Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180
- 199)
WEDNESDAY 1 JULY 2009
MR GARETH
THOMAS MP, DR
YUSAF SAMIULLAH
AND MR
PETER DAVIES
Q180 Chairman:
That is understandable. If we take the examples of what we saw
in Lagos, it may be very unfair in as much as a whole variety
of agencies are responsible, not least of which are the Lagos
state government and the Nigerian federal government, but it seems
to be a forecastable disaster, does it not? Basically, you have
a city of 18-19 million, they think, projected to be 25-26 million
by 2015—that is another six years, a million people a year.
It is three feet above sea level with a proposed strategy to build
100,000 housing units, none of which are being delivered, when,
clearly, we have a backlog of several million and there is the
requirement for a million a year. Nobody seems to be providing
the catalyst—not even to solve the problem but to contain
it. What is Lagos going to be like in six years' time with all
those extra people, sinking under its own weight?
Mr Thomas: Mr Bruce, the Committee
has a number of advantages over me, but one in particular in that
you have just come back from Nigeria. I hope to visit Nigeria
very shortly, not least before I have to appear before you to
discuss our Nigeria programme. I am not going to comment specifically
on Lagos, but I do accept your broad point that, as I have said,
there are a number of cities in the developing world where we
are expecting to see substantial increases in population in the
short to medium term. That represents a significant development
challenge going forward. That is one of the reasons why I have
asked for work to be done specifically on city governance, going
forward, because I do think the key to the challenge around the
growth in numbers of people living in cities has got to come from
the cities themselves. We have to do more, I think, to increase
the capacity of the institutions in cities to manage urbanisation.
Q181 Chairman:
To be fair, Lagos is conscious of that and I am not suggesting
they are not trying to do it; it is just the scale of what is
happening to them and the resources they have. Perhaps I can press
you a bit further: as you know, this Committee also did a report
on the African Development Bank and DFID's engagement with it,
a year or so ago. In reality it is the infrastructure bank—or
it claims to be—for Africa, but it is mainly focused on
water rather than general infrastructure. I wonder whether the
DFID partnership with the African Development Bank has the capacity
to suggest that jointly this may be focused a bit more sharply,
and that if they are developing an urban strategy, there is a
case for DFID and the Bank to provide some kind of push to ensure
that that delivers measurable outcomes in tackling the problems.
Mr Thomas: I think potentially
the African Development Bank does have a sharper role to play
on urbanisation and city governance. Certainly the World Bank
has got a big role to play. If I may, Mr Bruce, I want to do a
bit more work on this question of how you govern and how you provide
support for the governance of cities, and I would be very happy,
if the Committee is interested, to write back to the Committee
when we have done some further thinking on how we want to take
this forward.
Chairman: I hope you will not take it
amiss, Minister, but the Committee has been on quite a steep learning
curve on this debate, and I think you will find you will be as
well.
Q182 John Battle:
Can I return to the question of advocacy rather than just infrastructure,
as it were! The evidence from the expert witnesses from the Development
Planning Unit at London University was: "Just as it did in
the 1990s, DFID should once again play a leading and progressive
role in the global urban agenda and arenas of debate." One
of their experts suggested: "DFID has an advocacy role to
play in the same way as DFID has played an important role in raising
climate change issues on the international agenda. It has the
same role to do with urban development." In that context,
one of the organisations that, traditionally, has been at the
centre of urban development questions, but not perhaps supported
sufficiently or taken sufficiently seriously, is UN-Habitat. The
Government makes a contribution to their core funding of about
£1 million a year. In a sense I am asking for your view about
that organisation as a co-ordinating advocacy agency. Do you rate
it? Are we giving it enough money? Do you see it having a greater
role to co-ordinate in the future and expand, and how does DFID
view it? What is your vision for it?
Mr Thomas: Again, let me, if I
may, separate out your preamble from your specific question. I
would take issue with the notion that we have not advocated on
urbanisation. I think we have; we just have not necessarily done
it under the banner of urbanisation. We have been active on some
of the challenges that urbanisation brings in its wake around
specific sectors. I think that UN-Habitat do an important job
in terms of the advocacy they lead on around poverty and urbanisation,
but they are not the only member of the UN family that does important
work on urbanisation: UNDP,[1]
UNICEF,[2]
the World Health Organisation and a range of UN organisations
do. I think we need to see sharper work by the UN family as a
whole in developing countries on the urban challenges, and that
means building in a response to urbanisation into the UN development
assistance frameworks that each UN agency contributes to in the
developing country they are based in. There has been a drive led
by DFID for the last four or five years to try and get a stronger
operation of the UN family delivering as one more effectively
in response to the needs of particular developing countries. If
that developing country says, "We want more support from
you, the UN family, on urbanisation" it is not just UN-Habitat
that should contribute to that; it is the whole of the UN country
team that should respond. I would genuinely suggest that in terms
of the UN we should look beyond Habitat; we should look at the
whole range of organisations' response to urbanisation.
Q183 John Battle:
In response to your response, do you think then about a million
pounds for core funding is about the right amount or are you looking
to dismantle UN-Habitat and let it just tick over, or are you
going to apportion more resources in the future? What is your
plan for UN-Habitat in that context of wider co-ordination?
Mr Thomas: In a sense, you are
pre-empting what may or may not be in the White Paper, so if you
will forgive me—
Q184 Chairman:
When will it be published?
Mr Thomas: Soon. If you do not
mind, I am not going to go into the UN reform questions more generally.
We not only do core funding to UN-Habitat, but on occasion we
give specific project funding for work that they are leading on
in a particular context.
Q185 John Battle:
I like what you said about co-ordination in the UN and different
organisations, and to pull them under one umbrella would be a
massive advance, and if it followed through to action, even better—and
that might be the 20th century project, but what about—
Mr Thomas: Mr Battle, with respect,
I think it is already beginning to happen. It is happening in
eight pilot countries, a number in Africa and a number in Asia.
We want to roll out that model of success. Mr Bruce, if I can
be cheeky, I think the Committee is going to be meeting Helen
Clark, the new administrator of UNDP, and I think you might want
to ask her questions about her view of delivering as one and the
UN reform agenda, and how she is going to take it forward.
Q186 John Battle:
We will see her tomorrow but in the context of DFID—and
we will certainly follow through the eight case studies you have
referred to—can you give me any examples of DFID's advocacy
on issues which relate to urban policy?
Mr Thomas: One of the examples
I would give you would be from India, where the Indian Government,
back in December 2005, launched two major urban renewal programmes,
one focused on their biggest 60 cities, and the next focused on
the next 260 below that. We have provided and are funding a team
of policy experts in the relevant ministry to help support them
to take forward that work. That effectively involves a whole series
of different levels of advocacy work around particular needs on
urbanisation in the particular cities where that work has been
happening—so I would give you that as one very practical
and tangible example. In addition, our staff work with the World
Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the African Development Bank,
so there are a whole series of ways in which we make the case
for further work to deal with the challenges that urbanisation
brings.
Q187 John Battle:
In the example of India, going back to Hugh Bayley's question,
that could be transplanted or used as an example of a kind of
beacon project to look at other cities in Africa as well.
Mr Thomas: Potentially. The key
thing in India is that this initiative has been driven by political
will from a very high level within the Indian system. You do need
to see that political will replicated, and then obviously we can
respond.
Q188 Andrew Stunell:
I wonder if I could come back to link that with the advocacy point,
because I think the question that is perhaps behind some of the
Committee's questions to you is this: is DFID going to be a leader
on urban policy development across the developing world, or is
it going to be a follower? You said in relation to the UN agencies
that it was really for national governments to say to the UN agencies
how they wanted them to act and for DFID to have a fairly passive
role; and yet national governments on the whole are still at the
level with urban policy where they just do not want the people
to come, rather than what they do about rapidly expanding mega-cities,
which is what they are faced with. Is Africa the fastest growing
area of urbanisation as a continent, and has a very high proportion
of people in slums. Does DFID see itself as having a role of encouraging
national governments and multilateral agencies to get engaged
with this particular problem or not? Picking up from that, you
are investing in UN-Habitat core funding and also the Slum Upgrading
Facility, which again could be that sort of pilot project. Could
you take the two parts of that question and tell me whether I
have got it completely wrong?
Mr Thomas: Mr Stunell, I would
never be that brave! I think there is a difference of approach
between the Committee in terms of the questions you put to me
and in terms of my response. I do not see urbanisation as a particular
individual problem in itself. I think it brings a series of challenges
in its wake around particular sectors, around health, education,
economic growth and climate change, et cetera. I would say that
on those issues we are in a whole series of ways, certainly internationally,
trying to advocate for further work and further policy thinking
in those areas. There are a series of examples as you describe
that deal with particular aspects of the urbanisation story, which
the Slum Upgrading Facility or the Community-Led Infrastructure
Finance Facility have picked up. In their different ways we are
supporting them. They are trying to deal with some of the challenges
we have talked about, about the lack of community organisation
on occasion in some cities around the globe; and they are having
various levels of success, so we may well provide further finance
for some of those types of multinational initiatives going forward.
I would say at this stage we may not fund them all.
Q189 Andrew Stunell:
We have mentioned the Slum Upgrading Facility and there is the
Community-Led Infrastructure Finance Facility, CLIFF. There are
two projects there. Would you like to evaluate those for us and
tell us whether you think either of them or both of them ought
to or will get further funding and support from DFID?
Mr Thomas: To be candid, the Slum
Upgrading Facility has taken longer to begin to have real impact
on the ground. It is beginning to have success in one or two of
the pilot areas, whereas the Community-Led Infrastructure Finance
Facility has made faster and more impressive progress to date.
Before we take decisions to provide further funding we carry out
evaluations of such initiatives, and we will talk to a range of
advisers who engage with those projects before we make a decision
as to whether or not to provide further funding to them.
Q190 Andrew Stunell:
It is thumbs up for CLIFF and thumbs down for the Slum Upgrading
Facility!
Mr Thomas: I think that is a slightly
unfair black and white description of what I have just said. I
hope that the Slum Upgrading Facility will see further progress.
Clearly, in some of the pilot projects there are examples of success.
There are more examples of success in the CLIFF project to date.
Q191 Mr Sharma:
Can I just put my own question, just a continuation on the slum
upgrading facility? There are pilot stages in Sri Lanka, Indonesia
and, I understand, Tanzania. I am very interested to know in Sri
Lanka, under the present political climate, how DFID is monitoring
whether that pilot project is working in that area or not.
Mr Thomas: It may well be we need
to give you information by letter to that very specific question.
Do you know the answer, Mr Samiullah?
Mr Samiullah: The answer will
be with both the slum-upgrading programme and with CLIFF that
we would get reports from the managing agent, which in one case
would be UN-Habitat, and it would have staff and local representatives
in the field who would provide day-to-day feedback. With CLIFF
it would be Cities Alliance who would provide us, through their
implementing partners, with that information. At the end of a
cycle of programme funding then there is an evaluative process
which may or may not involve DFID core staff or certainly consultants
appointed by the programme or by the Evaluation Department, depending
on how arms' length you feel it is necessary to be to look at
those programmes, and that will then get us in a position that
allows us to determine whether or not a programme should be renewed.
Where we think it is important and it is large then senior officials
will go and travel to the region and evaluate with the specialist
teams that are doing that.
Q192 Mr Sharma:
I hope, Chairman, you do not mind me referring to the recent visit
to Sri Lanka. We are still concerned about whether the outside
agencies are allowed to work with the right type of people or
not, so what is that like?
Mr Thomas: On humanitarian access
the concern that you raise, Mr Sharma, is well-founded. This is
a slightly different project working in a slightly different context.
Q193 Mr Sharma:
The Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers currently make almost no
reference to urban poverty or slum dwellers. How are you working
with the developing country governments to ensure that urban development
issues are prioritised in their PRSPs?
Mr Thomas: This comes back in
a sense to the difference in approach which I referred to. We
do address and raise in discussions about Poverty Reduction Strategies
in country concerns about some of the needs of slum dwellers or
some of the needs around urbanisation in terms of education, on
health, on water, on sanitation et cetera. Simply because there
is not a paragraph that talks about urbanisation does not mean
that we are not addressing some of the challenges that urbanisation
brings in those PRSPs.
Q194 Chairman:
We have discussed the cross-departmental links but we have had
very strong evidence from local government organisations about
what they see as a role for them and for their people and I wondered
whether your department is engaged with UK local government to
see first of all what they are doing in terms of engagement with
urban poverty programmes in developing countries and the extent
to which they could be partnered with DFID in that process.
Mr Thomas: The straight answer
to that is undoubtedly we could do more in that area. We do not
have a central register as such of urbanisation experts whom we
could second if a developing country asked us to help them out
if there was a particular need. Having said that, we have not
been asked, certainly as I understand it—and Mr Samiullah
you may wish to comment—in any significant way for access
to such expertise.
Q195 Chairman:
You may have been now—I think I have seen a copy of a letter
from the LGA[3]
to the Secretary of State seeking a meeting to see what they can
discuss about co-operation.
Mr Thomas: With respect, Mr Bruce,
what I meant was from developing countries for expertise from
the UK. Certainly we have had a number of recent offers and, as
you say, requests for discussions which may or may not have been
prompted by the Committee's inquiry. I am certainly happy to give
the Committee an undertaking that I will look into this area as
part of future work that we might be doing on cities. The whole
issue of twinning, as the Committee will recognise, has its difficulties,
and I do think that we have to be clear that there has got to
be a clear need expressed by the developing country for access
to specific UK expertise, but I will look at whether or not there
is more we could do in a sense to have a ready pool of such expertise
that could be deployable if a request came in.
Q196 Chairman:
The way it has been put to us is that there is a huge amount of
professional expertise, whether it is in planning, water, sanitation,
finance, management, all kinds of things, which has a lot to contribute
to developing countries in working with them, admittedly if we
get the right people in the right place and the right environment.
Our understanding is that Norway and Canada have fairly good,
developed programmes on this matter and the LGA and others are
saying that they would see it as a career development placement
for their staff but at the same time offering expertise to the
developing country over a given period of time for particular
purposes. I guess they would be looking towards DFID to assist,
not in terms of paying the salaries of these people or taking
them on, but possibly providing a contribution towards travel
or accommodation while they were doing it. It does seem to us
that in a lot of these issues there is mutual benefit, that is
the point. There is a benefit in terms of expertise and knowledge
and learning that will accrue back to the UK to these people from
their experience and then there is the benefit of that experience
being applied to these urban places. If we take a very simple
example, what we saw in Lagos was effectively a bus lane development;
it was a simple project but it was working quite well there. A
lot of things are quite exportable but if you do not have the
officials and the expertise on the ground in the developing country
then it cannot happen, so what we are really saying and what the
LGA is looking for is whether or not there could be a really serious
look, which would actually extend the capacity of DFID in some
ways too.
Mr Thomas: As I said, Mr Bruce,
I am very happy to look at that, to give the Committee an undertaking
that I will look at that. As you referred to, we have had a number
of letters recently suggesting such a twinning programme and as
I alluded to in a previous answer we fund the Commonwealth Local
Government Good Practice Scheme which has about 34 capacity-building
projects in a range of Commonwealth countries. If I may, can I
bring Mr Samiullah in on your suggestion about twinning?
Q197 Chairman:
Before you do could I just finish this point. There are a number
of actual pilot schemes that local authorities have run themselves
so they would be able to show you that this is how it works, so
what we are really saying is maybe you could assist them with
one or two more partners from a DFID perspective. Mr Samiullah,
do you want to say something about that?
Mr Samiullah: I just wanted to
say something about the context within which these pilots function.
Often it is necessary to ensure that it is part of the process
which is looking at the wider development needs of the city, so
the work might well demonstrate how you can plan, how you can
book-keep better, basic functions like that. But it works much
better if it is in the context of looking at an overall urban
development portfolio, a potential lending package coming from
a multilateral development bank and then specific capacity-building
needs are identified and that is where those linkages are made,
to fill that. Just doing capacity-building in particular areas,
where the context is against success, is less effective.
Mr Thomas: What I would add, Mr
Bruce, is that there are various other twinning programmes where
expertise is shared, and health is one such where there are some
fantastic examples of co-operation between the UK health trusts
and hospitals or clinics in developing countries. There are also
some not very good examples of work there as well, so as I say
I am not against the idea and I will take away what I assume will
be a suggestion from the Committee that we look into doing more
work in this area.
Chairman: Just a point of clarification,
you mentioned earlier in your response "twinning". We
are not talking abut twinning, we are talking about technical
transfers, we are talking about people going to do specific projects
wherever, which will be for a particular purpose in different
places, not twinning of towns in various ways.
Q198 Hugh Bayley:
Some little while ago you mentioned, Minister, the importance
of strengthening the quality of local governance, and it seems
to me that that is absolutely essential if you are going to have
a joined-up approach in urban areas between a whole range of services.
If local government does not have the skills and the political
will to take a lead you will not get a joined-up approach, so
it seems to me it is not just a matter of transferring technical
skills, skills about the administration of schools, sending out
water engineers or environmental health officers, it is a matter
of improving both at political level and at top management level
the quality of governance within city structures. Your department
in the last White Paper signalled the importance of governance
and you have taken some important initiatives to work in the field
of parliamentary capacity-building. I wonder what work you have
done and intend to do to strengthen the capacity at both the political
level and at the level of local government officials to strengthen
the quality of city governance in these key strategic cities,
these mega-cities.
Mr Thomas: There is a series of
examples where we have programmes to strengthen government or
governance at a local level. I can think of programmes in Pakistan
and in Afghanistan which, forgive me, I will have to drop the
Committee a note about by way of example, but as I said in my
opening remarks there is a piece of work which I have asked officials
to begin to think about around what else we could do in terms
of city governance more generally, because I do think the pace
of urbanisation is such that as well as quite rightly focusing
on parliamentary strengthening and the institutions that underpin
parliaments, be it national audit offices et cetera, we do need
to start thinking about, in particular, city level governance.
I accept there is a challenge around local government but my instinct
is that the particular need is around big cities going forward
given the pace of urbanisation in a Lagos or a Nairobi or indeed
elsewhere. As I say, it is very early days in terms of that work
but I have asked officials to begin to do something. If you will
forgive me, I am not going to try and give you any greater sense
of detail because I cannot do that at this stage. Mr Samiullah
has just pointed out to me box 5 in the memorandum[4]
in terms of work on local government in Faisalabad.
Chairman: Yes, I saw that. Thank you.
Q199 John Battle:
Encouragingly, right at the beginning you made an important emphasis
that has come through what you said about relating to the people
on the ground, and I just want to ask a little bit about supporting
community-led initiatives, not least because DFID has got a reputation
internationally for championing bottom-up strategies and tapping
into people, listening to the poorest to make sure that their
voices catch light and go up through the structures rather than
being the old top down approach. I just wondered what more we
could do to support that. You mentioned India—in places
like India and Bangladesh there is some of the best community
development work in the world, better than in Britain. They have
organised and they have got the Slum and Shack Dwellers International—they
have set up a fund called the Urban Poor Fund International and
that transfers capital directly to slum dwellers that are working
on urban improvement schemes with local and municipal government
at a local level, again from the base. I am not asking for amounts
of money but what criteria would you use in DFID to decide whether
to support their initiatives or not if they put forward proposals.
Mr Samiullah: If I could say something
about the context for India because that has been the development
learning place for the world over a series of generations of programmes,
from early city block slum upgrading, dealing with sewers in small
towns like Cuttack and Cochin to the Andhra Pradesh Urban Services
Programme, which was the genesis of people's empowerment. It was
a £90 million programme over about five years in 32 class
one towns initially—towns of about 300,000 population—where
of the £90 million portfolio £15 million was allocated
to all the towns to build capacity to the local officials, to
teach people a little bit about democracy—you do not need
to do much of that in India in terms of teaching. We then had
a challenge fund which said that we would pay for half the capital
costs of upgrading any slum in their town, but it was first come,
first served in terms of if you prepared a credible municipal
action plan—a MAP it was called—to actually identify
a business plan for the town, and the capacity building helped
the towns to do that, we said the first towns to do this can actually
have that money. It was competitive and about eight of the towns
swept in and took quite a lot of the pot, which generated all
kinds of voice and interest. That sort of process is something
that the Government of India has taken up in this national programme,
the Jawaharlal Nehru National Development Programme for Mega Cities
really and then the other cities. So we would try and put our
development in the context of working with an agreed strategy
with the Government of India in that particular case. Then if
there were specific initiatives that came from that—we have
worked in the past with SPARC,[5]
for example, in Mumbai and groups like that, like Shack—if
they were consistent with a portfolio that had been agreed—there
is a big programme in Calcutta for example, an urban environment
programme there—that would be the mechanism by which they
would get access to money. It is to identify the framework that
had been designed for that support and then bid to that framework,
and through the local management unit then have that negotiation.
1 UN Development Programme Back
2
UN Children's Fund Back
3
Local Government Assocation Back
4
Ev 79 Back
5
Society for Promotion of Area Resources Centres. Back
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