Examination of Witnesses (Questions 192-199)
MR GARETH
THOMAS MP, MR
IAN MCCARTNEY
MP, MR RURIK
MARSDEN AND
MR NICK
ALEXANDER
21 JUNE 2007
Q192 Chairman: Good afternoon, Ministers
and your team. Thank you for giving evidence. I understand that
Mr McCartney may have to slip away sharpish.
Mr McCartney: I apologise to the
Committee. If there are any questions that are missed, I am more
than happy to respond in writing.
Q193 Chairman: I appreciate that.
Can you introduce the team?
Mr McCartney: I am Ian McCartney,
Minister for Foreign Affairs. Nick Alexander heads up the team
on our Burma desk.
Mr Thomas: My name is Gareth Thomas.
I am the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Department
for International Development and to my right is Rurik Marsden.
Q194 Chairman: Whom we met when we
were in Thailand. As you know, this is the last evidence session
we are having on this inquiry on the situation in Burma which
I think we would all acknowledge is fraught and complicated and,
in many ways obviously, depressing. One of the things that clearly
we are focusing on is that the need of the people in Burma is
extreme. By any other comparator, if we were able to deliver aid
effectively, we would have a budget for a country like Burma of
something like £80 million rather than the £8 million
that is actually provided. Why is the Department for International
Development overall level of aid to Burma so low? What are the
specific reasons that prevent or have prevented you from delivering
a higher level of aid?
Mr Thomas: As you describe, the
scale of the government's challenges, the level of corruption
and the lack of respect for human rights mean that we cannot work
in Burma in a way that we would want to. We do work in a country
like Vietnam, where the government takes a completely different
view and, as a result, we can use the government mechanisms to
help get aid more effectively out. The capacity to use aid well
is that much greater in other countries. Notwithstanding that,
as you will be aware, we have increased our aid programme from
some £2 million to some £8 million. Depending on the
outcome of the Comprehensive Spending Review for the Department,
I do think there is a case for increasing our aid to Burma still
further.
Mr McCartney: On the 28 May in
Hamburg, I met Burma's Foreign Minister U Nyan Win and I asked
him directly not once but three times to allow us complete access
to the country to do an assessment. On the basis of that assessment
we would look to put further investment in. This was turned down,
rather politely, on the grounds of personal safety of our staff.
Q195 John Bercow: Did he have a straight
face?
Mr McCartney: He had a rather
menacing face.
Q196 Chairman: In spite of the fact
that no member of the international community is allowed to travel
anywhere inside Burma without some government escort?
Mr McCartney: Indeed.
Q197 Chairman: As I said at the beginning,
it is fraught with difficulty and complexity. What you are saying,
Mr Thomas, is that you believe there is capacity nevertheless
to increase the budget but there are constraints and difficulties.
Mr Thomas: There are constraints.
The aid that we spend in Burma is effective and I am happy to
point to some of the successes that our aid achieves, both the
work through international organisations such as Unicef[12],
which is helping to get almost 760,000 young children to stay
in school, for example, and the significant increase in livelihoods
that we have been able to provide, again through work with international
organisations such as UNDP[13].
There are ways of having a significant impact with one's aid through
working with NGOs and UN organisations but they are, as you describe,
nothing like as effective as if we could work through government
systems. We simply cannot do that for reasons which the Committee
will understand.
Q198 Joan Ruddock: Do the same constraints
that you say quite rightly apply to work in-country apply to cross-border
work? Surely when the Department changed its policy so that cross-border
work could be supported more, why was that not accompanied by
an increase in resources?
Mr Thomas: Our resources are committed.
If we were to see an increase in our aid programme overall for
Burma, depending on OCHA[14]
who are now leading on the assessment of the humanitarian data—and
we welcome that and have strongly pushed for OCHA to get engaged
in the situation in Burma—if OCHA were to say to us, "There
is a need for more aid provided cross-border" we would obviously
look at that, particularly in the context of a rising aid budget
if indeed we get the good spending settlement that we hope we
will do. That would be something that we would take into account
at that point. There is a need, if I may say so, to recognise
the levels of numbers of people who can be reached cross-border
as opposed to in-country. Perhaps it would be helpful if I share
some of the figures that I have asked my staff to draw up. We
recognise that about 100,000 people live in areas where control
is disputed between the military and the armed groups. Those people
can only be reached cross-border. There are then about another
400,000 people who have been internally displaced, of whom about
100,000 to 150,000 could be reached, we think, cross-border. Those
two figures together represent about 0.5 per cent of the total
Burmese population. There are then another two million people
who live in or near ceasefire areas. Those people can be reached
through the various ceasefire groups, some of whom have their
own civilian administrations, who will have civil society groups,
and some of those ceasefire groups will have cross-border groups.
The most optimistic scenario in terms of numbers that could be
reached cross-border, very much at the end of the scenarios, would
be 4.5 per cent of the Burmese population. We need OCHA to scale
up its work on data analysis. There is potentially a case for
doing more cross-border. I happen to believe that there is an
even stronger case for the Department for doing more in-country
and that reflects too where donors are based and the level of
donors that are providing aid cross-border as compared to the
numbers of donors that have a presence in-country and therefore
have the contacts with NGOs and international organisations who
know what works and what can be done inside Burma.
Q199 Joan Ruddock: The implication in
what you are saying is that DFID itself has not made an analysis
of the potential for cross-border work. You are suggesting that
it depends on OCHA undertaking that review. Can you confirm it
is the case that DFID, apart obviously from the numbers you are
quoting, is at the moment saying, "The Department does not
see that there is a need for increased work using DFID funds"?
Mr Thomas: I am not going to say
that. We did a review of the aid that we provide in the run up
to Christmas. As you will be aware, we took the restriction off
on some of the money we give to one particular organisation that
runs refugee camps, so that they can decide how to use that money
for all the various activities that they do. I suspect there is
a case for more aid to go cross-border. There is also a very significant
case for more aid to be provided in-country. We need to see greater
coordination of aid and much better data-sharing across the international
community. In making an assessment as to where to put any increase
in aid that we might want to provide for Burma, we need to look
at how cross-border groups are funded, those donors that are funding
those cross-border groups and those donors that have a presence
in-country. We are one of only four donors that have a presence
in-country and have the capacity as a result to know what works,
who does what and where aid is best deployed. To use the development
jargon, I would suggest to the Committee that we have a comparative
advantage in working in-country. That does not mean that we should
not necessarily provide funding for cross-border work but perhaps
our greater strength lies in beginning to plug the considerable
gap there is in the donor community about providing aid from within
Burma.
John Bercow: We were told in the
course of our visit that DFID believes it has a comparative advantage
in respect of the delivery of in-country aid. Colleagues will
reach their own judgment about that. I confess that I did not
observe or hear any compelling evidence to support that thesis
at all. It seemed to me to be a triumph of argument by advocacy
rather than argument by evidence, but colleagues will reach their
own view of this. I want to press you a little about this because
it does seem to me that there is a rather worryingly unsatisfactory
situation. During the visit the head of DFID out there, Marshall
Elliot, told us that the review of cross-border assistance and
in-country work conducted by DFID had concluded that DFID had
a comparative advantage in working in-country. The review stated
that money provided by DFID for these groups—groups working
cross-border—will add little extra value. Clearly the judgment
had been reached that no more was needed. The bulk of the evidence
we have received from the miscellany of different witnesses that
have come before us is that it is a false dichotomy that it is
in-country on the one hand or cross-border. There is some sort
of Manichaean divide. What I would like politely to put to you
is that even if it is true that there is comparative advantage,
a fact of which I am not persuaded, there is surely no reason
to preclude additional cross-border assistance which could be
a complementary and equally valid strategy. If you accept that
it would be complementary and equally valid, is it not a bit odd
that DFID staff on the ground have not themselves made a serious
assessment of what could be done with those increased funds for
cross-border aid? Is it not even more bizarre that when we met
the head of DFID South East Asia in Bangkok we discovered it was
his first visit there? He had not even met the representatives
of cross-border delivery organisations. I put it to you that there
is a fundamental disfunctionality about the operation.
Chairman: What you mean is that
his visit to the border with us was his first visit to the border.
12 UN Children's Fund. Back
13
UN Development Programme. Back
14
UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs Back
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