International Development Committee

Oral evidence: Beyond Aid: The Future UK Approach to Development, HC 663
Thursday 11 December 2014

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 11 December 2014.

Written evidence from witnesses:

–       Department for International Development

Watch the meeting: Tuesday 11 December 2014

Members present: Sir Malcolm Bruce (Chair); Fiona Bruce; Jeremy Lefroy; Sir Peter Luff

Questions 117-204

Witnesses: Kathryn Tyson, Director of International Health and Public Health Policy and Strategy, Department of Health, gave evidence 

Q117   Chair: Good morning and welcome.  Thank you very much for coming in.  For the record, could you give us your name and role?

Kathryn Tyson: Yes.  I am Kathryn Tyson.  I am the Director of International Health and Public Health Policy and Strategy at the Department of Health. 

Chair: As I say, thank you for coming in.  You probably understand the context of this.  We are looking at cross-Government working on global goods—issues that cross departmental boundaries.  The Ebola crisis is a classic example of that.  I just wonder, perhaps just to start off, if you could explain what the Department of Health’s role has been in partnership with DFID, and given that DFID has led the effort, how that collaboration and co-ordination has worked.  Have there been things that could have been improved or lessons that need to be learnt?

Kathryn Tyson: Sure.  The reason that the Department of Health has a role here—so far so obvious—is that we sit at the centre of the domestic health and care system and so, in terms of ensuring the preparedness of the system domestically, clearly that is a lead role for the Department of Health.  From that, stems an understanding of how such systems work, and that is a basis for discussions with health ministry counterparts across Europe, particularly in the EU but also worldwide.  The Department of Health leads for the UK Government on global health security issues, based entirely on that understanding of how those systems work. 

The domestic side apart, the international role has been in three chunks.  We have contributed to the effort led by DFID, as you said, on in-country work in West Africa, and that has been in several ways.  First, we have been encouraging international counterparts in health ministries to support the UK or, indeed, the US and France in the other countries—it is not just in Sierra Leone we have been seeking support—and also through linking with expertise in the NHS and in Public Health England to get expertise out to Sierra Leone and helping to tackle the issues there. 

The second area I have just alluded to in describing the domestic situation, but in our discussions at ministerial and senior-official level in the EU and with member states in the Health Security Committee, we have been articulating the UK position on matters like medevac and the approach to screening.  As you know, back in October the approach to screening for arrivals back in home countries changed really quite rapidly from week to week.  We have had a significant role in co-ordinating the approach across particularly the EU countries. 

Thirdly, we are the lead department on the global health security agenda, which you are probably aware was launched by President Obama back in the early spring—before the World Health Assembly last May.  That was specifically aimed at seeing what could be done to speed up and strengthen implementation of the international health regulations.  The UK became a leading party in that and it has coalesced very beautifully—that is probably not a very appropriate word—with the Ebola crisis.  One of the things that has been at fault there is international health regulation—surveillance in particular is really not in place in those countries. 

As to how the co-ordination has worked across Whitehall, we have had some strong relationships set up to build on, probably dating back to the work to set up the Health is Global strategy from 2008, as well as the formal structures.  COBRA has met and called in the appropriate people as many times as necessary.  That is supported by a number of cross-Whitehall committees at various levels of officialdom to focus on particular issues or simply just to do a weekly or sometimes a daily update.  It is working well.  I am sure that as we go through lessons learnt when we are out of the white heat of this there will be things where we can learn to say, “We could have done that slightly more smoothly.”

Q118   Chair: That has been the response to a crisis, which is as it needed to be.  In that context, perhaps you could just briefly say how the role of the National Security Council has worked and whether it has been helpful in unifying the approach, but also whether you feel that this may open the way for a more systematic co-operation on international health issues between DFID and the Department of Health.  I noted that the Secretary of State, having been a member of this Committee, made particular reference to that fact when he was making a statement in the House, which suggests that he gets that point.  I just wondered whether you could see more permanent working arrangements beyond the crisis for tackling international health issues and drawing the Department of Health and DFID’s work together. 

Kathryn Tyson: We do have permanent arrangements.  You are right that this will bring those into sharper focus and make us see whether we can strengthen and amplify and perhaps bring them into a wider applicability, but there are other strands as well that would allow us to do that.  The moves to agree a post-2015 sustainable development agenda, where the goals will this time be intended to apply to all countries and not just developing countries, will mean of their nature a whole-of-Government approach.  One of those goals, without counting too many chickens, is very likely to coalesce around the health arena, so I do genuinely see that that will give us even more of a basis than we have now to pursue that in concert.  As you know, the Chief Medical Officer has been leading a particular banner on tackling antimicrobial resistance as one of the principal threats to the health of the world over the coming years.  Again, we would see the things that we would seek to do and the sorts of leadership that we would seek as the UK across groups of countries that are more or less interested in playing a part in this as being the same as the sorts of things that we would be seeking to do to help developing countries to respond to crises like this.  They are things like laboratory twinning and technical assistance—lending of epidemiologists and lending of expert medical and scientific staff to poorer countries.

Q119   Chair: Has that kind of thing been discussed at the Security Council?

Kathryn Tyson: I do not know whether it has been discussed at the Security Council.

Chair: You have never attended that.

Kathryn Tyson: No, I have not. 

Q120   Fiona Bruce: There has been some criticism of the time it took NHS staff to get trained and cleared to help on the ground regarding Ebola.  Could you clarify to the Committee the causes of the delay?

Kathryn Tyson: Yes, I certainly can.  As you know, DFID, leading on this, has been working very closely with what the NGOs on the ground have wanted and their assessment of the situation.  The plain answer is that as soon as the NGOs have asked for NHS staff to go out and work there, they have been found and supplied.  It is true that this has been relatively late on, but the NGOs did not ask, for perfectly acceptable reasons, for NHS staff to go and work in their facilities; they staffed those facilities through their own routes.  Now that we have facilities built and provided by UK money on the ground, we have NHS staff out there.

Q121   Fiona Bruce: Thank you.  In our recent report Strengthening Health Systems in Developing Countries, we made a recommendation that volunteering could be established by the NHS through a new framework—“a formal structure to facilitate the participation of many more medical professionals, including through extended sabbaticals, and [making] clear that volunteering overseas is valued and consistent with career progression”—and that “DFID should provide the necessary funds to support” such schemes.  I wonder if you could tell us whether you agree that a more formal volunteering structure for NHS doctors and nurses is needed and would be beneficial, and also how NHS management and finance experts could be made more readily available. 

Kathryn Tyson: Anything that adds to the clarity and, if you like, the indemnity with which not just NHS staff but Public Health England epidemiologists and so forth as well can with confidence end up volunteering is a good move.  You probably know that as part of the response to your Committee’s report, the Department of Health, in concert with Health Education England, set up a working group with all the relevant parties on to look at this.  They have produced an initial document.  I see it is referred to as a “tool” here, but it is a written document of guidance, and they do intend to go on and look and see if there are more formal means of ensuring this.  That is the start that they have made. 

Q122   Jeremy Lefroy: Would it be possible for the Committee to have a copy of that document?

Kathryn Tyson: Absolutely, yes.  I will send that for you. 

Q123   Jeremy Lefroy: Thank you very much indeed, and good morning.  I really want to continue with some questions on Ebola but relate that to other issues.  Could I first ask when you in the Department of Health first appreciated the seriousness of the Ebola outbreak?

Kathryn Tyson: It was around about June/July. 

Jeremy Lefroy: But this was an outbreak that had been going on since early this year. 

Kathryn Tyson: Yes, indeed.

Q124   Jeremy Lefroy: How was it flagged up to you?  Was there a system by which it was flagged up to the Department of Health?

Kathryn Tyson: I will have to follow this up with you, but, yes, we have a system of disease flagging.  It would have come from the countries through to the WHO and noted just as an outbreak of a disease that had had containable outbreaks before, as you know, in other countries in Africa, and was flagged at that point.  We have, through Public Health England, a particular relationship that has gone on over a number of years with Sierra Leone, so they were noting that this was happening.  If you do not mind, I would like to write back to you with the precise timetable.

Q125   Jeremy Lefroy: Of course.  It is quite important.  As these health threats become increasingly globalised with ease of communication the system by which things are flagged up becomes increasingly important.  We have been concerned that the WHO did not take it seriously enough at the beginning.  There are clearly other routes.  We have a strong FCO and DFID presence in Sierra Leone and, indeed, some presence in Liberia, and I wondered if there were channels through which, independently of the WHO and reliance on an international system that did not appear particularly to work in this case, we have our own systems as the UK to protect our own nationals.  One thing I say there is that we discovered that Foreign Office travel advice sometimes seems to lag a little bit behind events, particularly when it comes to health emergencies.  I just wondered if you had any comments on that and whether you felt that we could strengthen the direct health co-operation between—sorry, am I overstepping the mark here?  I beg your pardon. 

Chair: Peter is going to pursue the WHO point. 

Jeremy Lefroy: Okay.  I will say no more about that.  I am just trying to get a sense of whether there could be closer co-operation between our own in-country missions, whether DFID or FCO, and the Department of Health, particularly over matters like health.

Kathryn Tyson: On the travel advice aspect, that is very substantially informed by experts within Public Health England, and they work with the FCO and the in-country missions on a day-to-day basis on what that health advice should be. 

Q126   Jeremy Lefroy: On a day-to-day basis?  We found, looking at the websites, that sometimes the FCO advice seemed to us a little bit behind the curve, based on having been in Sierra Leone at the time. 

Chair: The Committee was in Sierra Leone and Liberia in June.

Jeremy Lefroy: Yes.  The FCO travel advice seemed to us to be a little bit on the easy-going side, shall we say? 

Kathryn Tyson: That could be because in June we were only just, in common with the rest of the world, becoming aware of the different nature of this Ebola outbreak from the previous outbreaks.

Q127   Jeremy Lefroy: Despite what Médecins Sans Frontières were saying at the time. 

Kathryn Tyson: Yes.

Q128   Jeremy Lefroy: They had been stressing for some time that it was a really serious situation. 

Kathryn Tyson: Indeed.

Q129   Jeremy Lefroy: I am trying to work out whether you have channels through people like Médecins Sans Frontières where you are able to say, “Hang on.  There is a little bit of a difference here between the official advice and that from the people like Médecins Sans Frontières, who are really on the ground and saying, ‘This is more serious; you need to pay attention to this’.”

Kathryn Tyson: We did, but not as soon as we would have liked.  There were also, as I recollect, issues with the Sierra Leone Government at the time not wishing to make as much of this outbreak as would have been helpful in tackling it at the start, because of the area in which it started to come to fruition. 

Jeremy Lefroy: I fully understand that. 

Kathryn Tyson: I am not trying to say that it was perfect. 

Q130   Jeremy Lefroy: We understand.  Having met the Sierra Leonean Health Minister and health team, we came to the same conclusion.  The problem is that with such a serious disease that has such grave implications for the Sierra Leoneans, others in West Africa and, indeed, the global community, should we be relying so much on the sensitivities of national Governments or even the WHO—sorry, Peter—in pursuing this, and should we be adopting a pretty robust national UK approach to this, saying, “We are not relying on the international architecture.  We have got concerns from MSF; we have got concerns possibly from people like the King’s Sierra Leone Partnership in Freetown.  We are going to take those seriously.”?

Kathryn Tyson: I am not sure that we ever did not take them seriously.  This is not a disease that spreads like flu.  It is not an airborne virus; it spreads through very close intimate contact, I would say, person to person.  That does in itself make a difference to how the advice is framed to travellers to the country.  The answer more broadly to your question comes when we look to what we ought to be doing as a global community—the UK has a very leading voice in that global community—in ensuring the implementation of the international health regulations and the follow-up of them, so that surveillance works properly and, as you say, takes due account of national political sensitivities but does not let them over‑ride the health issue that we are trying to tackle. 

Q131   Jeremy Lefroy: Thank you.  Just moving on on the global issue to the Health is Global framework, how successful do you believe that that has been as a unifying structure for the Government’s efforts on international health?

Kathryn Tyson: I will take this at two levels, if you like.  At a very brass-tacks working level, it has transformed the way we work together in a forum like the World Health Assembly.  We now go as a unified team, with a single briefing pack.  We have a single Global Health mailbox.  This encompasses the Department of Health, Public Health England, DFID, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, UNCD and the UK mission in Geneva.  They are all on the same mailbox.  We all then form part of the same team that supports the Chief Medical Officer or the Secretary of State for Health—whoever is leading the delegation.  Certainly, at that level, it has been completely transformative.  It had very significant ambitions to unify international health effort around three themes—health security, trade and philanthropy—and they are widely accepted as helpful boxes, if you like, into which to compartmentalise health effort.  We have some formal oversight to Health is Global itself.  We have a cross-Government officials group and we have a joint briefing of NGOs that happens from time to time, usually just before and after the WHO set pieces, but they are a wide-ranging set of briefings. 

Q132   Jeremy Lefroy: We understand that the framework is finishing in 2015.  What will happen after that?

Kathryn Tyson: Again, on the two levels, there is no prospect of us reverting to what went before, which was a completely fragmented approach to these key aspects.  In terms of what might be presented to an incoming Government for what they would want to present to the world as the way this framework happened, there are a number of issues to take into account.  Firstly, the UK gets a lot of kudos, if you like, in the world community for having been the first country to develop such a unified approach and the setting out of its strategy.  More than that, again, with respect to the post-2015 agenda, what we do with the learning from the Ebola crisis to boost the approach to international health regulations and our continued leadership on the prospect of tackling antimicrobial resistance will all feed into a package that can then be presented, whether that then comes out as a further cross-Government strategy or some other statement of intent.  My speculation would be that we would expect to see something replace it. 

Q133   Jeremy Lefroy: Thank you.  Just finally, 2015 is just round the corner.  It seems to me that what has been done is excellent in terms of all these bodies coming together, and I personally—and I am sure we all do—welcome that, but I am a little bit concerned that we are almost in 2015 and there is no sign from Government as to what is going to happen after.  What is the end date?  Is there an end date?  Is it 31 December or 30 June?

Kathryn Tyson: We will take it that it is 31 December. 

Jeremy Lefroy: 2015?  Okay.

Kathryn Tyson: But it will be part of what we present to an incoming Government. 

Q134   Sir Peter Luff: DFID spends a lot of its money and does a lot of its work through multilateral agencies, so the efficiency of multilateral agencies is very important to this Committee.  I have some specific questions about the World Health Organisation, if I may.  A leaked internal WHO document criticised its own role in the early stages of the outbreak.  Do you think that self-criticism is justified?

Kathryn Tyson: Yes, it is, and it is a helpful starting point to try to sort out some of the things that prevented things from happening more smoothly and more quickly.  You probably know that the WHO has been embarked for some years now on a very substantial process of root-and-branch reform of the way it prioritises the money that it receives, the way it recruits and retains—or does not retain—staff and makes sure that they are appropriate to the priorities in front of it, the way in which it engages with non-state actors, and the way in which its governance works to try to streamline and keep manageable its agenda and hold it to account for achievement.  That I see, in the light of the Ebola crisis, being accelerated and refocused in certain areas.

Q135   Sir Peter Luff: How is the British Government influencing that reform agenda?  Are you doing it yourselves?  Are you doing it with DFID?  What is the mechanism to drive that process forward from the British perspective?

Kathryn Tyson: The Department of Health leads on relations with the WHO.  Our Chief Medical Officer has just taken up the UK’s revolving seat on the WHO’s executive board, and in that capacity we will play a very significant role.  The executive board meets in January each year.  They are having a special session immediately before it on Sunday 25 January specifically to discuss the learning from the Ebola crisis.  They will take that in two parts: what still needs to be done to tackle the crisis as it still exists currently on the ground; and what that means for how the WHO and the global community more broadly needs to behave differently to ensure that future crises are better handled, more smoothly and more quickly.

Q136   Sir Peter Luff: But given the importance of health for development, what discussions do you have with your DFID colleagues about these issues?

Kathryn Tyson: We form part of a unified team.  We discuss constantly, particularly with colleagues in UNCD, who have been very hands-on with the WHO in terms of helping them to re-cast their results reporting so that it better aligns with where funders are placing their money and with the priorities agreed by member states in the assembly, and my team in Wellington House is constantly in contact, with weekly, sometimes daily telephone catch‑ups with the East Kilbride people on that. 

Q137   Sir Peter Luff: So you would be happy that DFID’s policy and the Department of Health’s policy are aligned.

Kathryn Tyson: Yes, absolutely. 

Q138   Sir Peter Luff: Going back to Ebola specifically, what mistakes do you think the WHO made?

Kathryn Tyson: I am echoing what the Chief Medical Officer said earlier this week to another select committee here.  There are three levels.  The WHO has a significant in-country presence in each of the countries affected.  Those country offices did not notice and did not react as quickly as they ought to have done in terms of alerting the region more broadly or the world to the threat—principally to the fact that both the state of the health systems in these countries and some of the social customs possibly meant that the disease might spread more quickly and get out of control more than it did in the more quickly contained outbreaks in Ethiopia and Uganda in previous years.  That was one level. 

Q139   Sir Peter Luff: Is that a structural failing or just a failure by individuals?

Kathryn Tyson: I would not know if it was particular individuals.  There are structural failings—there is no line of command between WHO headquarters and its regional offices and its country officers.  The WHO is its member states and its secretariat—its staff.  Member states, through the constitution, have then formed themselves into regional groupings, which is very sensible—it is very helpful sometimes not to have to discuss things on an entire global stage—but then the headquarters does not direct the regional offices.  That is good for regional democracy, but perhaps not good for very fast deployment in a global emergency. 

The second level was that the regional office did not react—massively did not react at all.  It would be fair to say that as soon as Margaret Chan was alerted to the severity of the outbreak she did act and moved resources to start tackling it.  Then she came up against some of the things that she is trying to reform within the WHO.  She has some relatively set-in-concrete staffing structures and budgetary structures that mean that she is a little constrained in how she moves resources fast enough.  Those will be the things that we will want to tackle with her in January. 

Q140   Sir Peter Luff: When the next big epidemic occurs, how confident are you that the WHO can cope with it?

Kathryn Tyson: It coped well with the MERS coronavirus outbreak in the Middle East.  Part of that is because it did not spread very far, but it did alert that.  Again, I am echoing my Chief Medical Officer from earlier in the week.  There are very good and sound protocols in place for a flu pandemic, which remains the biggest global health threat that we might face.  The learning that we can take from where this took us will help us strengthen some decent infrastructure worldwide that needs much more strengthening in countries, and particularly countries where their own domestic health systems are poor and in difficulty. 

Q141   Jeremy Lefroy: I would like to turn now to the global health workforce.  It is estimated by the Global Health Workforce Alliance that 4.2 million more health workers are needed to bridge the gap.  Earlier this week, I heard a figure of 4.5 million.  My guess is it is probably higher than both of those.  In Britain, we do not train enough doctors and we do not train enough nurses; we import them.  What can we do about this?  What is the Department of Health doing to ensure that we are not, as a national health service, draining countries that need doctors and nurses of those very doctors and nurses?  At the moment, we are seeing that.  We are seeing hospitals and other parts of the NHS recruiting in some cases from places like Portugal and Greece but, more seriously, from countries like Sierra Leone and, indeed, other sub-Saharan African countries where they are really needed.  What is stopping us from training a lot more doctors and nurses ourselves?

Kathryn Tyson: I am so sorry; is your question about why we recruit—

Jeremy Lefroy: My question is why we are not, as the Department of Health and as a Government, training at least the number of doctors, nurses and other health professionals that we need within our health service, so that we do not go out and recruit, as we are, from countries where those health professionals are needed at home.

Kathryn Tyson: I have to say that we do not actively recruit from a whole list of countries.  I have the list here.  It is a massive list that is agreed with DFID and set out as part of our response to the WHO’s code of practice on ethical health recruitment. 

Q142   Chair: But they are not prevented from applying to join the NHS.

Kathryn Tyson: No, they are not prevented from applying.

Q143   Jeremy Lefroy: In our Sierra Leone inquiry, we found 103 nurses and midwives on the UK Nursing and Midwifery Council who were trained in Sierra Leone.  They were working, I would imagine, in the UK.  That was 10% of the entire stock of domestic nurses in Sierra Leone.

Kathryn Tyson: I will come back to you to confirm, but I do not think that if you are on the register it necessarily means you are working in the UK.  I will check that for you.  I have a note here that tells me that we have 10 doctors from Sierra Leone working in hospitals and community health services in the NHS.  As you point out, we do not stop them from applying.  I am not sure that it is any part of our intention to stop people applying, but we do not actively recruit in those countries.

Q144   Jeremy Lefroy: One reason that they do apply and they do get jobs—and who would not, if they were in that position?—is that, going back to my original question, we are not training enough doctors, nurses and other health professionals in the UK.  I know that from what is being told to me by the NHS training organisations in my own constituency area.  What can we do to change that situation?  Other countries deliberately train more healthcare professionals than they might need at any one time in the domestic arena because they realise that they are doing this for, if you like, the global good—in some cases for their own self-interest, because they then go and earn money overseas that they send back.  The Philippines is a classic example.  That comes back to the point that if we deliberately—as we are at the moment; I cannot imagine it is just a mistake—train too few people in the UK to take up the posts that are available, we are by definition then going to rely on the global workforce and import doctors, nurses and others.

Chair: Can I reinforce Mr Lefroy’s point with my own constituency example?  This week my own local health board has launched a global recruiting drive for clinical staff in Aberdeen because they cannot recruit them and cannot get them in the UK.

Kathryn Tyson: I do entirely understand the question.  I do apologise; I have not got a briefing on this.  May I write to you with a response?

Q145   Jeremy Lefroy: Please.  It is an extremely important issue, because at a time when we are talking about for some young people in the UK the lack of availability of better-paid work, the health service provides a lot of opportunities for that, but we are not providing the training places so that they are then able to go on and do that.  There may also be a problem with young people not wishing to take up or not being encouraged to take up those positions.  I read a report in the press today that half of schools in Britain do not have any students going on to train in medical schools, which I found astonishing. 

Kathryn Tyson: I saw that yesterday, too, yes.

Jeremy Lefroy: I wondered if that is a paucity in ambition in our educational system that the DH is able to do anything about.

Kathryn Tyson: I cannot comment on that.  I am so sorry.  I will come back to you with a later answer to the question.

Q146   Jeremy Lefroy: Yes.  I would appreciate that, because this is a very important issue and it meshes between UK national policy and international policy.  If I could just move on a little bit, in our health systems inquiry we were told that the Department of Health should release UK health workers who want to work for periods overseas as part of their career and personal development.  I know Lord Crisp, who formerly headed the NHS, is doing a lot of work on this issue.  I wonder if you are taking steps that would enable that to happen—for instance, looking at pension arrangements, so that people when they work overseas could contribute to their pensions.  I declare an interest because my wife, who is an NHS doctor, worked running a public health programme in Tanzania for 11 years.  Throughout those 11 years, she was unable to contribute to an NHS pension.  As a result, when she returned, there was an awful lot of catching up to do.  We are not asking for a free ride, but if people could make their pension contributions while they are working in these kinds of situations, it would encourage them more, perhaps, to go and gain that valuable experience.

Kathryn Tyson: Indeed.  The Health Partnership Scheme that DFID runs in concert with us does look specifically at the continuation of pension contributions where that is possible.  I freely admit there is still work to be done on making sure that that happens in a thoroughgoing way, but it is an issue that is very alive to us.  The working group that I mentioned in my response to Fiona Bruce earlier is looking at that as part of its next stage.  The guidance, which I am going to send to you, alludes to it, but it does not solve the problem.  I do not think there is a one-size-fits-all. 

Q147   Jeremy Lefroy: The Health Partnership Scheme, I believe, is very important and very successful.  I was speaking earlier this week to somebody who is in the organisation that helps to administer it.  I believe that the funding for that comes to an end in 2015, possibly, although there has been an extension.  It is an outstanding international example—a world-leading example—of what can be done.  Could you just let us know what part the NHS has to play in that—it is an entirely DFID-funded scheme—and whether you are encouraging DFID to extend that, given the benefit it brings both to UK professionals and the places where they work?

Kathryn Tyson: I am sure as we look towards a future spending review that it will be a principal area of joint endeavour to ensure that that bid is thoroughly supported, yes.

Q148   Jeremy Lefroy: What role does the Department of Health play in that scheme?  Is it entirely left up to DFID?  It supports relationships between trusts.  One important one that I am aware of is between the Northumbria Healthcare NHS Trust and Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre in Tanzania but there are many others; there is the King’s Sierra Leone Partnership, which has been prominent recently.  These have done outstanding work.  I wondered how the Department of Health co-operates with DFID in that.

Kathryn Tyson: Where there are already strong relationships, we would not seek to get in the way and intervene in a way that did not add to that, but if there was a need to broker new relationships with different trusts or if there were a difficulty, for instance, with training and we needed to engage the health education authority on it, then the Department of Health would step in in its capacity as steward for the system. 

Q149   Chair: Our Secretary of State is waiting for the next evidence session, so I will just very quickly ask a couple of questions.  It has become apparent that part of the reason the Ebola crisis spread so fast was the weakness of the health systems in those countries.  What role will the Department of Health have, working with DFID, to ensure that after that we can build stronger health systems?  This is not related to that, but what new measures will be taken for research and development into vaccine and other kinds of prevention mechanisms, for Ebola and, indeed, for other diseases?  It seems to me we are using it as an example, not as a one-off.

Kathryn Tyson: In my mind, there are three tracks—it is not just in my mind but shared with others—that we can bring together here.  There is what we are doing for Ebola, and that covers, as you say, both the vaccine and such fast-tracking as we can do for vaccine and treatment there.  There is the work we are trying to do to open up the pipeline around antimicrobial resistance to bring new antimicrobials or even new approaches to tackling bacterial infection into the market quickly and at an advantageous rate.  Then the third thing is what we need to do around the international health regulations, where that relies on the strength of surveillance and other health systems in countries.  I see all of those coming together.  There is much work going on already as we prepare for the special session of the WHO executive board and in other fora as well to bring those together and see how we build that up.  It is a very clear conclusion that one of the reasons this spread so fast and so out of control was that the health systems in those countries were simply overwhelmed within weeks.

Q150   Chair: Following on from Mr Lefroy’s point about training and recruitment, does that not imply that we should have more UK NHS staff seconded to these countries to help that happen, which has not been the pattern in the past in a significant way?  There is no point in doing it if we have not got the capacity ourselves, but it would seem to me that it would enrich both countries—it would be beneficial to both countries—and a perfectly legitimate use of aid support.

Kathryn Tyson: It is a very significant element of any attempt to help to strengthen health systems in developing countries.  Public Health England has, as I said earlier, had a long relationship with Sierra Leone, which has involved seconding personnel—epidemiologists and microbiologists—to their labs, and we expect that to continue.  Also, as we look at what can be done to strengthen systems, part of our approach to the antimicrobial resistance scheme is to look at possibilities for twinning laboratories.  That is not just the UK and another country; that is to see whether other countries round the world that have strong surveillance systems, for instance, could be brought to twin with a developing country.  I completely agree; it is a very significant part of what needs to happen in health systems strengthening.  Technical assistance can be either direct, through secondment, or through helping develop guidelines and standards.  I have not mentioned the role that NICE plays internationally.  That can also be brought to bear in a more thoroughgoing way. 

Chair: Thank you very much for your evidence and also for the additional submissions you have sent in.  If you do reflect on anything that has come up that you have not specifically offered, please feel free to add it in, because it will help inform our report.  Thank you very much for coming in. 

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Rt Hon Justine Greening MP, Secretary of State for International Development, Liz Ditchburn, Director General Policy, Department for International Development, and Louise Thomas, Head of Trade for Development, Department for International Development, gave evidence.

Q151   Chair: Good morning and thank you, Secretary of State, for coming in for this evidence session.  Please, for the record, introduce your colleagues, although Ms Ditchburn was in front of us yesterday. 

Justine Greening: Of course, yes.  So I understand.  I am Justine Greening, Secretary of State for International Development. 

Liz Ditchburn: Liz Ditchburn, Director of Policy. 

Louise Thomas: Louise Thomas, Head of Trade for Development, but I was leading on this inquiry and continue to do so. 

Q152   Chair: Thank you very much.  This is slightly different from our normal kind of session, because we are really trying to explore the future and share ideas.  It is good timing in the sense that we have reached the 0.7% target but against a background of a pretty rapidly changing scenario.  The number of really poor countries is reducing, the number of bilateral partners is reducing and yet poor people are spread around the world, and the engagement requires perhaps changing approaches and different things.  It has been said that increasingly it is about development rather than aid policies.  Do you agree with that?  We have got a 15‑year strategy, but do you have a sense of a vision of how your Department will change even in the next five years?  We have already produced one report on finance, but what are we trying to buy with our aid budget over the next few years that is different?

Justine Greening: You are right, Chair, to say that there are a lot of different things changing in terms of the countries that we are working with.  They are going through, in many cases, a transition and they are on the path of development.  At the same time, there are pressures in the broader world.  I will briefly say a little bit about the challenges and then come quite quickly on to how we see it within DFID. 

You have got demographic challenges, certainly in parts of Africa—a very young population—and urbanisation happening on the back of that as well, as development takes place.  Set against that, you have also got some quite chronic areas of instability now.  You can see that in the quite long list of countries that DFID is now engaged in humanitarian work in.  That list is getting longer rather than shorter, and we also see those conflicts being protracted.  They do not clear themselves up in a few months or a few years; they tend to go on for much longer.  Another thing I would point to would be that the countries themselves, while they are steadily developing, are also developing their strategies on domestic resource mobilisation: how they can use the resources that they have got to best effect around—for example, extractives—but also work on tax and then the impact of the investment that has happened certainly over the last 15 years on human capital and in people, in terms of health and education.  We could go into this an awful lot more.  It is a fascinating area, but it is also extremely important in understanding what kind of a set of challenges we face over the coming years and then what that might mean for our aid policy. 

Broadly, I see about three different areas for beyond aid.  First of all, for DFID itself, we now work across Government and hand in hand with more Government Departments than we have ever done in the past, whether it is DECC on climate change—we could talk about some of the issues around global public goods shortly—or UKTI and the joint trade unit that we have got and the collaboration we have on areas like trade policy.  You will know that I have set up the HMRC-DFID tax team, which is all about helping to drive domestic resource mobilisation. 

Chair: We met one of them in Tanzania last week.

Justine Greening: That is comparatively new but working extremely effectively.  We work with the Home Office, not least on violence against women and girls.  The Girl Summit that we did earlier this year we were very proud of.  We work with the Department of Health at the moment on Ebola; we worked with the Cabinet Office more broadly when it came to the G8 agenda last year; and we work with the NSC—this fundamental structure that we have put in place that I am part of as Secretary of State for International Development that looks at the stability, conflict and security aspect of this agenda.  Within Government, I believe we are working more collaboratively and there is more co-operation now than there has ever been in the past from DFID. 

We are working beyond Government within the UK.  Only today, I had another roundtable session with the UK’s legal profession.  DFID will be part of the Global Law Summit that we will be holding in February next year.  That mirrors, as the Committee knows, a lot of work we are now doing with, for example, the extractives industry, the retail sector, the accountancy industry and generally with business.  There is a UK plc strategy that DFID is now driving in terms of going well beyond our core aid policy to looking at how we can access the expertise we need across the rest of Government and also policy-influencing but also the expertise that we want to access much more broadly that is available from our country that we can bring to bear on development itself. 

Q153   Chair: Have you had any particular successes you feel you have already achieved?

Justine Greening: Yes.  I would point to the trip you have just done in Tanzania.  The London Stock Exchange has now signed a strategic partnership with DFID to work with the Tanzanian Capital Markets and Securities Authority at a really important time, as their capital markets are very nascent but starting to develop.  It could be—and hopefully will be—the first of a number of those sorts of pieces of work that we get kicked off.  The legal profession is now working hand in hand with us on strengthening the rule of law and that side of our capacity-building programme. 

The final piece, Chair, I just wanted to mention was internationally.  I was co-chair of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation.  What I have talked about so far is what we can do within the UK.  We can also play a role in galvanising more effective co-operation internationally—whether it is the Global Partnership conference that we held in Mexico, which brought a whole range of different development actors together, or, indeed, our role influencing that within the post-2015 framework so that, when that gets finalised next year, it pushes this beyond aid agenda and takes that more systemic look, which is essentially what I have just outlined, at understanding how we can tackle not just the symptoms of poverty but really get to those root causes and start addressing those.  That is the shift that you are seeing.  I have really just scratched the surface with those opening comments, but I know you will have lots of questions so I will stop there. 

Chair: We have some follow-up questions.  I will start with Jeremy Lefroy.

Q154   Jeremy Lefroy: Good morning, Secretary of State.  We are now the only, as far as we understand, OECD Development Assistance Committee donor with a standalone development Department represented at cabinet level.  Do you think that is the right approach?  Why do you think we are the only ones?  Why have others not remained with that?

Justine Greening: It is the right approach, certainly for our Government and me.  Development is a strategic agenda for the UK Government.  It is why I have a seat at the National Security Council.  I should also say that for other countries—for example, the Netherlands—the development Department also looks after international trade.  It is interesting to see how the beyond aid agenda does evidence itself in the way that some of the other development Departments are set up. 

Q155   Chair: It is an interesting point, because under the previous Government for a period that was also the case.  It was only for about a couple of years that DFID was the trade champion. 

Justine Greening: Certainly from our perspective, we would not support tied aid, but clearly in the context of the growing piece of work we now have under way in relation to economic development you can see how the two can fit together effectively to drive a broad development offer and push from a country.  We work extremely effectively together with other Government Departments, but our ability to set the agenda as an independent Department is key.

Q156   Jeremy Lefroy: Could you give us one or two examples of how the cross-Whitehall collaboration that you have already referred to works in practice, particularly for security and development?

Justine Greening: One of the things we have done alongside setting up the NSC has been to pull together Foreign Office, MOD and DFID in relation to what was originally called the Conflict and Stability Fund and is now the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund.  That is now £1 billion of investment that allows us to combine both ODA—international development—spend and non-international-development spend on projects that can really sit alongside NSC priority countries, and it works very effectively.  ICAI have done an initial inquiry into it and made some recommendations, which we have very much taken on board, and we have continued to innovate how the fund can work effectively. 

Q157   Jeremy Lefroy: Last week, there was one thing we saw and one piece of news that showed two sides of the coin.  When we were in Dar es Salaam port, we saw ships being loaded with maize produced in Tanzania, which has a surplus—which is great, because often it is in deficit—about to go to Mogadishu.  It was Tanzanian maize, not Canadian wheat or American maize, being sent to Mogadishu, which showed just how much the situation in Mogadishu has improved and also how much there is a link between the prosperity of one part of sub-Saharan Africa in Tanzania, or at least its good harvest, and the ability to supply a place that needs the food.  The same week, we had this terrible incident in the Kenyan quarry, where people who were Christians were separated and shot dead by al‑Shabaab.  There is a real risk of that insurgency by al-Shabaab and, indeed, its insurgencies in other parts of sub-Saharan Africa destabilising this enormous amount of work that we are doing in that part of the world.  By my calculation, UK development aid in east and central Africa, if you include DRC, is more than £1 billion a year.  What is your Department doing, together with the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to support Governments like Kenya in countering the efforts of al-Shabaab to take us back to the middle ages?

Justine Greening: The Conflict, Stability and Security Fund is there to allow us to work together on collective projects that can help support security.  The broader development programme that we have in Kenya can also contribute to that.  The work that we do on education in particular can have a real long-term benefit in reducing some of the factors that lead to insecurity, as can the work that we are doing, for example, in places like Turkana, where we have a really effective cash-transfers programme and that, again, is supporting livelihoods.  Interestingly, some of the programmes that we have running in DRC are there to support livelihoods, not just because we think that creating jobs and that economic development agenda matters, but also because we recognise that in a country like DRC it can also play a role in making sure that young men in particular have the chance to earn money and have some independence.  That, in a very fundamental way, is one of the ways we can at least minimise the risk that they may feel they are living in a country with so few opportunities that they prefer to get involved in the sorts of groups that are causing the instability. 

It is a really powerful point, because it shows what stage many of these countries are at.  They have one foot in a past that is more chaotic and is about more conflict, and they have got one foot in the future, which is about being a developed country with prosperity, with jobs, with people with opportunities and with young people able to contribute.  That is why it is important that we knit these bits of work together, because we have to compete to make sure that it is the future that they are moving to that is about the positive development path, and that we do not allow them to, and we help make sure that they do not, slip backwards. 

Q158   Sir Peter Luff: Good structures, Justine, will not solve the problems of the world, but the lack of good structures can impede progress.  Does the National Security Council work for you?

Justine Greening: It does.  It is not only a very regular meeting of key Ministers in Government to talk about a structured agenda of high priorities for Government on the security area but means that in the round we can look at what DFID is doing.  For example, if I take my own Department, we can go through a process of saying, “To what extent does our investment line up and should it line up with our security agenda?”  It also gives me the chance to make sure that this development aspect of tackling security, which is really important, can be a full discussion part of what are often some much more detailed conflict and security-driven discussions that take place at the NSC.  It does work extremely effectively.  I am sure it will continue to evolve over time, but it has been a very good thing that this Government has put in place.  It means that we have a natural and a rigorous ability to look at national security in the round, both nationally but also the international aspect of it. 

Q159   Sir Peter Luff: Presumably, it is not the meetings of busy and distracted Ministers that are really the value; it is the preparation that is done for those meetings.

Justine Greening: There is a significant amount of preparation done.  It is vital that we use the time that we have effectively.  That takes place within Departments and also in terms of the work that officials do in helping prepare the common agenda to go into those NSC sessions.

Q160   Sir Peter Luff: Turning back to the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund, which takes up its role from next April, what do you worry about about it?  What do you think might be its weak spots?  What keeps you awake at night worrying about it and what are you really proud of?  What do you think it is going to deliver really effectively?  What are your hopes and fears?

Justine Greening: First of all, it is set up effectively.  It is managed effectively, in the sense that it now has a joint secretariat, so it is collectively decisioned between three Departments, and that means we can ensure that it has the right balance of focus.  The challenges are making sure that we effectively combine the international development part of the budget with the non-international-development part of the budget and that that is stacked up in the right proportions, in a way.  We have seen a significant increase in our budget over recent years and therefore the investment in the fund from our perspective has been something that we have felt has sat alongside our core development agenda and also has been something we have been able to do.  But we recognise that for other Departments the resourcing side of it is difficult, and therefore we have to bear that in mind in understanding what the right mix of money in the conflict fund is versus the broader departmental investments that they have in these similar areas. 

Q161   Sir Peter Luff: But you are happy the focus on development is adequate.

Justine Greening: Yes.  I very much welcome the fact that DFID is part of the NSC, but also that we have this joint fund, because it really does help us do much more effective work with the MOD, with the Home Office on occasion and also with the Foreign Office. 

Q162   Sir Peter Luff: I have seen, as a former Defence Minister, very effective work indeed between the MOD and DFID, but there is a degree of concern sometimes that the development agenda perhaps is downplayed to military priorities.  Indeed, UN Special Representative Michael Keating said that aid in Afghanistan was wasted because it was co-opted by the military and used in Helmand to boost the military role.  Do you recognise that criticism?

Justine Greening: The work that we did in Afghanistan has helped that country come forward a huge way over the last 13 years.  Only last week, we had the London Conference on Afghanistan where we had both President Ghani and also Chief Executive Officer Dr Abdullah.  It is a democratic Government handing over for the first time to another democratic Government.  They came to present their reform agenda.  Next year, we will go through a process of looking at how the international community can support and invest in that reform agenda, but it did give us a chance to reflect on just how far the country has come.  Clearly, huge challenges remain, but the ability of Afghanistan to take on board its own security agenda has transformed in that time, alongside all the work that has been done around development on improving health, and particularly making sure that a huge number now of Afghan people have access to health facilities within walking distance who never did before, children who are in school and coming through school, and the economic development taking place in that country. 

Q163   Sir Peter Luff: All this I agree with, Secretary of State, but why did Michael Keating say that aid was being used to bolster the military?  What moved him to make that criticism of aid programmes in Afghanistan?

Justine Greening: I am not familiar with that particular quote that he made and the backdrop to it, but what I would say is we have worked hand in hand with the military. 

Q164   Sir Peter Luff: You deny it, effectively.  You say he is wrong.

Justine Greening: I am not able to give you an informed comment on it, in the sense that I do not think it represents how I would see our relationship with MOD.

Q165   Sir Peter Luff: You are happy with the relationship.

Justine Greening: Absolutely.  We worked with the provincial reconstruction teams that were in places like Helmand.  That had a mix of staff from us, the Foreign Office and also the MOD.  We have the stabilisation unit in place, which means we can work hand in hand.  That is reflected at a more strategic level on the NSC.  Overall, it works very well.  We are all very conscious of our respective roles and how they differ and how the ODA rules drive that, too, but the collaboration that we were able to have on the ground between the fantastic work that MOD did and then the development work that DFID did was outstanding. 

Q166   Sir Peter Luff: Conflict prevention work is always less exciting in terms of headlines than dealing with the consequences of a conflict, but it is the most important thing of all.  Are you sure the emphasis is right in the Government’s programme of activity?

Justine Greening: Yes.  It is always very easy to say that we should focus more and more and more on defence and that that money should come from international development.  What we are engaged in is often, essentially, investing in conflict prevention.  There are evidence bases that show every £1 we can invest to prevent conflict can save £4 in having to deal with it.  You only have to look at how much money has had to be spent in relation to the Syrian conflict—£700 million alone by this Government.  The UN came out with its appeal earlier last week for billions and billions.  It is extremely expensive when you compare it with what that money could have driven in relation to development outcomes in stable countries.  Conflict prevention is a good investment and it is why we are right as a Government to have supported reaching our 0.7% target. 

Q167   Chair: We have not finished our report on parliamentary strengthening, but we have certainly had evidence saying that long-term support for parliamentary strengthening makes a very significant and not very costly contribution to conflict prevention.  I am anticipating the report; you will get that in due course.  In principle, do you think there is merit in that argument?

Justine Greening: There is some merit.  It sits alongside the whole golden-thread agenda that we have talked about as a Government, which is about supporting institutions.  If I go back to the meeting I just had with our legal representatives from the UK and DFID, we are meeting them because we think they can play a role in helping support rule of law.  That sits alongside the work that Parliament does in passing those laws.

Chair: I know Fiona Bruce will want to follow that up, but did you have a supplementary, Jeremy?

Q168   Jeremy Lefroy: I just have a little supplementary on Afghanistan.  Earlier this week, I met with somebody who has been involved in running the Afghanistan Business Innovation Fund, and that rather shows the opposite of what Michael Keating was talking about.  It seems to me from looking at the results of that fund that it has been pretty successful in investing in new and emerging businesses in Afghanistan, creating a lot of jobs and delivering a great deal of return for the investment that we have put in.  Would you see that as one of perhaps the unsung really positive results of DFID’s engagement and involvement in Afghanistan?

Justine Greening: It is a good example of some of the work that we have done.  It sits alongside transformative work on tax.  I think I am right in saying back in 2004 the Afghanistan Government was able to collect $200 million; now it can collect $2 billion.  That is in part down to a tax capability-strengthening programme that we have had in place that I have just announced will be extended into the future.  These are the sorts of structural steps that we can take that sit alongside the stability and security agenda that in time can really help Afghanistan develop.  It is critical now with the new Government that they get on with that reform package they have talked about and that they follow through on the strong words that they have talked about in relation to anti-corruption.  Those are the sorts of building blocks that will really allow this country to progress.  If you look at the grand sweep of history in Afghanistan and the level of conflict it has had and then look at where it is now after 13 years, which, in a country’s life, is a comparatively short period of time, it has come an immense way.  It has a long way to go, though. 

Q169   Fiona Bruce: Thank you, Secretary of State.  I am encouraged to hear you talk about talking with lawyers, because in the countries we have visited clearly there are issues about the rule of law, about enforcing systems, about having clear laws and about ensuring that prosecution occurs.  How are you looking to strengthen this in terms of the work of DFID?  Are you going to look at employing lawyers on the basis that they are qualified lawyers to work in countries? 

Justine Greening: This is a piece of work we have got under way right now.  We have already taken some tentative steps in relation to supporting the legal capacity within Governments.  We are also looking at what we can do to support the development of the legal profession.  Certainly, the lawyers that I just met up with were very keen for us to do more work, for example, on so-called judge-craft.  How can we make sure that judges understand how to dispose of cases and discharge their duties effectively? 

The final brief point to make is on transparency.  A lot of the work that DFID has done has really focused on making sure that ordinary people and, indeed, civil society have the information to make sure that they can hold Governments accountable, and all the evidence, to my mind, suggests that they are increasingly doing that. 

Q170   Fiona Bruce: One of the challenges we found, for example, in Tanzania is that the law is not clear, so assistance is needed even in the drafting.  Help is needed, yes, on the judicial stage but also right down to the bottom in ensuring that local prosecutions stick and in working with—as we saw on the Speaker’s visit to Burma—young lawyers who perhaps need to learn the craft, where there has been no legal aid system and there is no access to justice for the poorest.  Is that something that you will look to increasingly emphasise in this work?

Justine Greening: Certainly, we already have a range of access-to-justice programmes.  For example, there is one in Somalia.  Going back to Afghanistan, we particularly had programmes in place to make sure that women have got access to justice.  We can do more in this area, and that is one of the reasons why we kicked off this piece of work with the UK legal profession earlier this year and we followed up on that today.  It is one of the reasons why DFID will be part of the Global Law Summit that is happening in February next year to mark 800 years since the Magna Carta was signed.  It is a good example of this beyond aid agenda, where you take an area where I believe the UK has some unparalleled expertise and then say, “How can we tap into all of that from a development perspective and allow that to be something that we can use alongside the rest of the work that DFID is doing?”  For example, there is a huge amount of work that the legal profession has done—partly pro bono—in Sierra Leone.  We are learning from that and understanding how we can develop it further.

Q171   Fiona Bruce: Could I turn to joint working in terms of human rights?  The FCO certainly has mainstreamed this in recent years, challenging Governments wherever they go across the globe.  Do you think DFID should increasingly prioritise the challenging and the protection of human rights in countries in which it works?

Justine Greening: You are right to say that the Foreign Office really takes the lead in terms of advocacy in this area, but much of the work that we have done—the Committee will be very familiar with all the work on women and girls, particularly violence against women and girls—underpins this issue of human rights, and in particular the rights of women and girls to have a voice in their country, to have some choice over what they do with their lives and then some control over what happens to them and their bodies, whether it is in terms of when they get married, how many children they have or when they want to have children.  As you know, we are also pulling together a better strategy in relation to LGBT rights, and we have already published our work on how we have faith within that, too.  We have taken that issue, which is so important, and put it into what we do, and we work hand in hand with the Foreign Office on that.

Q172   Fiona Bruce: Could I ask you specifically about one country, which is North Korea, where human rights and their abuse are stated to be sui generis—there is nowhere else like it in the world?  It is the holocaust of our generation.  The breach of human rights there causes massive malnutrition, stunting and poverty on a scale that is not seen in many countries in which DFID works.  Is the tackling of human rights abuses there, even in the limited ways that seem available at the moment, such as increasing support for British Council English language training or supplying charities who work within North Korea with food—they say that they can guarantee safe passage—or even cultural exchanges, something that DFID at least should be in part supporting, bearing in mind that, as I say, this is labelled the holocaust of our generation?

Justine Greening: For different countries in different parts of the world, you will see different Government Departments taking a lead.  In the case of North Korea, that will continue to be the Foreign Office.  We very much target our work on countries where we think, first of all, there is an inability more domestically for them to lift people out of poverty without some help but also, combined with that, that the work that DFID can do can make a difference.  That is what drives our development agenda, and I do not believe that North Korea really would fit into that.

Q173   Fiona Bruce: Thank you for that frank answer.  Just talking more broadly about language training, we have spoken before as a Committee about our view that language training should be brought into line between DFID and FCO.  Has any progress been made on this?

Justine Greening: Maybe I should write to the Committee about that.  I am quite happy to give you an update offline.

Q174   Chair: Certainly, I think quite a lot of the staff on the ground feel that they would benefit from more intensive language training.  I can testify that Mr Lefroy’s fluency in Kiswahili was a genuine asset to our Committee’s visit in Tanzania, and it impressed.  Yes, some of our staff do speak some Kiswahili, but when we have a member of the Committee who can speak a language, you immediately see the response that you get from the audience.  We think it is important.

Justine Greening: It is a very fair point.  Over time, a greater proportion of our DFID staff have become locally employed.  That is a recognition of the sense that we need to have effective teams on the ground, but I will be interested in the Committee’s recommendations on that.  In the meantime, I will make sure I give you a fuller update following this session. 

Q175   Fiona Bruce: Talking now about the one HMG team overseas programme, since its inception last year what progress has been made?  Perhaps you could also tell us something more about the 44 country strategies—whether they ensure shared HMG analysis and objectives around the world.  Are all DFID countries covered?

Justine Greening: We have made a lot of progress on this.  It is not just about co‑location, although that has happened in all apart from two of the countries that DFID operates in and has a country programme in.  There are particular reasons for the fact that it has taken a bit more time for us to do work, for example, in Nepal to get people co-located.  It also is in terms of collaboration; it is in terms of streamlining our back-office processes as well.  That has helped us to save some money as well as work together more effectively.  We have made some big strides forward.  On a very basic level, it is great for the teams to really feel that they are ultimately in one Government team.  That goes back to my original comments in many respects, Chair.  I am very conscious of the fact that DFID is not some Department that is set on its own doing something totally different and that is not relevant to our country.  We are a Government Department, we are part of our Government’s strategy, and I have been very clear that we need to make sure we are playing our full role in helping to deliver that.  That is one of the reasons why we work so hard with other Departments and try to collaborate generally. 

Q176   Chair: The Committee can also confirm from our visits that we find that pretty good in pretty well every location. 

Liz Ditchburn: Can I offer a couple more examples of the ways in which we are working together?  This is an evolving picture and one that is really exciting in terms of the potential of doing more work and thinking on beyond aid—exactly the areas that the Committee is looking at.  Some of the discussions previously have been about some of the areas where we have got pooled funding or some of the areas where the international-facing Departments—FCO, MOD and DFID—are working together, but we are really seeing an increasingly diverse set of ways in which we are working together.  The Secretary of State mentioned some of them at the beginning.  They fall, in my mind, into two categories. 

One is exemplified by the Girl Summit, where we took an issue that is a challenge for us in the UK and a challenge for other countries, and we worked it in a way that brought together domestic considerations and international considerations in a way that we had not ever done before and that was mutually beneficial for both objectives.  Our ability to tackle it at home was strengthened by being part of a global movement and learning from the experience of countries that are further ahead, perhaps, in having dealt with FGM and CFM as issues, and our ability to influence internationally was strengthened by being able to speak from a strong domestic platform of saying, “This is an issue for us, too.  We are not preaching to other countries; this is a challenge for us.  We have citizens who are struggling with these same harmful practices and we want to learn from you.”  That gave us a very different way of speaking internationally.  That is one set of issues where we are increasingly finding areas where there are real synergies between domestic concerns and international concerns in a way that transcends the boundaries of what we perhaps would normally have thought of in terms of the way we do development.

The other issue, which exemplifies a different way of approaching it, is the anti-corruption work, some of which we talked about yesterday.  We are clear that this is a global challenge that is very damaging for developing countries that we, as DFID, care about.  We are also clear that the levers to change that global situation reside in many different parts of the UK Government and we need a whole-of-Government effort to tackle what is a very big global challenge that is damaging to the UK and damaging to other countries.  We are already working together as directors across Whitehall to look at how we can work together effectively to make the biggest difference.  This is not just about how we spend our aid money; it is about the different levers that the UK Government holds.  Those two examples are very different ways in which we are moving into this territory that goes far beyond just joining up different particular bits of Government, either overseas or here in the UK.

Justine Greening: I will give a third example, which is the G8 work from last year.  The Cabinet Office pulled a lot of it together, but DFID was a really central player in that.  The agenda of trade, tax and transparency was slap bang in the middle of a lot of what DFID has been doing, certainly in recent years.  Our ability to be part of that overall HMG team, making sure that the agenda for the G8 was something that would deliver and could work for developing countries as well, worked really effectively.  Now we are following up on all of that.  We are seeing legislation passing through on things like beneficial ownership.  It can really unlock our ability to complement that with the tax capability work we are doing to start to help developing countries really drive this domestic resource-mobilisation agenda, which is going to be another big part of the beyond aid policy approach that we all have.  I think everyone recognises that ODA is going to continue to become a smaller part of the resourcing that countries are bringing to bear on development, whether that is inward investment, their own ability to invest from their domestic resources, remittances or ODA.  One of the discussions and the policy debates that will be happening alongside the post‑2015 framework will be around how we pull together these different resourcing streams to turbocharge development over the next 15 years. 

Q177   Jeremy Lefroy: I just wanted to follow up briefly on the question of joint working, particularly over human rights.  Pakistan will, if it has not already, become the largest bilateral recipient of our aid, yet a lot of us have very serious concerns about the actual and the legal position of minorities of various kinds, whether Hazaras, Christians, Hindus or so on, within Pakistan.  Given that DFID is very much involved in the education system in Pakistan, both in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and in Punjab, and given that the education system is a way of helping people to understand things like minority rights, what work is DFID doing together with the governments of those two states and the education system to ensure that the education system is not reinforcing the increasing marginalisation of these minority communities?

Justine Greening: First of all, the focus on education is absolutely right.  We have had very successful programmes.  One of the main ways in which we can help provide the conditions for better human rights in the future is to have people better educated and able to play a more successful and productive role in society, but also to have a greater understanding of these sorts of areas.  A key point, though, on those education programmes has been their access to everyone.  That is fundamental.  We do drive making sure that there is access not just for low-income children—the poorest of the poor, particularly girls—but more broadly as well.  That sits alongside very clear messages and discussions that we have from a Foreign Office perspective with the Pakistan Government in relation to human rights.

Q178   Jeremy Lefroy: If I may just push this a little bit, I fully appreciate the great tension that there often is between respecting a national Government and on the other hand ensuring that universal principles of human rights are upheld.  This is going to be an increasing question for DFID.  It is not going to go away.  It cannot be parked in the too-difficult-to-handle box.  How far are DFID prepared to push the fact that there are fundamental human rights that apply to everybody and these must be respected not just throughout DFID’s programmes but in countries where we are operating?  How much on the one hand does one say, “It is better to be there even if we are quite quiet about it because we can have some quiet influence,” as opposed to shouting about it and making our voice very clear?  How are you resolving those tensions?  Can they be resolved?

Justine Greening: I do not necessarily see them as tensions.  If you look at it from the foreign Government’s perspective, they see one HMG.  Increasingly, we are all under the same roof, so when there is interaction it is in one place, which is often the UK embassy.  I think they are already getting a very clear message from us.  DFID has one particular lead, which is development.  The Foreign Office has a particular lead, which is policy advocacy, which includes human rights.  They are by no means at all exclusive.  We are very careful to make sure that our overall approach has some policy coherence.  That is really important, otherwise there is a danger that you undermine the important message on human rights that you are trying to make.  We are also very clear at the same time, though, that you very much need to look at this often on a case-by-case basis and get a sense of what is the right way to deal with human rights issues.  For example, there may be some areas where we would be quite publicly vocal; there may be other areas where we would not be—for example, on LGBT rights in Uganda.  When we sat down and talked with civil society who were part of that movement, they were very clear to us that they wanted a much more moderate approach taken and that the worst thing that we could have done would have been to be very strident about our concerns; that would simply have made their task on the ground in Uganda harder.  We are conscious that we have got to be very sensitive and thoughtful about how we get to the end point that we want to, which is supporting human rights and seeing progress.  That is the same for any area, including women and girls. 

Q179   Jeremy Lefroy: Thanks.  How can we establish new ways of working in low-income countries that are graduating to middle-income status but where large pockets of poverty remain?  Clearly, this is an issue that we have been grappling with in countries such as India, which is home to at least 400 million people who are some of the poorest people on earth.

Justine Greening: Perhaps I would give three different ways I think we can.  First of all, we can steadily shift, as we are doing within India, to technical assistance—helping them get more out of the huge resourcing, in the case of India, that they themselves are putting into health and education.  There is an advocacy piece of this as well, which is around advocating about no one left behind and the need to focus on bringing everyone up as growth takes place and that growth needs to be inclusive.  There is all of that.  The third bit, which is comparatively newer but can potentially have some real power over the coming years, is so‑called south-south co-operation, where you have developing countries that are much further down the development track—like Brazil, for example, and also China—increasingly sharing their expertise with countries that are following in their footsteps around some of the challenges but also the opportunities.  The Global Partnership for Effective Development Co‑operation conference that we held in Mexico—that is now going to be co-chaired by some new co-chairs—was all about trying to hard-wire this co-operation piece of development into the way that we work more effectively, so that it happens in a more strategic way, rather than simply being an ad hoc series of relationships that might spring up because of particular people being involved.  We want to get a much more rigorous approach to co‑operation happening. 

Q180   Chair: In that context, we would like to think that this inquiry and the debate we are having will change the basis of the debate about aid—the rather old-fashioned idea that it is about hand-outs to poor countries and the critics saying charity begins at home and all of that.  Secretary of State, you are articulating very clearly this is about the UK Government’s engagement with countries, yes, to help them tackle problems of poverty, but also to make them more and more partners across the piece with the UK in the longer term, so there is a proper, legitimate, enlightened self-interest in all of this. 

Justine Greening: Correct.

Q181   Chair: Can I just, for example, pick up on India?  There is a tendency when criticised simply to say, “We are closing the programme in India.  We have closed the programme in China,” whereas in reality you have already articulated we are changing the relationship but we are maintaining it.  I personally do not think we should apologise that DFID is in India and that DFID is in China; we should explain how that is a quite different relationship from what it used to be.  First of all, do you agree with that?  In that context, can we perhaps explain to people that the British Government has a much more sophisticated vision of what aid and development is for than the legitimately simplistic one when it was just poor people in poor countries?

Justine Greening: First of all, the transition that we are seeing take place in India is really symptomatic of a good problem to have, which is that countries are developing.  They are in the middle of their development.  Again, you are seeing them with one foot in a prosperous future but also significant poverty still in the country, which we continue to partner with them on helping to tackle. 

Chair: Sorry—I think some people are taking photographs.  Please do not take photographs.

Justine Greening: What is changing is the way in which we are working with India to help India tackle poverty.  When they are spending—I think I am right in saying—around $50 billion themselves on health and education, the most effective thing we can do is work with them, with our technical expertise, to get the most out of their budget.  Alongside that, as their economy grows, we can look at some of the so-called returnable capital investments in the poorer states still—so, targeting it, but rather than simply having grants, we have investments that we have a chance of getting back that we can then recycle.  The way I would characterise it is we are not in a marathon here where a country starts off poor and then we get to the end of the race and it is suddenly developed.  It is more like a relay race.  What we have worked hard in DFID to do over the last two years is to develop that transition where we hand the baton over, where it moves gradually from aid to trade.  That is why it is important that we work, for example, with UKTI and on some of the other things that we have talked about today as well around economic development and expertise.  We need a transition strategy.  That is what we are putting in place.  You are right; it is not just on one day, off the next day.  It is getting the nature of that transition right.  Learning how to do it effectively is key.  Also, you see some of the policy area challenges around the progress of human rights.  Even if an economy is rapidly developing, human rights do not always progress along the same path; you get some things surging ahead and other things lagging back, and in the round we need to look at how we can have an overall relationship with the country that supports that overall progress, while recognising that some things move faster than others.

Q182   Chair: We have referred to this before.  Part of it is about politics rather than a simple strategy that says, “You have reached a cut-off point.”  We have some middle-income countries with which we are maintaining a long-term relationship, like Nigeria and Pakistan, and others, like India, where I am glad to say we are not ending the relationship but we are downgrading it in money terms, yet we are also engaging the Philippines and the Middle East for humanitarian reasons.  It could look a bit incoherent that we are pulling out of some countries just because they have graduated—or that is the impression—whereas we are staying in some countries that have graduated, for political reasons.  How do you rationalise all of that?

Justine Greening: It does stack up.  We have talked about the transition strategy that we have got in a country like India, but if you look at some of the other areas that DFID is involved in, they are in relation to things like global public goods and working on collectively and internationally tackling climate change, which is why you would see some of the work that we are doing in relation to Indonesia, because it makes sense for us to do that.  You particularly mentioned the Philippines.  It goes back in a sense to an analogy to the point you made on conflict prevention.  It is much better for us if we can work with countries to help them have the capacity to be climate resilient.  What you saw recently is, although there was a very bad major storm that passed over the Philippines, they were much better prepared in relation to evacuation and local and national government organisation this year as a result of having had the experience last year.  DFID has worked with them on looking at four to five particular cities where we know there is a big population that we can help particularly be climate resilient.  The final point I would make about that is that, in terms of climate change and countries not being climate-resilient, the reality is the people who are most affected by this are the poorest.  They get hit hardest and first, and they have got the least wherewithal to be able to recover from it.  That piece does sit very clearly against all of the work that we are doing in relation to development.

Q183   Fiona Bruce: Secretary of State, your key priorities have been women and girls, economic development, governance, conflict and humanitarian relief.  Do you see these same priorities as the right ones going forward?

Justine Greening: The UK will always be a country that is there quickly to help other countries in need when crisis hits.  That humanitarian piece of what we do is massively important.  It does sit alongside the development agenda, because what we are seeing is that crises often do not clear themselves up overnight and therefore we need to have a more sophisticated approach to understanding what we do after a humanitarian crisis has happened.  For example, there is the work we are doing in Syria on education for children.  We know that one of the best things we can do to drive long-term development in the future is to invest in young people, and particularly those children now.  We will always be doing that.  What will change over the coming years, as we have seen in places like India, is the nature of the work that we are doing.  We are already making sure that we are doing more on economic development, because that simply reflects where many of these developing countries now are.  Something like six or seven of the top, fastest-growing economies over the last decade have been in sub-Saharan Africa.  Our programme has to reflect that.  On human rights, it also has to reflect the fact that I believe the greatest unmet human need of the 21st century is the appalling rights for so many women and girls around our world, which is why it is a central part of what DFID does. 

You have these three strands, in a way, of work and I believe that they will broadly continue.  The final bit is that the next post-2015 framework will also challenge us and drive us.  I believe that with the pieces I have just set out and the discussion we had on institutions and the rule of law, we will end up with a post-2015 framework that probably is not miles away from the sorts of priorities and work that DFID is involved in.  Hopefully, it is a sign in many respects that we are working on the right things but also that we are helping to shape that international approach to be effective as well.

Q184   Fiona Bruce: Can I pick up on two of those?  The first one is humanitarian relief.  In our Middle East report, we recommended that DFID set a clear budget for this, but you rejected that, saying that you manage the spend year on year.  Have you set an upper limit for humanitarian spending?  If so, what is that?

Justine Greening: I do not think we have really particularly set an upper limit.  It is very hard to do that, in the sense that it would be extremely difficult for us to see a major crisis happening somewhere around the world and say that we had no wherewithal whatsoever within what is still a large budget to be able to respond.  We have a notional sense of on average how much we are likely to be contributing in relation to the humanitarian relief that is happening around the world, but I just do not think either it is possible or appropriate.  It is a bit like asking MOD how many conflicts they would limit themselves to having any involvement in or work on. 

Sir Peter Luff: One.

Q185   Fiona Bruce: The other area I wanted to ask you about was economic development.  In May, ICAI reported to us on the private sector work of DFID.  It was an amber-red report, which caused members of our Committee considerable concern.  We have had DFID officials before us twice since then.  I wanted to ask how you see we can improve the private sector work, which clearly is potentially huge—£1.8 billion is allocated for 2015-16, which will be upon us within days—and which we all agree is essential if countries are going to exit financially from aid dependency.  Do you have any comments you would like to make on that area of DFID’s work, bearing in mind the concerns this Committee has expressed about it?

Justine Greening: We really have set ourselves an ambition of doing much more in this area, and we need to.  One of the first things I talked about, Chair, was the demographic challenges facing countries, particularly in Africa.  We need to make sure that those young people growing up who have had the benefit of much better health systems, often, and much better education have some opportunities for a job.  We have to get on with this.  I am pleased that it is almost certainly—and I hope—going to be part of the next post-2015 development framework.  Is working more closely with the private sector a newer thing for DFID and, indeed, many actors in development?  Yes.  We are going through a process of understanding how we can do that more effectively and the different components of our strategy.  It is part and parcel of this Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation work.  We have come a very long way in a comparatively short space of time.  We are also looking at how it dovetails into the work that CDC already does in relation to this agenda.  We are right to be ambitious on this, and in many respects we would be much more liable to be criticised if we were just staying within our comfort zone and saying, “Let us not do any more of that,” even though it is key to these countries that we are now working in and it is in our interest particularly to shape inward investment to help it to have the biggest development footprint that it can. 

Q186   Fiona Bruce: This Committee would entirely agree it is critical.  It is interesting you talk about a comfort zone.  I wonder whether you would like to comment on the fact that among those working within DFID on this area we need to ensure that there are at least some who have worked themselves in the private sector—who have run businesses or who have some first-hand experience of making the private sector work themselves.  Do you think that is something that we need to look at?  Can I add an addendum to that?  Certainly, I am concerned—and I think this concern is shared by other members of the Committee—about the use of consultants, often at great cost, when it might be better to employ DFID staff to work on projects, to improve the institutional memory and to strengthen cross-learning across countries within DFID on this issue and, indeed, on other issues.  Are these areas that you are going to look at as we move forward?

Justine Greening: We are already in a transition.  The two halves of your question in many respects show the challenge.  On the one hand we need to develop our own internal expertise, and that is what we are doing.  Partly that has simply been to do a very straightforward thing, which is to group all of our economic development activities under one director general and to have some clear line of sight through the totality of what we are doing so we can make sure it has some coherence. 

We do have a closer working relationship with different sectors, particularly of the UK economy, now than we have ever had before.  Not only is that sensible but we are also learning a huge amount from it.  You should also bear in mind, though, that we have got a lot of experience working with private sector suppliers.  Our procurement team has won awards two years running from the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply, which we are very proud of.  We do have some good institutional knowledge around how to work with the private sector and we are bringing that to bear in terms of the economic development agenda and how we can work smartly with industry there.  We do pull industry knowledge into our work and we are increasingly looking at the opportunities for DFID staff to get out into industry to understand the coal face. 

I should also say that the bigger part of my career I have had in my working life has been in industry and in business.  The minor part of my working life has been spent in politics thus far.  As Secretary of State, I can certainly bring my own personal understanding of 15 years in business and industry that I had before I became an MP.  That does help. 

Q187   Fiona Bruce: I am sure it has in terms of policy direction.  Finally, when we were in Tanzania, we saw a project that those of us who saw it were impressed with regarding the support for around 30,000 smallholders producing tea and the setting up of a co-operative for them in conjunction with a charity, the Wood Foundation.  What really impressed some of us regarding that project was the fact that much of the funding that was being provided to set up that project and get it into a commercially viable state, once that was in profit, would then be returned to the Wood Foundation for re-use.  Is this something that increasingly you will look at when you are working on private sector projects, which, at the end of the day, are intended to ultimately make a profit?

Chair: I think you still have to approve this project, Secretary of State.  We commend it to you. 

Fiona Bruce: In that case, let us commend it to you.

Justine Greening: I am very pleased that you like it.  That is one of the reasons why we have been working it up into a business case.  When I talk about returnable capital, this is exactly what I am referring to, or one aspect of how it can work really effectively.  There you have got the Wood Family Trust, which has got a lot of knowledge in this area, helping to improve the productivity and incomes of a whole range of people who will be growing tea.  It is a very good example of the projects that DFID is increasingly getting involved in. 

I should also say, though, that the “what works” agenda in this whole area is continuing to be developed and to evolve.  If you look at its maturity by comparison to the more traditional aid work in health, education and water and sanitation, this is comparatively new.  If you look at climate change, again, we are building up much more understanding of how to develop effective programmes.  I would say the economic development work is perhaps a bit further down the track in relation to needing to understand the “what works” agenda more effectively.  Partly that is because so much of it is being done by the private sector, and getting them to work with us on developing the evidence base is something that we have talked to them about, because that can really help demonstrate from their perspective what they are doing that they think is effective on the ground, and we can then complement that with our understanding from the more core DFID work that we are doing around tax, improving investment climates, capital markets, and reducing trade barriers—some of the TradeMark East Africa work that you may or may not have had a chance to see in Tanzania.

Fiona Bruce: Yes.

Justine Greening: That is a huge amount of work we are already doing, but it is working with the private sector that is becoming a bigger part of DFID’s agenda, too. 

Q188   Chair: I am going to comment before I bring in Sir Peter Luff that what we liked about all the projects we saw, Secretary of State, was that they were all time-limited, sustainable and transformational.  They did not look as if they were going to require endless funding.  That is transformational.  I suppose the point of Fiona Bruce’s question is: can you find £1.8 billion worth of those kinds of projects?

Justine Greening: That is across a much broader economic development portfolio.  I am pleased you got a chance to see that project, but, as you can see, as with any kind of business investment, it takes some time and effort to make sure it is a sensible one that is going to work.  All of them need to be looked at in terms of a case-by-case basis.  It is not uncomplicated.  That is why we have tried to have some sense of pace on this but, at the same time, as you can see, we are also taking some care with it.  We are not just going to dive in without properly understanding the risks as well as the opportunities.  That is what we are doing in that case. 

Q189   Sir Peter Luff: I have a detailed question about paragraph 12 of your written submission, which contains a word that has a whiff of Sir Humphrey about it.  “DFID continues to challenge itself to focus on the right set of policy issues.  The Chief Economist’s office recently invited views on which international ‘beyond aid’ actions DFID could pursue to support developing countries secure a timely, self-financed exit from poverty.  This initiative received a variety of suggestions which will act as an innovative resource to support policy development.”  What does that word “variety” mean?  Are they good or are they bad?  Are they helpful or unhelpful?  What were they?

Justine Greening: I will ask Liz or Louise to comment if either of them want to.  Essentially, our Chief Economist, Stefan Dercon, set a very open question to the development community about what they felt the emerging trends and challenges were going to be in relation to this whole beyond aid agenda.  I think I am right in saying he had a variety, which means about 100 different submissions from all sorts of different development organisations, which he then looked at and saw what the emerging themes were.  They were some of things that I talked about at the beginning of this session.  He will now take forward some discussions around those themes.  We are doing some work at Wilton Park, for example, to enable more detailed discussions around how we see this agenda and people see this agenda gradually developing.  I do not know whether either of you want to particularly input into that.

Liz Ditchburn: There were 20.  The 100 submissions boiled down into 20 issues that came out of that, and they are very diverse.  Some of them we have talked about.  The first one is “enabling OECD private capital to be invested in development assets” but then further on there is “changing international social norms”.  It is a whole range of interesting things that the development community and DFID’s own staff think are some of the kinds of beyond aid issues we ought to be thinking about into the future.  Some of them are very actively being worked through already, and they work within the international processes that are currently going on, such as finance for development and the post-2015 goals; some of them are ones that we will think about.  “A variety” was a very positive term for a good number of interesting avenues to explore. 

Q190   Sir Peter Luff: Is there going to be a published analysis of this variety of solutions?

Liz Ditchburn: At this stage, it is just the results of informal consultations and internal working, but I guess it is the sort of thing we could consider.

Q191   Sir Peter Luff: Any surprises?

Liz Ditchburn: No.  They were not surprises to DFID, in the sense that we are already working in this way that sees the world as a very interconnected set of things.  Had we been an organisation that had only been thinking about aid, maybe they would have seemed very surprising and very new, but the sort of organisation that we have been describing today knows they are the areas that we are engaged in internationally and the areas that we are thinking about. 

Justine Greening: That is your answer.  It was a really good piece of work for us to kick off, and in many respects it sits alongside all of the thinking that you are doing. 

Q192   Sir Peter Luff: It is like a call for evidence from a select committee.

Justine Greening: Very similar.  I will be interested to see your report.  It comes through at a really interesting time, particularly as we look forward to 2015 and the debate next year around the new framework.  I will be interested in whether there are any surprises for us in your final report.

Q193   Sir Peter Luff: My next question is an age-old one about prioritisation when it comes to policy making.  Future development policies are now global policy goods: fighting infectious diseases, tax avoidance, climate change and all these big issues.  How do you set that against the need to carry on working to relieve poverty in basic aid-relief poverty countries?  Where do you set the priorities between those very different objectives of DFID’s work?

Justine Greening: There are some strategic imperatives around these global policy goods where it makes sense to work collaboratively internationally to make progress on them.  In the case of climate change, we have to.  In the case of global public health, seeing what is happening in Sierra Leone and Ebola shows us very clearly why we need to make sure that we strengthen regions and the international response to those sorts of crises.  In a sense, there is a global strategy piece, and then that can sit alongside the more tactical development work we are doing with individual countries to help them move down the path of development.  I do not necessarily see it as an either/or direct prioritisation.  It is more complex than that, in a way, because the work that we might do, for example, through The Global Fund or through Gavi on vaccinations sits alongside the work that we are doing in-country on strengthening health systems.  Part of that decision about which mechanism we are using—whether we work bilaterally or we work through, for example, The Global Fund—can also be driven by value for money.  The fact that the ability to procure and get economies of scale from those big mechanisms like The Global Fund and Gavi means often it is better for us to work through those, setting aside any of the global public good arguments that are also there. 

It is a complex question.  The key to all of this is making sure that we take the time to stand back—which is again where NSC can help us—and say, “In the round, do we think this mix of work that we are doing and investment is about right?” recognising that in some areas we might do exceptionally important work—for example, very effective technical advice and assistance—that costs very little in comparison with, say, an education programme for thousands of children in Pakistan, so it is not always just about looking at where the money goes.  That is what I have tried to do within the Department.  We now have so-called challenge meetings with each of our country programmes and departmental leads, so that we can step back and look at the portfolio as a whole regularly to say, “Is it working?  What are the upcoming investment decisions?  How do they sit against what is happening in-country politically, socially and economically?  Are we sure and making sure that that basic trajectory of work that we have got is right?”  NSC gives us the chance to do that at a much more strategic security level.  For us, that has been quite an important step forward to be able to start looking at things much more routinely in a much more structured way in the round.

Q194   Fiona Bruce: I was very encouraged to note earlier this week you were in the north of England talking to smaller organisations about how they could access DFID funding.  I wonder if you could tell us more about that.  This has been a theme for many of us on the Committee; it is very difficult for some small charities or organisations doing tremendous work and providing incredible value for money to penetrate opportunities for DFID funding and support.

Justine Greening: Yes, I can.  It was one of our director generals who was up in Manchester this week.  I did one in Cardiff a couple of months ago.  It is called Aid Direct.  Essentially, it is about us getting out of Whitehall and getting out of London and going around the country and talking directly to some of those smaller organisations that still have a fantastic and a key role to play in the UK development effort.  Therefore, we have been out and about with DFID officials and DFID Ministers, giving those NGOs a chance to directly hear from us and then ask questions about how they can access funding and support and work with us through things like Aid Direct.  The feedback has been fantastic.  I am very pleased a) that we are doing it and b) about how it is being received.  It is hopefully demystifying some of our processes for these organisations that can work with us.  Also, it is enabling us to hear very directly from a lot of smaller and medium-sized NGOs who do great work who we otherwise probably would not hear from so often.  It is all part of this co-operation approach that we have got, and I am really encouraged by the first few that we have done so far.  We are working on moving in the right direction.

Q195   Chair: I hope you can manage that, because you will open up quite a large channel.  I know you go there regularly, but maybe you could do that particular visit in Scotland. 

Justine Greening: I am sure we will.

Q196   Chair: Just a couple of things.  You have very clearly outlined the expertise and the new competencies that you are acquiring and building up within your own Department, but other Departments are taking over more ODA work.  Do you think that they should also incorporate some more development specialists in their staff?  I just say in passing the fact that our High Commissioner in Tanzania comes from a DFID background was particularly welcome.

Justine Greening: There are different ways to make sure that we can drive excellence and value for money in the ODA that is spent by other Government Departments.  Some of that can come from making sure that we are jointly decisioning things with those Government Departments.  DECC and the Green Climate Fund and the work we have done on the International Climate Fund is a really good example of where we are one team, essentially, helping to manage that fund.  The Committee is right to say, “We have had a discussion about beyond aid but also what it is going to take for DFID to be able to be in a position to deliver that agenda successfully.  How are other Government Departments achieving that?”  I know that most of your work does tend to focus on what DFID is doing in relation to ODA spend, but I suppose one area for the future that the Committee might want to look at is the way in which other Government Departments approach spending the ODA budgets that they have and the effectiveness around that.

Q197   Chair: Another small but relevant point in the light of the discussion and the changes that are taking place beyond aid is that, under Tom Clarke’s 2006 Bill, which became the International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Act, you are required to report on policy coherence, which you do through the annual report.  Do you think there is a case for perhaps making a more separate report as the Department changes and the focus changes—an annual report on how you are ensuring policy coherence both within the Department and across Government?  Do you think there would be merit in doing that as a separate report?

Justine Greening: I do not know that it needs to be a separate report, but you are right that, as it becomes a bigger part of how we deliver our agenda successfully, it will need to become a bigger part of that annual report, essentially, in the same way that I am sure if you flip back to any DFID annual report maybe 10 years ago or so it would have a much smaller section on economic development and what the Department is doing than it does now, because it is now a much bigger part of what we do. 

Q198   Chair: I have been Chair of this Committee for 10 years and I have always told people it is the International Development Committee, not the overseas aid committee.

Justine Greening: You are quite right.

Q199   Jeremy Lefroy: We have made a recommendation previously about the possibility of DFID setting up an arm’s length partially or wholly owned consultancy on the basis that we feel that that would both bring an element of challenge and potentially drive down costs, particularly when it comes to the running of the larger programmes that this consultancy arm could bid for, a little bit like CDC is owned by DFID.  Having been in Tanzania with the Committee last week, it really struck me even more forcibly that there is a real need for retaining within the public sector or the social-enterprise sector—whatever you would like to call it—the expertise of DFID staff who may otherwise perhaps go to some of these rather large consultancy organisations.  I feel that with these increasingly challenging programmes that DFID is running, where there is a mixture of conflict prevention and there is the private sector, all demanding substantial expertise, we are finding that DFID is not necessarily able to get this expertise except by going out to these very large consultancy organisations.  By having a halfway house, it would enable that expertise to be retained within the orbit of DFID even if they were not direct DFID employees.  When we raised this recommendation before, we had a “partial agree” from the Government on this, but I would like to raise it again, because the more I see of DFID’s work, the more I think it could be relevant.

Justine Greening: It is a really interesting idea.  We have a cadre of policy experts in DFID that particularly have expertise in different areas of our work and, indeed, part of their role is about sharing that expertise with the organisation—so, almost operating a bit as an internal consultancy for us to draw upon.  We had a discussion earlier about the fact we are now going through the process of building up that expertise in relation to private sector and economic development as that becomes a more important part of what we do.  It is an interesting idea, though. 

I am struck by the number of times I am at conferences or I am out in countries looking at programmes talking with one of the stakeholders we are working with and it is somebody who has worked at DFID previously.  There is no doubt that our people do move on and we do have a very big footprint, but you are quite right to say that there will be some expertise that we always need to have in-house, mainly because it will be core to what we are trying to do, so therefore understanding it matters hugely importantly.  I also think it is important for a second reason.  I believe if we are going to procure sensibly and smartly we have to procure with knowledge.  That is another thing that we have been very clear on as we have improved our procurement over time as well.  That is bearing fruit now in terms of some of the awards that we are winning and the expertise that we have built up in-house.  As our portfolio evolves, so does that expertise, and you are right to point that out.  Your idea is an interesting one. 

Q200   Chair: It is not quite related, but what we have noticed too on our visits is that CDC is increasingly more visible and more closely associated.  In the past, you talked to DFID about CDC and they would say, “We have no idea.”  That is definitely working better. 

Justine Greening: Perhaps if I can just briefly comment on that, I am very pleased that you have seen that, Chair, because CDC is arm’s length—we are the sole shareholder, so we set an investment framework and it then delivers on that—but nevertheless there is a huge wealth of knowledge within CDC, and it sits alongside and it needs to sit alongside an economic development programme that, as it were, core DFID is delivering as well.  Improving that relationship—making it more streamlined both at a strategic level but also on the ground—is something that I have been very keen to see us make progress on, and I know that the head of CDC, its Chair, Graham Wrigley, has as well.  I am pleased that you are seeing that change starting to come through on the ground, because that is what we want to see too.

Q201   Chair: Yes.  We met an export company—I have forgotten its name—that CDC has been supporting and maybe preparing for flotation.  It is the first and only time we have had a presentation, effectively, by CDC in-country, organised with DFID.  That is definitely a much better arrangement than it used to be. 

Justine Greening: I am pleased to hear that. 

Q202   Jeremy Lefroy: I have just one final point, really to back up Fiona’s question earlier about engagement with very small UK organisations that are doing this great work often having huge impact for only a few thousand or tens of thousands of pounds a year.  What plans do you have on extension of, for instance, the Global Poverty Action Fund or similar programmes that would enable even those smaller organisations to access support or matched funding from DFID?

Justine Greening: Aid Direct really is the extension of the Global Poverty Action Fund.  I felt that was a bit of a mouthful of a title and that Aid Direct was a much better way of conveying what we were trying to do in working with organisations.  That is the extension of it, but a bigger part of it is now there for smaller and medium-sized NGOs to access.  I have been particularly clear that part of what this is about doing is not just us achieving development results through a wider variety of NGOs and partners; I want to use it to help our own NGO community strengthen.  At the Aid Direct event that I did in Cardiff, we had two smaller NGOs present to the room first about their experience, and essentially what they said was that it had not been uncomplicated to go through the various processes of putting forward the plan, showing it is value for money, etc. but that doing it had really helped them improve their capability and that, alongside getting the resourcing to be able to deliver the programme that they wanted to do, a secondary benefit to both organisations was that they felt they had become a better organisation through working with DFID and the experience of how we looked at business cases and developed them, and the structure that we pushed them to pull together in order to be able to work with us and get some of that Aid Direct funding.  It does have a dual benefit, and that is why I was really keen to see it continue.  It sits alongside Aid Match, where we essentially take the priorities of the public in terms of where they are willing to put their contributions and then match them with some DFID money. 

Q203   Chair: We might be just about to lose our quorum.  Thank you very much.  I hope, Secretary of State, you will find our report interesting and constructive.  We are drawing on the whole of the Parliament’s work.  It will be on your desk, but it will also, we are mindful, be on the desk of the next Government and the next Parliament, because we are looking that far ahead.  I also hope it will help shape the debate about aid and development and, I would like to think, a more positive and visionary and slightly less compartmentalised direction.  That is what we hope it will achieve, anyway.  Thank you very much for a very worthwhile session.

Justine Greening: Thank you very much, Chair.  I do think it is an important report.  We have talked a lot about the work that we do in my Department in shaping the debate and the policy agenda more broadly.  The Committee has a really positive role to play in that, too, and this report can be part of that.  There are not that many Select Committees that can work hand in hand and scrutinise the work that we do and then use your knowledge to also be part of that shaping agenda. 

Q204   Chair: I think we see ourselves as a constructive but occasionally critical friend. 

Justine Greening: It is valued.  Thank you. 

Chair: Thank you very much indeed. 

              Oral evidence: Beyond Aid, HC 663                            6