International Development Committee
Oral evidence: The development work of the FCDO, HC 531
Tuesday 13 May 2025
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 13 May 2025.
Members present: Sarah Champion (Chair); Tracy Gilbert; Monica Harding; Noah Law; Alice Macdonald; Brian Mathew; David Mundell; James Naish; David Reed; Sam Rushworth; David Taylor.
Questions 1 - 70
Witnesses
I: Baroness Chapman of Darlington, Minister for State for International Development, Latin America and the Caribbean, Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO); and Nick Dyer, Second Permanent Under-Secretary, Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO).
Witnesses: Baroness Chapman of Darlington and Nick Dyer.
Q1 Chair: We are very pleased to have the right hon. Baroness Chapman of Darlington, who comes with a very grand title, Minister of State for International Development, Latin America and the Caribbean. Thank you very much for joining us.
About a month ago, you took over as the lead of the humanitarian and development ODA spend. It is on that that we want to focus the first part of our session. You are also joined by the Second Permanent Under-Secretary, Nick Dyer. Thank you for joining us, Nick.
Minister, I need to start by expressing my frustration that a number of broadsheets today did not just cover the fact that you were speaking at this session, but were actually saying what you were going to be saying at this session. I find that rather disrespectful to this Committee. You did ask me a number of weeks ago if you could make a statement here setting out your priorities, which again is not normal but I said yes. Had I known that you were going to be leaking that in advance, or someone from your team, I probably would not have been so open to the idea.
All I can say, Minister, is you have given us an extra four hours to come up with some questions to interrogate you on, so I am not entirely sure if it has helped you out, but it is something that we are going to be pushing you on the details of quite hard. If I could ask for it not to happen again and you refer that to your team so that it does not happen again, I would be very grateful. Thank you. All that said, over to you.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: I completely accept what you have to say and we will make sure that that doesn’t happen in the future, with all respect to everybody on the Committee.
Thank you, first of all, for inviting me to speak about how we are going to reset our approach to international development now that we do have less money. To my mind, development is how we strengthen and stabilise countries, we tackle poverty and we make the world safer, but we need to prioritise, be more efficient and focus on impact above all else.
We have to get the best value for money, and that is for the UK taxpayer, of course, but it is also for the people we are trying to help. Anyone who wants us to have a serious budget in the future knows that we have to rebuild public support. Only 18% of the public think our aid and international development spend is effective. We cannot just be talking about misery all the time; we need to tell the story of what development can achieve. We have to show the country that we have a strategy that matches their values, supports their interests, and that I hope can make the country proud of what we do. There is a lot to be proud of, as you all know, but the world has changed and with it so must our approach.
The days of viewing the UK Government as a global charity are over and the public here and many of our partner countries want to move on from this model. We have heard this directly from our Africa approach consultation, and this means that we have to change how we work. The last Labour Government was central in building the development model for the last 20 years, so now it falls to us to build the future model for the next 20 years.
While our commitment to helping those living through emergencies is unwavering, for countries developing we need to be an investor and not just a donor. It is about partnership and not paternalism. We have to draw on all the expertise that the UK has to offer, such as our world-class universities, the City of London, the Met Office, Land Registry, HMRC, and our education, health and tech sectors. We need to support other countries’ systems so they can educate their children, reform their own healthcare systems, grow their economies in ways that last and, ultimately, exit the need for aid. We have an opportunity and a responsibility to modernise the way that we work.
The alternative, the other way we could go about this, is just to salami-slice without a strategy. I think that would be wrong. We have to sharpen our focus with our money on areas that the UK can make the biggest difference. I think that is on humanitarian, which is where the public expects us to lead. This includes maintaining, as the Prime Minister said, our leading role in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan. It is also on health, supporting countries to combat disease and build their health systems. Thirdly, it is on climate, tackling climate change and supporting the recovery of nature is in all our interests.
Underpinning all this work is our work to develop economies so that countries can be more resilient and support themselves. Inevitably, this means that in some areas and countries there will be less to spend. There is no point being anything other than completely open about this. I think that is likely to be on education and gender. In those areas, we cannot turn away from them. We have to make even more of our technical expertise in the FCDO and across the UK more widely, and our diplomatic influence to lead.
We also need to use our voice at the big multilateral funds to leverage more money, reform the system and make sure that they continue to deliver. Since I was appointed—and thank you, Chair, for acknowledging that was only recently—we have had to work at speed reviewing programmes line by line and improving coherence across Government. We can talk more about that. Yes, you are here to question me, but I am also here, I hope, to hear and learn from you, and a much wider range of voices, on how we get this right in the coming months. Thank you, Chair.
Q2 Chair: Thank you. I will start by picking you up on one thing. I never saw aid as charity. It is helping and supporting nations around the world, some of them facing the most awful conflicts, extremes of weather, and persecution. It is our soft power; it is our global influence. I will also say that before the merger, but even after the merger, the spending of ODA was, around the world, seen as the most transparent and providing the best value for money. I do not like any inference that we have not always been absolutely scrupulous to make sure that the taxpayer got the best value for money, the best reach, and we help the poorest people in the world with that money. I hope that they are principles that will guide you in whatever you are doing going forwards.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Absolutely, I accept that and I would expect you to say nothing other than that. However, when I am communicating with the public, and we have an absolute crisis in public support for this agenda, we have to speak very bluntly. We are not speaking to ourselves and I need the public to know that I want to have confidence in the money that we are spending so that we get their consent to continue with this agenda. At times that may seem a little blunt and it may not convey all the nuance and the successes that you outline, but one of my jobs is to make sure that we can rebuild that confidence from the public. By saying that in the way that I have, that I hope is the first step towards doing that.
Q3 Sam Rushworth: I just do not quite know what the Government’s policy is any more. It used to be 0.7%, then it was 0.7% if our fiscal rules are met. The OBR has said that our fiscal rules will be met by the end of this Parliament but it is being reduced to 0.3%. From this language about pivoting from being a charity to being an investor, it makes me wonder: are we really saying that we are tearing up the International Development Act and we no longer have that commitment at all?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: No. Thank you for that question. The first thing I would say is that 0.7, 0.5, 0.3% is not a policy, that is a spending target. The way I am looking at this, policy is about how we work, how we make sure we get best value from everything that we spend and, maximum impact, and how we work much more in partnership with other Governments, which is what they are telling us they want.
One thing I would say is that having begun the process of going through things line by line—and we have to cut by more than 40%—and looking for things to remove from our spend, there is not 40%-odd worth of spending that you can just put a pen through without worrying about what you are doing. Some of the reporting of our aid spend would lead you to believe that there is mountains and mountains of programming that is pointless and impact-free. That is not the case. I think that part of the job we have is to explain that better, explain what we are doing and why we are doing it.
Q4 Chair: Minister, could you explain the principles are that are guiding you now?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: International development is about alleviating poverty globally. That is what it is about. We can choose many different ways to do that. I think that the right way to do that is to focus on our humanitarian work, of course, because that is saving lives, that is feeding children. It is about health, where the UK brings something, I think, that is strong internationally. We develop vaccines. We have a good story to tell. We have enormous expertise and research and development capability here, which we should be making the very most of.
We also have a climate leadership role, so that is why I think climate should be a big part of what we do in the future. However, you do all these things and really what you are trying to do is to strengthen other countries so that they can grow, they can be more independent, and they do not have the need for aid from us in the way that they have done in the past. We look at examples like South Korea where they have transformed themselves in recent decades. They are now a global powerhouse. Who thought, 40 years ago, that that would have happened?
This can work but we have to modernise how we do this. We have to look at the multilateral architecture. We need to work with them to reshape how they are going to work. We have to now, because there is less money, but everyone I am talking to says that this is something that we could and should have been doing many years ago.
Q5 Tracy Gilbert: I just wanted to press you a little bit. You said in some of your opening remarks when you were talking about charity and aid that this is a conversation with the public and this is evidenced. I wanted to press you a bit further on that. Can you tell me about why you think that is the public’s perception and what evidence you base your views on for this?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: There is the YouGov polling—it is polling data, but I am being completely honest with you, it is experience as well. It is doing lots of engagement with the public over very many years, both as an elected Member of Parliament, but also since then. Having taken a strong interest in the journey of development in recent decades, it feels like a very long time ago now since Gleneagles and the decisions that were made then. You look at how the world has changed—the posture of the United States, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Things have happened that have led people, I think, to view our role on the world stage slightly differently than they used to, and I think it is important that we understand that better.
When you see stats that 18% of people do not have confidence in the way we are spending our aid budget, even though I think around 48% of people support work on development, then there is a problem. It is a real problem of public confidence that any Government that believes in this needs to fix.
Q6 Tracy Gilbert: Can I press you further on that? On the figures, you are saying 18% of what, 18% of how many people that were taking part in the survey?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: These are respectable polling companies. I can get you more.
Chair: It would be helpful if you could give us the evidence.
Tracy Gilbert: Just because if that is the evidence base for the change of direction, I think it is very important that we know that—
Chair: Not least because a number of other organisations have done surveys that would counter that.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: I have read those, too, and I have read the More in Common work as well. That is not the reason for the change. The change in direction today is because we have had to cut the budget and we have done that because the Prime Minister decided, as a reflection of the changing geopolitics—and we all understand what that means—to put more money into our defence budget. That was a political choice that the Prime Minister made. It is one I support and it is one that I now have to implement.
We are not doing this in response to polling data, but I think we would be making a big mistake if we imagined that the public were completely confident and satisfied with this agenda and the way it has been implemented in recent years. The sector needs to take some responsibility for this. I can remember when I was first elected in 2010 I used to get inundated with representations on climate goals or whatever it might be, and that just does not seem to happen any more. Maybe because of 0.7%, the need to communicate and to speak to the public about this fell away. I think we need to relearn how to do that.
Q7 Monica Harding: Your manifesto does not seem to suggest that there was a crisis in support for international aid and development. Indeed, it seems to say, “With previous Labour Governments, Britain gained world-leading expertise in international development. Under the Conservatives this capacity has been downgraded and as a result Britain has lost influence.” There is other polling and, depending on the question that you ask, it suggests that the public do support international aid and development when it is within their interests, when it supports defence and security and soft power, which the Foreign Secretary has also talked about.
I wanted to talk about your language of “charity”. It is remarkably reminiscent of the US Administration’s current language about charity, and the decision to cut aid was done very soon before the visit by the Prime Minister to the US about the defence budget. Would you say that the US is driving our policy on international aid? Would you also acknowledge that the £3.2 billion of cuts to ODA was counted as day-to-day spending, but that was only true of £0.6 billion of the increase in defence spending, which means that under Treasury rules £2.6 billion of money previously devoted to helping the world’s poorest is now being used by the Chancellor to restore the fiscal headroom that she lost in the months following her autumn budget? What would you like to say about that?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: There is a lot in there.
Chair: There is a lot in there. Are we following the US on this?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: No. It is unfortunate in a way—
Chair: A bit of a coincidence.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: It is unfortunate in a way. When I have been on visits I get asked this, so I think it is a completely fair question and I am pleased to assure you that it is not. Yes, there is obviously a common geopolitical context here, but we have made our choice for very different ideological reasons. This is about necessity and having to shift some spending to defence. We maintain our commitment to go back to 0.7% when we can. What has been reassuring to countries is the approach that we are taking and the engagement and the dialogue and our continued commitment to the agenda. We are not saying we are turning away from this because we do not think it is effective, we do not think it is important, or we do not think it is our responsibility or in our interests; it is absolutely in our interest to continue to do this work. We will have to do it differently and we will have to do it with less money, and that is a very different posture from the one that the US has taken. Their decisions are for them, and there is a consequence of some of the choices that they have made in places where we are active. However, I can assure you that we are not following a lead here. This is a response to the geopolitical context that we would prefer was not there.
Q8 Chair: Minister Chapman, while you were speaking I was thinking of the girl child in Malawi who is no longer getting her education supported. She probably does not care whether it is driven by ideology; she just knows that her opportunity has collapsed in front of her eyes. I have to say that we have known each other for a long time and I know how passionate a defender you are of the rights of women and girls. Why on earth are you putting on record that we are no longer supporting education and we are no longer prioritising the rights of women and girls? Why are you not saying that we will be embedding those within everything we are doing, which is where I think they have always been?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: I could not agree more—I had this very conversation with Harriet Harman last night about how we do that. Whenever I have a priority about something—and I started out in local government some time ago—I would get told by officers, “That is okay, we will integrate that thing that you care about. We will mainstream it. It will be everyone’s responsibility.” It was the worst thing you could ever say to me. However, we will have to do that with our work on gender. If you work in development and you do not have a passion for work on gender and equality running through you, you are in the wrong business.
What we need to do—and I would be grateful for views, and I want to work with Harriet on making sure we do this well—is to mainstream this and integrate it. I have had people who work specifically in gender themes say before all this came about that that is the approach they want. They do not necessarily want stand-alone programming all the time. Sometimes that is needed, and when we are talking about health, maternal health is important and there are examples where that is needed. We have to find a better, smarter way of working to make sure that we do not walk away from this agenda. Because this is now contested in a way that it maybe has not been for many years, we have to be very clear by our presence at multilateral events, about the language that we use, about our championing of this agenda, that we are not turning away because we do not think this is important. We are having to recalibrate our spending because when you are losing that much of the budget there are choices. There are tough choices. When we say there are tough choices, that is because you are having to stop doing things you care about.
Chair: Let me pause you there, because I want to bring Noah in.
Q9 Noah Law: Minister, on this question of the tone around the idea of aid being charity and the question marks looming over education programming, for example, does a fear of moral hazard play into policy making around development aid for us now?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: What do you mean?
Noah Law: As in if you are assumed to be ready to provide charity to someone, then they will continue to make use of that.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: I have heard that as well, and you can point to examples. Refugees in camps, because we have not put enough work into supporting them for moving on, find themselves there for a very long time, far longer than they would like to be. There is not nothing in this, but in our humanitarian work, which will be aid based, we will be spending money on feeding people, on educating them in precarious situations, and on providing the care that they need. I was in Chad last week on the border with Sudan. That is a situation where there is no investment vehicle that will do that; that is aid, and that is right that we do that. There is then this division in the way that we think between our humanitarian work and then development work. In many countries they even have separate Ministers for those two things. We have invented this thing in the middle called Nexus to try to recognise the fact that you have humanitarian work and then you need to transition to development work.
I find that quite a rigid way of thinking, and I think we need to work with international partners and multilateral organisations in trying to unpick some of that. Talking to the Chadian Government, they are very anxious about how they support—and that country has every challenge going—those hundreds of thousands of people who are living in precarious situations, and how they support them to integrate into their community where that is appropriate, to contribute, to be safe. There is a huge security challenge here. You do not do those things by sticking to humanitarian aid; you do that by thinking longer term about moving people into towns and villages, about giving them skills, about allowing them to grow their own food.
There is a whole different mindset around this and I am finding a lot of interest and enthusiasm in having that discussion. I do not know exactly what the answer will be at this stage, but what you are getting at through that question does speak to this different way that we have to think about supporting people in dire circumstances but then enabling them to get on with their lives, which is surely what everybody wants.
Q10 Noah Law: On the shift from 0.7 to 0.3% of GNI being put towards IDA, will there be an overall impact assessment of this?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Yes—we will have to do impact assessments on our decisions, for sure, because they do affect marginalised groups and vulnerable people. We have not done those yet. I can imagine what they will say, and I am quite keen that we share as much of that as we can and we are open about it. These are decisions that have consequences in the real world for some of the most vulnerable people and there is no point me sitting here and pretending that is not the case.
Q11 Noah Law: What are the timeframes for those impact assessments to be published?
Nick Dyer: We will be doing them when we do our allocations for 2025 and 2026. We will do the quality impact assessments at the same time. We hope to be able to publish the allocations with the annual report that will come in June/July, and I would hope that we have something to share or be ready to share on the quality impact assessments around that time. We will have to take stock as we are progressing them and doing them.
Q12 Chair: Minister, to bring you back to women and girls, but leading on from that, from the 2021 round of cuts we ended up using Committee privilege to publish the equality impact assessment. It showed that the impact on women and girls specifically was 66% of those cuts, down from where it was in 2017. What concerns me is, when you do that piece of work, will that influence where you are and are not funding going forwards, or will you publish it and go, “Oops, that is awful”? Because with your statement around women and girls, that is great, but how will you compel every aspect of development spend to make sure that women and girls are involved in that? Is there data that you will be instructing your teams to use to capture that, and is that something that you will publish and inform going forwards?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: The idea that you had to use privilege to do that—
Chair: It was ridiculous.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: I find that interesting. I am quite keen to look at those things—which I have not done yet—from last time.
Q13 Chair: Women and girls, people with disabilities, minority groups; the most difficult to reach were the ones that were hit hardest—
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Yes.
Chair: —largely I think because it was our bilateral aid that was supporting them.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: That makes sense. I will make sure that I look at those, and I think that we need to learn lessons from the way that was done. We are making some very broad-brush decisions at the moment. We are also making some decisions about our bilateral programming, which I wrote to you about, and we can talk about that as well. Doing these pieces of work takes officials’ time, and then to not share seems a bit counterproductive.
Chair: Not only to not share, to not learn.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Exactly. They are there for a purpose, are they not? The reason we insist on them being done is so that we are making better decisions in the future.
Q14 Alice Macdonald: I was quite surprised to hear you say that there will be less for women and girls, because you have talked about polling. The polling shows that 65% of the public across all political parties think that aid for women and girls is important. I want to understand the process because in my world normally you would do the equality impact assessment to inform the decisions that you are making. How have you got to the decision already that women and girls are not a priority, given that we know in the US a lot of the money that has been cut has been on gender equality, and in the Netherlands as well? How have you looked at this holistically in terms of the impact to get to this decision?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: That is a fair challenge. It is because I think we can do our work on gender in a different way. For instance, with health, we are vaccinating; you cannot do that in a separate way. You can integrate it with nutrition, you can take a more holistic approach to health, but you are doing health. On gender the thinking is that we can integrate and mainstream our work and make sure that when we are doing work on health, women and girls run all the way through it. I want that to be the case. What I cannot do is sit here and tell you today how that happens, and that is why I want to engage with yourselves and with the sector, and I want Harriet, as part of her job, to hold me and the Department to this because it is easy to rock up and say, “Yes, it is okay, we will integrate this stuff”.
We cannot do everything that we were doing before, so we do have to make some choices early. How we then work, particularly on our bilateral programming, means that there will be the opportunity for those decisions to be made in slower time and to be able to take into account more of the impact assessments, but also all the work that we can do on engaging with the sector and engaging with partner Governments. It is two things: it is about wanting to make sure that we integrate for real, and it is about making sure that when we make the decisions that flow out of what we are doing now, we are able to ensure that we are not unconsciously losing something that is precious.
Q15 Chair: Minister, can I push you on a specific? I chair the APPG on SRHR, sexual and reproductive health rights, which is linked very tightly to what you were saying about vaccines. Will you be looking at a model where you have a one-stop shop, basically? Is that what you are talking about?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: I was speaking with Ministers from—I think it was Somalia. They were telling me about their frustration with the multilateral system. I am not going to mention agencies because there is no need; I can make the point without doing that.
They were talking about how in their country there is a vaccination service one side of the village, and then a few hundred metres away there is a nutrition service. What we are expecting women to do is queue twice with their very young children to access both services. What they said was the woman will come, she will access one service and then she is going to the other—we do not expect people to do that. Well, we shouldn’t.
We can go and get our babies weighed, vaccinated, checked and get nutritional support and breastfeeding advice all that in one place. Why we expect women who are living in the most difficult circumstances imaginable to have the willingness to do this just defeats me, when those agencies ought to be compelled to work together. It is things like that that I think everybody has said, “Oh, yes, that has been a problem for years. We are trying to solve it.” Now is the time.
Q16 Chair: Minister, realistically, with the services that you are describing, they are the multilaterals giving those, or the big players. Are you looking at continuing your level of support to them to continue the level of influence we have over them or are they going to be facing cuts as well?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: In a world where we are losing almost half the budget everybody gets a cut, basically. We are going to try hard to cut some things less than others, but it is difficult to see how you spend what we are spending now on many of those things. To your point, we are major donors to these multilaterals—major donors—and we ought to be using that to have a louder voice than I think we have had.
Chair: Rather than “we ought to be using that”, are you willing to make sure—
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: We will. Yes, we will.
Q17 Brian Mathew: Minister, in this world of new spending targets—specifically 0.3%—I have two questions. There is need for clarity on both of them. Can you confirm that the 0.3% on aid spending is now a floor beneath which the Government would never sink and not a ceiling? That is the first question. The second question is: will the Government set out a clear timetable for a staggered return to a higher level of spending as an implied requirement of the International Development Act; for example, increasing in the first instance to 0.65%? Let’s deal with the first question.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Yes—I think is a simple answer, without wishing to pre-empt my good friend the Chancellor’s future decisions. We have made a big commitment now. We have taken what the Prime Minister said was a hard decision for him, to go from 0.5% to 0.3%. We are at 0.3%.
We are being told now—I am telling you as well—that our intention is to increase this over time. If you want to describe that as a flaw, you can, but it needs to be understood in the context of the decision that we made to increase defence spending, and that is why that happened. If the geopolitics had been different, we would not have had to make this choice.
Chair: We have heard this argument a lot. We hear what you are saying. We do not necessarily agree with it.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Absolutely. I do not expect you to agree with it. I know that there is huge concern about this decision for many people, but it was a choice. It is a choice that has been made and it is a choice that we now have to implement as well as we can.
Chair: Your understanding is the 0.3% is as low as we are going, and you are going to fight tooth and nail to make sure that is true?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: I have no reason to think—no one has ever suggested to me—that there is any intention to go lower than 0.3%.
Q18 Chair: In the spending review that is upcoming, what conversations have you had with the Treasury about protecting the departmental budget?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: The FCDO departmental budget?
Chair: Yes.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: That is part of the normal spending review process. My bit of the forest is about the ODA spend, and I am sure my friend the Foreign Secretary will stand his ground when it comes to his wider departmental budget.
Nick Dyer: Could I just add a nuance to that? In terms of our budget, one of the shifts that has happened since the 2025-26 spending year is that we will no longer become the spender and saver of last resort. We will be given a cash budget rather than linking it to the movements in GNI. The cash that we have been given is in relation to the forecasts that had been made at the 2025-26 spending round.
In terms of our budget, what is happening for the next three years, the FCDO has run a process where we have sought that evidence papers from all Government Departments have come to the FCDO. We have reviewed those evidence papers and Ministers are proposing a strategy and a set of allocations for the whole of government on ODA, which will then go to No. 10 and the Chancellor for review and final decision in the SR.
There has been a shift in the process. In effect, the FCDO is running the process and making the proposition and the proposals on allocations, but the final decision, of course, as it always will be, is with the Treasury.
Q19 Chair: Can I push for clarity on that a little bit? Over recent years the proportion of ODA that has been spent by what is now FCDO has been in decline and going to different Departments. Are you now saying that they have to basically put a pitch in to you and you then make the recommendations—you being the Minister—and you then make the recommendations as to what is and is not accepted?
Nick Dyer: We asked them to send us the evidence papers and justification; they have come to us. We have reviewed those. We have had conversations across Government. There are good reasons why the Government Departments should be spending some of the ODA, because they have skills and capabilities that we want to use and draw on. A good example is DEFRA for nature or DESNZ for mitigation, but the FCDO Ministers, the Foreign Secretary and Minister Baroness Chapman will make a proposition to the Treasury and No. 10 about what those allocations should be.
Q20 Chair: Could I layer on to that? The frustration of this Committee over the years has been when other Departments have spent ODA money and sometimes they have done a brilliant job, but sometimes they have not. Quite often we hear evidence of where they are running parallel but with no seeming connection to other projects that FCDO will be running or have oversight of, and in some cases tripping up other projects, not sharing the learning. Are you also able to make sure that the embassies and high commissions have oversight of those, if not running them, so that that does not happen in the future?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: I will maybe put it a bit more bluntly than Nick. When I first was appointed I was astonished to see how much money was spent by the Departments and my gut reaction was to get it all back, put it in one place and run it as a single strategy.
Chair: It makes my life simpler as well.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: That is true. Having gone through this process where I have met with the relevant Ministers in all the other Departments, officials have done a lot of work on understanding what other Departments are doing. There is a good case for keeping some of that spending happening in other Departments—we talked about the Home Office, which is a slightly different situation. I think that there is a good case for doing it.
What you cannot defend in a 0.3% world is running parallel strategies, having duplication, having spending that when evaluated does not match up to how the FCDO would have liked it to have been spent. We are going to have to do a good piece of work across Whitehall bringing all that together; if it needs shared governance or if we need to change the way we work as Ministers. I have had some good conversations with Patrick Vallance about the R&D portfolio and how we can use his expertise to try to bring some coherence to all this. It is a case of necessity being the mother of invention. We are going to have to work in a much more focused, disciplined way across Departments. That is easier said than done, but the way that this process has surfaced some of those issues means that we are—hold me to this—in a better place than we were to do that.
Q21 Chair: Can I push you a little bit further? We have brilliant development directors and development teams around the world, who are already co-ordinating NGOs, private sector, their own projects and multilaterals. Can I urge you to trust and empower them more and give them the oversight of these projects as well? They are superb, but I have to say over the years and with recent weeks they have felt very demoralised and undervalued.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: This could almost be a planted question, because it is one of my hobby-horses at the moment. This is sharing my journey with you. The Prime Minister said to me, “You have to go through this line by line. I want you to have a firm grip on spend.” Absolutely. What we did was we said to posts, “Continue to spend anything you are doing on humanitarian”, because it seemed the responsible thing to do and because we did not want to walk away from things mid-programme or that we had legally committed to. We thought that would be reputationally damaging for the UK and harmful in other ways, too. Posts were asked to continue with those.
For everything else, we asked them to submit to us reasons why they felt that a particular programme was worth us continuing to support, the idea being to create some headroom in this financial year in order to smooth out the cliff edge into next year. I have been so impressed by the way the exemptions process has been managed by our development teams. They have not inundated us with hundreds and hundreds of exemption asks. Their reasons for wanting to continue things are nearly always sound. There has been good dialogue.
They have also, to their credit, organised themselves regionally and they have put forward suggestions to me about how we make this change, with new ways of working. There is a real strong desire to work more regionally, to be able to recognise common issues for a group of countries in a part of the world, and to come together to work to devise solutions.
They are the most creative and innovative. They are good budget managers. They manage their spend well. They care about impact. These people are values driven and very skilled. What we need to do, in this new way of working, is get them on multi-year deals so they can plan their spend. When there is less money, having the ability to plan across years will make a big difference to what they can do. We need to work it out between the guardrails of “cannot do anything” and “complete freedom to do whatever you like”, which means I will not be able to sleep at night. Somewhere between those two extremes there is a balance where they get the ability to innovate and do what is right in their place, because we have them there as they are experts in their place. Let’s allow them to be experts in their place.
Q22 Chair: Are you trusting them to be involved in how this process is being shaped?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Yes, I think that is vital. I landed in Jordan on my first visit and the development director there got me in the car and gave me a good old talking to. Honestly, those conversations.
Chair: I think she keeps driving round the block until you agree with her.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: She is very effective; thank you, Hazel. It is not just her. You find this attitude—they want to get things done.
Chair: They also want the absolute best value for the taxpayer and they take that incredibly seriously.
Q23 James Naish: Can I just jump in? That is not a new idea.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: No, of course.
James Naish: It is like we are saying there is a new way of thinking, we can sharpen our focus, we can change how we work. Why is that suddenly just going to start happening now just because we have to do the budget? These people have always worked impressively.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: No, I agree. You would have to ask previous Development Ministers, I do not know.
Q24 James Naish: The last one said, “It will be impossible to maintain these priorities given the depth of the cut. The effect will be even far greater than presented.” The last one did not feel she could continue in her job. I think it is a bit idealistic to be presenting some of these ideas as meaning that we can just work differently without having this huge impact.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: There will be a huge impact, and I am not pretending otherwise. I think I have been very clear about the fact that I understand that. I also have a lot of respect for the former Development Minister. We sat down together and talked through her views and thoughts and her concerns. I respect and admire the way that she handled that decision.
I have a different job. I have to implement these cuts and, using the strength of our network and the experience and the commitment that they have, I think that is the right approach to take. As you quite rightly point out, we could have taken different approaches at various points in the past. When we went from 0.7% to 0.5%, there was an opportunity to do some of this. I cannot answer for why that was done the way it was. What I am determined is that we do not just say to everyone, “Right, everyone is losing 45% of their budget but carry on as you were”. That would be completely wrong. The right thing to do is for us to think hard about impact and about how we want to work. Yes, there is a difficult thing to do regarding cutting the budGet. There are choices that have to be made, and there are consequences of those choices, none of which anyone in this room takes lightly. There is an opportunity, too.
Q25 Alice Macdonald: I want to finish on the women and girls point again, and I recognise these are tough choices. I understand about mainstreaming, and the 2014 legislation is very clear about having to give due consideration to gender equality. What about things like stopping violence against women and girls? We have a cross-government commitment to halve violence against women and girls. The Foreign Office has an important role to play in that. The What Works programme is huge. That could potentially put a million women and girls at risk of sexual and physical violence. What priority are you giving to more stand-alone funding like that for stopping violence? That impacts on all the other things you have talked about, such as economic growth, health, and so on.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: It does, you are completely right. I cannot promise to protect every good programme, I just cannot. We have not got to the point where we are making those decisions yet, but when we do we will look at the impact of those choices, and we will look at the success of programmes. There are some programmes that have been more impactful than others. Where some things really worked and delivered, then that may be looked at in a slightly different way, but I cannot name a programme where someone has come to me yet and said, “There is this programme that does not really work, we do not think it is very impactful, and we think you should cut it”. Everyone is coming and telling me about things that are important and successful.
Q26 Alice Macdonald: I am trying to understand what the criteria is. Is the criteria really value for money or is it values? How are we weighing those things up?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: It is values, because how do you assess value for money in a value-free context? You cannot do that. It is about making sure that we are true to our values. Our values have got us to where we are, but we cannot stay where we are because we have to make these choices. There will be things that we no longer do that, if I was in your position, I would be challenging and saying that this is something worthwhile. I need to be held to account for those choices.
The way I want to work, especially when we come to looking at which countries, is to try to come up with a way of making those choices that is as transparent as we can be, where we are open about the criteria. We have devised the criteria in consultation with our posts and with others so that there will not be consensus and agreement but at least people can see that there is a coherence and a logic to how we are working.
Q27 David Reed: I would like to go into the mechanics of how the money flows out from the FCDO and into defence. The way in which it was pitched by the Prime Minister in late February was that it would go down from 0.5% GNI to 0.3% by 2027 for ODA, and then that would go from 2.3% to 2.5% for defence. It was pitched that it would be going across almost as a hypothecated spend. Is that the way you still see it? We are hearing many murmurs from across Whitehall that that is not going to be hypothecated and money might be moving across to bolster up the Chancellor’s fiscal headroom. Do you still see it as hypothecated, and how do you see that breakdown over the next couple of years as we get to 2027?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Can I be completely honest with you? All I know is that it is leaving my budget. How it gets to the MOD and how that is done, I do not know. Nick, can you answer?
Nick Dyer: There is no hypothecation in the Government budget. We have one budget, we have one tax revenue, we have one debt level and then we allocate the resources out. What we know is that—and this was one of the lessons from the NAO study—there were two challenges about the previous cuts. One was the speed and pace of the cuts, and the second was the lack of consultation. On the speed and pace of the cuts, there is a commitment that this will be a trajectory, so there will be a glide path. It will go from 0.48% in 2025-26 to 0.37%, then 0.3%. We are trying to mitigate one of those challenges.
In terms of the consultation, we are in the foothills of making decisions here, and there will be a process of consultation, both externally and internally, of what the best choices are going to be.
Q28 David Reed: From your perspective, was it incorrect for the Prime Minister to say that the money would be going from aid into defence by 2027?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: The only answer I can give to that is no.
David Reed: Thank you.
Chair: There is so much that I think all of us could pick away at that, and I am not going to right now, if that is okay, because I think you have given us so much more.
Q29 Brian Mathew: I would like a further clarification on the 0.3%. Will UK refugee illegal immigrant costs still be taken out of the 0.3% and, if so, what proportion?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: It would be, give or take, around a third, and it would be about £2.8 billion at the moment, I think. The Home Office is working to get that down, and not just to help me out; there is a strong political motive for doing that. It is wrong that people are left in hotel accommodation for that amount of time and are unable to get on with their lives or be returned or whatever it is that the decision eventually is.
The processing of those decisions needs to be faster, and people need to be returned when that is appropriate. We need to work much harder to stop the number of people arriving. This is not particularly news, but the bit where I am interested is that that means that we can free up more money to spend where it ought to be spent. Nick will remind me of the exact number, but they have reduced it this year already. I have spoken to Home Office Ministers about this and I will continue to do so, not that they need any additional pressure, I think they’re feeling it, but we need to make sure that that money is reduced as quickly as possible.
Nick Dyer: Can I add to that? In 2024 the in-donor refugee cost spend came down by a third compared to the previous year. It is now running at about 21-22% of the budget in 2025-26.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: After we have reduced the budget, it will be a bigger percentage, and this is the issue. We have cut the budget by 40%, but because the Home Office spend is not being cut by 40%—I hope it is as soon as possible—everything else is having to take more money. We have less discretion than you would imagine.
Brian Mathew: You can understand why some of us are pushing for people to be allowed to work.
Q30 Sam Rushworth: I do not envy your position. I have no doubt that you are trying to get the best impact for the pound. The Government are making political choices and it is important that the British public are given the full evidence of that impact. Will you commit, when we know the answer, for example, to how many girls stop going to school as a result of our aid cuts, or how many landmines we do not dig out of the ground, or whatever it is, that the Government will publish that impact so that the British public can see the full cost of this political decision?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: I am happy to be maximalist in our approach to this. We know pretty much what a lot of these impact assessments are going to look like, so not being open about them is a bit futile, I think. I do not know how we do that; do we publish them; do we publish summaries? I am unsure of the mechanics of that, but I do want to be as open and transparent as possible. I do not see any benefit in not doing so.
Q31 Monica Harding: I would like to expand on this. On the impact assessment, the ONE campaign suggests that the 40% cut to UK aid would result in 600,000 fewer lives saved —that is roughly the population of Glasgow—and 37 million children missing out on vaccinations for deadly diseases, which is more than double the number of children in the UK. These cuts will cause deaths. Are the Government cognisant of that and will they square that with the public?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: I have huge admiration for the ONE campaign and what they do. I would be interested in talking to them and understanding how they have reached those conclusions when they do not know, because we do not know, exactly which programmes and which funds will have what resource in the future. The broad point they are making is that this is a decision they disagree with and a decision that will cause harm to some people, and I respect that.
There is going to be harm caused by this decision. Our job is to minimise that harm and to try to get to a place where we have the impact that we want, and we can increase the spending in the future, because we have absolute confidence in what we are doing and we can leverage in additional money. When we are spending through something like the IDA programme, we know that for every £1 we put in, we leverage in £4 extra. I think it is quite difficult to make the assessment they have, but they are making a point and it is a point that I would expect them to make and I understand why they are doing it.
Q32 Monica Harding: I understand when you say you want to minimise the impact of it, but you are the Government. These cuts are a political choice, and we have talked also about how they are linked to the defence budget. Also, in previous Governments when fiscal circumstances have been even worse than they are now, they have kept to above 0.3%; in fact, 0.7%. Under Boris Johnson’s Government, the fiscal emergency to the cut to 0.5% was because of the pandemic. We are in a different place now but not as challenging as those times, yet the Government have come down to 0.3%.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: However challenging our economic situation is or is not—you will have heard Treasury Ministers talk about the £22 billion black hole that we have—we have made a few decisions that we have had to make because we want to make sure the economy is stable. We are seeing some good signs in the economy: interest rates reducing, people’s mortgage rates will be improving. This is all good; the decision that was made clearly this Committee does not agree with, but it was made because we needed to spend more in a different policy area, and that is defence. People can have a view, but it is the same question, and it is the same answer.
Q33 Chair: I am going to say the same thing that I have been saying. It is so naive to not understand that development is how you prevent conflict in the future, it is how you prevent terrorists in the future, it is how we keep people safe and prosperous. I do not know why it was decided to link the two together. I get that it is all one budget, but the decision that was made by the Prime Minister or his team to announce that is not doing your case any good. I hear what you are saying, but I really do not want to hear it any more in this Committee, if that is all right. Thank you.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Absolutely, we understand.
Chair: We have read it a hundred times.
Q34 David Mundell: I want to clarify the narrative. The tone of the remarks that were reported in the press this morning was actually very consistent with, “There’s lots of money being wasted and we need to cut because there’s lots of frivolous projects”. As you have appeared before us, you have given a much more reasoned argument and set out the factual position: the budget is being cut and therefore that will have to be dealt with. What is the narrative? Because in answer to one question you said that all the programmes that you have seen seem to be worthy and impactful and not a complete waste of money. Where are you coming from? Are you subscribing to that?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Who is the real Jenny Chapman?
David Mundell: Well, yes.
Chair: What is your vision; what is driving you?
David Mundell: This has been the case with previous Development Ministers. There has always been a lot of pressure from the public and certain sections of the media about money spent on development. Nick is very aware of that. However, in the past Development Ministers have been the advocate for the cause. Do you see that as the real Jenny Chapman?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: I am a very strong advocate for development. I think that it matters and is in the UK’s interests. It is not just our responsibility—which I do think it is—but it is how you create the stable, secure world that makes life safer, as the Chair correctly said, for everybody. Previous Development Ministers, and all of us who care about this, agree—it is not just the Minister’s job, it is everybody’s job.
This goes back to the point about the way we communicate with the public. This is slightly off the point but it is relevant, and the Chair will correct me if I steer too far away. We still are putting out press releases that are headed by “X million pounds for X project”. The public has no idea and I have no idea whether that pound sign is next to something that is a big number, a small number, more than last time, less than last time. We do not know what the project is. We are talking to ourselves far too often when we ought to be talking about people and stories and the good that is done and the improvements that have been made.
We never celebrate our successes. Look at the thousands of lives that are saved and the way that poverty has reduced and the impact that we have had. We do not talk about that. We do not close the feedback loop with the people who are paying for this, and that has to change. When we say “make the case” it is about, yes, identify where the need is—you have to do that— but also say, “Look at the vaccines that we developed that are saving lives across the world. Look at the seeds that are devised in this country that are drought resistant and are keeping people in livelihoods in Africa”. These things are happening because of things that were done by this country, and we should be proud of that and confident about it. That is the Development Minister that I want to be. However, at the same time you cannot ignore the scepticism that has been allowed to develop among the public. You change that, I think, by engaging with it, recognising it and, in the end, persuasion. You cannot just say, “What we do is good, trust us”. That does not work any more.
Q35 James Naish: I want to go back to the in-donor refugee spending. You talked earlier about how the budget is falling, and therefore as a percentage of the future budget the in-donor refugee spending will grow, potentially to 30% or more. In an ideal world that is a short-term cost that is coming down. Is there not a risk that in needing to find all these savings we make short-term decisions, cut certain bilateral or multilateral aid to keep within the budget, but in two to three years’ time that will be growing again? What is the risk that we make incorrect, short-term choices as a result of the in-donor refugee costs growing as a percentage of the pie?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: That is the question that I ask myself every day. It is a risk and very well put. We need to use the information that we have. We have officials who have done this task previously. The NAO has done some helpful evaluations of how that was done and I have read those. They were generally quite complimentary about the way that the Department did that, but there were some shortcomings that we will make sure that we learn from. I think that once we are over this initial phase we have to be open, engaging, listening, working with people on the ground and, importantly, working with partner Governments, because the things that we want to do will be far longer lasting if they are things that partner Governments want to do as well and want to do with us and want to use their systems change and policy change to implement.
We have to be incredibly mindful of that risk. I cannot say that every decision will be perfect and that we will get everything right, but one of the benefits of the system that we have is that there are opportunities like this to hold us to account and to course-correct if we need to. I am very open to that. Do you have anything to add from your previous experience of having to do this?
Nick Dyer: We have done it before. We have had various helpful feedback from the NAO, ICAI and the Committee itself, and we have looked at all that again in the course of the last few weeks to ensure that we do it this time in a way that makes the best job that we can do with the resources that we have. That is all that I can say.
Q36 James Naish: I would just emphasise that if a third of your pie is a fluctuating cost, my point is that if you are just trying to hold at 0.3% by 2027, you will make decisions that might go the right way or might go the wrong way. Say, a five-year funding package for Gavi. You will make a decision with some of that that is fluctuating. That means that we might underbake or overbake that for the long term by holding rigidly to 0.3%. I think that what you probably should be advocating for is a level of flexibility, given that that third, which is a huge chunk of the remaining budget, will potentially not be permanent. I do not want to see short-term decision making that means that we ultimately damage some of the things that we have talked about—our global reputation, our footprint and so on—because we still have that huge chunk sat in ODA.
Nick Dyer: The most damaging thing that people in our organisation tell us about is the lack of predictability. That is what kills them. We turn around and say, “We said that we were going to give you X and now we’re going to give you Y”. The change that has happened in this SR is that we are going to get full predictability because we are no longer going to be the spender and saver of last resort. We will get a cash budget. If there are more refugees coming into the UK and the internal refugee costs go up, that cost has to be absorbed by the Home Office and the Treasury. It will not come to us because we have a predictable budget over the next three years. That volatility that we have suffered with over the past five years has gone, and that is a good thing.
Q37 Chair: The Government keep telling us that these figures will go down, on refugees in hotels being paid for by ODA. Do you have any assurance that if that happens the money will go back to where it was meant to be spent?
Nick Dyer: We are having a conversation right now in ambit of the SR with the Treasury, which is having a lot of conversations with the Home Office about what the trajectory will be over the course of the next SR. We want to lock that in before the SR starts. That is not settled, and that depends on the speed at which the Home Office makes decisions, how much it can use dispersed accommodation, and what the SR allocation is from the Treasury to the Home Office. We are doing that work now and we hope to see that push down as far as possible that allocation. However, the deal is that we are not the spender and saver of last resort, so if the costs go up we do not benefit. If the costs go down, we will not benefit in the course of this SR.
Chair: Can I say to the team that we had agreed a whole list of other questions? Most of them have been dealt with, but we could rattle through and do them as quickfires, because we want to look at the international humanitarian law as well while we have you, Minister. James, you have a follow-up.
Q38 James Naish: Very quickly, you mentioned partner Governments and the importance of working effectively with them. In March the UK Government told the EU-UK Parliamentary Partnership Assembly that we were seeking enhanced collaboration with the EU on international development and humanitarian issues. Given the summit next week, I want an understanding from you about conversations that have been taking place and the extent to which you see progress being made towards achieving that goal.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: The world has changed and we all have to work way more closely than we have done in the past. My visit to Chad last week was with the Norwegians. I met my EU counterparts, and we all agree that we need to work closely together. We do not want to see everybody saying, “We want to prioritise health” and then other things not getting the focus that they need. That is important and it will be a big part of what I spend my time doing over the next few months to make sure that we have those good relationships. To their credit, there is very good communication and relationships at official level, which we will be relying on as well.
Q39 Alice Macdonald: To go back to the impact assessment side of things, we touched on protected characteristics, but can you provide a bit more detail on how you will mitigate the impact of the cuts on marginalised groups, particularly those with protected characteristics?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: The truth is that we will not be able to in every case, but we need to be doing these decisions with our eyes open. I do not know how we will do that until we get to the point where we have the assessments and we know what programmes we are looking at. I am happy to come back and go into detail about that when we get to that point.
Q40 Alice Macdonald: As well as the consultation with the secretary, do you get input from beneficiaries of programmes? Do you ask people what the impact would be if that programme stopped?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: I am trying to spend more time in country to be able to do that. I have met with the heads of most of the multilateral organisations now. The next thing that I need to do is spend more time getting to know the NGO sector to understand how they work and what their priorities are. That has to be a starting point when you make these choices: what is the impact on the ground; who is it who will be affected by this choice? It does not mean that you can avoid every decision, but you at least need to know what the decision is that you are taking. You cannot do that just by looking at the header of a programme. You need to properly understand what is happening. The exemptions process has been quite good for that because people have come to me and said, “Can we keep this going?” I will say, “What is it? Explain. I need more information. Where is this happening? How does it work? Could you do it more cheaply? Could you work with other civil society organisations?” That has been a helpful process from that perspective.
Q41 Brian Mathew: Nick, you told us in January that the Department was planning to recruit an additional 200 development staff to help rebuild its capacity. Are these plans still in place?
Nick Dyer: We have recruited, I think, 120 of those 200 and we are continuing with the recruitment of the other 80.
Q42 Brian Mathew: Are you losing development staff as well? What is happening at the moment in terms of the rest?
Nick Dyer: As you are probably aware, we are going through a process at the moment in FCDO of a voluntary exit scheme, so there are different people who are applying for that scheme. Some of them will be development staff, some will not be. Your underlying question, I suspect, is do we still care about our capability. The answer to that is absolutely. We all agree, as I have heard the Committee say in the past and I hope that you still do agree, that our people are one of our best assets. What sets the FCDO apart is that we do have professional capability and people who deeply understand the sector and can provide technical inputs and technical capability and provide advice and support and ideas. That is something that will continue.
As we go through a reduction process, it is inevitable that we will have to look at the question of where people are placed, how many people we need and in what sectors we need them. We will have to work through all that as decisions are made. However, I think that the Minister agrees that our capability and having a core capability of expertise in the organisation is essential for our future.
Q43 Chair: On that, Minister, and you mentioned it very briefly in your opening remarks, I have had a number of meetings with ambassadors from different African nations recently and they are all pushing to make sure that aid does not create a dependency culture. They want technical support to be economically viable in the long term. You mentioned capability. Could you tell us a bit more about what you think in practice that would look like?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Yes, I have had similar conversations to you, and the consultation that Lord Collins has done in the Africa approach—we have read the submissions to that—says the same thing, too, which is that countries want to have access to our technical assistance, whether that is on how to realise more tax or the Met Office doing some work in Bangladesh. There are many examples of where our expertise has made a real difference. In a world where there is less money, the expertise that we have has a high value that, as countries are developing, they want more and more access to. They want to learn how to train teachers, what a good curriculum can look like, what safeguarding is, all these things that we know how to do.
Nick likes to call it our centres of expertise. James Landale suggested to me that we might call it skill share, but we do need to work out how to almost brand it and market it and make it demand-led so that we do not just have, “These are the things that we think that you need” but instead a country or a post can say, “We think that if this country had a more organised land registry system, that would be a helpful thing”. We know how to do that and we should be able to organise that expertise. Some of it we might provide in-house but for some of it we might be saying to Google, “We want you to go and show them how to access satellite imagery of the Amazon so that they can identify illegal logging and intervene”. A lot of it we do already, but we could do it in a much more strategic and organised way where we get more impact. It is another way in which we have less money to spend bilaterally and we can engage with other countries in a way that is more partnership and partner rather than donor and recipient.
Q44 Chair: What about the lobbying up? I know that with a lot of the big multilaterals, some of these countries do not even have a seat around the table, whereas we tend to. Will you encourage our teams in the World Bank, for example, to advocate more? I am thinking about small island developing states, for example, who are at the absolute sharp front of climate change.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: I did not ask you to ask that—I did not ask you to ask anything, because that would be inappropriate—but I was at the meeting of the World Bank in Washington a couple of weeks ago. I was really surprised. People who have been going to these things for years do not seem to notice, but you had Canada—I have nothing against Canada; we love Canadians—speaking on behalf of the entire Caribbean.
Chair: There is no one else who is doing it, Minister, so why are we not doing it, particularly when it comes to our overseas territories?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: We should be advocating for developing nations and small island developing states to be able to advocate for themselves. We need to find ways of them having their voice heard and understood. That is just one of the ways where we need to use our voice and our influence with some multilateral institutions. There will have to be change. Everybody I spoke to at the spring meeting—and we got so fed up with hearing it—was saying, “We need reform of the international architecture”. Great. How? What does that look like? Who are our like-minded partners so that we can agree what that should look like, so that we can advocate for it and make sure that it happens? Using our voice and making sure that partner countries are properly included and can drive some of this feels to me like the next place for us to go.
Chair: Maybe arguing for more seats around the table or giving up our seat in some instances as well.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: I would not want to commit to giving up our seats anywhere at the moment, but we do need to find ways of making sure that those voices are heard properly.
Monica Harding: To continue on advocacy, I met a Health Minister for an African nation today who was ever so pleased with the support that the British had given with the almost elimination of malaria, but urged us to keep at it before it grows. There was no suggestion that they wanted reliance on the UK but they wanted more time. I have to push back on the speed. I know that these are planned decisions but the speed of going from 0.5% to 0.3%, a 40% cut, is very sudden. I also asked him about how this nation felt about the UK as a result of the support that we had given them, and he was full of praise and the trading relationship had strengthened as a result.
I want to look at soft power. As the Foreign Secretary put it—and we could not have put it better ourselves here—“Development remains a very important soft power tool. In the absence of development I would be very worried that China and others step into that gap”. Is the Department aware that us retreating from the global stage on international development means that it will open the space for other nations, other actors that may not be within our interest moving in?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: I will not incur the Chair’s ire by repeating the points about defence.
Chair: Thank you.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: You’re welcome. However, I do not accept the view that we are retreating from the world stage. ODA is an important part of what we do, but it is a part of what we do. We have our strong diplomatic network, we have influence. Soft power is far more than ODA. We could do a whole session on what soft power is and how important it is. We have teams in country who are able to use all the soft power levers that they have. It is not that there will not be any bilateral aid in the future or money to use for investment. That is what I would say on that.
We also need to look—this is a challenge in a multilateral system—at how what we are spending in IDA, in Gavi, in the Global Fund is recognised and how we are able to track that money and to see where UK money is making a difference in country when it is spent through IDA. We can use that, as we have said, to leverage in additional money, and we know that it is a good use of our spend. How can we make that more known and make that more transparent? Apparently, DFID, back in the mists of time, used to have a way of doing this, and we need to relook at that. Your question is about getting the credit and about showing that we have not turned our backs. There are ways that we can do that that we are not using at the moment.
Q45 Monica Harding: Does the UK remain committed to the sustainable development goals?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Yes.
Chair: Thank you. We like short answers, Minister.
Q46 Tracy Gilbert: I want to go back to multilateral and bilateral spending. You have touched on some of it and you said that none of these budgets will be protected. Is that correct?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: No, that is not correct. I should not have said it quite like that. The Prime Minister was clear about Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan.
Q47 Tracy Gilbert: A lot of these budgets are about to be replenished in the near future, including the Global Fund, which the UK is hosting. Will the UK’s contribution remain or will that be reduced as part of the ODA cut?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: It is probably best if I offer to come back and talk to you in more detail about that. I will say that I am very impressed with the way that Global Fund, Gavi and IDA in particular operate and the impact that they have, but we have not concluded decision making on those yet. I am happy to come back as often as you like, but it might be that as those replenishments take place you want to have further conversations.
Q48 Tracy Gilbert: I have one further question on that. Will the £2 billion that the UK committed to the World Bank International Development Association be maintained?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: I refer you to the answer that I have just given.
Chair: Monica, I cut you off.
Q49 Monica Harding: Yes, you did. Does tackling extreme poverty, which a previous Labour Government did so much good on post-1997, remain the focus of UK aid?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Yes, it does, because unless you do that you cannot develop a country. It does. There are different approaches that will be needed in different places because countries need a tailored approach. Yes, because while you have extreme poverty you will have a risk of extremism; you will have insecurity, conflict, instability, climate crisis, all these things. I am a Labour politician and I believe in alleviating poverty here and anywhere that it exists. That is who I am; that is the values that we have.
Q50 Monica Harding: That is the surprise of the Labour Government, that the cut to international aid is hurting the world’s very poorest. Within the cut, how can you be assured that the tackling extreme poverty commitment remains of the Government?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: We have less money to do it with but that remains our commitment. You are asking me to relitigate. We differ; we take different views.
Q51 Chair: We have heard what you said. One specific. The Committee was promised to see the Shafik report. We were promised it on various occasions. Will that happen and is there any point in our seeing it now?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Yes, I think that there is a point. Do you still want to see it?
Chair: Yes.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: We could arrange for a briefing on that, couldn’t we?
Nick Dyer: I am very happy to. The former Minister committed to come and brief the Committee on it.
Chair: Just giving us a hard copy is quicker.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: We will sort it out. I do not know quite why we would not give you a hard copy.
Chair: That is the way it is, Minister.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Let’s just work out how to do it and we will make sure that you get—
Q52 Chair: Is there any point in us reading it?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Yes, I think that there is. It was the first thing that I read when I was appointed. You will see a thread for where we are from that. There are different contexts and less money, of course, but some of the thinking is still relevant, so there is a point.
Q53 David Taylor: I want to ask a question about the balance between multilateral and bilateral spending and where your head is at the moment. Notwithstanding the points that you made about Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine, there is an argument to say that if your focus is on extreme poverty, the MDBs will have more impact if we plough the rest of the money straight into them. Obviously, there will be a traditional FCO view that the more countries you are involved in, the more influence you will have. Where is that debate at the moment?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: I am an impact person, which is where I think that we need to be. There are some places where a decent-sized bilateral programme is important. That could be for historical reasons where we have ties to a place. It could be that there is nobody else geared up to lead in that way. There can be political reasons. However, I think that development spend is about development and it is about poverty alleviation and it is about helping countries go on the journey that they choose. You do that in various different ways. In some places you need an element of both. We have not talked about BII—
Chair: We will.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Okay. That sounded ominous. There are different tools that we can use. Quite where the balance is gets to the heart of the challenge that we have.
Q54 David Reed: Moving on to BII and going back to a few of your opening comments around leveraging more money from the market, first, will the Government continue to provide capital injections into BII, despite the cuts in ODA? The follow-on from that is, would you be allowing BII or considering allowing BII to borrow from financial markets to support its investment activity?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: I think that BII is a good model. It is not perfect and we need to have conversations with it about countries and climate, and there are some things where I have some questions for it. Although it is independent, it is totally legitimate for the Development Minister to show up and say, “Tell me what you’re up to, and this is what I think about it”.
Q55 Chair: Minister, we would go further in that this Committee has always advocated that FCDO should be on its board, because you are the sole shareholder.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: I do not know what my thoughts are on that but I would be interested in learning why you—
Chair: It is delivering for you, Minister, on all the objectives.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: I am a big fan of that, but there must have been some thinking at the time that led to it being constructed the way that it is, and I need to understand that properly before I reach a conclusion about it. I do not know if this Committee has done a report on it. If it has, I will make sure that I read that.
Chair: We will pull the highlights out for you.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: I will make sure that I read that and I can benefit from it.
Q56 David Reed: On that final point, about leveraging money from the markets, is that an ambition for BII?
Nick Dyer: In a 0.3% world I think that it will be difficult for us to provide any core funding to BII, but there are ongoing commitments. For instance, we have a commitment with BII that it will operate in Ukraine. It may well be that we want to continue with that special commitment. There are also questions on climate mobilisation and whether we want to do that through a third party or through BII. It probably makes sense to think about doing it through BII rather than a third party. In terms of borrowing from the markets, at the moment it cannot. We have looked at that and discussed it with the various parties—BII and the Treasury—and that is still an outstanding question, so the answer to that at the moment is no.
Q57 Chair: Permanent Secretary, it is not that it cannot, it is that the rules that we have placed around it do not allow it, whereas other countries do.
Nick Dyer: The rules on which BII operate do not allow it.
Chair: Exactly, which is a different thing.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Yes, but if it does borrow, the argument is that it will add to the government debt. There is an issue there about whether we want to be adding to the government debt.
Q58 David Reed: Is BII aware of the points that you have just raised or has it been waiting for a decision to come out from the FCDO?
Nick Dyer: It is fully aware that we are going through the SR process and our decision-making process and we have been keeping it informed.
Q59 Chair: Minister, we are always told that BII is independent.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: That is what I was told as well.
Chair: However, we have also seen it responding very promptly when previous Ministers have indicated areas that they would like it to look at and seek out investments. You referenced the meeting with Jordan recently. Jordan is an anomaly. It has a very capable workforce and BII could be making investments there. There are private businesses that it could invest in that would help the whole country. Will you be doing an oversight of where it is investing and why it is investing?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: I have been briefed that it is independent, and I need to understand properly its governance restrictions as they currently stand. I do not see a problem with the Minister saying, “I think there’s an opportunity here, please look at it”. I am not a massive fan of Ministers going on visits, having a great experience, coming back passionate about whatever it was they saw and saying to the Department or to BII or anybody else, “We have to do something about this”. There has been a bit of that that has gone on in the past.
Chair: That is what I am referring to.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Yes. I do not think that that is the right way to work with the money that we will have in the future. We will have to have a very clear way that we prioritise and make those choices, which is not just about where you happen to have been. Having said all that, I have just been to Jordan and I could not agree with you more. I have had a long discussion with the Development Minister from Jordan yesterday morning and it sounds like there are several opportunities, particularly in its energy and water sectors. There is an opportunity there, just to completely contradict myself.
Chair: You are talking about drawing on our expertise. I would say that that is one of the areas of our expertise and trying to look more creatively about how it is applied would be a sensible way forward.
Q60 Sam Rushworth: BII has a remit of where it will and will not invest, but that is set by the Government, and the Government could review it. I would encourage you to, and I will write to you about this. I met with the head of the Bank of Palestine, for example, who pointed out that Palestine is not within BII’s remit but it would like to be. There are places where we could be doing a lot of good but we are not currently.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: I had the same conversation and I am happy to look at it. It is not something that I—
Chair: We have done a whole report on it, Minister, and it is a brilliant report. I would suggest accepting all our recommendations.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Absolutely. Noted.
Q61 Alice Macdonald: While we are on financing, ODA is one thing but there are other ways that we could maximise financing and the levers that we could pull. Debt is one of them. The Labour Government last time did a huge amount on it. Lots of African countries pay more on debt than on their healthcare. Can you tell us what this Government are going to do on debt, including conversations with the Treasury on how we could bring more private creditors, governed by UK law, to the table?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: That is a good point. The difference is that the debt is different now from what it was at the end of the last Labour Government and we need to think in a completely different way. A lot of it is private debt and it needs some careful thought. I have heard a few ideas about how we might go about that. I need to understand it and work out how, as a Government, we can best use our influence to be able to do this. Some of it we have managed to do through credit rating support to enable countries to improve their credit rating so that their interest rate declines so the payments are reduced. We can look at working like that. We can work with creditors to try to organise them and try to support agreements. I do not know the mechanics of how we do this yet, but it is something that we do need to look at closely because it is preventing countries from doing the work that they need to do. The example of African nations spending more on debt that on health is one that I hear a lot.
Chair: We have done a great report on that as well, Minister.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: This is fantastic. You will save me so much work, thank you.
Q62 David Mundell: I was pleased to hear that GAVI and the Global Fund are still in play, because your impact criteria and even when money is really, really—I want to emphasise that point because what is happening here in the UK also has to be seen in the context of USAID. What assessment is being made of that because some of those cuts are particularly impactful on certain areas? I co-chair, for example, the HIV/AIDS All-Party Group and there is a serious concern that the progress globally that has been made on HIV will start rolling back because of the USAID cuts. In the context of the decisions that you are making, what weight are you putting on what is happening with USAID?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: It is another argument, I think, in favour of making sure that some of those funds do not fall over, because we may now find ourselves among the largest donors, so there is an impact. The idea that we, the UK, or any other country is in a position to backfill when the US makes those decisions is unrealistic. Some of these decisions the United States is still working through and it is not quite clear exactly which decisions will be permanent and which will be reversed, so we need to give that a little bit of time. However, when you are talking about our multilateral commitments, we do need to look at what other countries are doing. We do need to talk to our European partners and others as well. If there are elements of funds that are at risk if we withdraw, that needs to be taken into account as part of our decision making.
Q63 David Mundell: I also want to ask you about the World Health Organisation, which is another not-favourite of the US Administration. Is the UK still committed to the World Health Organisation and its activities?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Yes, but it is perfectly reasonable for us to have a conversation with the WHO about mandate and what it does and its focus. I am very keen to do that.
Nick Dyer: I want to add a general point on this. There are a lot of multilateral organisations in the system that are currently facing quite significant cuts. As the Minister said, we will look at the system and see which ones we think absolutely must be protected and supported. Global health is one of those. At the same time, it is incumbent on the system to reform. One of the things that we want to do is to work with these organisations—WHO, GAVI and Global Fund—and ask the question about what the future of that sector looks like and how they can work better to work within the likely smaller funding that they will get.
David Mundell: I think that that is a positive approach and I am not arguing against that. Nobody would suggest that we could backfill for the US, but in your decision making we have to understand what the impact of the lack of US funding would have in particular areas. Obviously, with my interests, I am citing HIV.
Q64 Chair: Minister, with my interest in SRHR, it has been devastating. I am particularly thinking of the UNFPA. The UK has always led on this. I am glad that you are focusing on health, because global health is something that the UK has overlooked for a long time and we do have a lot of opportunities. Most of those frontline services are being delivered by women. They were horribly decimated and died over covid and have not been built back again. The SRHR is literally a lifesaver for many people, so I would urge you to try to make sure that this is there in the mix.
You said “climate”, which is a throwaway for something that is enormous. What bit of climate are you thinking of focusing on?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: We have been having robust conversations, if I can put it that way, with our friends and colleagues at DESNZ about every penny that we put into the work that it does and our international climate funding commitments. The Foreign Secretary has made no secret of his passion for nature as well, which is where we have been working with DEFRA. There will obviously be less money, and I am keen to understand what the best buys are on those. Is it the GCF? What is it that gives us the biggest impact that we can have? We have COP approaching and I know that the Brazilians are keen that this is not just about who turns up with the biggest cheque, this is about how we do things differently. Again, this is something where we have to work across Whitehall, and we want to make sure that we are spending this as well as we possibly can. It is about impact and it is about getting rid of some of the duplication. Improving the governance around this spending is what I want to do next.
Q65 Chair: It is also about leadership. In the FCDO orals in the Commons today, four MPs, including myself and the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, raised—it is the World Ocean Conference in four weeks—that while we said that we were going to ratify the ocean treaty, we still have not.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: BBNJ.
Chair: Yes. The last Government in 2023 said it would be ratified in time for this conference. This has an immediate impact on the SIDS, on our overseas territories and on the global ocean system. It is that leadership that does not require money. It does require a bit of parliamentary time, but it is the leadership that we need to be doing, rather than putting in cash. For this Committee it has always been about empowering local people. It is very easy to spend a lot of money on climate, but if you ask the local people what they need, they tend to know the answers and it tends to be a lot cheaper.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: That is encouraging. On the BBNJ, I gave evidence to the Committee with Emma Hardy, who is the Minister responsible at DEFRA. The commitment is there. I can speak to the business managers and find out where we are on timetabling, because my understanding is that that is what is holding it up.
Chair: Thank you very much. Even if we could make a statement of a timetable to ratify it, that would keep us on that world stage that we are so desperate to cling on to.
Q66 Monica Harding: In relation to the US, are there conversations from Government to Government encouraging them to keep their role as the leader in USAID? I met a group of Congressmen and women yesterday who were very interested in the separation when DFID came into FCDO. They are going through the same thing with the absorption of USAID into the State Department and they were very keen to learn lessons. What conversations are taking place?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Those conversations have been happening. It is quite early days still with their new Administration and they are still making appointments, but things have moved a bit. While I was in Washington I was able to meet with a group of Republican thinkers on development, which was really interesting. There was more agreement than you may have imagined. I know that officials are speaking specifically about this issue of the FCO-DFID merger and how that was done and the lessons that can be learned.
Q67 Sam Rushworth: Earlier you talked about areas that remain a priority for the Government as well as areas that would be cut, but you did not mention on either of those lists the prevention of conflict. Is that still a priority for the Government and, if so, in what ways?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: It is a priority. We do need to challenge ourselves on how we do that. One of things that I am finding in development is that there are these silos of programming. My challenge to the system and to the Department, if we are interested in conflict prevention, which we are, is: what are the best things that we can do? Is it about economic reform and economic development in a particular place? I find it hard to believe that investing in young people and health does not also give you a benefit in terms of preventing conflict. We know that conflict has the most devastating impact, particularly on women and girls. It is one of the main drivers of migration. It is about trying to understand this in a more holistic way and making sure that, much as we are prioritising particular programmes, in the work that is done at the moment that is labelled as conflict prevention—because that is how up to now you get your funding—we learn what is good about those programmes and that we are able to make sure that the good stuff is not lost. There is ISF and the contribution that we make to that as well, so there are things that we will have to continue doing.
Q68 Sam Rushworth: I know a bit about the impact of this because it was my life for many years before I was an MP. One of the most impactful things that I have seen the UK Government be a big contributor to is the work that we have done with civil society organisations on the ground that prevent rumours from spreading, that do peace education work and grassroots peace building. It seems to me that the way that we have outlined the UK Government cuts, civil society will not be getting a slice of the pie. Am I wrong in thinking that?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Yes, you are wrong. What we have said so far is very broad-brush. You do not have to look at this work for very long to understand that civil society organisations are an incredibly powerful partner to work with, and we do need to continue to do that. At the moment we are talking prioritisation. We then need to get into efficiency and, when we are commissioning programmes, whether we are doing so in a way that is getting the costs down as much as possible. That will be a challenge to the system, but we will be better placed to do that because we will be able to put development directors in command of many over multiple years, which will enable them to commission in a more cost-effective way and enable them to work in a more collaborative way and to have a bit more creativity. We will have less money but we need to try to get the same relationships working on the ground.
Q69 Sam Rushworth: My worry is that those projects will not be successful in a call that is based on health, they will be successful in a call that is based on atrocity prevention. Therefore, if there is not an atrocity prevention focus, if there are not specific funding rounds linked to it, those things will not get funded.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: We will still have centrally managed programmes and we will still have a bilateral spend. This comes to some of the control that our posts will have. Because something might be a priority for us on a national level, I do not think that it follows that we say to every post in every place, “We want you to focus on the same priorities that we have nationally”. The reason that you have people in country is so that they understand the specific needs of that place. They will be able to say to us, “We think that in this place we need to do de-mining. We need to do work on conflict and more work on misinformation. We want to work with the World Service. We want to do different kinds of work. We want to get some of the social media companies in because we are concerned about what is going on here”.
Q70 Chair: Will they be allowed the freedom to do that?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: That is where I want to get to. How do we do that in a way that enables me, as I said, to sleep at night and not worry? There needs to be an agreement about how that happens.
Chair: It is about trusting your staff as well.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington: Completely, yes.
Chair: I go back to your points right at the beginning that you have brilliant staff on the ground.
Thank you, Minister.