Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
Lord Malloch-Brown and Mr Marcus Manuel
8 NOVEMBER 2007
Q20 Lord Anderson of Swansea: The
great temptation is always to have grand declarations which everyone
rallies around and no implementation. Is it suggested that there
should be various milestones and that stock should be taken at
each one of these? How can one avoid the charge so frequently
levelled: "Grand declaration, no fulfilment?"
Mr Manuel: It is a real danger. This is what
is interesting about the process here, that you have these action
plans on these eight specific areas, which attempt to do that
by setting out what are the expected outcomes, what are the expected
duties.
Q21 Lord Anderson of Swansea: At
each level?
Mr Manuel: Each plan and each sub-component
of each plan.
Q22 Lord Anderson of Swansea: What
would be the monitoring mechanism?
Mr Manuel: There is a broader monitoring mechanism
which is that there are twice yearly troika AU meetings and—this
is one of the really good things that has happened recently—it
is specifically agreed that civil society will be involved in
consultation prior to those troika meetings, both on the EU side
and on the African side. So there is, at the highest level, quite
substantial space for monitoring, even if the details of that
monitoring have not been fully fleshed out.
Q23 Lord Hannay of Chiswick: Could
I preface this by saying it is not Darfur specific because, if
you agree, Minister, we are going to have word about that separately.
What is it doing and what is it planned to do in the strategy
and action plan for enhancing African capabilities in the areas
of peace and security, including peacekeeping? To what extent
is the EU contributing to strengthening African capacity in this
area directly and to what extent is it backing the UN's own ten-year
capacity-building plan for African peacekeeping which was one
of the outcomes of the September summit. As a last and much smaller
question: Are we satisfied that the EU is now properly equipped
in Addis Ababa as we recommended in our report so that the diplomatic
post there that the EU has is not divided in these artificial
divisions between development and security issues and so on and
is actually able to conduct real business with the African Union
institutions in Addis Ababa and, above all, their African security
council and the various mechanisms there?
Lord Malloch-Brown: Let me say that this has
been an area of the preparations in which we in the FCO have been
particularly interested. It will not surprise you that I have
been frustrated now and before between these gaps which have opened
up in African peacekeeping capabilities, where you have to re-hat
something as UN to deal with outstanding funding, training, equipment,
even troop issues. That is creating a perverse incentive, in that
it is undermining Africa's own peacekeeping operations, such as
Somalia, by having people wait until they get re-hatted as a UN
one and it is seen as in better financial shape. Even where the
UN is there ready to write the cheque, there are still threshold
quality and training issues which not all African contributors
can meet, so there are these gaps. When several years ago that
special fund was created to fund African peacekeeping, rather
controversially out of, you will recall, the development side
of things, it was enormously important but it was not a sustainable
structure for the long term. So we have set up in this summit
a kind of ongoing process. To knock off the issues where there
will be cooperation, there is, (1) cooperation between the evolving
AU conflict early warning system and the EU's own early warning
and analysis structures, and (2) EU support for an African standby
force, which would include support to regular training, even civilian
support to the force helping with defining logistics and other
key needs for deployment, et cetera. There is a proposal for a
Euro RECAMP training and validation exercise which is provisionally
planned for 2009. Then a separate part of the draft action plan
deals with the need to address this core question of external
funding for African peacekeeping missions. The EU is currently
itself the single biggest provider of finance for AU peace support
operations, but, as I mentioned, Darfur, Somalia, there are serious
gaps, and, to be honest, there is a particular British interest
here too because we tend to be the financier of last resort. We
go in and we lift a Burundian battalion, as we have just done,
to Somalia, or we put in some support to the Nigerians to allow
them to deploy more urgently to Darfur so we have a double objective
here to get as much of this into a European burden sharing formula
as possible and to consolidate European support for this, but
also look at longer term sustainable mechanisms which we can then
get non European donors to join as well and then finally to work
out what is the long-term relationship between UN funding and
AU peace support operations. I see it as a complex of issues which
is going to need sustained work over time to sort out which is
very urgent. On the Addis issue, obviously we have strongly supported
the need for a strong representative of the EU in Addis who could
speak to all these different integrated elements of EU work with
the AU and we think that individual needs to be in place to follow
up on this summit.
Q24 Lord Hannay of Chiswick: It will
be no surprise to you if I recall that the High-Level Panel of
course recommended that the UN should be prepared on a case-by-case
basis to provide financing for African Union missions. I hope
we are not giving up on that as a long-term objective, even though
there are those who would rather the cup passed away from them
and of course stayed with the EU or with individual countries
like Britain.
Lord Malloch-Brown: I completely support the
objective because it is the ultimate burden sharing. It is a good
deal for Britain to get as much as we can through this. Having
been responsible in the UN ultimately for the fiduciary management
of the UN, there are fairly hair-raising issues that we came across
in our support to the AU's Darfur mission of financial control,
management accountability, et cetera. There is a lot we need to
get done to build up the confidence that we can indeed transfer
money to a regional peacekeeping operation and yet still feel
accountable to our financiers for how that money was spent, but
I think it is very much part of the long-term strategy.
Q25 Lord Anderson of Swansea: Mobility
is crucial for both peacekeeping and responding to natural emergencies.
To what extent would heavy lift and helicopters be part of this
operation? Presumably it is the EU which currently would provide
much of that. Is it proposed that that be transferred to the capability
of Africa-Union countries?
Lord Malloch-Brown: First, it is very important
to separate heavy lift, which is, if you like, the strategic lift
that brings troops in from out of theatre, from Ghana or wherever
into the area where they are to peace keep, and that is not really
a problem. Between us, the Brits, the Americans, the French, we
kind of provide that and the real issue is the close tactical
support which we are seeing becoming such an issue in African
peace keeping, because, you are right, mobility is key and if
you take Darfur—because in a sense it is the clearest expression
of this but the Congo (DRC) is not dissimilar—you have 26,000
troops, if we ever get there, in an area the size of France. So,
still, helicopter mobility is critical to effectiveness and at
this point we have no helicopters for that operation. This is
not a lack of goodwill on anybody's part; it is the Sudanese saying,
"We do not want Western helicopters" and it is, secondly,
a genuine global shortage of helicopters at the moment. We were
debating last night how we have magnificently restored the production
line for these important armoured vehicles in Afghanistan. Frankly,
I think there should be some questions in the Lords about whether
we should not be doing the same on helicopters because it is not
just a British problem. There are not enough in Afghanistan, there
are none for Darfur. I have been having some surreal conversations,
because I took it upon myself to call every country where there
was allegedly a surplus of helicopters to see whether I could
persuade them to make them available for Darfur. First, I had
to knock off the lists the ones we are already trying to head
out to help in Afghanistan. Then it became surreal when people
said, "We kicked the tyres and it has not flown for several
years but maybe with a little mechanical help we could get it
airborne again." It is just not what you want to hear when
you have an operation which we had promised to get deployed in
the next few months. I think this lift issue is a key thing. It
is not that there is some great pool of European helicopters that
we are applying to these operations.
Q26 Lord Anderson of Swansea: Not
even with the Ukraine and Russian surplus Antonovs?
Lord Malloch-Brown: The Ukrainians are looking
at what they can provide but they are quite heavily involved already.
I hesitate to say where, but they already have several major deployments,
so even they, who are the usual fallback, say they do not have
spare capacity at the moment. They have the very, very, very big
ones but they do not have those able to do this quick movement
of people and support that we need.
Q27 Lord Crickhowell: It is a very
depressing comment you make. Some of us were asking these questions
that you say we should be asking of the minister two years ago
and we are not really much further down the road than we were
then.
Lord Malloch-Brown: Mine, just for clarity,
is a slightly different question because I do not see this as
a British problem, I see it as a European and a global problem
that we need to address.
Q28 Chairman: This may be something
on which we need to come back within the discussions within the
European Defence Agency and elsewhere, because it does seem to
me that we should take that up with MoD ministers in due course.
Mr Manuel has already covered the mechanisms which exist to ensure
the implementation of the summit conference but I wonder whether
you or Mr Manuel would like to say something about what particular
role you see for the United Kingdom in implementing the strategy
and action plan.
Mr Manuel: This is a question we are actively
debating now. Having achieved four new action plans and got the
Millennium Development Goals and peace and security on the table,
which we are very pleased about, the question is just how to follow
up. At the moment, it seems to me, there are two options, one
of which is that we, having got them on the table, encourage other
people to take ownership for them and to take them forward. That
might be the most productive way to achieve momentum. The other
would be to put our own hand up and say, "Yes, fine, we will
take an active lead on working with this action plan" and
that is the debate that we are currently having as to what is
the most effective way forward to do this.
Chairman: It may well be that the Committee would
want to come back and talk to you again about that at a later
date. I wonder if we could go on. Lord Tomlinson.
Q29 Lord Tomlinson: Minister, it
appears that not all EU Member States are fulfilling the commitments
that they have signed up to concerning the financing of development,
including the long-term allocation of 0.7% of GNI to ODA. What
is your opinion of how far the other EU Member States are on track
to meet their obligations? What pressure are we exercising here
on those that we perceive to be potential backsliders?
Lord Malloch-Brown: Let me first, if I may Lord
Tomlinson, give you the factual answer and then a little interpretive
analysis. In general, last year was quite good because the Commission's
report in May showed that for the years 2005-06 the EU exceeded
the target it agreed to in 2002, which required it to have got
EU-ODA to an average of 0.39% by 2006, but with two significant
buts: (i) the debt relief for Nigeria and Iraq was a significant
surge in this figures and (ii) three Member States, Greece, Italy
and Portugal, missed their agreed targets for 2006. It is not
as good as the superficial figures would suggest. In fact, we
would expect overall numbers to be down in 2007 because of the
big debt relief numbers phasing out of the numbers. For some years
British ministers have been pressing the quality of aid issues,
that we have to make sure that as debt relief phases down new,
fresh monies phase in, which is a lot more expensive money than
debt relief and therefore a lot harder to force out of the political
systems. Two points: one obviously Britain is trying to lead by
example. It has a pretty good track record. DFID ministers are
quite rightly embarrassed by their success in the spending round
and coyer about it than you might expect them to be because they
have won very significant increases which are consistent with
the commitments made at Gleneagles and which will keep us on track
to make the 0.56% and then the 0.7% by 2013. Secondly, very important
is what the Prime Minister did in his visit to New York by declaring
an MDG emergency. He is personally very seized, as the two secretaries
of state are, with this view that somehow some of the focus on
poverty reduction, aid levels has been lost since Gleneagles.
Partly it is climate change—a nice problem to have but another
terribly important global priority muscles its way to the front
of the discussion and it has had the unintended consequence of
perhaps putting poverty back a bit more in the shadows. We feel
that through pushing for a summit level discussion of MDG progress
next summer at the UN, we will put the political spotlight back
on this and tee up a G8 recommitment to this and a European recommitment
and, also, with all the new oil wealth created, try to get some
new donors to play a much more active role on this. I think the
honest answer is we are not doing as well as we want but we are
in a hugely improved position than we were a few years ago.
Q30 Lord Tomlinson: In order to meet
the goal of 2013, there is an accelerating demand as you approach
2013. If at the relative early stages of this process we are backsliding,
is the problem not going to get significantly worse in the run-up
to 2013?
Lord Malloch-Brown: Again, I think that is why
the Prime Minister has decided to make a real political push on
this over the next year essentially. I think this is why he called
it an MDG emergency because I think he accepts the logic of your
point, that, unless we make a push now with spending plans tending
to have two or three year trajectories and with possibly economic
conditions in the West getting harder and tighter, if we do not
kind of put our foot down and make a fuss and push, we will indeed
face a growing gap between commitments and what has been put on
the table.
Q31 Chairman: Mr Manuel, would you
like to add anything on this particular point?
Mr Manuel: There is a real political challenge
out there. The challenge is political and for all our colleagues
to meet what they promised. The fact that the UK has, is making
a big difference. I was in Tokyo and they said to me, "Yes,
we noticed, the UK is now the second largest bilateral donor in
the world. We used to be that and we are now fifth." That
has a real impact. Leading by example really does make a difference.
Q32 Lord Tomlinson: You immediately
demanded that they told you what they were doing to restore their
second position.
Mr Manuel: Absolutely. Of course. I was there
talking to them 14 months in advance of them presiding over the
G8, which was trying to encourage them in that process.
Q33 Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean:
Minister, do we have the capacity to spend it properly? It
is all very well getting the money, but one of the things I found
really depressing when I was a minister was going out to the UN
and talking about money that we were putting into projects and,
frankly, feeling somewhat less than confident that chaps and,
indeed, chapesses on the other side of the table really knew what
the projects were in which they should be investing. And I thought
we had a lot more expertise at home than they did there.
Lord Malloch-Brown: You know, that is one more
reason why I regret that you would never come and talk to me when
you came to the UN!
Q34 Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean:
A good side-stepping answer, but ...
Lord Malloch-Brown: Let me just say that obviously
part of the DFID strategy—and I am again going to turn to
Marcus, but as there is a political level to it let me address
it first—is to rely growingly on multilateral vehicles for
financing—which is not just the UN, it is the World Bank
and the other development banks as well—and it is to rely
on growing amounts of direct budget support to countries which
we feel meet the conditions of governance and judiciary, et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera. In that sense, we can ramp up spending through
tested vehicles and I think we want to do that wherever we prudently
can. I would make the plea for the multilateral that, from the
recipient's point of view, to get a single seamless funding strategy
for your health sector or education sector rather than a DFID
bit and a French bit and an American bit is a hugely important
improvement in good donorship, because it allows them a huge reduction
in the transaction costs and the competing priorities of different
donors, et cetera, et cetera. I think you will find that there
is a great support for these multilateral mechanisms amongst the
countries on the other end, that they like to make this work.
But to take the UN point: the Prime Minister was on a panel that
the Secretary General organised last year to look at how to make
the UN perform better at the country level, because we recognised
on the UN side that if we were to be the home for more funds we
had to perform better; we had to raise our game. I think that
has to happen. DFID, if I might say so, having been on the other
end, is a hugely competent department. It is viewed as the best
bilateral development agency by those of us at the multilateral
end of things but obviously it is going to have a challenge of
ramping up its expenditure at a very rapid rate. I am sure all
of you there are kind of making sure you do it without accidents
en route.
Mr Manuel: In terms of where DFID is, one of
the things the UK has been leading on has been looking at the
relative effectiveness of different multilaterals because using
extra aid money well is incredibly important. We have been doing
a process of how do you rank the EC, the World Bank versus the
African Development Bank versus UNDP versus the Global Health
Fund, et cetera, et cetera, and that is being used now for ministers
who are precisely discussing these issues in DFID, with the settlement
as to how the money should be exactly used across the different
spending processes so that we are making sure that we are using
it most effectively on the multilateral side. One of the issues
also within DFID is: What should the balance be between the multilateral
and the bilateral? That will again take into account what the
relative effectiveness and efficiency is, and country offices
have come back to the ministers saying, "If we had more money,
this is the sort of thing we would want to spend it on and this
is how we could do it." Having worked both for developing
country governments and also for the UK and watched different
country programmes, I have no doubt that we could use the money
really well. We are sitting on projects that we are having to
turn down. The worst was when we had to halve what we were going
to give for malarial bed nets in one country because we just did
not have enough money. There are projects that clearly just need
to be done and that is just one example, but the infrastructure
needs or anything else, there are so many different things that
could be done and I think there are now much better international
structures for managing that.
Chairman: We are coming up against time
constraints but I know I have supplementaries from both Lord Crickhowell
and Lord Lea.
Q35 Lord Crickhowell: Clearly, as
the biggest donor with an efficient department we are quite good
at selecting where we want the money to go and the projects. I
am interested in the audit process. I imagine we are also quite
good at making sure that our money is being spent, having got
it to projects, where it should be spent. The question I have,
because this is a Committee dealing with the EU, is whether EU
aid is being effectively audited so that we know that it is going
to where it should be going and it is being spent where we thought
it was going to be spent.
Mr Manuel: For us the biggest and best way of
monitoring and evaluating aid is being out in the field to see
what is happening. I think the biggest change that we have pressed
for and we are pleased to see in terms of the EC is that there
is now much more decentralisation of their aid management processes.
In 2002 only 24% of the European Development Fund was being managed
by delegations and now we have revised that to 82%. In that sense,
you can have auditing processes but what you want before the auditing
processes is the people who are going to manage it who are designing
it and working on it. If you have those people in Brussels, if
you get them out of Brussels and you put them in the country,
from our view that is by far the best way of taking it forward.
There are, in addition, a range of audit processes that continue
and are being strengthened and worked on. We recognise there has
been a real improvement in the effectiveness of EC aid and that
is our perception as to how we measure it at a global level and
also what we talk about when we work with delegations in the field
and we see what is happening. Could more be done? Yes, I am sure.
That is why we will continue to press for better auditing and
better monitoring processes.
Q36 Lord Lea of Crondall: Minister,
every report we have done—and we have done a succession
of reports on the effectiveness of EU aid—reaches one conclusion
among others, that you cannot have this debate going on endlessly
about bilateral versus multilateral because in Burundi you just
cannot have 28 countries telling you different ways of doing auditing.
You really have to have EU policies. I am not posing EU versus
the UN versus the World Bank or anything like that, but you certainly
need a very strong multilateral element. To say that we are more
effective than doing it through the EU is a false dichotomy but
another example of where the EU will have a bigger role in the
future. Going back to your remark, is it not the case that when
you said that the climate change and the Stern Review and so on
have started to leap up the agenda and, if we are not careful,
will displace MDGs that is partly the fact that the MDGs are failing
in Africa? I think on the last statistics it is going to be 30
years before most of sub-Saharan Africa, on present trends, will
get there and some GDP per head of growth rates—per head
is the obvious statistic we need—are only 1% or something.
Therefore, is it not the case that, far from saying that sustainable
development and climate change is somehow edging something off
the agenda, given the importance of the CO2 question—and
you and I were at the same discussion yesterday with Professor
Stern—it is essential that we integrate the climate change/sustainability
agenda and population growth and the whole problem, otherwise
Africa will have a population bigger than India or China, and,
as somebody said in Ghana, "They'll all come here, if we
don't do something over there." So is it not essential to
include in our thinking what is essential in the next 20 years
for African nations themselves as well as for us? We have to put
a huge amount of money into the carbon tax and this has to be
thought through quite urgently now.
Lord Malloch-Brown: I completely agree. I think
the difficulty is that at both ends public opinions are a little
too quick to look at these as alternatives rather than the two
sides of the same coin. There is a little bit in Western public
opinion and we are preoccupied with climate change: we see it
as a very Western story about our own low carbon economy. To the
extent we see it having a developing country dimension, it is
India and China belching noxious gases into the air but it is
not viewed as an African issue, and on the Africa side that is
understood to mean, "Ah, typical rich man's problem. You
are no longer thinking about Africa." But, in fact, as Nick
Stern was arguing in front of both of us yesterday, it has a huge
African dimension. It may not be an African-made problem but it
is going to be a problem with an African consequence in terms
of water, agricultural productivity, et cetera. So, yes, we need
to reattach to the word "development" the word which
has come detached in recent years "sustainable", sustainable
development, because we need a development model which has a vision
of what are the useable sustainable water and agricultural strategies
available to Africa. I agree, it should not be an either or, it
is both.
Chairman: I will move on now to a question
on Darfur. We have two or three other questions to which we may
have a chance to return but there is a time constraint. Lord Hannay.
Q37 Lord Hannay of Chiswick: There
are two things I would like to ask you about Darfur, Minister.
First of all, how confident are we that the resolution which has
now been adopted by unanimity for a deployment there of a hybrid
force will take place broadly as planned and on schedule and will
it work when it has been deployed? The second question is what
can Britain and the EU do to bring some influence to bear on the
rebel groups who have not been so far prepared to participate
in Serte conference and so on? Is there any way they can be influenced
so that the Sudanese Government is not left sitting looking as
if it is the peacemaker when in fact it has been the cause of
the problem all along?
Lord Malloch-Brown: Let me just say, if I may
that obviously the two are very interrelated because the resolution
1769 very rightly tackled all three fronts. It said that it has
to be a political process; there has to be peace keeping to support
principally the outcome of that political process; and there must
be an economic recovery process as well. I think that was one
of the reasons this was a much more successful resolution than
the earlier one. The second thing is it pulled punches on certain
enforcement issues in order to make sure that we got China and
the Arab and African members of the Council to join us in a 15
to zero outcome, because we felt that was critical to showing
the Sudanese community that the international community was united
and would not blink. Where we stand is that on troop deployment
it is falling behind schedule. The AU and UN agreed on a force
composition which was largely but not exclusively African and
would include such things as a Swedish/Norwegian engineering troop,
Nepalese and Thai battalions and some other critical components
to its effectiveness. There are two obstacles to its deployment
at this stage. One is that the Sudanese are still fighting over
the non-African components of it, and, second, we have not found
the helicopters. So the Secretary General, when he complains about
this distributes his complaints probably around those two objectives:
one, Sudanese problem; one, problem at the international community.
We are pushing to try to overcome both issues. I have talked to
the Sudanese several times, including to President Bashir, about
the force composition issue and tried to get them down off their
high horse on this and to say that this force meets the requirement
of the resolution which is a predominantly African character,
et cetera, but we are not there yet and we really feel we cannot
compromise any more and that the UN should not compromise any
more because otherwise Bashir will feel that he can get away with
whatever he wants on these things. On the Serte talks, by contrast
the government has done rather well. It showed up at a very senior
level, it offered a ceasefire of the rebel groups.
Q38 Chairman: The Sudanese government.
Lord Malloch-Brown: The Sudanese government.
Their delegation was led by their main Darfur political person
and presidential aide called Nafi Ali Nafi. They offered a ceasefire
to the rebel groups who were also at the talks. But it was contingent
on not being shot at, the fighting not spreading into Kurdufan,
and did not cover the groups who were not at the talks. The problem
was that, even if this was an important progress on the Government's
side, the rebels behaved dismally and the main groups stayed out
with completely impossible demands of saying they would only come
if there was peace first, that the UN had managed to establish
security across the country. As a consequence of that, the UN
and AU have sent delegations of their negotiators to Juba and
somewhere else—I forget where—where the rebels are
to try to persuade them to come into the talks, and we are deliberately
avoiding kind of letting the train leave the station and giving
the rebels a last chance to get on the train but it is the view
of the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary that if the rebels
continue to hold out they would be as liable to be sanctioned
in some way as the government. There has to be even-handed pressure
on both sides. We are very worried about the situation. There
is more displacement going on. There has been violence in the
camps and now, overnight, the Sudanese government appears to have
expelled the senior UN humanitarian official in Southern Darfur.
As always with this, it is a step forward or maybe two steps forward
and then a step back. The situation is not great.
Q39 Chairman: Thank you very much
indeed. Minister, I know you have to be away by noon so I would
like to thank you very much indeed. I am sorry we have not had
a chance to ask you all the questions that we had hoped to. If
there are any points that you feel we could have covered and we
have not and you wanted to write to us, we would obviously appreciate
it, but we are very grateful to you and we look forward to seeing
you on a number of future occasions.
Lord Malloch-Brown: I appreciate it.
Chairman: Mr Manuel, we are also very
pleased to have DFID officials in front of us and we are hoping
to see DFID officials again later in November to discuss other
matters with them. We are very glad we are fulfilling all three
of our responsibilities. Thank you very much indeed.
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