Examination of Witnesses (Questions 340
- 359)
TUESDAY 7 JULY 2009
BILL RAMMELL
MP, RT HON
LORD MALLOCH-BROWN,
KCMG, MICHAEL FOSTER
MP, MR RICHARD
TEUTEN, BRIGADIER
GORDON MESSENGER
DSO, OBE, ADC, AND MR
NICK PICKARD
Q340 Chairman:
Even for homeland security.
Bill Rammell: I am talking specifically
within this remit and I am not at all convinced that by appointing
a senior official within the Cabinet Office you would add value
to what is being done. Ultimately, this is about political will.
It is about the relevant secretaries of state coming together
and pushing and persuading their Whitehall departments to break
down the barriers, to cut through the bureaucracy, to challenge
the cultures and say, "you have got to work at it in this
way". No amount of structural re-orientation is a substitute
for that.
Chairman: I think we would accept it
is about political will. What we are trying to get at is whether
that political will exists.
Q341 Mr Holloway:
Political will! Call it leadership. Who is leading?
Lord Malloch-Brown: Look, the
country is at war: the Prime Minister is leading it.
Mr Holloway: If so, it has not been very
successful. On the political level we have had a tribal revolt
since 2006. If you talk to an ordinary person in Helmand—I
have done it—they would say there has been nothing meaningful
to them. Violence is massively up in Helmand since 2006. We are
losing the consent of the people and there is a great drive of
radicalisation, not just in southern and eastern Afghanistan but
also across the region. There is an urgent need for leadership,
not promptings and meetings and persuading, but leadership. Where
is it coming from?
Q342 Chairman:
Minister, can you answer the ministerial question within that
because we will be coming on to some of the other issues?
Lord Malloch-Brown: First, I really
would dispute that description of the current situation. Britain
went into Helmand because Helmand had become a crisis for ISAF
and for the government in Kabul. It has had tremendous difficulty
getting on top of the situation, there is no doubt about that,
but remember this was a late developing front, and the conflict
in Helmand has characterised the last few years. It is not something
that has been a feature of the conflict from the start. In recent
weeks and months, a US/UK operation has demonstrated a huge military
surge to expand control and provide security to people, and that
is being backed up by, again, a US/UK and allies' development
push. In that sense the problem that you describe, Mr Holloway,
has been recognised and addressed. Frankly, the politics of co-ordination
of that has very much come at the level of President Obama and
his conversations with our Prime Minister, backed up by the conversations
of the two Foreign Secretaries and Defence Secretaries. This turning
of the corner, if that is what it proves to be—and I hope
it does—comes from agreements at that top level of government,
between the two governments.
Q343 Mr Holloway:
Who is providing leadership? That was my question. There is no
way the Prime Minister can be focused on this the correct amount,
and then it just becomes a sort of amorphous mass of people having
meetings telling one another what they have been doing in the
past few weeks.
Lord Malloch-Brown: Look, I say
again, I do not think that when you have a war of this scale on
it is something that is easily delegated. You have the Prime Minister
and the three Secretaries of State who, in a sense, have put themselves
on the line for the quality of our engagement for leadership—
Mr Holloway: It is our soldiers who are
putting themselves on the line, and we are failing to provide
leadership to sort this problem out. They are the ones on the
line.
Chairman: Allow the Minister to answer.
Mr Holloway: Can I just—
Q344 Chairman:
No, allow the Minister to answer.
Lord Malloch-Brown: Look, I just
do not accept that interpretation. What we hear is the soldiers
feel that there is additional support coming through in terms
of equipment, despite the tragic deaths of this week, that there
is a sense of us getting on top of this problem.
Q345 Mr Jenkin:
Can I just point out, you keep mentioning the three Secretaries
of State but, with the greatest respect to the three Ministers
present in front of us, the Secretaries of State have sent their
Junior Ministers to this Committee, which underlines that this
is not regarded in Whitehall as a top issue and yet we are losing
our soldiers on the front line in Afghanistan because there is
a failure of direction.
Bill Rammell: In my experience
as a Minister, most of the work at select committees is done by
ministers of state and parliamentary under secretaries. Rightly
or wrongly, it is not the practice generally for secretaries of
state to come to select committees.
Lord Malloch-Brown: I would just
add that there are the travel schedules of the Ministers as well,
the Secretaries of State. The Defence Secretary was in Afghanistan
last week. The Foreign Secretary is in Pakistan today. I do not
think there is any lack of commitment to this.
Michael Foster: Can I just add
that in terms of how DFID is structured, country responsibility
for Afghanistan is my responsibility, as is the Stabilisation
Unit, which is the reason I am appearing.
Q346 Robert Key:
Chairman could I turn to the nuts and bolts of this and turn to
Richard Teuten for some questions about the Stabilisation Unit.
Back in 1974, when the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit was set
up, it was all very focused; and then in 2007 it was renamed the
Stabilisation Unit, and it was in support of the management of
the Ministry of Defence's budget called the Stabilisation Aid
Fund, which had a budget of £269 million that year. What
is the budget today of the Stabilisation Unit?
Mr Teuten: It was set up in 2004.
When it was set up, it had only a small catalytic budget of its
own, though much of its work is in support of the design and delivery
of programmes funded by the Stabilisation Aid Fund. As was discussed
at the briefing with Permanent Secretaries, the value of the Stabilisation
Aid Fund and the Conflict Pools is now £171 million in 2009-10.
Q347 Robert Key:
How many staff in each of the three departments are working on
the Comprehensive Approach?
Mr Teuten: I would say somewhere
between 500 and 1,000, inasmuch as there are over 500 individuals
in conflict-affected and fragile states across the globe. That
figure of 500 does not include those working in Whitehall on those
issues.
Q348 Robert Key:
How are they recruited for this function? Are they all volunteers,
saying, "I really, really want to get involved in the Comprehensive
Approach", or is it part of the line management process that
this year you are going to do the Comprehensive Approach stuff?
How does it work?
Mr Teuten: All are volunteers.
In the Ministry of Defence, for example, they have certain categories
of people working in hostile environments, for which individuals
are encouraged to apply, and then they are vetted for their suitability
for working in that categorisation. In the case of addressing
the needs across Government, the Stabilisation Unit has been given
approval to set up a cadre of civil servants who would work in
the most hostile of environments and, as it so happens, we are
launching that this week at Civil Service Live with an initial
objective of having 200 people available for deployment as a pool
at the end of this year. They will receive specific training in
advance of any assignment, and then additional training specific
to the assignment for which they have successfully applied.
Q349 Robert Key:
Do all these people have a basic introduction and training, and,
if so, who does it, and then they go on to the specific one for
your cadre of 200 people?
Mr Teuten: In the case of the
people for whom the Stabilisation Unit is responsible, we recently
had a substantial uplift in resources to provide additional training.
We are aiming to ensure that at least 40% of the thousand people
on the databases, that we will have achieved by the end of this
year, will receive core training, which comprises training to
work in hostile environments and training to understand the issues
that relate to stabilisation and working across government in
a hostile environment. We will aim to achieve that objective by
the middle of 2011. Already, we have trained a substantial number
of people from across government and from our database of experts
on these courses, and we will increase further the number who
will be trained.
Q350 Robert Key:
Who does the training?
Mr Teuten: The training is outsourced,
so in the case of those three courses I mentioned—there
are two stabilisation courses and the hostile environment course—it
went out to limited UK competition, and two British companies
won each of the two bids.
Q351 Robert Key:
It is basically a privatised operation. Which companies are these?
Mr Teuten: Coffey/GroundTruth
won the most recent bid for the hostile environment training course,
and Cranfield University the stabilisation planning course. We
did design the stabilisation planning course in-house over a two-year
period. Once we felt we had got the content right, it was felt
that it would offer much better value for money to enable the
private sector, or the not-for-profit sector in this case, to
provide the course.
Q352 Robert Key:
Is the UK Defence Academy at Shrivenham involved in this?
Mr Teuten: The UK Defence Academy
has been involved in designing the syllabuses, yes, and we continue
to engage with them in the development of their own courses, so
there is a very good two-way mutual exchange of knowledge between
ourselves and them.
Q353 Robert Key:
How many of your trained personnel are currently deployed in Afghanistan?
Mr Teuten: There are about 40
individuals from our database and our own unit in Afghanistan.
There are also four members of DFID in the Helmand Provincial
Reconstruction Team.
Q354 Robert Key:
The conditions under which they are going to live and operate
in, in for example Afghanistan, are very harsh and very difficult.
How big is, if I may put it like this, the drop-out rate from
those who initially are assigned to Afghanistan and who find that
it is hard to cope?
Mr Teuten: Between 5-10%.
Q355 Robert Key:
That is very low.
Mr Teuten: Well, we go through
a process of interviewing and checking the individuals before
they are deployed. We also test their resilience to stress on
the hostile environment training course, which includes some quite
unpleasant scenarios such as kidnap, so those who are not suited
to stressful situations would normally be screened out through
that process.
Q356 Robert Key:
How many of these people who are deployed in Afghanistan from
each department are fluent Pashtun speakers?
Mr Teuten: We have two members
of the Stabilisation Unit database who are deployed at the moment
in Helmand who are Pashto speakers. We have a total of 19 on our
database.
Q357 Robert Key:
So do you rely on locally recruited interpreters?
Mr Teuten: They play a very important
part, yes.
Q358 Chairman:
How many Dari speakers?
Mr Teuten: I would have to write
to you on that.[1]
The unit is focused at the moment on working in the south where
Pashto is the prime—
Bill Rammell: Bill Jeffrey, who
gave evidence to you, is just in the process of writing to you.
The figure for Pashtun is 264 amongst the military and amongst—
Q359 Mr Holloway:
Fluent?
Bill Rammell: No, there are a
range of—
1 See Ev 157. Back
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