Oral evidence - Conflict, Stability and Security Fund – Annual Report 2017-18

David Lidington MP, Dr Christian Turner and Joëlle Jenny.

Q1 Chair: Thank you all for coming. We are grateful to you. As you know, this is an issue that the Committee has considered in the past, and the Government have kindly responded to our concerns. Now that things have been going for rather longer, we thought that it was time, especially in the aftermath of the annual report, to return to the issues.

The first question I would like to put is whether national security objectives and UK aid objectives are given equal weight in the design and allocation of funding for CSSF programmes. Could you slightly separate the answers? I am interested in both the design of the programmes and the allocation of funding.

David Lidington MP: First, might it be easier, Chair, to allow my officials to introduce themselves for the record?

Chair: By all means.

Dr Christian Turner: I am the deputy national security adviser and now SRO for the fund.

Joëlle Jenny: I am the head of the joint fund unit overseeing the CSSF and the prosperity fund.

David Lidington MP: I shall ask Christian and Joëlle to comment further on the detail. The quick answer to your question, Chair, is yes. As you know, and as the Committee knows, the National Security Council sets the overall priorities for the joint funds. They have to be spent in accordance with national priorities, as determined by the NSC. The country’s aid development priorities are part of what the NSC routinely considers, whether it looks at our national security interests in particular regions or countries, or more thematically. Since the Committee’s previous report, we have tried to ensure that we are able to demonstrate, and are more transparent in our reporting of, the relationship between what is being spent and both the aid and the overall national security objectives.

Joëlle Jenny: You have probably seen from the annual report that the split on funding between official development assistance—ODA—funding and non-ODA funding is roughly equal. Absolutely all ODA money that is spent has to comply with official development assistance requirements. It is part of the scrutiny process for any bid submitted, particularly if it is funded from ODA, that it must be entirely in line with the requirements of the international development Act.

Dr Christian Turner: To go to the heart of the question, there is no rigid approach between the five objectives such that we break them down and say, “This proportion must be on number 1 and this on number 3”. They cover the totality of the work. The strategies are directed by the National Security Council and the council’s 16 current priorities that flow from that. There will be overlap across several of the strategies to our five objectives, rather than a set weighting that says that we will give a bit more to the national security ones or the ODA ones.

Chair: Are you pretty confident that there is a seamless web between the design of programmes and the allocation of funding?

Dr Christian Turner: The intent is certainly to make it seamless. Since becoming SRO, I have tried to try to put further governance in place to make sure that in any advice we give the new ministerial committee we are sure that it is the case. In reviewing the allocations and the programme, I sat down with the SROs for all the national security priorities, including all the DfID representatives, to look across the piece, and make sure that we are happy at director-general level, and that there is the right lay-down and we are not missing gaps. We should not be adjusting the overall direction set by the NSC and the ministerial committee.

David Lidington MP: When the National Security Council agreed the fusion doctrine earlier this year—from memory, at an April meeting—it was intended to give a very clear direction to Whitehall across all government departments that we wanted things to operate in that seamless way. I shall not claim that there are no improvements we need to continue to work on, but there has been recognition of the need to make fusion a reality in how we go about implementing policies, and to try to get away from looking at things in different silos.

Q2 Lord Harris of Haringey: How do you explain the persistent perception that the CSSF does not give sufficient priority to longer-term activity such as conflict prevention?

David Lidington MP: It is for the people who make the criticism to justify that. A balance has to be struck. It is important that the CSSF has available to it funds that can be deployed in rapid response. We perhaps saw that most obviously in the response to Hurricane Irma; the fact that there was CSSF money that could be spent quickly enabled us to gear up to help British Overseas Territories that had been badly affected, more rapidly than if we had gone through the normal, formal departmental processes. As the National Security Council priorities work their way through the new system, and the governance structure that Christian sketched, involving SROs for each programme, becomes more embedded, we will see more shorter-term plans reinforcing some of the longer-term strategic objectives.

Dr Christian Turner: I agree. One unique aspect of the fund as we have developed it over the past three years is its agility, and its ability to take risks and surge where we need it. The response to Hurricane Irma through the rapid response mechanism was a good example. At the same time, all the theory of change we are looking at, and all the advice from the latest conflict commission in Oxford and the OECD, is that we need multi-year programming. Clearly, the goal for all these programmes has to be that we are learning and building that effect over time.

There is tension between those two things. As SRO, I worry that the programme can quickly get set in its ways and will sit doing the same thing. We have to do a job to interrogate that. Joëlle may have the precise figure, but, unless she corrects me, I think that about 80% of our programming is on a multi-year basis—which is long term, as it should be.

Joëlle Jenny: It is an important question, given what the fund has been established to do. It is important to make sure that we protect enough funding for the more discrete, low-key interventions that can really have an impact on conflict prevention. The numbers may be a little misleading when you look at the breakdown, because some of the most effective, local-level peacebuilding and conflict prevention support costs very little money, so it does not necessarily come through very visibly in the reporting. I can give you examples of work that the fund is doing at local level—for example, in Colombia—where the area was formerly held by the FARC, to create socioeconomic conditions that prevent a return to the fighting or that enable people to travel to the truth commission.

Similar work is happening in Yemen, where the fund has been able to support women and establish an organisation of women who are now accredited to the UN and support the special envoy, Martin Griffiths. You know how difficult it is to get the voice of women at the negotiating table. With a little money, you can have a real impact. For example, work has been done in Jordan to maintain the pre-war level of social services. We know how strategic a partner Jordan is, and how important it is to help Jordan cope with the enormous influx of refugees, given how disruptive that could be if it led to people feeling that their basic services were not being provided. The CSSF has been able to provide funding that has assisted 4.2 million Jordanians to maintain a pre-war level of access to basic services.

I shall not bore you, but there are a lot of similar examples around the world, and I am very happy to give more. Because they are small amounts of money, they are not necessarily visible. Work is being done on early warning in South Sudan, in Ukraine and so forth. It is absolutely critical; we need to get it right and maintain scrutiny to make sure that we continue to protect the money for more discrete and longer-term peacebuilding work.

Lord Harris of Haringey: Can I pick up the point that Dr Turner made about 80%, or thereabouts, of the funding being multi-year? Of course, multi-year could simply mean that it spans the end of one accounting period; it could be a six-month programme that just happens to fall into two financial years. Can you give us the proportion of programmes that last longer than 12 months, 18 months or two years—some sort of breakdown—to get an idea of the number of programmes that genuinely enable some longer-term engagement to take place?

Dr Christian Turner: I do not have that figure; Joëlle might. From my experience, I would expect nearly all of the 80% to be genuinely multi-year, rather than over the span of the year. When I was high commissioner in Kenya, we had a programme that was starting, and there were some projects in year 1 that inevitably, after review, we decided were not worth continuing because the evidence was not there. Now the fund is more mature; we have a better evidence base and have learned some lessons, so most interventions are multi-year rather than just six months. If you want the figure, we can try to provide it.

Lord Harris of Haringey: It would be useful to have that information. Are you confident, therefore, that the annual budget and reporting cycles do not hinder a longer-term focus?

Dr Christian Turner: Yes.

Chair: It would be very helpful to have the information. Thank you.

Q3 Dr Julian Lewis: Is it possible to quantify what proportion or percentage of CSSF programmes in the last financial year were focused on counterterrorism or countering violent extremism?

Joëlle Jenny: In the year 2017-18, on countering extremism it was 2% of the fund. There is also funding going into that through a geographic allocation, not a thematic allocation. The 2% figure I have given you is for the global programme, as we call it. A fair amount of work also happens through the Middle East and North Africa strategy. If it is helpful, we can certainly go through the numbers and give you a detailed breakdown.

Dr Julian Lewis: Could you give us an idea about how the fund works to that effect? In particular, it has been put to the Committee that there might be occasions when we find ourselves, because of the immediate need to counter terrorism and violent extremism, supporting separatist groups in places such as Iraq that are fighting Daesh, although in the long term, by supporting them, we might be undermining the integrity and stability of the countries concerned. How do you deal with such tension?

Joëlle Jenny: Your question goes to the heart of some of the challenges that we face with the fund. It is inevitable that we have to take a degree of risk. The very purpose of a fund that can work to counter violent extremism or terrorism is defeated if we shy away from difficult dilemmas. We address that through a very robust programming cycle.

When a proposal is made, a very robust assessment takes place of the risk of doing harm. For example, we have developed a methodology to assess the conflict sensitivity of the programme, to be absolutely sure that we understand the socioeconomic context in which the programme is being developed. There is another tool, the OSJA, for assessing any programme that has a security or justice component that includes counterterrorism. There has to be a very robust assessment.

All the evidence needs to inform theories of change and results frameworks that enable us at programme level to take a view on whether the right mitigation measures are in place. There is regular monitoring and evaluation on the ground, including information that would point to diversion of any of the funds. Any high-risk programme is brought to the attention of Ministers since, ultimately, Ministers need to make the decision on whether the level of risk is acceptable or not. There have been instances of programmes that have been stopped, when evidence has come through the regular monitoring process that we were not sufficiently confident that the funds were being used for the purpose for which they were allocated.

Dr Julian Lewis: Let us assume for a second that the funds are being properly used but a genuine balancing of interests has to go on. Let us stick to the example of the Peshmerga, where funds might be applied for approved projects, the effect of which will strengthen the fight against ISIL/Daesh but also, in the medium to long term, might undermine the cohesion of the country we are trying to assist overall. How would you resolve that clash of interests?

David Lidington MP: Ultimately, that is a judgment for the Minister or Ministers in the department with the lead. In the kind of case that Dr Lewis suggests, it would probably fall to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, but, in other circumstances, it might be DfID or, indeed, the Ministry of Defence. In such a case, when there was a conflict between two clear UK government objectives, I would certainly expect officials to take it up to the Minister and present the Minister with the pros and cons. Then the Minister, or, if necessary, the Secretary of State, would have to decide to which interest he or she gave the greater priority.

The most important thing, as Dr Lewis’s question highlighted, is that risk and the management of risk is inherent in the intention and design of the CSSF. In certain programmes, it might involve us working, in the aftermath of conflict, with some groups that might have a chequered record, to try to promote conflict resolution and reconciliation. It involves us having to work with Governments about whose internal human rights record we might have some reservations. The test is whether we have in place the analytical tools to enable us to ask ourselves serious questions when we spend money, and, in reviewing the progress of such programmes, about whether we have the balance of risk right and that we can look at our ability to take decisions at the appropriate level to continue or discontinue a programme after taking account of what the evidence tells us.

I was a Minister at the Foreign Office before the CSSF was invented, but I remember saying to ambassadors who asked me to authorise spending on controversial conflict resolution work that I would trust their judgment that we had to be prepared to take risks to secure those objectives. If the evidence was there to justify it, we should do it, and, if it did not work, we should stop it, and I would deal with any adverse media or parliamentary action here. At some stage, you have to trust the people on the ground to take risks, provided that the proper calculations have been made.

Dr Christian Turner: Exactly in line with that approach, there are at least three stages in the life cycle of a project when we would try to pick up the concerns described in that scenario. The first is the design of the project and the theory of change that goes with it; an ambassador would have to look at that, and it would then go through a programme board across Whitehall to review and make that judgment. The Peshmerga is a good hypothetical example.

Then there is an OSJA process, so, in a CT example, it would have to go through Ministers and the four steps of the OSJA, which are published. Of course, that is reviewed annually at the end of the project, so we can go back and test each programme to see whether we think that is still the case, and they are still being met. An example of the kind of project that we have stopped, which Joëlle referred to, is the AJACS programme—access to justice and community security in Syria. Through that process, we decided that we were not assured that it was still delivering the outcomes we wanted and the balance was not quite there—so, with ministerial agreement, we stopped it.

Across the piece, we have heard loud and clear, including from the ICAI review of the fund, that we need to step up our monitoring and evaluation. We need a better global results framework, and we have bolstered the expertise and work on that so that we can be ever more sure that we are testing those kinds of questions with a rigorous process.

Dr Julian Lewis: I was not quite clear whether you were saying that Ministers will routinely consider all these cases as part of the process that goes on, or whether it is only the difficult cases, such as those I outlined, where Ministers would get involved. If it is the latter, are there any statistics you could give the Committee to indicate how many times in a given year Ministers had to be involved to resolve a clash of interests in that way?

Dr Christian Turner: We have thresholds whereby we judge whether we need to go to ministerial level, which would be about the sensitivity and type of risk as well as the amount of spend. I do not think we have centrally collated the number of times that has been reviewed, because some of it is across Whitehall. For example, the OSJA process, which we rely on, is not collated by just this fund, because it goes across a whole host of government CT work.

I am happy to add that to the list and, if we can collate the data, we will give you a sense of how many times it has been elevated. There is a balance, and, with the new ministerial committee, we have to have the right thresholds right through the system for what will go to a programme board, what will be elevated to my SRO board and what ultimately will come to the ministerial committee, so that it can give strategic direction without dropping into micro-detail. We can set out some of that.

Joëlle Jenny: On CT specifically, about 3% of cases have been escalated to ministerial level.

Chair: Thank you.

Q4 Tom Tugendhat: Secretary of State, you will be aware of my interest in the Asia Bibi case, which has been ongoing in Pakistan. It raises questions about the rule of law programme, and whether it can be considered effective and good value for money. It is £9.32 million of ODA money and an undisclosed amount of non-ODA money. Given the situation we are seeing, with the mob running rampant against the specific judgment of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, that rather raises some questions for our own funding. Can you tell me how you feel that money is being spent?

David Lidington MP: It is being spent in line with our National Security Council objectives and the agreed NSC approach to Pakistan, which remains, as Mr Tugendhat knows, a very important strategic partner for the United Kingdom. Working with Pakistan is important in our efforts to understand, disrupt and defeat terrorist and extremist groups. The presence of large numbers of people from the Pakistani diaspora in the United Kingdom, and the kinship ties between communities in the United Kingdom and in Pakistan, make it essential that we have a close operational relationship at all levels with Pakistan. It would clearly be in our interests to strengthen the independence and rigour of the judicial system in that country and seek to influence respect for human rights and pluralism.

I will not pretend that the sort of scenes that Mr Tugendhat described make me content or remotely satisfied with the state of affairs in Pakistan. As Joëlle Jenny said earlier, we subject these programmes, like all others, to the assessment we make about human rights risk and justice risk. Perhaps my team would comment on the particular case of Pakistan in that context.

Dr Christian Turner: The question goes much more broadly to our assistance for Pakistan, a significant DfID spending country. That bit of the programme is clearly designed to build the capability of key institutions in the country. You could argue that in this case the judiciary made the right call after a long time. It is exactly the kind of thing referenced in the previous line of questioning that we would want to take back to Ministers, to test appetites, depending on how this particular case unfolds, to see whether we felt overall that that sort of assistance was appropriate. Fundamentally, the goal of assistance is to build the capability of institutions and enable them to be stronger and take the kinds of decisions that we support.

Tom Tugendhat: I support the goal; it is the results I am seeing that leave me deeply concerned. There comes a point when we must ask ourselves whether we are putting in good money after bad, and whether it is actually making a difference. The way we have seen the country go in recent years is not a direction that any of us would support, and it raises some very serious questions.

Given how we have handled other abuses of minorities by other countries at other times, when we have either withheld funding or closed down individual programmes, it raises serious questions for our significant assistance to the Government of Pakistan, in the light of the current Government’s seeming tolerance of extremist violence and propaganda against the interests of human rights that we, rightly, support much more widely. First Secretary of State, would you agree that the external evaluator’s assessment of the programme in the year 2017-18 would be very useful for us to understand how you are looking at this going forward?

David Lidington MP: I shall certainly take advice on whether that could be released to the Committee, or more widely. As the Committee knows, we normally release programme summaries, except when a national security risk is involved. Some of the work that we do in Pakistan touches on matters of national security, so I will test that.

Tom Tugendhat: May I make a very specific argument for its being released? We are dealing with a situation in which the policy of the United Kingdom Government is being decided by a Pakistani mob. We claim to offer freedom of conscience and asylum to individuals in various areas, and few can possibly be a clearer beneficiary of such an asylum right than Asia Bibi and her family. Her only crime, if it is a crime, was to drink water from a common well as a Christian woman. Even the Supreme Court of Pakistan, admittedly eight years late, got to the point of declaring her innocent.

It is hard to imagine a more egregious example of abuse of human rights on the basis of freedom of conscience, yet there is a question as to whether or not she will be offered asylum, because of security implications in Pakistan and the United Kingdom, as the Permanent Secretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office put it. That raises some serious questions about our policy as a country and what we are willing to stand up for. There is a very clear case for releasing the evaluator’s assessment so that we can understand and scrutinise properly where public money is being spent, and if it is indeed having the effect only of using British government personnel and programmes as a means of holding our own policy hostage or as leverage to a Pakistani mob.

David Lidington MP: I have a number of comments in response. Like all members of the Committee, I share the sense of horror and outrage that Mr Tugendhat has expressed about this case. The very fact that the Supreme Court has come to its decision eight years late indicates that the difficulties in Pakistan over tolerance for extremist views in parts of the official world there, as well as in sections of the wider community in Pakistan, go back a lot further than the new Government of Imran Khan.

I would deny the proposition that United Kingdom policy is being determined by a mob in Pakistan. As the Committee knows, we have a law that requires each asylum case to be assessed on its merits, and the Home Secretary is determined that, should this case come before him, he will have it dealt with on its merits, in the same way as other cases. International conversations are going on about how best to provide help so that Asia Bibi and her family can live in safety. It would be wrong of me to be drawn further on those in public session.

On the evaluator’s report, I can only repeat that, although my own instincts would be to try to be as transparent as possible, I must seek advice first on whether there would be good national security reasons why we might need to withhold at least certain elements of such a report.

Joëlle Jenny: Can I highlight that, on the web page that has been established for the CSSF with all the programme summaries, you will find the programme summary for what the CSSF funds in Pakistan? It includes work at sub-national level in places such as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab. A fairly large component has been about gender empowerment and equality. One big achievement that the CSSF has delivered was to enable up to 400,000 women to get national electoral cards, enabling them to vote, by sending vans and registration teams way out into rural areas, where normally the state does not reach. The work the CSSF does is really geared towards empowering women and working with women in Pakistan.

Tom Tugendhat: May I ask one final follow-up question?

Chair: Just.

Tom Tugendhat: Will the new National Security Council sub-committee on cross-government funds, which I know you chair, First Secretary of State, take the Asia Bibi case into account when you meet later this month to consider fund allocations for 2019-20?

David Lidington MP: We will take all relevant information into account. I will certainly take away from this Committee the strong views that Mr Tugendhat has expressed.

Q5 Lord Powell of Bayswater: Settling down a bit from high drama, the CSSF supports the delivery of the Government’s illegal migration strategy in the central Mediterranean area. Indeed, apparently it is providing increasing support for it, but it is actually quite difficult to find detailed information about exactly what is being done. Could you give us a bit of a picture of the type of activity that the CSSF is supporting?

David Lidington MP: Perhaps I can give a couple of illustrations. As the Committee will have seen, most of what the CSSF does is managed by the migration programme board, which had an allocation of £28.5 million during the current financial year. It is a cross-government board for the migration programme chaired by the migration envoy, Tim Cole. Its programmes include the organised immigration crime task force, which funds United Kingdom border crime and immigration officials to work with source and transit countries to help them tackle organised immigration crime, disrupting the people smugglers and people traffickers. The task force also works to improve our overall intelligence picture.

To give you an example, in April this year NCA officers were involved in an international law enforcement operation that successfully disrupted one of the most important people-smuggling operations working between Iraq and the United Kingdom. Another programme under the migration programme board is the Border Force cutters programme, which is our contribution to providing immediate protection and humanitarian assistance in the central Mediterranean and the Aegean. The programme also funds work with the Greek authorities to try to improve conditions for migrants and refugees who are in large numbers in camps in Greece, in conditions that have come under widespread international criticism.

Separate from the migration programme board funds are CSSF funds that focus on migration work as part of wider country and regional programmes. For example, we contributed through the CSSF to the rescue of some Nigerian girls who had been trafficked to Mali, and we have given funds through regional and country funding to disrupt people trafficking from Senegal. Most of it would be through the migration programme board, but it features as an element in some country regional programmes as well.

Lord Powell of Bayswater: It is clear that there are several mechanisms. You mentioned the CSSF regional and country programmes in Africa, which seem to have a role there too. Other departments have programmes that deal with it; DfID has a safety, support and solutions, phase 2, programme. Then there are EU programmes. How do you align them all without duplication? How do you de-conflict what you are doing from what others are doing?

Dr Christian Turner: That is a very good example of the question the Chair posed at the outset of how we make sure that this is being done coherently towards a single strategy. The cross-Whitehall migration strategy set by the National Security Council and owned by an SRO, currently a DG in DfID, sets out all the pillars of the work we want to do on migration; it is a whole-of-route approach, upstreaming issues across the Mediterranean.

That group has to look across all our capabilities, of which the CSSF is just one pot of funding, and compare that with other pots of funding, some of which will come from the National Crime Agency and some of which will be about defence capability. It will put all those alongside each other and make sure that we have the full set. As a sub-component of that, the CSSF has to look across and make sure that we are not bumping into each other or duplicating. That is one of the new processes that the NSIC approach allows us to do for the first time; we can make sure that we can see coherently what our bit is doing alongside the others.

Q6 Lord Powell of Bayswater: I have one other point. We had a reference just now to the “Do no harm” principle. Are you confident that the CSSF does no harm in supporting Libyan detention centres and so on?

Dr Christian Turner: On exactly the same basis as we discussed for the OSJAs and human rights reviews, we would have to interrogate very closely not only the migration spend but the country spend through the Sahel and in Libya, to make sure that exactly that problem does not happen. The goal is clear: we want to disrupt criminal gangs, and breaking the pipeline is a big part of the strategic policy goal in each of those projects. Through the layers that I described, we would make sure that the programme boards, up to the ministerial board, were scrutinising it, if we thought there was risk.

David Lidington MP: My view would be that, if officials were to find evidence that harm had been done or if analysis showed significant risk of harm being done, it should certainly be escalated immediately to the responsible Minister in the relevant department.

Q7 Lord Harris of Haringey: First, I should declare my interest as chair of the independent reference group for the National Crime Agency.

You mentioned that agency and what sounds like a very valuable operation on people smuggling. In a different context, there was a reference in the 2017-18 annual report to a joint maritime operation between the National Crime Agency and the Tanzanian navy, which resulted in a large seizure of heroin. Could you explain to us the decision-making process?

Is the funding on the overseas component of that, or is it pushing up the priority list of NCA operations to carry things out? I am trying to get at whether those are operations that would not have happened were it not for the CSSF funding. If they had not happened, would it have been because of National Crime Agency funding or funding in the country concerned?

Dr Christian Turner: One of the core things about the fund is that it should not be core departmental activity.

Lord Harris of Haringey: That is what I am trying to get at.

Dr Christian Turner: In this case, we are looking to fund activity that would not otherwise have happened. Critically, if we see a case for something that is cross-cutting, such as the Iraq case the Minister referred to, we must make sure that it is visible to the NCA and not duplicative. In the past, when we started out on the old Conflict Pool, there was a danger that the pot sat in a bit of a bubble and was done by one part of government and did not have read-across. Under the fusion doctrine and the structures we are trying to put in place, it is critical that I am sure, and can assure the Minister, that an intervention we would be making through CSSF funding is completely synchronised with other activities of the NCA. It would, therefore, be part of the programme board, and would sit on my SRO board to make sure that that was the case.

Lord Harris of Haringey: I am trying to get at whether these are operations that would have fallen below the threshold of what the NCA could afford and are now being pushed up because of CSSF funding. Is that funding going to support the NCA side of the operation or the operation in the country concerned—in the case of the heroin, the Tanzanian navy?

Dr Christian Turner: If we thought it should be core NCA activity, we would not look to fund it; we would look to the NCA to do so. It is additional. It could be either the NCA component or the whole of route.

Joëlle Jenny: To confirm what Christian has just said, when there is no capability to do so under departmental priorities, and it is a priority for national security that there should be a programme, the CSSF will fund NCA capabilities. It can fund a network of NCA officials operating in the countries of concern.

Q8 Theresa Villiers: The security and justice programme is a significant chunk of the CSSF discretionary spend. A concern raised by the ICAI review was that, since the transfer of responsibility for these programmes from DfID to CSSF, there has been much more of a security than a justice focus. It would be interesting to hear whether that is the case, and what the rationale was for shifting a great deal more to the security side of things in relation to the programme.

Joëlle Jenny: A fair way of looking at it is that the programmes for security and justice came under a lot of criticism at one point, and DfID took a view that some of the programmes needed to be stopped because of the scrutiny and because of sometimes valid concerns about their impact. The CSSF stepped up at that point and has been able to develop programmes in a lot of places where they would not have taken place, supporting security and justice, but through a mechanism not geared towards five or 10-year reform. DfID has a key role to play in re-entering that space, and wanting to do long-term work on security and justice reform. I think you will know that institutional reform for capacity building takes five, 10 or 15 years, and this is really a space where we welcome DfID being more involved and deploying its expertise and resources on institutional capacity building.

Theresa Villiers: Can you give us any examples of programmes on justice that were discontinued because of DfID concerns?

Joëlle Jenny: DfID decided to exit some of the work in, for example, DRC, Yemen and other places. The CSSF has been able to start some of that work.

Theresa Villiers: Another point made in the ICAI review was that there did not seem to be a clear policy lead on the general theme of security and justice in the Government. Is there now a clear lead, given the overlapping responsibilities of DfID and the CSSF?

Joëlle Jenny: The CSSF is not a policy instrument. It is an enabler to deliver on the top priorities. Traditionally, DfID is the department best positioned to support security and justice programming, particularly in developing countries. It has very good expertise and policies in place, and it is the department that has to lead. The CSSF is in a position to act as a catalyst and enabler, taking a bit more risk than some departments may be comfortable taking. What we really want is to work seamlessly with DfID so that the short-term support that the CSSF can provide is in line with the longer-term objectives that DfID can bring.

David Lidington MP: It will not just be DfID; there are middle-income countries where there is a UK objective of trying to improve the justice system, and probably of security sector reform as well, so the Foreign Office will have a quite significant interest.

Theresa Villiers: Is there a security and justice policy framework within the CSSF determining the criteria for allocating funding, and is it published?

Joëlle Jenny: We have a results framework that assesses the overall objective and ability. Policy sits primarily with DfID on security and justice, but each department will lead; if there is an area of security or justice that is more a Home Office lead, the Home Office will set the lead. You may or may not consider that organised crime is part of security and justice. I would consider that it is very much part of security and justice. The Home Office has just published its organised crime strategy, on 1 November, where it clearly sets policy priorities and direction. Again, the CSSF provides the catalytic funding to enable the delivery of core HMG objectives.

David Lidington MP: What we have tried to do through the CSSF, partly in response to the ICAI report and this Committee’s earlier report, is to strengthen our safeguards for justice and security programmes. All projects have to comply with this country’s domestic and international human rights obligations. Joëlle referred earlier to overseas justice and security assessments, which provide an additional risk management process, particularly for the kind of programmes to which Ms Villiers referred.

Those assessments are intended to ensure that our national human rights obligations are designed into a CSSF programme from the start. We have now introduced a conflict sensitivity marker, which is used to assess the human rights risk, particularly in security sector reform programmes when we are dealing with the police or the gendarmerie in some countries around the world. What we are trying to do through the joint funds unit is to ensure that those tests are built in from the very start, which in turn gives a mechanism for subsequent assessments as to whether those standards are being adhered to.

Theresa Villiers: I should like to return briefly to the matters raised by Tom Tugendhat. There is an extensive aid programme in Pakistan designed to increase the capacity of the state. I presume it includes some justice measures. When there is a really worrying case such as Asia Bibi’s, does it mean that within the CSSF they look at programmes they may be running that overlap with that area, which have a relevance to the justice system in Pakistan, or is it purely something that DfID would look at? What is the response when UK taxpayers’ money is going in part to support the justice system in a country where injustice occurs?

Dr Christian Turner: Yes is the short answer. I would expect the programme leads on the ground, whether it was a DfID or CSSF programme, to flag up if they thought, as a result of the Asia Bibi case, that there were different concerns and considerations that we needed to raise, as previously discussed.

More broadly, the cross-government team driving that for south Asia, not only in post but back in Whitehall—I mentioned NSSGs, the cross-cutting national security strategy groups—would need to look at that, and across the piece to determine whether all those interventions, of which the CSSF is just one, had a different threshold set because of that case. On your previous point, there is no single lead on security and justice, as both the Minister and Joëlle have described, because it cuts across so many areas. We have to drive coherence in our work with the CSSF in a theory of change, whether it sits on conflict, serious organised crime or our counterterrorism work, as well as most of our geographic programmes.

Joëlle Jenny: To be clear, the CSSF will not release money for programmes if they are not part of the strategy, and that strategy is usually owned at local level by a local board that will have, under the authority of the ambassador, a board reviewing all the HMG objectives. The CSSF is one element that will be delivering alongside the set of tools at the disposal of the ambassador. That is then reviewed by the boards at regional level or at NSSG level in London, so the risks will be escalated if there is a sense that a particular project is not delivering. It will be escalated to the Minister when that becomes necessary.

Q9 Lord King of Bridgwater: You have given us a breakdown of your expenditure in different areas, some of which are listed under territory and some under category. For instance, the biggest single category is peacekeeping and not south Asia. Is peacekeeping Afghanistan and Iraq?

David Lidington MP: Joëlle and Christian will correct me if I am mistaken. Peacekeeping is mandatory. It flows from our United Nations obligations.

Lord King of Bridgwater: Where is the money, £345 million, being spent?

Joëlle Jenny: If you have in front of you annexe C of the annual report that was published, it gives the breakdown of all non-discretionary spend.

Lord King of Bridgwater: I just want to know the territories where we are spending £345 million on peacekeeping, which is the single largest item.

Joëlle Jenny: Certainly. There is the UN Interim Force in Lebanon and the UN Disengagement Observer Force, UNDOF, which is the observation on the Golan Heights.

Lord King of Bridgwater: And Cyprus.

Joëlle Jenny: There is Cyprus, of course, and Liberia, Kosovo, Western Sahara, South Sudan and Haiti. There are two different missions in Haiti. There is MONUSCO, which is in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and there is the Central African Republic, Ivory Coast, Somalia, IBA for South Sudan, MINUSMA in Mali and there are—

Lord King of Bridgwater: You have given me a helpful list of countries. That is covering expenditure, but not for British forces necessarily. In some cases it is, but in other cases it is supporting local forces. You have just mentioned South Sudan. Do we have any forces in South Sudan?

Dr Christian Turner: We do.

Joëlle Jenny: We have some British forces in some of those missions.

Lord King of Bridgwater: What are MoD ring-fences, which is the third-largest item, on which we spend £166 million? I have never heard of them before.

Joëlle Jenny: They are operations that the MoD conducts in support of UK national security priorities. I can give you the list, if you want.

Lord King of Bridgwater: Where?

Joëlle Jenny: Afghanistan, with Operation TORAL. There is the DMAP, which is a contingency to enable rapid deployment when it becomes necessary. That has been done, for example, in the Sahel to support some of the operations there at the time of the crisis. There is Op CATAN in Somalia, Op TRENTON in South Sudan—

Lord King of Bridgwater: Thank you. I just wanted to get a picture of what the items were.

Joëlle Jenny: There are a few more.

Lord King of Bridgwater: Ring-fences support MoD operations in other territories where we are helping. Is that right?

Dr Christian Turner: That is correct, Lord King. They are ring-fenced because as part of the spending review settlement the Treasury agreed that those operations should be funded from the CSSF, but they were not discretionary for us.

Lord King of Bridgwater: They are extra MoD expenditure that, under the previous regime, would have fallen to the cost of the MoD, before the creation of the CSSF. If we were in Sierra Leone or wherever we had made our commitments, it would have been straight MoD expenditure. Is that right?

Joëlle Jenny: Those were never on the MoD baseline. The fact that they are now with the CSSF is a matter of economy of scale, managing the funds in a manner that assures the Treasury that all the value for money checks, such as monitoring of spend and annual forecasting, are well in place. It is not money that has either been taken away from what the CSSF would have done otherwise or that has been removed from the MoD baseline.

Lord King of Bridgwater: One of the benefits, which is probably seen by other quarters, is that perhaps it gives the Foreign Office more influence over what the MoD is doing, because it has a voice in that expenditure. Is that correct?

Dr Christian Turner: That comes to the nature of the fund. As I said earlier, we moved from the Conflict Pool, in which three departments were involved, and we now have 12 departments involved. In this space, we are genuinely making sure that, in any of the missions that Joëlle read out, we have a cross-government approach, and the thematic spend you see listed is directed alongside the geographic.

Lord King of Bridgwater: The CSSF has been running for three years. Is that right? Have you had a chance to oversee or to assess the strategic impact of CSSF over the previous arrangement of individual departmental expenditure and programmes?

Dr Christian Turner: Yes. It comes to the reviews that we described. The strategic impact, first of all, comes through the results framework that we put in place for every single programme. They have to justify that, to move from outputs to outcomes, as you see in the recent programme summaries we published. From those annual reviews, we have synthesised; the Stabilisation Unit has done a lessons-learned exercise on all of them. Then we have been subject to some of the external reviews that we have already referred to, by this Committee, by ICAI and the International Development Committee. Across all those, we are building the case for strategic impact where we are succeeding, with specific examples of what we think works well and what we think works less well.

Lord King of Bridgwater: We have done all the things you have been talking about today before, but under different hats. Does your assessment indicate that setting up the CSSF is justified in cost terms? It has a cost and there is a bureaucracy attached to it that may involve cost in delay and time in getting multilateral agreements for actions that may be needed in one area or another. Is the view overall that CSSF is a good idea?

Dr Christian Turner: It is certainly the view of the Treasury, ICAI and others. There has been good feedback to us on what we need to improve. I do not think we are doing things we would have done before. There is new activity that we can point to and where we can give examples. Some of that activity would not have happened. We are doing things now that we would not have done before the fund was established. There are some good examples where that is the case. Our costs all fit in the usual boundaries. Joëlle may want to comment on the amount of the fund that is used for staffing and training.

Lord King of Bridgwater: Would you give me an example of what you think would not have happened under previous structures?

Dr Christian Turner: The White Helmets programme in Syria is a good example of a high-risk programme. We have assessed that it has affected about 115,000 lives. About 4 million people have had services that they would not have had. That sort of programme in previous regimens would probably have been something we thought too high risk and would not have funded.

David Lidington MP: DfID would have struggled to endorse the White Helmets programme, because it might well have put at risk its wider humanitarian work in the region, but doing it through the CSSF meant that we could deliver.

The catalysing effect of CSSF is quite important, because there is now a pool of money in Whitehall, across departments, without departments having to fight each other in a turf war over whose budget it should come from. Our ambassador in Egypt came up with a proposal for a relatively small amount of spending through CSSF on educational reform. It was for about half a million, and it was key to unlocking $500 million of World Bank funding. Had we not been able to take that unilateral UK initiative through CSSF, there might well not have been a World Bank contribution.

Lord King of Bridgwater: DfID would not have done it before.

David Lidington MP: No.

Joëlle Jenny: No, DfID is not active in Egypt. It does not have a large programme there. Because there is a central management structure, there is much greater responsiveness if there is a new priority. One example is the speed at which it was possible to set up the response to Hurricane Irma and all the devastation that affected hundreds of thousands of people. It was extremely short notice, but because we have a central structure and a rapid response mechanism, we were able to put in place an emergency response. We could find the funding and deploy because we can access directly all the departments working with the fund.

Let me give another example. You were talking earlier about conflict analysis and looking at some of the risks in any given country. In the past, each individual department would have made its own assessment of its programme or diplomatic priorities and risks. Today, through the programme processes that are in place, all the departments have to come together. We bring together the perspective of the agencies, our diplomatic missions, the expertise of DfID, where DfID is present on the ground, the Home Office and so on. They have to be part of the analysis of the risks. We get much greater granularity in understanding the risks and the response options and how to mitigate them. It has increased the quality of debate within HMG because we bring all the different perspectives together.

You asked about the cost. The central management unit costs about 0.5% of the budget. There is economy of scale because previously there were many different pots of money that were managed separately, so each of them needed their own annual reporting arrangements and monitoring, and their own staff evaluation and overview. Bringing that together in a single unit means real economy of scale.

Q10 Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho: We started the conversation talking about the funding structures going between multiple years. We have heard that some of the supported organisations still feel quite short-term focused because of the single-year break and reflection after a year; I cannot remember the correct legal term. I am interested in your view on how you balance the short-term assessments that you are making all the time with the longer-term outcomes you want, and whether you feel that the balances are right.

Dr Christian Turner: I would certainly repeat what I said before. My assumption is that most of the programming coming to us should be in the frame of a long-term strategy, the move from outputs to outcomes. We are having to drive through the programmes. I am concerned that people still feel we are too short-term. I do not think we can justify that because all the theories have changed. The results framework should be saying to us that it has to be a multi-year intervention if it is to have effect.

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho: Do you still have many contracts that you assess after the break of a single year?

Dr Christian Turner: Joëlle may want to answer on the detailed contracting.

Joëlle Jenny: Most of the contracting is done through a framework, because a procurement framework enables a more rapid allocation of funding. Of course, there is a threshold above which you cannot award a contract without its having gone through a tender and a framework.

We have had feedback from many suppliers. There were issues with the initial framework. That is part of the learning curve with any new instrument. It was not perfect. It was doing many things right but a few things not. We have taken those lessons on board in the new framework contract. For example, we have roughly doubled the number of people on the framework, so that gives many more NGOs and other organisations access to the framework.

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho: Could you give us a sense of the scale? How many organisations are we talking about?

Joëlle Jenny: The official figure for the new framework will come out in the next few days; it will be around 100, from roughly 50 in the current framework. That is a major improvement that will broaden the scope.

The framework is not the only way in which we reach out to implementing partners. There are also grants. We are mixing the different instruments so that we can make sure that we have the right implementing partner. We are working with the implementing partner and giving them, for example, a synthesis of lessons learned. We are inviting them at the level of the call for expressions of interest to give us feedback on how to design the most effective programme. There are many innovations in the new framework that we hope will enable us to get even more value for money and impact from the contract. We hope it will address some of the teething concerns that we had with the earlier framework. We will continue to ask regularly for feedback from suppliers.

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho: How long do you hope it will take for the new framework to bed in and start to yield the results you are talking about?

Joëlle Jenny: It will be in place for at least two years. Then we get into a spending review, so there is a question; we cannot commit funds beyond the current spending review for legal reasons. We need to take that into account.

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho: In the annual report, many organisations are reporting monthly, which seems quite onerous for organisations, particularly as the frameworks you are talking about are quite complicated already. Why is monthly reporting necessary?

Joëlle Jenny: We have heard from this Committee that, as we operate in difficult and high-risk environments, it is a necessity that we assure ourselves through regular reporting that the activities are not doing harm, that there is no risk of diversion and that we are delivering the strategic objectives that the Committee is asking of us to make sure that the money is delivering. It is potentially onerous.

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho: I take your point, but regular reporting does not equal lower risk. It is the quality of the reporting and what you are asking people to report on.

Dr Christian Turner: I agree. Having run a team on the ground that dealt with some of that in earlier incarnations, I think that generally, if we are to be agile, we need less bureaucracy. I agree; driving up quality and getting the right balance on oversight is right. I have two figures that might help. The average contract length for 2017-18 was 18 months. I would expect that to carry on extending. We are now able to turn around a tender award contract in nine weeks. I hope that will go up.

Q11 Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho: Hearing you talk this afternoon, it sometimes sounds like start-ups talking about risk and return ratio; it is always about how you bed in the processes to be able to take the right risks, not the wrong risks. How do you feel about the tools and ways you have for reporting, and how are the innovations you are making in reporting, oversight and governance being used? Do you think you are up the curve using the best tools and the best innovations, or do you still think it is a challenge to get them right?

David Lidington MP: Christian will speak for the official side. The new ministerial oversight arrangements are very new, and my experience of other cross-departmental ministerial committees is that it will take time for colleagues to get into the habit of thinking collaboratively and strategically, rather than simply sitting with a brief from individual departments in front of them. That is the work of cultural change that we have to focus on. The key will be to try to make sure that the right questions are posed and the right challenges are made of the official advice that comes to us.

Dr Christian Turner: The question goes to the heart of our conversation and to Lord King’s challenge as well. I look at how far we have come in three years; the fund is maturing, and the skill sets we use and the way we are building behaviours, which are at the heart of it, are genuinely cross-departmental. That is why I genuinely believe that we are doing things now that we would not have done before, which is good. The scrutiny we are under from the Treasury shows that they rate the fund highly. ICAI and other feedback is generally in the right direction.

Equally, we have a way to go. There are three priorities for me as SRO. The themes have come out, but let me reiterate them. The first is the governance we put in place, with proper political direction. The second is transparency. I want as the absolute default that we should be sharing things. There has been clear feedback from this Committee and we are publishing those results. If there is more, unless there is a genuine national security case, which there will be in only a small handful of the reports we publish, we should have a presumption of transparency in 76 of about 90.

The third theme is the question of strategic direction and making sure that what the fund is doing on the ground, through the hierarchy of boards and programme direction, is properly aligned with the strategic intent that Ministers and the NSC are asking for. There is more for us to do in all three areas but I see a pathway towards doing it.

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho: How good is the technology that enables this stuff? Do you feel that you are deploying the best of class tools?

Chair: That was clearly a home question.

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho: I fear I know the answer. I am not sure why I even said it out loud.

Dr Christian Turner: You can tell by my pause. We work with the systems we have.

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho: Which are? Can you give us a sense of who you are working with?

Dr Christian Turner: Joëlle may want to comment on some of the results frameworks and material we are using.

Joëlle Jenny: It depends on what you call technology. On the whole, we are not using the latest artificial intelligence technology for monitoring and those sorts of things. In the past, the Committee picked up that we were not monitoring adequately the results framework or measuring political influencing. We have now developed a very innovative tool. Nobody else across government has had such a tool. We now have a tool called political access or influence and, to my knowledge, no other donor or Government have come up with such an innovative way of doing what we are trying to do.

Will it measure completely? I suspect it will go through a number of iterations, and gradually we will learn and adapt the tool. We have already mentioned the conflict sensitivity tool, which is also an innovation. It did not exist before and is now being used quite widely. It will be standard across all programmes by next year. We are innovating. We can do better. It is a journey.

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho: Do you talk to other Governments, agencies and organisations to share experiences?

Joëlle Jenny: We do up to a point. We discuss within government and with each department what is their best practice. Interestingly, some departments that were not performing very well initially when they first bid for CSSF money have learned lessons. Now they are coming up with impressive ways of monitoring impact and making their own innovations. The CSSF can learn from them centrally because departments realise that they need to step up. It is a very dynamic picture. We are constantly looking at what is happening in academia and the latest research. The Stabilisation Unit is a very useful tool for monitoring evaluations and feeding lessons, and we are making sure that it informs the programming.

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho: Let me finish on transparency because the tools can help you with that and give everybody reassurance. My question has two parts. First, how do you plan to reassure, or continue to reassure, the public about the bits of the fund that are secretive and that you are not transparent about? We have heard concerns that some funding has been moved into even more secretive funds, such as the integrated activity fund. How do you approach reassurance for the public? Secondly, what are your plans more locally to improve transparency on the things you are more open and report about?

David Lidington MP: Perhaps Christian could deal with the first element and Joëlle the second.

Dr Christian Turner: As I said, my presumption is transparency on the funds. I see absolutely no reason why we should not do that. At local level, it means good embassies and high commissions being clear about what they are doing and not being afraid to badge it as such unless it is inappropriate.

At a programmatic level, as I said, in 2018-19 we published 76 of 90 programme summaries. A further six will be published in due course. We have a little more work to do on those. That leaves a very small number that we do not think are appropriate to put into the public domain. It would probably fall under the remit of the ISC, if there was a desire to talk about those. I would have to check that. Otherwise, for the rest, our presumption should be to make them available and we would be happy to explain what we are doing, as we are in all the frameworks we publish.

Joëlle Jenny: We have published two annual reports, in addition to all the programme summaries. We are sharing the synthesis of all the lessons learned with implementing partners and NGOs. In December, we have an NGO stakeholder forum at which we can discuss those results and share them to get their feedback. We are planning, as an innovation, to produce CSSF country or thematic factsheets to give even more information on the different activities.

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho: Is it true that money is being moved to more secretive funds?

Dr Christian Turner: I do not recognise that suggestion. There are some lines of work that we have closed and stopped. That goes to previous discussions on concerns, the OSJAs and human rights activities, where we have stopped certain lines, but I do not recognise a strategic intent to say, “We can’t do this here because it is too transparent, so we are going to do it elsewhere”.

Q12 James Gray: We have heard a lot about the trigger mechanism by which high-risk programmes went to Ministers. That is fine. The ICAI report in the spring said that the vast bulk of the spending was going on pretty low-level training for security personnel. Can you give us a flavour of the kind of decisions that went to Ministers? Was the ICAI incorrect in its assessment that a large percentage was going to low-level humanitarian law training?

David Lidington MP: This is the justice and security report.

Joëlle Jenny: The threshold is not linked to money. It is not that there is a low-level, low-spend small project that, therefore, escapes scrutiny and a large programme gets more scrutiny. It is not linked. The scrutiny is based on analysis of the context and the environment, and the likelihood that there may be funds that are mismanaged, or used in countries where there are human rights abuses or where they could be doing harm. That is a threshold that is unrelated to funding.

James Gray: I think you misunderstood me. I recognise that that is absolutely correct. I just want some examples of the things that might have been referred to Ministers, because if the ICAI view was correct that nearly all the money was being spent on pretty low-level training, clearly that would not have been referred to Ministers. I want some examples of the kind of mitigation measures that are in place and have been referred to Ministers under the mechanism.

Dr Christian Turner: Some training might come under that category. I am trying to think of a hypothetical example. We might be undertaking an activity with an institution in a country, in a subset or unit that we were trying to develop to do the activity in a human rights compliant way, and we then had evidence of abuse or failure of process in the chain of judgment, such as extrajudicial killings, that clearly crossed not only our laws but the boundaries of the guidance. We would quickly go to Ministers and recommend that we needed to stop that activity, the training and capability-building assistance to the institution, until we were happy that there were suitable checks and balances in place. If we could not get those assurances and put them in place, we would stop building capability and training with the particular institution.

Joëlle Jenny: We cannot be more specific here, but there are at least three instances where, as a result of that process, a programme was stopped. One was in Africa.

James Gray: A great deal of reliance is placed on OSJAs in assessing that. The ICAI came to the conclusion that in its sample no single programme had been stopped because of OSJA. Is that correct?

Joëlle Jenny: At least three programmes have been stopped. It is not necessarily the OSJA itself. As I mentioned, the OSJA is one of a set of measures that we use to monitor risk. The Syrian example, which Christian mentioned earlier, was the result of regular monitoring. We get information. If we get credible evidence that there is reason for concern, action is immediately taken. The OSJA may be one of the pathways through which risk is identified, but there are other monitoring tools. There have been at least three instances where that has led to either stopping or completely redesigning an intervention under the CSSF.

James Gray: I want to focus on OSJAs for the moment. What is your assessment of how well they work? Do they work? Are they useful instruments? Do they achieve what they are supposed to achieve?

Joëlle Jenny: They are useful instruments. They have been used quite extensively. Like you, we want to be absolutely sure that they are doing what they were designed to do, and that is the reason why we commissioned an audit jointly with the Stabilisation Unit. We should have the results within the next few weeks.

As with the other instruments we mentioned earlier, they are work in progress. It is possible that we will find that they can be improved, in which case we will definitely refine the guidance. We have already tightened up the guidance on the back of the ICAI review. We took that feedback on board and reflected it in the guidance. It is something that unquestionably we will need constantly to revisit, given that it is a critical part of ensuring that the money is not being diverted to support human rights abuses.

James Gray: That is one particular part of the review. At the moment, I think I am right in saying that OSJAs cannot change if circumstances on the ground change. Are you going to bring in some process by which OSJAs can be reviewed as they go along, if circumstances change in the programme?

Joëlle Jenny: I am surprised. I will double-check. Thank you for bringing that point to my attention. It is not my understanding, but it is a very important point. There are other instruments.

Dr Christian Turner: If we have a concern with an OSJA, we can reconduct it and resubmit it up the ministerial chain.

James Gray: On reflection, let me correct myself. I have just re-read my brief and you are quite right. It is the other way around; they can be revisited. Can you give an example where an OSJA might have been revisited when circumstances changed on the ground?

Dr Christian Turner: I am sorry to repeat Joëlle’s point. It is not that I want to be evasive, but the three cases where we have seen an OSJA lead to a change in a programme are ones I would not want to refer to in open committee. To go to your previous question, as a practitioner looking at teams of officials on the ground who are grappling, in some cases, with the level of risk that we have been talking about, I think this is a framework that makes our lives much easier; it is logical, transparent and published, and we know exactly how we can follow the steps to give clear advice to Ministers on whether boundaries have been crossed.

Q13 Dan Jarvis: The earlier exchange with Mr Tugendhat reminded us of the real complexities involved in dealing with instability and insecurity. All of us understand that there are tough choices and very difficult judgments to be made. Secretary of State, earlier you referred to some of the risks that have been taken and I think we all understand that. I want to ask you about the extent to which, when specifically allocating money that goes into the CSSF, the IAF and the GBF, in addition to hard-headed judgments about national security, there is an ethical dimension in the decisions relating to the specific allocation of those funds.

David Lidington MP: The ethical dimension certainly exists. In the overall governance structure that we are looking at, it should be built into the process from the start, long before the bids assembled together come to the committee I chair for final ministerial decisions about allocations. They ought not to be coming in front of us if that work of risk assessment, including the risk of doing harm and the risks to do with the justice and security sector reforms we discussed earlier, has not been taken into consideration.

It is for each department, in assessing the spending initiatives for which it has responsibility, to carry out the assessments and ensure that the ethical test is applied. When the committee meets to look at the 2019-20 allocations, I expect every Minister there to have been assured that their department’s proposals meet the tests. It is undoubtedly one thing that would be taken into account by Ministers when they make decisions on allocations, but the test ought to have been surmounted before it gets to the final allocation stage.

Dan Jarvis: On the tests made by Ministers when making these decisions, are there currently any funds that are being used to build the capacity of Governments who not only use the death penalty but are complicit either in torture or in human rights abuses?

David Lidington MP: As I said earlier, every programme needs to comply with this country’s domestic and human rights obligations. On the specific question, Joëlle will say whether I have overlooked anything that ought to be covered.

Joëlle Jenny: We have already spoken about some of the safeguards, processes, evaluations and tools that make certain that there are no violations of human rights. As someone who has designed programmes in the security and justice space for much of my career, I look at the vibrancy of debate among the officials designing those projects. Everybody is conscious of our obligation to abide by international law. Everybody who goes into the Civil Service has a deep commitment to protecting security interests, and to complying with human rights. I can only testify to the vibrancy of the discussions that I have witnessed as people design the projects.

There are difficult choices at times. If the teams are not confident that we meet the legal, ethical and moral requirements, there is a real solid pushback. People will not want to go forward with programmes that they know can do harm. There is a deep commitment, but we do not take it at face value. On top of that, we have all the instruments to monitor and make sure that compliance happens, such as the OSJAs, the conflict analysis and conflict markers, and the discussions through political reporting and so on.

Dan Jarvis: I completely understand the commitment of officials. I am not in any way seeking to question that. I am looking for reassurance that taxpayers’ money is not being used to fund activities that might lead to the death of people in other countries, either through torture or human rights abuses. Are you able to give me that assurance?

David Lidington MP: Absolutely. The programmes should certainly not have the intention of leading to that outcome. If they are working as we intend, we should be working to minimise any such risk. What is unavoidable is that work on conflict prevention and resolution will at times involve working with countries whose human rights record we might wish to challenge. Christian described earlier the way our ambassadors and high commissioners on the ground are intimately involved in judgments about which programmes will work or not work in the particular political and governance context of that nation. Their professional views are very important in informing the judgments.

Dan Jarvis: My final question is on the transparency of the funding. Baroness Lane-Fox asked a question to which the answer was that it was not appropriate for some of the funding to be published or put into the public domain. Could you say a bit more about the process by which the funding that is not published or put into the public domain is scrutinised, whether that is by the Intelligence and Security Committee or whether it might be appropriate for this Committee to look at that detail? What mechanism is in place whereby we can be satisfied that the funding that is not published is properly used?

David Lidington MP: I will say a bit about the principle and then I will ask Christian and Joëlle to comment on the practical detail. The presumption under which we now operate is that there should be transparency and publication. It is the exceptions that have to be justified. Our policy is that the exceptions have to be justified by reference either to national security or to protecting the safety and security of the beneficiaries of the spending or, perhaps, of the country where the agencies, charities and NGOs involved in delivering the programmes on the ground are operating. The question of who makes those assessments is one for Christian.

Dr Christian Turner: The specific programmes on which we do not want to publish full details are a very small number, given the 76 and the further six that we want to publish.

David Lidington MP: It will be eight out of 90.

Dr Christian Turner: There are eight remaining. I am happy to take away and consider properly how those are scrutinised in the appropriate way, whether by this Committee or another group. For the criteria that the Minister set out, we do not want to publish them.

Q14 Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill: I would like to give the panel the chance to explain to me the point at which being engaged with human rights violators becomes being complicit in their human rights abuses. I am thinking particularly of Bahrain and what you would wish to say on that. I heard what you have already said about how you have to make very difficult choices.

David Lidington MP: It boils down to a question of judgment. The principles we apply to the programmes are designed to make certain that nothing we do actually causes harm. In the case of Bahrain, we think there is still value in working with the Government in Bahrain. It is no longer done through the CSSF, but through other means and contacts. We are still trying to support and encourage progress on human rights, and that means trying to help Bahrain build up effective and accountable institutions, and strengthen the rule of law and justice reform.

We did that through CSSF fund programming in Bahrain until March 2017. A lot of the funding was explicitly to do with supporting reforms in Bahrain and implementing the recommendations made by the independent commission of inquiry, as well as recommendations made as part of the UN universal periodic review process. Looking back, those decisions could be justified at the time. We are not funding them at the moment, but we are still working to try to support and encourage reform in Bahrain through other means.

Q15 Tom Tugendhat: I want to ask about Egypt, a country I know you know well, Dr Turner. Counterterrorism and human rights objectives often play against each other. In scenarios such as those, which objective is given priority?

Dr Christian Turner: I do not want to sound evasive, but it depends on the specifics of the programme. I like the example the Minister gave earlier about education funding in Egypt, where a small intervention unlocked a remarkable programme of concessional finance from the IMF to access a broader set of education objectives.

In Egypt, it would be a straight balance between the partners we were working with and our concern about any alleged human rights issues with the objectives we were trying to achieve in delivering the capability building and security reform we were aiming for.

Tom Tugendhat: Could you touch on an example? You were director of the Middle East, but you were also high commissioner in Kenya. Can you draw on your experience either as high commissioner or as director?

Dr Christian Turner: Let me give a Kenya example, because when I was director of the Middle East at the Foreign Office it was well before the fund was established. An example from Kenya involved quite a small intervention of fund money that allowed us to fund a criminal justice adviser. This goes to Lord Harris’s question. It was not an area of work that was prioritised otherwise by the NCA or other agencies, but on the ground I felt it could have an effect. The criminal justice adviser was able to develop an MLA, a mutual legal assistance framework, with counterparts in the Kenyan system.

As a result of that exchange, the NCA was able to bring a string of prosecutions against a paedophile ring where westerners, including a very upsetting case of a British national, were brought to trial. For the first time, as a result of the MLA, we enabled video evidence to be given from victims in Kenya, young street children, in a British courtroom, and that videolink led to the conviction of Keith Morris. It was the first time that that had been done. That is a very specific example where I saw the balance of judgment playing well. We made the intervention, and it had a very clear impact that we would not previously have achieved.

Chair: We are almost out of time. Perhaps we could try to get in the last couple of questions. I am particularly interested in the second bullet point.

Q16 Lord King of Bridgwater: The hobby horse I was on before is how you run this in a cost-effective way. How do you keep oversight between meetings of the NSC sub-committee? I suppose that is a question for the Secretary of State.

David Lidington MP: One has to be practical. The NSC’s remit to the ministerial committee is to exercise strategic oversight. The reality is that, when the NSC took its decision earlier this year, the spending allocations for the current financial year had already been set. The programmes were in place. The role of the Committee becomes more significant as we start to review recommendations and take decisions about future allocations and the future direction of programming. That ministerial governance work is at a very early stage. If ministerial oversight is to work effectively, we have to be assured that governance structures are in place at official level underneath us and that we have confidence that the assessments that have been the subject of many of the exchanges this afternoon, to give assurance on such matters as human rights, are effective in practice, programme by programme.

Lord King of Bridgwater: What is the programme? How often do you see the various levels meeting?

David Lidington MP: If I remember rightly, the National Security Committee meets quarterly.

Lord King of Bridgwater: Is that the sub-committee? Which committee is it?

David Lidington MP: That is the ministerial oversight committee.

Lord King of Bridgwater: And under that?

Dr Christian Turner: The board I chair, which is of directors-general, the SROs for the NSC priorities, probably meets half a dozen times a year, every other month, but it would be more intense in the process building up to the allocations round, when we make key strategic judgments about the annual allocations, testing many of the questions we have been discussing in this session.

Lord King of Bridgwater: Do you have a schedule of those dates now?

Dr Christian Turner: Yes. We can look back to when the framework was established from about June, and that will work through to next year’s allocation round.

Chair: Thank you. We have time for one very last question. We will probably write to you with a couple of process-type questions, if that is all right.

Dr Christian Turner: Please.

Q17 Lord Powell of Bayswater: You have obviously done a great job in improving co-ordination generally and focusing resources very well, but the price seems to be a rather cumbersome structure. To take an example, you have created the senior responsible owners and implementation groups. Do you really need CSSF regional and thematic boards as well? How do you disentangle their responsibilities? It looks like a spider’s web from outside.

Dr Christian Turner: That is a very fair question. It plays to my response to Baroness Lane-Fox. Because one of the USPs of the fund is its agility, it is absolutely right that we try to bear down on bureaucracy within the overall framework of the appetite for risk that the Minister described and the Committee has been testing.

The co-ordination in the new structure is not specific to CSSF. The SROs and the NSC strategies are set right across priorities of which CSSF is just one. The regional level boards, which for those interested in the hierarchy are chaired at director level in Whitehall, are to give the right levels of assurance coming up. Within the fair challenge that we are not heaping the thing under its own weight, and we can still move quickly on issues such as Hurricane Irma and some of the rapid response we have done in Somalia, the new structures add coherence and the right level of strategic direction.

Lord Powell of Bayswater: I hope you are right. Usually, multiplying structures does not make for quick decision-taking.

Chair: Thank you very much all three of you. You have been very patient. I am sorry we have taken a little longer than usual.