Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120
- 134)
TUESDAY 23 JUNE 2009
MR GEOFFREY
PAYNE AND
MR RICHARD
SHAW
Q120 Chairman:
Have you had any response from DFID at this stage?
Mr Shaw: No, it is going into
the mix for the White Paper.
Q121 Chairman:
It is timely.
Mr Shaw: It is timely. We are
aware of demand from developing countries for this kind of expertise
sharing. I do not know if the Committee is aware of the report
that Nigel Crisp, Lord Crisp, wrote in 2007, I think on behalf
of the Prime Minister at the time, called Global Health Partnerships.
He was looking at health issues and he toured about 17 health
ministries in Africa and found a very strong desire for expertise
exchange. There is strong demand there and I think the benefits
of it could be two-way.
Q122 Chairman:
That is very helpful.
Mr Payne: One of the key issues
in my experience is the issue of governance. The UK does have
considerable experience in innovative ways of bringing the private
sector into development in ways which have a public benefit. It
is not always successful, of course, but it is innovative. It
has achieved major benefits socially in deprived areas. I think
that experience is something which would be certainly exported,
on a twinning basis, perhaps, on certain DFID projects. The issues,
in my experience, are not those of policy ignorance or policy
constraints. All the innovative ideas, on land, on services, on
finance and so on, are already in the public domain. The World
Urban Forums, the World Bank Research Symposia, the UN-Habitat
agendas, Google and so on, all the academic literature shows that
everything that we need to do is in the public domain. There is
no excuse for ignorance. The real constraint, it seems to me,
is that on governance—whether it is the political, economy
aspects and so on, the ability to do something with it. I think
the UK does have a major contribution to make in terms of our
experience of managing urban areas, and certainly in terms of
exchange, I do see there is a massive amount of interest among
young professionals in the UK. I have personal experience in the
UK and Europe where young professionals are very, very keen to
do something. I was very interested to hear the US Government
is talking about national service for all 18 year olds. One American
student said, "It will help take us out of our bubble"—which
I think is interesting. The scope for that sort of innovation
across the board is considerable.
Q123 Chairman:
We get regular submissions from the Institution of Civil Engineers
across the road who would be very keen to offer their assistance.
Mr Shaw: Yes.
Mr Payne: Yes.
Q124 John Battle:
Governance is sometimes interpreted as telling other people how
to do democracy, and we might have to learn a bit more about doing
that well ourselves. To take a practical example, something like
waste management—and the Daily Mail are campaigning
against green wheelie bins at the moment, so we do not quite have
that right, but we do have some good ideas—waste tips in
slums is the big issue. Waste management and the environment could
be a joint project from which we could learn mutually and develop
some new methodology.
Mr Payne: Exactly. I would not
want to give the impression that it is a one-way traffic of paternalistic
advice. I think it is a two-way experience. We could also learn
from developing countries.
Chairman: We had a specific short discussion
in Kano, on our visit to Northern Nigeria, about waste to energy.
They have a severe energy shortage—the lights go out about
every five minutes—and they have a massive waste problem.
We were saying that maybe they could put these two things together.
Q125 Andrew Stunell:
Urban areas are places where social and cultural constraints are
relaxed, and if you have poverty it is worse. Crime and disorder
is a major problem in many of these areas. Do you think there
is scope for DFID to co-operate with other government departments
in the UK to take some elements of what we have learned in this
country to such communities?
Mr Shaw: Yes, I do. I think that
is another area, akin to waste management and so on, where we
have been wrestling with this for quite some time. I think the
enlightened approaches to community safety in this country are
often where local authorities help to bring partners together
and bring communities together, and you build community cohesion
essentially. Certainly it is not just about cracking down on crime;
it is much more than that. We have some good expertise in this
country of where that has been done with local authorities, police,
voluntary groups working together to build community safety. One
of the case studies—and I am not sure whether we shared
this with you or not—is Leeds City Council.
Q126 John Battle:
That is my neighbourhood.
Mr Shaw: I understand it is working
in South Africa.
Q127 Andrew Stunell:
I was just going to ask if you had any practical examples which
are working now, but you got there ahead of me, so that is absolutely
fine. Do you think there is a reasonable area for co-operation
and development linking local government experience council to
council, or should this be Home Office and DFID working together?
What would you like our report to say about how those links should
be strengthened?
Mr Shaw: Again we are talking
cross-departmental, are we not? This is an area that affects the
Home Office, which has the lead on crime prevention, but it also
affects CLG, which has the lead on local governance. I would expect
a strategy as part of the wider approach to urbanisation to be
developed, with those two departments working hand-in-glove with
local government to develop it.
Q128 Andrew Stunell:
I suppose what I am working towards slowly is: is there a suite
of policy solutions which we have and they do not have? What exactly
do you see us transferring? What would be the vehicle for transferring
it?
Mr Shaw: I am sorry, I am not
sure if I am quite answering the question in the way you are encouraging
me to, but we do have good practice in developing local community
safety solutions. One of the mechanisms of the IDeA, the Improvement
and Development Agency which I mentioned earlier, is a Beacon
Council Scheme and that draws attention to a small number of authorities
that have excelled in a particular area. One of its beacon categories
is community safety, and there are a number of authorities that
have particularly good experience in community safety. We are
talking here about the potential matching of really good expertise
where it exists. There are 407 local authorities in this country
and they are not all the same and they are not all good at the
same things, but where that expertise does exist, I think it can
be matched. It needs to be matched carefully; it needs to be matched
within a managed programme.
Q129 Chairman:
One of the things that has been made clear to us in the course
of this evidence is that a lot of the expansion of people living
in urban slums or poor urban areas is not driven by immigration
but by population growth within those communities. Is there or
should there be a strategy, given that it is running away from
us? Should we be more rigorous in some kind of promotion of trying
to keep the natural growth of the population within parameters,
or is that a lost cause?
Mr Payne: The old story is that
the best contraceptive is development.
Q130 Chairman:
Yes, I think we do accept that, but does that mean that is it?
Or do you think you have to try to encourage people to it?
Mr Payne: If people are given
better access to clean water, to education, especially for girls,
and women's rights are enhanced, that in itself helps to reduce
fertility levels. But it does need to be balanced with economic
growth. A lot can be done without necessarily changing the whole
structure of government policy. For example, in one city I know,
the amount of empty government-owned land within an urban area
is sufficient to accommodate all planned growth or anticipated
growth for the area. I am talking of a large city.
Q131 Chairman:
In that case, I will now turn to Mr Shaw. Within that context,
it seems that is partly urban planning, but what about the clean
water and the sanitation? Is there a role there for local government
in helping to ensure that happens as part of the process of easing
the problem, inasmuch as you are improving the quality of advice
but you are also taking the pressure from population growth that
is offered?
Mr Shaw: Yes. Local government
in developing countries, if we can help strengthen its capacity,
can develop better urban planning and that will lead to more sanitary
conditions, and hopefully the better living conditions and improved
life expectancy will help to alleviate the population growth.
Coming back to your first question about population, I was in
India during the Indira Ghandi emergency when some approaches
to family planning were taken which set back the cause of family
planning for a generation, so I think it is a very tricky, sensitive
area, and we have to be very careful, but I certainly take your
point that population growth is outstripping the gains that have
been made in international development and often claims are made,
for example, that such and such a proportion of the population
has been lifted out of poverty. I was in a country recently where
it was claimed that only 35% or so of the population were now
living in poverty compared to over 40% a few years ago but in
that time the population had almost doubled, so the absolute number
of those in poverty had increased substantially. I do think there
is a real issue there about population growth outstripping our
gains.
Mr Payne: I think there is considerable
scope for improving the support to secondary cities in countries,
to help them expand their economic and physical base so that they
can absorb people more easily, give an alternative to the major
conurbations, and plan in advance before situations do get bad.
Q132 Chairman:
I would like to thank you both very much. You have been concise
in your answers and you have addressed directly the issues we
are addressing. The Committee certainly is of the view that addressing
urban poverty is of much higher priority than perhaps it has been
given. There is a tendency for things to go in fashion. Ironically,
at the other end of the scale agriculture was a focus, then it
went off and now it is coming back. Urbanisation was a focus,
and now it maybe needs to come back. I do not think we see local
government as a resource to supplement DFID. DFID has access to
money but it is short of people
Mr Shaw: Yes.
Q133 Chairman:
That seems to me where there can be a connection that would be
mutually beneficial, both to local government in the UK and to
the development of good local government in developing countries.
Without prejudging what the Committee might say, I think that
is an area for us to move to some quite interesting recommendations.
Mr Payne: Perhaps I could make
one other comment which I think might help, and that is that I
think DFID had until recently an innovative and successful research
programme, not just on urban but on other related subjects, which
has now been outsourced. There is a tendency for research budgets
to be channelled more into a fewer number of large projects which
I think has been very disappointing to the research community.
Q134 Chairman:
I take that not as a special pleading but as an observation.
Mr Payne: Yes. It is something
I personally would benefit from in the long run, but I do see
the younger generation of professionals not getting the chances
that I had when I was starting, and so I say that on their behalf,
not my own.
Chairman: That is a good point to note
and we will take note. Our advisers have written that down. Thank
you both very much.
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