Mr.
Foster: To answer the second question first, one of the
key aspects of the division of labour is that we are getting more
effective use of our resources on the ground in-country; but that
division of labour is not limited just to EU partners. We can take
advantage of it when working with other world organisations such as
AusAID and USAID. That aspect of division of labour is
important. I
recognise and welcome the hon. Gentleman’s support for ensuring
greater accountability between donor countries and their partners and
assisting civil society in-country. As he said, it is a major plank of
our recent White Paper. We have agreed to set aside 5 per cent. of
budget support funds to strengthen the mechanisms for making states
more accountable to their own citizens. That will ensure that
citizens’ groups, local media, Parliament, audit bodies and
others can monitor how Governments use the resources made available
through budget support. To put it on the record, we have doubled our
non-humanitarian support to civil society organisations to £300
million a year by
2013. Mr.
Stephen Crabb (Preseli Pembrokeshire) (Con): The
agreements that the Minister and his colleagues from DFID make with
other countries often include conditions for aid to be interrupted,
delayed or withheld altogether in circumstances of gross human rights
abuse, failure of financial management systems or gross corruption. Can
he point to any examples of EU agreements containing similar
conditions, and any cases in which those conditions have been met and
aid has been interrupted or withheld from recipient
countries?
Mr.
Foster: I will seek that answer. If I cannot get it now, I
will write to the hon. Gentleman in detail with the
evidence.
Mr.
Clappison: What proportion of the total amount of aid
spent by this country is channelled through the European aid
budget?
Mr.
Foster: I will give the hon. Gentleman the exact amount in
writing so that it is on the
record.
Mr.
Clifton-Brown: May I clarify something that the
Under-Secretary said in his opening remarks? It is not on a matter of
contention among the three parties; it is about the level of the aid
budget. He said, importantly, that he will introduce a new Bill to
enshrine the 0.7 per cent. target in law. Are we likely to see it
before the general election, which has to take place by June? There is
nothing contentious about that.
Paragraph 2.5
on page 2 of the document that we are considering says that the
Minister of State, Department for International Development,
“shared the
Commission’s concern that the collective EU commitment to reach
0.56 per cent. ODA/GNI might be missed, despite the fall in expected
GNI”. If
that is true within the EU, it is a worrying development. Will the
Under-Secretary comment on
that?
Mr.
Foster: Before taking this job, I had a couple of years in
the Whips Office. I would be frowned on if I were to give details of
what might or might not be in the Queen’s Speech next week.
Matters to do with the parliamentary timetable are, of course, dealt
with by others. The Department is always keen to bring that issue into
the public eye and have it debated. To add a little bit of controversy,
given the track records of other Governments with regard to the
percentage of GNI spent on international aid, there is some merit in
having a political debate on making that 0.7 per cent. target binding
in
legislation. We
believe that the UK will meet the 0.56 per cent. target by 2010 but, to
return to the domestic agenda, some countries are questioning aid
volumes and how much cash they should give to development assistance,
effectively rowing back on agreements reached in 2005. One country that
springs to mind, and that I know has debated the issue, is Italy.
Berlusconi has been clear about wanting to reduce its
commitment.
Mr.
Clifton-Brown: All that I can say is that the Opposition
hope that the Minister and his Department succeed in having such a Bill
mentioned in the Queen’s Speech. If they do, the Minister will
certainly have the full support of the Conservative party in aiming to
reach the 0.7 per cent. target; indeed, our party leader is absolutely
committed to it.
I have a
question for the Minister about the ethos of this paper. We do not
oppose working with the EU to enhance the effectiveness of in-country
aid. Indeed, we welcome it; it is a sensible way to operate. Will that
portion of our aid budget that is bilateral be increasingly bound to
such EU procedures, and will that start to dictate where our bilateral
programmes can operate? We have historical ties with many poor
countries—the least developed countries—and it would be a
worrying trend if our bilateral aid were somehow put into a pool for
programmes that were agreed with the EU, and were able to carry out
only certain programmes in certain countries. Will the Minister give us
an assurance on that point?
Mr.
Foster: I shall not go into detail about the 0.7 per cent.
figure because, as we used to say a few years ago, that would not be
quite on-topic or on-message. None the less, I do not anticipate that
it will have a negative impact on our UK bilateral programme. It is
about implementing the commitments made in Paris and Accra, and it
should not have an impact on ministerial decisions. However, playing
devil’s advocate, it seems that the Conservative party is asking
in which countries British aid should be spent. In July 2009, the hon.
Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. Mitchell) was quoted as
saying that
“We
should have an aid policy that is more
Commonwealth-centric”.
That, of course, would
mean leaving countries with which we have a strong relationship, if not
those that we colonised in years gone by.
Mr.
Borrow: Does my hon. Friend agree that the comments of the
hon. Member for Cotswold illustrate the difficulties of ensuring aid
effectiveness? Many donor countries need to work together to ensure
that aid money is spent as effectively as possible, and pet projects
are sometimes not the most effective way of spending that
aid.
Mr.
Foster: My hon. Friend makes a valid and sensible comment.
I shall give the Committee a couple of examples of why the framework is
so important. In 2005, Vietnam received 791 donor missions; and the
Government of Mozambique have more than 1,000 bank accounts because of
varying donor requirements. Clearly, that is in no one’s
interest; we want to make the most effective use of aid, whether in
Commonwealth countries or elsewhere. That is our thrust, and why we are
pushing forward with the framework.
Mr.
Clifton-Brown: My question is pertinent—the hon.
Member for South Ribble was mischief-making—as we clearly want
to improve the effectiveness of all that we do with bilateral and
multilateral aid. Everyone accepts that DFID’s bilateral aid is,
on the whole, of a higher calibre and more effective than that of the
EU. I hope that it will improve under this
process.
I wholly
endorse the frameworks that are to be implemented under this paper, but
will they involve asking the recipient countries more about what they
want in aid? Too often, I think, the multilateral aid community goes to
a country and says, “This is what we will give you.” The
countries, let alone individual districts, are not often asked what
they want. Will the Minister give us an assurance to that
effect?
Mr.
Foster: As a point of principle, I do not disagree with
what the hon. Gentleman says. Our policy is very much to consider what
in-country Governments require in order to meet their development
needs. It is important that those views are taken into account. Nothing
in the framework goes against that; on the contrary, it helps
in-country decisions because it makes aid more effective. The whole
Paris-Accra agenda is all about having an in-country-led
approach.
Mr.
Clappison: The EU has been criticised for the slow
delivery of its aid. Is there any measure of how much EU aid arrives on
time and if so, what is
it?
Mr.
Foster: I do not have information on what we anticipate
the overall EU position to be. The target is 0.56 per cent. by 2010,
and the EU position is a target of 0.7 per cent. by 2015. It is very
much up to individual countries to make their decisions. We are keen to
get them to agree to the commitments that they made back in 2005. One
way in which we are doing that is by taking a lead in the
UK.
Mr.
Clappison: Perhaps I did not make my question sufficiently
clear. I asked about slow delivery; I am asking about the delivery of
EU aid to individual
countries. Is there any measure of what proportion of EU aid is
delivered on time to individual countries? If so, how much
is?
Mr.
Foster: If we have that measure on a country-by-country
basis, I am sure that we will look to see what we can do. Clearly the
issue of aid predictability is part of the EU’s wider
development agenda. If we have the information to answer the hon.
Gentleman’s question, we will make it
available. Motion
made, and Question
proposed, That
the Committee takes note of European Union Document No. 13732/09,
Commission/Presidency Paper on an operational framework for the EU to
promote aid effectiveness; and calls on the Commission and Member
States actively to implement its recommendations. [30th Report of
Session 2008-09, HC 19-xxviii, Chapter 2].—(Mr.
Michael
Foster.) 5.27
pm
Andrew
Stunell: We have had a very useful and constructive
question time and I hope not to take too much of the Committee’s
time at this stage. Liberal Democrats certainly welcome the intention
of the document before us. We welcome the aims and objectives that it
sets out. We have some doubts about the practicalities, the process and
the time scales for achieving this ambitious project of bringing
together the aid programmes of 27 different nations with
different historical, cultural and geographical interests and
consequently very diverse approaches to delivering development support
to other nations. I have noted the Minister’s responses, both in
writing beforehand and his answers to questions. He has clearly set out
his broad endorsement of the paper, although he has queried a number of
points relating to the technical co-ordination and the appropriateness
of pressing ahead with
that. The
paper talks about the division of the labour. Some of my questions were
directed at some rather anomalous approaches to that. It does not
surprise me that the paper refers to the slow progress that has been
made on bringing these things together. Some quite specific problems
are identified in paragraph 2.2 on either page 6 or page 15, depending
on which numbering system one chooses to follow. The experiences of the
International Development Committee when we visited Bangladesh and
Nepal recently seem relevant here. EU representatives in country tend
not to have the same level of discretion about taking decisions on
programmes. They do not have the flexibility that DFID wisely gives to
its local management and aid teams. That means that co-ordination has
to go through an extra loop, and nations have to refer back to national
Governments and possibly to the EU before changes can be made. I want
to give credit to DFID, because it has a far more flexible and nimble
way of approaching these matters. It would be good to hear from the
Minister that he will press that angle with Ministers from other member
states as a way of improving the process as it goes on.
I have
already commented on the criticism that even where a division of labour
has been set up, nobody seems to know quite what to do. The document
talks about “unclear donor roles” and a lack of
understanding of what being a lead nation, or an active or a silent
donor in a particular country means. I look forward to receiving the
further information that the Minister is
going to supply about the Bangladesh situation. Things seem to be
working on the ground there, but the situation absolutely is not what
is described in the appendix to the document before us. The document
also makes the point that the process—however good it turns out
to be—does not involve other non-EU donors. That includes some
countries that are major donors. In Bangladesh, Japan is a big donor,
and in Nepal, which we have also visited, India is a big donor, but it
seems that no real capacity is being developed to link things up. Some
donors have very specific agendas. The USA is governed by quite
limiting rules from the US Congress, which even a change of
Administration has not entirely loosened. We listened to an interesting
discussion between the representatives of the USA, DFID and the EU
Commission in Bangladesh. They were discussing—rather
circumspectly, I thought—the difficulties of pulling together
all the threads, even when there was a lot of good will in the relevant
country to make sure that that
happened. Let
us move on from the division of labour, if we can take at face
value—I am sure that we can—what the Minister has said
about the division of labour network having already been set up, and
about the deadline for the end of November 2009 having therefore
already been achieved. If we can take that at face value, despite the
evidence that I am bringing to the Committee that in one particular
place—Bangladesh—that does not seem to be the case, I am
happy to move on to a further
stage. The
next area on which I want to comment is the use of country systems. I
am pleased that DFID can report that 60-something per cent. of our aid
is directed through country systems—in other words, through the
formal structures of national and local government in the relevant
country. However, I want to enter a note of caution about accelerating
that process unless some of the problems in the recipient
country’s governance arrangements are tackled. Whatever the
deficiencies of our democratic system, and however busy Sir Christopher
Kelly has been recently, there is plenty of work for him still to
do—in Bangladesh, Nepal and Nigeria, for example. The hon.
Member for Ealing, Southall and I have visited those three countries on
the Committee’s behalf in the past six months for international
development reasons.
We need to
interpret very carefully what we mean when we say that we want to take
greater account of what a country wants, and we need to mediate that
with a realistic assessment of what that country needs. We also need to
make sure that the programmes that we put there, and the way in which
we fund them, do not throw away the excellent regard in which DFID is
held in this country as a trustworthy user of taxpayers’ money
on important development projects. We must not chuck out the probity
and integrity that we have shown in the use of our funds to give
additional power and credibility to state structures that cannot take
the weight.
One rather
disappointing feature of the paper before us is that it gives little
recognition to the effective NGOs that operate in a number of the
countries where we work. Page 13 lists points relating to the transfer
of funds to develop partner-country capacity, and point (8)
refers to the possibility of south-south co-operation—one
developing country passing its learning and expertise to another to
ensure that aid is delivered effectively.
I draw to the
Minister’s attention the excellent work done by the Bangladesh
Rural Advancement Committee, which is a Bangladesh-created and
Bangladesh-run organisation. It claims to be the largest NGO in the
world, and I see no reason to dispute that. It has an excellent record
of spending money effectively on delivering education and health
projects in Bangladesh and it is now developing parallel work in
sub-Saharan Africa.
The third aspect of the paper
is technical co-operation. The Minister believes that raising this
issue may be putting the cart before the horse and that it may be a bit
premature because there are other things to fix first, and I do not
disagree. None the less, a note on page 22 of the documents refers to
the need to focus on the internal coherence of technical co-ordination
provision “from
different national departments (e.g. security, foreign affairs,
development)” In
Nepal, we saw the work done by the Gurkha Welfare Trust’s
projects, which are a good example of DFID, the Ministry of Defence and
the Foreign Office co-ordinating support for development work in the
villages of retired Gurkhas. However, there are always opportunities to
improve, and I hope that the Minister will tell us that he is keen to
do so.
The UK is a
major donor and a pace-setter. We have an excellent record on
stretching towards our 0.7 per cent., we are committed to getting the
millennium development goals in place and there is plenty of evidence
on the ground of our being flexible and innovative in delivery.
However, there are significant challenges in terms of weak governance,
which is another way of saying corruption, impunity and political
violence, among many players in many of the countries in which we
operate. Although my colleagues and I are strongly in favour of the
direction of the paper before us, we would love to see greater
co-ordination of aid from many different donors and capacity-building
at recipient-country level, as set out in the documents. It is still
important to retain accountability to, and the trust of, people at
home, who are paying for these projects in the first place. I will
certainly listen carefully to what the Minister has to say on those
issues when he sums
up. 5.39
pm
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