Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240
- 259)
TUESDAY 20 FEBRUARY 2007
RT HON
HILARY BENN
MP, MR ELWYN
GRAINGER-JONES,
MR GREG
BRIFFA AND
MR IAN
CURTIS
Q240 Joan Ruddock: Earlier you referred
to the fact that you had expertise in all the countries you had
prioritised but I was not clear if those were water experts. A
lot of the reports that we received in taking evidence to this
Committee suggested that there was a need for sanitation advisers
specifically which it was said DFID did not have because the skills,
in terms of advising about water and sanitation, are actually
quite different; sometimes they can be related but not always.
It is particularly the point Richard Burden raised which is the
relationship is so much with health and so you are dealing with
social marketing of health messages and hygiene expertise. We
received a lot of evidence that there is a need for specific sanitation
advisers and the suggestion that DFID is not making that provision
and ought to meet head on staffing needs in this area.
Hilary Benn: I am not sure you
want separate sanitation advisers, going back to Mr Burden's point.
If you are trying to integrate the two, you want people who can
advise on water and sanitation together. Certainly in Bangladesh
the support we gave to that programme has been very successful
and whatever we were doing helped to make it happen.
Q241 Joan Ruddock: If they are water
and sanitation advisers, is there enough emphasis put on sanitation?
Mr Briffa: I agree that continually
splitting down to smaller and smaller areas of focus is not the
way to go. However, there are two things that we should be doing.
One is strengthening the links between water and sanitation and
health colleagues and that is indeed what we are doing. We certainly
need to do more but, for example, the education strategy talked
about making a commitment to more sanitation for girls in schools.
Similarly the health strategy coming out later this year will
particularly focus on sanitation. A couple of weeks ago colleagues
from my team presented at the Human Development Group's retreat
on health and education and had a session specifically on sanitation.
It is something we are picking up by building those links. The
other thing we are doing is through an update of our policy work.
Sanitation, which I suppose is apparent from the fact we are so
far off the target, is an area where we struggle to come up with
really successful ways of achieving results. We have some good
examples but we need to work out how to do those to scale. We
are actively undertaking a review of sanitation and our policy
and strategy. I listened with interest to Professor Sandy Cairncross's
submission before the Committee. He is one of the experts we have
on a small panel of four or five who are advising us in putting
together this work. That will be done over the next six months
and this strategy will include a follow-on action plan to make
sure we are actually following it up.
Q242 Joan Ruddock: That is very welcome.
Earlier a number of you commented on Bangladesh and praised Bangladesh
for being a very important example. It sounds as though you are
saying it is a very good example and it has been transferred to
India but you are not saying "We actually think this is the
best thing that could be done and we want to roll this out and
we want to put finance behind it." It seemed to us rather
obvious in Ethiopia that the health extension worker scheme was
taking the experience of Bangladesh and applying it in Africa
and, certainly as far as we could tell, applying it very successfully.
Mr Bercow earlier spoke about the women who were kept in the background
but when we insisted on hearing from the people who were chairing
the village committees, in terms of managing the water and sanitation
programmes, it was women. They were the health extension workers
the government are sending to all the villages. To what extent
are you taking that forward, or plan to take it forward? Are you
looking to find a pattern that you are convinced really works
well and should be properly supported and financed?
Hilary Benn: One example of that
would be the WASH[8]
programme which is trying to take the lessons learnt about what
works elsewhere. As I am sure you know, that comes under the Water
Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council and is all about advocating
on the question of sanitation and hygiene involving communities,
getting people to plan better, water user groups and so forth.
To be honest, I do not know in how many places the WASH programme
is working but that is one of the things we are trying to do,
to pick up precisely that point.
Mr Briffa: There are certainly
elements of the community-led water and sanitation work in Bangladesh
and India that make it work particularly well in those continents.
Transferring it elsewhere we will probably look at which of those
elements makes sense. In Ethiopia they have picked up some of
the elements, particularly around getting communities together
to address sanitation which is particularly important because
it is a public good. There is another particular interesting way
of working which is where you can tap into companies that see
a potential demand, for example, for soap. There is some work
going on in Vietnam looking at marketing and stimulating the demand
with Unilever. With sanitation the challenge is understanding
the reason people want it is not for health reasons. What Professor
Cairncross talks about is really trying to understand what are
the things which will motivate people to want sanitation. It can
be convenience or prestige or whatever it is rather than because
they think it is not going to improve their health. Therefore,
pushing too much down a supply health driven approach may be one
of the reasons we have not had the success we have wanted in the
past.
Hilary Benn: That is absolutely
right for the bottom up. From the top down, linking the two questions
that you have put, absolutely health ministers and officials should
have an interest in pressing the case for progress on sanitation
because that will help deal with diseases they have to pick up
the consequences of.
Joan Ruddock: I am surprised you are
suggesting that we still do not know enough and we need to be
thinking about this. Some of this is about advocacy, is it not?
I wonder if we are not being too slow in addressing what is such
a critical problem and where we are so far behind.
Q243 Chairman: The communities we
saw specifically told us, after the event certainly, that the
effect on the health of their children was dramatic and only in
the space of a year. They volunteered that; we did not ask them.
It would seem there is a huge mismatch between that connection.
Hilary Benn: It comes back to
the point I was making at the beginning which is about politics.
If I were living in those communities you have been to, or the
ones I walked around in Freetown and Monrovia with the circumstances
I just described, if it was us we would grab hold of our nearest
councillor or Member of Parliament, if you had one, and say "What
are you going to do about it?" What is extraordinary in some
cases is what people continue to live with instead of saying "We
are not going to have that any more. Do something about it."
Q244 Richard Burden: Given the numbers
of people in the developing world living in rural areas who do
not have access to clean water or improved sanitation it is not
surprising there tends to be an emphasis on rural areas, but Secretary
of State you yourself talked about the specific challenges of
urban areas under the water and sanitation issues. UN Habitat
indicates that there is a problem of not enough coordination between
UN agencies in tackling the question of water and sanitation in
urban areas. I wonder whether you feel that your Department and
the UK could provide rather more leadership in the urban sector?
Hilary Benn: The Global Call for
Action aimed to do that because one of the points that it picks
up is the lack of clarity about who is leading for the UN on water
and sanitation in countries. I would say the context in which
I would like to see the proposals on the Global Call for Action
brought into being is the context in which we are seeing the urbanisation
of the developing world. The problems that you put your finger
on in asking the question are going to get bigger because more
and more people are going to be moving from the rural areas to
live in towns and cities and more informal settlements, more slums
and more of the problems I referred to in answering an earlier
question. In that sense I hope what we are doing is providing
leadership. In this conversation we also need to take into account
what others in the international system are doing. That is why
I am in favour of having an opportunity to get together, see what
the nature of the challenge is, find out who is doing what, see
what the gaps are and work out how they are going to be filled.
That is the rational thing to do in the circumstances. There are
others doing quite a lot on urban water. I have not made the point
yet in this evidence session but I will make it now. In the end
DFID, good organisation though it is, cannot do everything and,
therefore, we have to make some choices about where we are going
to apply our effort. We have some examples of the Urban Services
for the Poor programme in Andhra Pradesh, which I saw for myself
a couple of years ago, which was absolutely about trying to address
those problems in urban areas.
Q245 Richard Burden: Can I give you
an example of what we saw in Ethiopia? We went to a particular
project and it was, in fact, the one that had the men fronting
it where the women were actually doing a lot of the work. That
was in a very poor area on the outskirts of Addis. There was potentially
a project there producing biogas. That obviously brought with
it an emphasis on improving sanitation but also using the proceeds
of that in a constructive way potentially in kitchens and powering
cookers and ovens and so on. It was pretty obvious, within just
a few minutes of our visiting, that there were a few question
marks about what was essentially a very good project and how far
it was being used in that urban area. It was a small number of
families who were using it and the extent to which they were using
it was questionable. That was originally funded by Finland and
it was something known to DFID because it was a programme organised
by DFID that took us there. As far as we could tell, there were
a number of countries and different agencies involved in that
but nobody appeared to be saying why do you not do it this way
or why do you not use it a bit more which indicated to me there
is a bit of a problem. It looked like it was a community and whilst
it did have a community leadership it was probably not as well
advanced as some of the rural areas we saw. Nobody seemed to be
asking what appeared to us to be fairly obvious and elementary
questions.
Hilary Benn: Are you saying that
donors did not appear to be asking those questions or the people
in the community?
Q246 Richard Burden: The people in
the community did not ask them but it seemed to be rather surprising
to everyone the questions were coming from us. There was no evidence,
but maybe I am wrong, that any donors had asked those questions.
That is a specific example and you are not going to know the answer
but maybe it indicates a broader problem of donor coordination.
Hilary Benn: What I say generally
is donor coordination is a continuing challenge. One of the reasons
I am arguing is we ought to have in each country one plan that
is going to deal with this and one body that has responsibility
for taking it forward. That should clearly include the donors
because if you are sitting around a table and looking at one plan,
working out what each of you could contribute as donors in that
country, you should end up with a better conversation and a better
outcome than if it is all rather disparate. It is very simple
in one sense; it is making it happen that is rather more difficult.
Q247 Richard Burden: Can I ask another
specific question about the situation in urban areas because the
performance, and the existence in some cases, of public utilities
in urban areas is absolutely vital. Firstly, for the reasons that
Ann mentioned, if you are talking about bringing water and sanitation
to urban areas in terms of capital requirements they are very
major indeed, and it is something that does need to be done through
public utilities in one way or the other. What is the approach
of the Department at the moment to the development of urban utilities,
the strength of those utilities and, where appropriate, the reform
of those utilities?
Hilary Benn: One of the things
we need to do more of, and we have not done up until now, is public-to-public
lesson learning and that is something we are working on currently.
The public-private debate we have not discussed here I hope because
the Committee, like me, in the end, take the view there are lessons
of successful public and private provision of water supply and
there are spectacular failures. The conclusion you draw is not
whether it is public or private but does it work or does it not
work. One thing that irritates me enormously in some of the debate,
or what passes for a debate, about water and sanitation in Britain
is an excessive focus on the public always has to be good and
private always has to be bad or the other way around. It is completely
missing the point frankly. In the end countries and communities
are going to find their own way of doing it. Sometimes they might
give a private contractor responsibility to manage the system
while retaining it in public ownership and if they want to do
that and it works, fine. There is a very good example, I think
I am right in saying, in Uganda of the publicly run water supply
system. They have been pretty effective and they have exported
some of their knowledge and experience elsewhere.
Mr Curtis: That is correct.
Hilary Benn: That has been a success.
The other thing I would say is precisely because you have this
very complex mix of issues which local authorities, and those
who are responsible for water and sanitation supply in urban areas,
face you do need whoever has responsibility to be working very
closely with the local authority. If the local authority says
"Our policy is we will not allow you to provide services
to an informal settlement because that brings a whole load of
other problems, people start to think they can stay there permanently",
you need to look at it in the round. The worst supplied areas
in urban centres are the informal settlements for reasons that
all of us understand. At some point those responsible for city
planning are going to have to take the decision whether to regularise
this. That has to start with land rights and tenure. Are we going
to provide electricity, water supply and sanitation? Are we going
to clear some of the housing so they are not all built cheek by
jowl, as I saw in a settlement two weeks ago in South Africa with
tin shacks that people have come and set up? Where are we going
to get the capital from to provide the infrastructure and maintain
it? The pattern in so many countries in the towns and cities is
the rich get pretty good water supply, either via a pipe system
or it comes in a tanker and they can pay for it, and at the other
end of the spectrum the very poorest who have access to nothing
buy it from the water sellers in their plastic bags and buckets
and they are paying more. That is the fundamental inequality here:
they have worse health, poor water supply and they are paying
hand over fist for this stuff. That is why we are trying to get
people to shift their investment on providing services to people
who have nothing currently. That is one of the things we are encouraging
the World Bank to do with the increased amount of money they are
putting in. They do quite a lot in middle-income countries and
quite a lot on extending the existing connections of the system
which may get nowhere near the people living in the worst circumstances.
We do need to ask some very hard questions about where the financial
support is prioritised to reach the very poorest.
Q248 Mr Davies: I agree wholeheartedly
with what you have just said. There are, however, a couple of
curious aspects to the way that DFID deliver your water and sanitation
programmes which require an explanation. I am sure there is a
good explanation but we ought to know what it is. One of them
is while you have got these ambitious programmes and increased
spending in this area you are actually reducing the number of
water and sanitation experts in DFID. Why is that?
Hilary Benn: I am not sure it
is correct to say we are reducing the number. I gave the figures
earlier.
Q249 Mr Davies: We had a memorandum
from the Institution of Civil Engineers[9]
which said that you have reduced the number of water and sanitation
sector specialists you have employed. There has been some concern
expressed to us that you are trying to manage an expanding aid
budget while reducing your complement of technical staff. Are
you telling me that information is wrong? Are you increasing your
numbers of technical staff in this area?
Mr Briffa: I think the Institution
of Civil Engineers is slightly out of date. It is fair to say
that we have in the last couple of years increased our number
of water and sanitation specialists.
Mr Davies: I am glad I have given you
the opportunity to set the record straight.
Q250 Chairman: According to the brief
we have you had 41 infrastructure advisers in 2004, 36 in 2005
and 44 in 2006. It has gone down and up again. On the other hand,
you are increasing your programme so you are still not much above.
Hilary Benn: It has not been cut.
It is what it was two years ago as the figures demonstrate.
Q251 Mr Davies: It was being cut
and it is now being raised again.
Hilary Benn: Yes.
Q252 Mr Davies: I understand you
cut water and sanitation programmes in Malawi and Nepal. Why is
that?
Hilary Benn: I have not got the
figures for either of those in front of me. From memory Malawi
is making reasonable progress on the water MDG. I would have to
check and come back to you.
Q253 Mr Davies: It may be that what
we have been given is pretty doubtful information. I cannot go
everywhere around the world myself checking everything, and if
we get this information I have to put it to you and make sure
the public do know what the truth is.
Hilary Benn: Indeed you do and
I promise to come back and give you the answer to the question.
I am sorry I cannot do so now.
Q254 John Bercow: What about Nepal?
Hilary Benn: And for Nepal also.
Mr Briffa: On Nepal there has
been difficulty given the political situation which curtailed
the hopes to scale up the programme. There was a rebalancing that
took place due to calls within the Asia division as a result of
humanitarian and other demands.
Q255 Mr Davies: Let us get away from
the bureaucratic double-speak. Are you increasing or reducing
the programme in Nepal? All this about rebalancing does not tell
us very much.
Hilary Benn: I will send the Committee
a note that will answer the question.[10]
Q256 Chairman: On the question of
what happened in Bangladesh, given the importance of DFID's involvement
there the Committee was intending initially to go to Bangladesh
and were advised by both the Foreign Office and your own people
that it would be unwise to do so. You obviously knew something
because the week we would have been there was the week they dissolved
the parliament and declared a state of emergency. Is that likely
to compromise the water and sanitation programme in Bangladesh?
Hilary Benn: Not as far as I am
aware. The situation is difficult there but we are getting on
with the business notwithstanding that.
John Bercow: Secretary of State, can
I just ask that in this helpful note that will be winging its
way to us very shortly the point about the political difficulty
in Nepal is addressed because in that wonderfully civil service
answer that Mr Briffa provided us with a moment ago the alarm
bells started ringing when he referred to political difficulty
frustrating the hopes of achieving what had been hoped and intended
to achieve. In the discussion on Ethiopia we know very well that
you withdrew budget support, with considerable approval from many
of us, precisely because of the political difficulties but recognised
that there was a responsibility to protect basic services. The
fact that there might be some political difficulties, as Mr Briffa
euphemistically described it, in respect of Nepal could not possibly
be a justification for withdrawing resources which are necessary
to the improved performance of water and sanitation in Nepal of
the kind you rightly contemplate and intend to achieve in Ethiopia.
Q257 Chairman: The Secretary of State
indicated he will take note of that.
Hilary Benn: I have taken careful
note of that.
Q258 Mr Davies: We want to know whether
it is increasing, whether it is reducing, whether it has been
cut altogether and why. In the case of Malawi it cannot possibly
be because of the security situation or bad political background.
That is a country which is doing rather well in governance terms
at the present time and I hope you have every political and humanitarian
reason to try to support Malawi. It is a very poor country and
it is making a very good effort to try and improve its own situation.
Hilary Benn: Indeed it is and
we are a very, very strong supporter in relation to Malawi. I
would say to the Committee one of the things that we all need
to bear in mind is within countries different donors sometimes
work on different things and that is a legitimate thing to take
into account in deciding what we are going to do. I will try and
shed light in the answer that I am going to send which will be
winging its way to you very, very shortly.
Q259 Ann McKechin: Can I just clarify
that given you are going to double your aid on water and sanitation
by 2011 how many infrastructure advisers do you estimate you will
have by 2011 to actually manage the projects and programmes at
that time? Have you carried out a needs assessment about what
you will need?
Hilary Benn: I do not know whether
such an assessment has been carried out.
8 Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH). Back
9
Ev 267. Back
10
The Committee has received supplementary information from DFID
regarding Malawi and Nepal. Ev 114. Back
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