competent at it and there should be others who were. I think your point is absolutely right, that if we are going to enter a sphere of any sort of operation then we have a responsibility to engage with others as far as we can; and we do. I think that can only be helped by beginning that co-ordination earlier. Obviously it is very difficult to co-ordinate before a major earthquake or something because, sadly, we do not have too many crystal balls into which we can gaze, but where it comes to chronic food crises which are going to reach a peak of acute need at certain times of the year in certain years, then investment by agencies such as ourselves and also by bilateral and multilateral donors in early warning systems will have not only the impact of greater prediction of the scale of the need that there is going to be, but can also mean that response is better planned in advance. To give you a good example, in Southern Africa, which was arguably a very poor example of prediction and good, co-ordinated response in the food crisis of 2002-2003 RIACSO (Regional Inter-Agency Coordination and Security Office), the UN office in Johannesburg, grew its capacity significantly during 2004 so that we would not be caught in the same position again, and arguably by putting that investment in - and I know that the people in Johannesburg had to fight on a six-monthly basis to continue to exist and to continue to get their budget from OCHA in New York, which is where they were funded from, that investment undoubtedly paid off in last year's food crisis because we were able to have discussions as to who was where and who was doing what last June rather than waiting for the real peak of the crisis to happen round about October / November. So there are good examples. They are a bit scarce but we need to focus and learn from them. Mr Oxley: One of the problems is that all the evaluations that come up say that co-ordination is an issue, and we know that, and one of the problems is that it must be a bit of a nightmare. If I was in local government there, it must be a nightmare when these disasters happen because of this huge influx of all these foreign NGOs and different UN organisations. They are already working in the white hot heat of a crisis and then all these other foreign bodies come in. It must be tremendously challenging for them to have to divert the resource that they want to use to engage in sorting out their own internal issues to co-ordinating all the NGOs and the UN agencies. I have empathy with the governments in the challenge that they face in doing that. The point being that in the white hot heat of an emergency these things are extraordinarily difficult to do. What that says is it is about preparedness. What we need to co-ordinate around is planning. To be able to co-ordinate effectively you have to have a plan. A lot of people confuse what we mean by co-ordination. They seem to believe that if you go into an inter-agency meeting and you share some information, that is co-ordination. Of course, proper co-ordination is much more than that. It is about having a coherent framework, understanding where the gaps are in the system, and then allocating resource against where those gaps are. That requires preparedness. It requires planning in advance and there is very limited investment in disaster preparedness and much more money goes into the actual response side of things. The point being that if we want to improve the effectiveness of disaster response then we have to invest more in actually being prepared to respond. Particularly in the case of natural disasters, which is what the subject matter of this Committee is, we actually know with a relative degree of certainty which countries are affected by natural disasters, so it is not too difficult to identify which are the higher risk countries and where that advance investment needs to go. If that was done I think it would help the co-ordination issue. Q44 Mr Davies: Just one very brief one there. What you are talking about there, Mr Oxley, is preventing countries from allowing building on flood plains or forcing countries to insist on earthquake-proof construction standards. How the devil do you do that? We are talking about often poor countries or countries like China which are certainly not open to foreign interference in the way that they run their show. These things sound wonderful in theory but in practice they seem to me to be extraordinarily difficult to deliver. Mr Oxley: There are two slightly different issues there. One is about disaster preparedness and what disaster preparedness is saying is there is going to be an earthquake and there is going to be a cyclone so what we need to invest in is how better do communities and governments and NGOs respond to that. That is what we call disaster preparedness. The other one, which you are alluding to, is actually mitigation, and what mitigation is saying is how can we prevent that cyclone from happening in the first place or how we can prevent that flood. That is things like plans to move people out of the flood plain. That is called disaster mitigation and that requires a lot of long-term, up-front investment. It is very much a developmental challenge while disaster preparedness is saying, "We know this flood is going to happen. We know there are a lot of vulnerable people living in that flood plain, how can we be better prepared to respond to that?" Mitigation and preparedness are two slightly different issues, one dealing with causes, the other dealing with effects. Both of them save lives; both of them prevent the disaster from occurring: we need investment in both. Q45 John Battle: Just on the question of over-subscription, what strikes me is that sometimes once a great crisis is announced on television and people give to NGOs funds and resources, that sometimes you can have more than you need for that particular emergency. It strikes me that the charity rules you are under that only let you spend the money on that background framework might need looking at to allow you to release those funds to other emergencies. That really brings me to my question of whether we can make distinctions in natural disasters between what I would call the geological ones, the great earthquakes and the great tidal waves, and the almost slow-burn humanitarian situations of chronic vulnerability, particularly harvest crop failure, which may or may not be linked to climate change but which certainly occur pretty regularly, and that means drought and that means famine. Niger was a case the media picked up and said "no-one is paying any attention", although the aid agencies were trying their best for a year before that hit the media. Malawi and East Africa come in and out with crop failure. How do you address specifically the challenges of chronic vulnerability? What are the major challenges there for you getting ahead of those crises and not seeing them in terms of the high drama but getting resources in behind them? Mr Porter: I am glad you asked that because I think the three of us felt that the slow onset emergency was a theme lacking from your previous questions to the media group. It is really important. Lyse said that this year had not been a year of major disasters but there have been many millions affected by drought in the Horn of Africa, so it depends what you define as a disaster and certainly the three of us would include the chronic ones. On this question of over-subscription, I really would urge you not to let this become a red herring. It is not a big problem. The opposite is the case. In 95-98 % of humanitarian crises the more resources that aid agencies have the more they can do. In Niger last year Save the Children launched one of our biggest ever nutrition programmes. We had 20,000 children in four months pass through intensive feeding programmes and you could drive just 15 miles from where we were working (and we just could not expand any more) and there was no-one doing any work at all. On chronic issues can I just explain in headline terms and then maybe pass over to one of these two. Essentially you need two elements to have a proper global response to these kind of slow burners and there are some every year. The first is you need a proper early warning system, and we know that. The second is you need predictable funding because, as the Oxfam brief explained very well, usually by the time slow burners get to generate significant funding you are dealing with people who are threatened with loss of life but far after they have lost their livelihoods and economic viability. What I would say at the moment is that we currently have early warning systems of various success and sophistication in various countries, but what we do not have and what we do need is an early response system, so that there is a linking in of the early warning information with at the same time a more predictable source of funding for this kind of situation. Ms Cocking: To add to that, I completely agree with Toby's points. I think for us and our partner organisations on the ground (because a lot of this stuff we do with local organisations) the two characteristics that we really need are creativity and flexibility. You raised Malawi as an example and it is an absolute classic. There will be years when people do not need emergency assistance but they are still looking for building their skills and building their choices to improve their livelihoods. What we have done as just one organisation (but we are not alone) in Southern Malawi over the last two or three years is to say that we will make sure that our staff and the local government staff with whom we work are skilled across the board in long term and short-term responses, so that they can talk to communities much sooner and they can say, "What is this year going to be like and what is it that you need?" We will not set up our own systems to say, "Look, you are either in mode A, which is long-term development, or mode B, which is short-term disaster," because in one community at any given time there will be some people who will be having a really rough time because of their own personal circumstances and there will be others who are just about getting by and coping. So building that flexibility into our own minds and into their systems is absolutely essential. I think that has been a sector wide, and still is a sector wide issue as to how you do not just have a switch that you flick on and off, and I think we are getting somewhere on those flexible solutions. What we need to back that up, as Toby was referring to, are the sources of funding which are going to support that kind of work which have a level of predictability and can be multi-year so that you are not having to go through long bureaucratic processes in order to change gear. It is like driving a car; you do not stop the car before you change gear, you just shift up and down. It is that approach that we are really trying to enforce. Q46 Chairman: Is there a danger or a risk if you are the government of a poor country which is prone, for example, to periodic famine, that in theory it would be much better to take early action and head off and deal with things before the famine arrives, but past experience might tell you that when the famine arrives so do the television cameras and so does the money and you do not have to spend the money yourselves. That is not too good for the people on the ground but not too bad for the budgets of the central government. Is there any evidence that that happens? Mr Porter: You are probably familiar with Amartya Sen's work around democracy and famine. Famines do not tend to happen in places where they have good governance. There was reference to the 1994 famine in Ethiopia being much more complex than it appeared. Obviously the Kenya drought was again a complex issue because they had just sold a whole load of grain. Humanitarianism is a very simple thing and governance is a very complex thing. Humanitarianism says that if people are marginalised and if governance is questionable or absent, then the most marginalised communities (who are the ones that are most likely to suffer) are probably the ones that register least or even negatively on the radar of the government, so you are then left with a dilemma about should we encourage good governance by allowing the communities in the North East not to receive any assistance when they are under immense stress and threat from this drought? That is all I would say. I think people legitimately get frustrated with governance failures and seeing foreign aid as to some degree compensating for national government responsibility, but there are inefficiencies also in international policies and the point that Jane was making earlier is that the later you leave it to intervene in a slow-burning crisis, the more expensive it is, so we all just have to focus on our own mandates and on people's right to survival and assistance regardless of who governs or respects them. Chairman: Presumably the international community's emphasis on budget support could make a contribution to that, I do not know. Marsha Singh? Q47 Mr Singh: When a disaster happens it is my understanding that DFID picks partner NGOs based on its knowledge of those organisations. What happens in between disasters? Does DFID do any work on maintaining its knowledge or extending its knowledge about those NGOs or even assessing the effectiveness of those partners in the field? Ms Cocking: Yes is the straight answer. Just to take us as an example, whether it is here in the UK, whether it is in regional centres, or whether it is at country level, we have a continuing and what we would like to think of as an excellent relationship with DFID. That includes engagement on early warning systems, on policy, and also on evaluating and monitoring previous responses. So, yes, it is very much a continuing relationship. I think we are very clear in our submission, for us DFID are a top-of-the-range donor in terms of creativity and in term of progressive thinking and we could not do that together if we did not have that engagement. I think if we have a criticism it is just that the kind of systems changes that we struggle with ourselves we might like to see DFID struggle with a bit more as well. Q48 Mr Singh: Does the existing system crowd out new NGOs? Britain is very much a multi-cultural society now and there will be ethnic groups here who want to set up their own NGOs, for example to help in Pakistan or wherever. Is there any access for them to participate in the work that you are doing? Mr Oxley: Yes, I think there is room. Over recent times there has been a proliferation of NGOs, so clearly there is space somewhere to allow new agencies to come up because they are coming up literally all over the place. I know just recently Islamic Relief have applied to the DEC to join them so even the larger NGOs are able to join the DEC. So I think there is space there. Perhaps the danger is that some of the thinking in the NGOs is that the problem is we are not very good at self-regulation and the issue is how do we make sure that we are more accountable in what we do, particularly accountable to the people we are purporting to serve. There are various quality standards that people say we have got to have and it is all to do with self-regulation and people saying perhaps you need an external accreditation process to say these agencies have reached certain standards or international standards or external accreditation as a way to professionalise what the NGOs do so that you can get a better quality service, and a drive to increase the quality of the service. The danger with that is that you exclude, by professionalising yourself, the smaller agencies that are trying to aspire to come into that. So there are various discussions within the sector about how to stimulate innovation and growth, but also how to enhance greater accountability between ourselves and how do we do that because at the moment it has depended on self-regulation and there are questions as to whether that is the best way to go. Mr Porter: On that specific point, the point you make about new NGOs is extremely important. I think that Islamic Relief is the NGO that most illustrates this and is fast becoming not just a significant national NGO but in fact an international federation. I think it is a very good sign that the DEC has included Islamic Relief in its membership because DEC members have been accused of acting like a cartel, which I do not think was the case, and I think it is good that they have shown it is not a cartel, or at least one that is prepared to admit new members. Q49 Mr Singh: Are you not changing the rules of membership at the moment to continue to be a cartel? Mr Porter: I will defer the question to the right honourable gentleman behind me! I think also one has to apply administrative realism to this question. If you are talking about groups that are going to be responding regularly and on a similar scale to a whole variety of emergencies where they might feel mandated to respond, such as a country where all or a large part of the country is a Muslim population, then I think you have the grounds to expect from DEC and from DFID and everything else that people will look at the credentials of the agency very closely. If however, as is often a feature, you get a large number of ad hoc groups springing up for a specific emergency, I think you have to be realistic and say ad hoc-ery is a very good thing and often these networks are just as effective as more established ones but you are talking slightly apples and oranges. Q50 Joan Ruddock: You will have heard our discussions with the representatives of the media. I just wonder if we could hear your responses to things they have said. You will remember that Lyse Doucet said that you are all there with your t-shirts and buttons making it very, very clear who you are and getting projection through the media and there were issues of whether you dump your sacks of flour in order to put a journalist on a plane, that sort of thing. Where do you stand? Ms Cocking: I will comment later on the accusation that we wear too many of our own t-shirts. Q51 Joan Ruddock: I think she thought it was justifiable. Ms Cocking: I think she did. It was perhaps a slight overstatement but to look at the overall picture, my sense is that our relationship with the media has become vastly more sophisticated over the last decade, as Lyse referred to, and part of that is simply technological. When I worked in Somalia in the early 1990s the agency I worked with in Mogadishu owned the only satellite phone in Mogadishu so journalists had to come and use it, and we were absolutely flabbergasted when all of a sudden this journalist turned up with a little briefcase with a sat phone and we thought, "Crumbs, that has changed". In a way the relationship has been driven to change. There is something in the nature of it which means there will always be tension, but the fact that, as they mentioned, we employ specialists from their world and they employ specialists from ours is a very clear indicator of the way in which we accept that we have a mutually supportive role. Undoubtedly, we need the profile and the people who we seek to assist need the profile, and to claim that there is something honourable in anonymity would be impractical and rather foolish. However, there will always be, as they said, difficult moments. I am not sure if it was the one that Lyse was referring to but we had a very interesting debate with the BBC when one of our planes was going to Pakistan just a couple of days after the earthquake as to whether or not the two passenger seats would be given to BBC journalists and we said "no, it was more important that logisticians who could clear the cargo through Islamabad quickly received those seats", and they were not awfully happy, but at the same time only yesterday we were engaged in a very interesting discussion with the BBC's developing world correspondent about precisely this issue of how we represent chronic crises better in the media and working with him on planning a particular piece of work in July. I think, by and large, I would agree with a lot of their analysis but just add the rider that I think it has over the last decade grown immensely in sophistication and we do not always get it right. Mr Porter: I did a lot of interviews last weekend on BBC Breakfast, Sky and News 24 and I did not wear any badges or t-shirts or ask for any boxes. Q52 Joan Ruddock: You probably had a good caption, a good introduction when you were on though. Mr Porter: When Sky News did a live broadcast with me and stood outside my house I had a For Sale sign and it did sell the next day, so perhaps that was connected! You are sophisticated enough and DFID and the media are sophisticated enough to realise that NGOs are very odd things in that we essentially spend other people's money on other people again, and when you appreciate that, then what makes the way we operate justifiable is that if we were acting purely from an institutional perspective in a way that had brought no benefit to affected populations, that would be morally a very problematic position to occupy, but in most coverage of most emergencies I do believe there is a convergence, if you like, of profile being used to attract funding to increase that particular agency's response to that particular emergency, and therefore it is probably morally justifiable for sophisticated analysts like yourselves. Q53 Joan Ruddock: Could I ask you about skewing priorities and whether you feel media coverage does skew priorities for you? Ms Cocking: For what we do I do not think it does. Has it ever significantly changed our particular approach to a particular crisis? I struggle to find an example of a time when it has, and that is looking quite honestly and self critically at ourselves. Where it does skew things is undoubtedly in terms of public response. We have been frustrated over the lack of media coverage for the apparent food crisis in East Africa so what that means is we have to be honest and sometimes incredibly fortunate to have our own resources through our shops and through our own supporters, and what it means is that we have to put more of our own money into certain crises that do not receive high public profile because we cannot rely on additional, dedicated funds for that so it creates a lot of shifting of resources. Chairman: Thank you very much. Obviously the Committee has under-estimated the time allowed. I am anxious that we do have a few minutes at least to look at the DEC. Thank you very much indeed for coming along and for answering our questions.
Examination of Witness
Witness: Mr Brendan Gormley, Chief Executive, Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), gave evidence. 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 co-ordinate 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 co-ordination 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 co-ordinate 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 co-ordinating. As you have probably seen in our evaluations that we commission however, because co-ordination 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 co-ordination. 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. Q60 Chairman: You could square that circle and set yourself up as media consultants. I think that is what everyone is groping with in the media world, to get that balance right. Mr Gormley: They are quite right. News editors have to be independent. They cannot be seen to be doing deals with the DEC or they will lose their authority and the quality of their reporting. Q61 Mr Singh: Is it a fair criticism of DEC that your monitoring and evaluation is focused far too much on the head offices of NGOs in the West rather than their activities in the field? Mr Gormley: Funnily enough, the current trustee view is that it is the opposite, that we have misinformed or mismanaged expectations of what the DEC is. If our primary function is to raise the money, we ought to be reporting back on the robust systems of how we get the money in, what we spend on it and let the members who are responsible for spending it and being accountable do more at that end. In a way we are looking at how can we more fairly project the mandate of the DEC back to the British public, whereas we have historically commissioned much more work out there which we then publish. So my perception is a slightly different one to yours. Chairman: Thank you very much. Obviously you have been very successful in raising money. I think the tenor of our questions and the debate is clearly about how we can ensure that when the money is raised it is effectively spent. I think you have answered our questions very directly and very helpfully. I am sorry it was slightly curtailed. John Battle: Could I make a suggestion. Having done the reading before and listened to the session today, it may be worth our while as we progress with our inquiry towards the end of it having another session with Brendan to compare notes again, perhaps informally, just to try and take another view because I think I am getting slightly counter-wise views, which I think is helpful. Chairman: I think that is a helpful suggestion. Q62 John Battle: It may help in the structural questions. We have just started and we have ranged a bit widely. Mr Gormley: And you have got a very ambitious programme. Q63 Chairman: Well, that is the nature of this Committee; the world is literally our oyster. Mr Gormley: As I am based in London it should not be a problem. Chairman: Thank you very much. [1] DFID Situation Report No. 7, Indonesia Earthquake, 1 June 2006, 14.00 GMT [2] Ev [3] Catholic Agency for Overseas Development [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. |