1

Joint Committee on
National Security Strategy

Oral evidence: Conflict, Stability and Security Fund, HC 208
Monday 28 November 2016

Watch the meeting 

Members present: Margaret Beckett (Chair); Crispin Blunt; Baroness Buscombe; Baroness Falkner of Margravine; Lord Hamilton of Epsom; Lord Harris of Haringey; Dr Julian Lewis; Lord Mitchell; Lord Powell of Bayswater; Lord Ramsbotham; Lord Trimble; Lord West of Spithead.

Evidence Session No. 2              Heard in Public              Questions 24 - 41

Witnesses

I: Sir Mark Lyall Grant KCMG, National Security Adviser, Cabinet Office, National Security Secretariat; Mr Robert Chatterton Dickson, Director of Foreign Policy, Cabinet Office, National Security Secretariat; Ms Melinda Simmons, Head of NSS Joint Programme Hub, National Security Secretariat.

Q24            The Chair: Good afternoon. Thank you for coming and welcome to the Committee. We are pleased to be able to take evidence from you about the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund. Our first concern, Sir Mark, is how you intend to measure its strategic impact.

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: Thank you, Madam Chair, for taking evidence from us. I have with me Robert Chatterton Dickson, who is director of the foreign policy team at the National Security Secretariat, and Melinda Simmons, who is head of the joint programme hub for the CSSF.

In terms of measuring impact and evaluating, I think it is fair to say that this is work in progress. The fund has been established now for nearly two years. It is programmed on a multiannual basis, although spending allocations are reassessed every year. We are looking to make a difference in the areas of preventing conflict and building stability overseas in support of the National Security Council strategies and the aid strategy.

All the programmes and projects that are funded from the CSSF flow directly from the strategies set by the National Security Council, so ultimately it is the National Security Council that assesses whether the money that is being spent through the CSSF has helped to progress or achieve the objectives set in that overall strategy. In each case, that will depend on what has been achieved on the ground and what the objectives were, so it is difficult to give you a single definition of evaluation. There is a mechanism in all the different programmes. Each programme is reviewed annually, and if it is seen to be achieving the impact that was set at the outset, the funding might be continued, increased or changed. If that is not the case, there is the opportunity to suspend funding or indeed to cancel the programme entirely.

The Chair: You say that each programme is reviewed annually. Do you also look at how it is working compared with similar efforts by partner countries? Is that part of that review?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I am not sure that I fully understand the question, Madam Chair.

The Chair: You are trying to assess how our fund is working. Do you try to do any kind of comparison with what our partner countries may be doing along the same lines, or to achieve the same ends, or is that not part of the review process?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: Absolutely, in the sense that the individual projects will be overseen by a board at the ambassadorial level, so the mission in the country concerned will oversee the individual project. It will be in touch with other allied countries—partner countries—that are working in a similar field. Obviously, a deconfliction process goes on at that level.

The Chair: We have been given evidence that suggests that the majority of the current projects are relatively low value and relatively short term. How can you tell whether together they add up to being strategic?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: The CSSF is a tool for the delivery of the strategy. It is not the strategy itself; it is just one of the means by which one tries to achieve the strategy set by the National Security Council. There are 97 programmes running at the moment within the CSSF. Beneath that, there are even more individual projects within those programmes. The average cost of each programme is around £5 million—a reasonable sum of money. Beneath that there are a number of projects in some cases that are much smaller—tens of thousands of pounds in individual cases. The whole purpose of the fund and the sole purpose of the fund is to help to deliver the overall strategic effect set by the National Security Council. But it is only one of the tools that try to achieve that.

The Chair: Basically, you are saying that the overall strategic impact is assessed, reviewed and held by the NSC itself.

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: By the NSC itself, which will regularly review the strategies. The NSC has about 40 individual country, regional or thematic strategies. All those will be reviewed by the National Security Council, some—at the moment, Syria and Iraq, and Libya, as you would expect—quite frequently, but others perhaps less frequently. Nigeria and Egypt, for example, might be looked at once a year by the National Security Council.

The Chair: Given that so many of the strategies are regionally based, how easy is it for you to assess whether the total is addressing our national security objectives?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: All the national security strategies are in pursuit of our national security interests. The Prime Minister has made it very clear that that is the purpose of our national security strategy, so all of them relate directly back to our national security interests as set out in the strategic defence and security review and national security strategy last year.

The Chair: We had a Written Ministerial Statement in July this year, which gave an example of a strategic impact that was dated from 2013-14, when we had the Conflict Pool. When, roughly, do you anticipate that you will be able to make similar statements about this fund and its impact?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I would hope that we could do so already in some cases. As the fund develops and over the period of the Parliament, I would hope that there would be more and more examples where you can demonstrate actual impact and the achievement of objectives against British national interests.

Q25            Lord Hamilton of Epsom: Following on from that, does it not worry you that we are spending relatively small amounts of money in lots of different countries when perhaps we should be spending rather bigger amounts in fewer countries where our direct strategic interest is much more clearly identified?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I think that is a legitimate argument, but I think we have a balance between the two. We have cut the number of countries in which we are operating the CSSF.[1] Some of the countries in which we operate have substantial allocations. For example, Afghanistan has £90 million, Syria has £60 million and Somalia has £32 million. Those are reasonably substantive sums of money that are being allocated per country. It is not such a large number of countries. As I mentioned, there are 97 programmes, but that does not mean that they are in 97 different countries. They are in considerably fewer. Melinda, how many countries are there in total?

Melinda Simmons: The CSSF operates in more than 40 countries, but it is probably worth highlighting that in the first year of the CSSF we closed down more than £1 million worth of projects that had been legacy activity in the Conflict Pool. As Mark said, we are in only the second year of the CSSF, so it is a journey.

In terms of integrating the projects and programmes and bringing departments’ separate interventions together under them, it is already a lot more coherent than it was under the Conflict Pool.

Lord Hamilton of Epsom: We have been given extensive briefing about human rights abuses in Bahrain. When one looks at that region generally, one sees that lots of people seem to be involved in human rights abuses on a much larger scale. What made it be decided that Bahrain in particular should be identified as needing to be investigated in this way?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I would not say “investigated”. We are trying to support what is already a reform process in Bahrain. It is a country where there are some concerns about human rights and practices but at the same time where we believe that there is a political will to have a reform process. We think that we should help to support that. It is why some of our programmes in Bahrain focus on the criminal justice system and social reform.

Lord Hamilton of Epsom: Does that mean that there are not organisations that you can support in bigger countries in the region?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: No, I would not say that, but Bahrain is certainly one country where we feel there is a process that we can support and that is worth us supporting.

Lord West of Spithead: I am still not clear about assessing the aggregate strategic effect. You say that it the job of the national security committee. It is always difficult, of course, to prove a negative in preventing conflict. Is it you as the National Security Adviser who has final responsibility for producing a report that says, “This is the strategic effect that we are achieving by the following things”? I have not seen such a report, or is that not how it is done? Do you feel that you are responsible for this or is a Minister responsible? How does it work?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: There are different levels. As I mentioned, an annual review of all the programmes is done by the regional boards, which are director-level boards. Then, on a six-monthly basis, my deputy, Gwyn Jenkins, who is the Deputy National Security Adviser, produces a report from a panel that he chairs across the strategic piece of the CSSF programmes. He reports to me on a six-monthly basis on whether he feels that the overall balance of the programming and the effect achieved are right, and that we are responding to the national security edicts. Then, on an annual basis, I report to the National Security Council. I make recommendations on what the allocations should be for the following financial year, and the National Security Council then decides on those regional, country and thematic allocations for the following year, based on the analysis of what is working and what needs to work.

Lord West of Spithead: That analysis of what is working strikes me as incredibly difficult. I am not quite sure how you can say, “Well, we’ve spent £20 million here and it has achieved this, and we’ve spent £2 million there and it has achieved that”. I just cannot see how you do that. To whom do you then give the proof of what you have done with that money?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: Proving impact in this area is not going to be easy. As you rightly say, proving a negative is difficult if you are preventing conflict. We are also working in very high-risk areas, often in high-risk countries. Therefore, one cannot expect fully to achieve the objectives that one sets at the beginning of the strategies. Some of the overall strategies will fail, whereas some of the individual programmes may be relatively successful in their own terms. For wider reasons, you could say that the Syria strategy is not working, but individual programmes within that might be quite successful in their own terms.

In some cases, it is relatively easy to draw a direct line between a programme, the funding and the beneficial effect for national security. I will give you one example, of some criminal justice advisers who were funded to go east Africa and whose work led directly to the seizure of £512-million worth of cocaine in UK waters. That is a direct cause and effect that one can draw in that particular programme. We established and helped to fund the Organised Immigration Crime Task Force. That led to the arrest of a smuggling gang that was smuggling 50 people into the UK every month.

There are some specific programmes and projects where you can say that you put money in at the front and you get some effect for national security at the back. But that is not true of all the cases; it is a much more complex situation. Perhaps I may cite one further example, which is in Jordan. We have an extensive series of programmes there, which help to train the military but also work in some of the refugee camps in Syria. Clearly, that work is having important effects in promoting the stability of Jordan. I would argue that it is a good example of a programme successfully supporting a strategy.

Q26            Baroness Falkner of Margravine: Can I come back to Bahrain and how you assess and mitigate human rights risks in projects? You implied that a great reform process is going on in Bahrain, that it is all going so well and that we are therefore engaging because we are really bringing them up to our standards. Anyone who has ever dealt with Bahrain in the past 10 years can tell you that the reform process has entirely stalled. In fact, some believe that it is regressing. You will have seen how tricky these things are in relation to our involvement in arms sales to Saudi Arabia, which has led to the new dialogue with the Saudi Government and the internal inquiry on whether those weapons have been used for repression in the war in Yemen.

I am afraid that I do not agree with your analysis of Bahrain. My broader question is whether at some point—we have been engaging with Bahrain since the Manama Pearl roundabout uprisings in 2010—you decide that the risks of the perception that we are aiding and abetting such human rights abuses become sufficiently significant whereby you carry out an independent assessment. Do you call in, for example, the very credible human rights groups that make these allegations, as well as upright bodies such as Chatham House, ask them what foundations they have for their concerns and carry out an independent assessment? Are you ever likely to make that independent assessment visible so that the public do not believe that we are collaborating, aiding and abetting? It is taxpayers’ money after all.

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: There is of course extensive engagement with human rights bodies across the Middle East region. We engage with them; we listen to what they say and it is one of the inputs into policy. But this is a political and policy decision taken by the National Security Council: that we want to engage and help with reform. There will be occasions when the National Security Council decides that we should discontinue a programme. We did that with one of the prisons programmes in Saudi Arabia earlier this year, for instance. But in Bahrain those programmes are seen to have some effect and we are continuing with them.

Q27            Crispin Blunt: You referenced country, thematic and regional programmes. What is the balance of expenditure between those three heads?

Melinda Simmons: There are dedicated thematic allocations for multilateral programming, for migration programming and for counterterrorism, but the balance is quite hard to strike. In country programmes, everything that you do in a country is on a theme. It is either to support migration activity, to work on gender or to support upstream conflict prevention activity, as we have discussed. All the work that is supported by the CSSF is thematic, but it is focused, in countries, on which of those themes is most important for the country’s priorities. The majority of the dedicated allocations are regional or country specific. A much smaller amount—£20 million for multilateral programming, £15 million for migration, and so on—is dedicated programming. The vast majority is put to countries and regions, which then mainstream those thematic activities.

Crispin Blunt: To countries and regions, or is there a regional build-up?

Melinda Simmons: There is an allocation for the overseas territories, for example, which will cover all in that region. Otherwise, the NSC signs off on regional headline allocations and the boards will then decide, on advice from the hub, which I run, how they divide that among countries. Some of the activity will cross countries and will be regional. For example, the Africa board has an Africa continental allocation, which it has decided that it needs in order to programme regional activity—activity that crosses borders. Peacekeeping training is a good example of that.

Crispin Blunt: So there is £35 million for migration and multilateral, which leaves £998 million for in-country programmes, where the programmes are written, programmed and managed in country. Is that right?

Melinda Simmons: Yes, as Mark described, the head of mission—the ambassador—in each country runs a programme board, which is attended by all NSC department staff who are present at post. They deliver the programmes. They report for those programmes to director-led boards in London. Those boards report up to Mark via the NSC and the NSC(O) structures.

Crispin Blunt: In writing those programmes, they will be expected to hit some of these themes.

Melinda Simmons: Yes, that is right. The NSC and the NSC(O) give steers on which of those themes they want to see prioritised. Gender, for example, is a mandatory theme, not least for the ODA allocation. Migration, countering violent extremism and so on have all risen as priority themes as directed by the NSC.

Crispin Blunt: We appear to be responsible for your financial oversight. Do we get country programmes by size and then how they relate to your objectives? Do we have that data?

Melinda Simmons: Do you mean a list of the allocations by country?

Crispin Blunt: Yes, programmes by country, so that we can examine exactly what is happening in each country and whether it is able to hit your cross-border issues, such as migration, gender issues and regional issues.

Melinda Simmons: The Written Ministerial Statement confirmed regional allocations, but we are looking to publish more information about country allocations for the first time.[2] One reason for grouping it as regional allocations is that it covers the complete range of security activity, some of which is sensitive. For that reason, we have in the past kept our reporting to regional, but we are trying to find a way to describe allocations by country so that you get a better flavour of how the allocations are prioritised.

Crispin Blunt: Particularly with country programmes, it is impossible to assess exactly how that country programme relates to a thematic issue.

Melinda Simmons: Sure.

Q28            Lord Ramsbotham: You mentioned that all your work was thematic. You also mentioned migration, and somebody mentioned the criminal justice programme in Kenya that led to the identification of heroin. In the context of migration, who is responsible for developing the policy on, for instance, hunting down the traffickers who are present in many countries—many countries must be looking for them—to prevent the migrants from being exported across the Mediterranean, for example? How is that carried out under the fund?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: The migration policy has been set by the National Security Council, which has discussed migration maybe three or four times in the course of this year. Within that, there are a number of different strands. There is the UK border strand, there is the European Union border strand, there are the transit and source countries, and there is the global agenda on migration. All those are separate strands of an overarching National Security Council strategy.

On the source and transit countries, to which I think you are referring, we have policies on those different countries, some of which will be supported by funding from the CSSF. Ethiopia is one example of a transit country where there is a CSSF programme supporting our migration objectives in country. But the migration strategy goes much wider than the CSSF, which is only one relatively small input into that strategy.

Q29            Lord Harris of Haringey: In the oral evidence that we received five weeks ago, concern was expressed to us about “the loss of conflict prevention as a policy”. Do you accept that that has disappeared from the stable of CSSF activity?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: No, I do not. When I was ambassador at the United Nations, I sponsored and pushed through the Security Council the first ever resolution on conflict prevention, so it is dear to my heart. As National Security Adviser, I have made sure that we are heavily invested in a conflict prevention strategy. There are certainly many programmes within the CSSF that look specifically at conflict prevention.

Lord Harris of Haringey: Can you give us an idea of what proportion of the expenditure in the last financial year was aimed at preventing conflict?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I will have to turn to Melinda on that. Is it possible to give that figure?

Melinda Simmons: I do not have the figures for the last financial year, but I can give you an idea of what we have procured against each of the main pillars in this financial year, if that would be helpful. It is a little misleading and I will explain why. The majority—about two-thirds—of the activity that has been procured is against the security and justice pillar. Defence support services are about £41 million, which is about a third of the security and justice activities programming. Conflict prevention and peacebuilding activity are also at about a third. The thing about that is that conflict prevention will happen within the security and justice programmes. You may have a headline of a programme involving more than one department, and indeed more than one supplier, operating a range of activities in a country or across a region that will primarily have security-related objectives, but those will be contributing in the cycle to conflict prevention and resolution. There are quite a few examples of those, so the data is a little misleading.

Lord Harris of Haringey: It would be helpful if you could supply us, if we have not already had it, with as much information as you can, so that we can try to disentangle that. What proportion of the individual projects are multiyear? Do you track the impact over that sort of timeframe?

Melinda Simmons: This is the first year in which the Treasury, after the spending review, stipulated that we were allowed to programme multiyear. It is quite a high proportion at the moment—around two-thirds. There must always be a balance in the CSSF with ensuring that we still have sufficient flexibility for in-year activity; one of the main reasons for setting up the CSSF was to create an agile fund. This is the first year of focusing in a more determined way on multiyear programming and it is a pretty good outcome, for the first year since the spending review, to reach two-thirds. We have not yet had an opportunity to evaluate that as a whole. We will be prepared to do that in the next round of annual reviews.

Lord Harris of Haringey: But is that proportion—two-thirds, I think—multiyear just because those projects happen to span the end of the financial year or last longer than a year?

Melinda Simmons: No, it is a deliberate and strategic approach which the boards have taken. It is not right to suggest that the CSSF funds only quite short-term activity. That is multiyear activity that is none the less subject to review by the boards and by the hub, towards the NSC and the NSC(O), as part of the annual allocations process, but there are programmes running two, three and four years inside the fund.

Lord Harris of Haringey: We were told that quite a lot of projects last only for six months. Is that because you did not have this Treasury permission or because those are the short-term in-year portions? Six months is not enough time to create a strategic effect in a fragile, complex environment.

Melinda Simmons: The six months is news to me, and I run the fund. It is not the case that the majority of activities last less than a year. The majority of activities are multiyear.

Lord Harris of Haringey: I am sorry to interrupt, but I want to pin this down. I can understand why it might have been the case before the Treasury gave you permission to spread them over more than one year, simply because by the time things have been approved there might only have been six months or so of the year to run.

Melinda Simmons: But those projects were not programmed to run for less than a year, even before the Treasury stipulated this in our spending review settlement. It was multiyear programming. Boards and programme deliverers were assigning annual one-year contracts and then having to start the process again. This is not activity that started and finished within the year.

The exception may be where there is new unforeseen in-year activity in response to a crisis. A good example was after the massacre in Sousse. The Middle East board decided to make an in-year allocation for Tunisia, and the initial activity, which would have been short-term, was transferred into a bigger programme that was bid for in the next allocation round. That is an exception, but even then it would be built into a bigger programme for following years.

Lord Harris of Haringey: But even within those bigger programmes, because a project is assessed each year it would not know until it was given the go-ahead that it would extend into the next financial year.

Melinda Simmons: No, it would be the same arrangement as for DfID, which also programmes multiyear. Every multiyear contract has a break in it that enables the Government to take different decisions about how they want to spend the money. There is the same predictability for multiyear programming in the CSSF as there is elsewhere in government.

Lord Harris of Haringey: When typically in a financial year does that break point occur?

Melinda Simmons: We are going through an allocation round now, as everybody does in the autumn period. The contracts will run with an annual break, depending on when they started. There are programmes going live and being developed throughout the year, and they all have that break clause in them. However, more or less as Mark has said, the fund is still quite young and there has not been a habit of cutting projects that are multiyear or more than one year in order to do something radically different.

Q30            Baroness Buscombe: My question concerns duplication. Who is responsible for ensuring that the programming funded by the CSSF complements rather than duplicates other departmental activity in fragile and conflict-affected states? How do they do this?

Perhaps I may also ask a subset of that question. The CSSF regional boards are cross-government by design, but to what extent are the design and delivery of CSSF projects also cross-government?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: On your first point, the CSSF is not there to fill holes in departmental spending; it complements individual departmental spending. There will be some countries where DfID has a large development programme, for instance, of which the CSSF element might be relatively small or non-existent.

Equally, there are some examples of countries where DfID has no development programme. Burundi is one example. The CSSF stepped in as the Burundi political situation became more tense and there was the risk of violence and conflict in Burundi. The CSSF had the flexibility to fill in and try to help to promote stability in Burundi. There should be no overlap between the two.

I am sure Melinda and Robert will say that if a programme is put up for funding, the first question that is asked is whether a government department is funding this already or whether it should be funding this. Is this a genuine call for the aims and purposes of the CSSF? That duplication should be weaned out at an early stage before the programme gets allocated and authorised.

Baroness Buscombe: Who is ultimately responsible for that in order to avoid that duplication? Is it you?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: It will mainly be the regional boards, which themselves are cross-Whitehall, as is the programming. Indeed, one of the advantages and developments of the CSSF compared with the Conflict Pool, which covered only three departments, is that the CSSF is genuinely cross-Whitehall. It has departments such as the Treasury, the Home Office, the NCA and the intelligence agencies, which can all bid from the CSSF, which they could not do from the Conflict Pool, so they are fully invested in this.

Q31            Lord Powell of Bayswater: Mark, from the outside, the oversight arrangements and even the allocation arrangements look incredibly complex. I do not think that a self-respecting spider would weave such a complicated web if it had a choice. We understand that some of the projects must be signed off by departments as well as by the regional boards. Is there not a risk that some good projects just do not get through because it is all too difficult in administrative terms?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I do not think so. The regional boards play a very important role in allocating the resources. If the programme is particularly big, once that programme has been approved by the board the money will be allocated to a lead department to spend it. But at that stage the individual department accountability processes come into play, so if the programme is particularly large it will need to be signed off by the Permanent Secretary and in some cases by the Minister of that department.

One example was the Lebanon project.[3] That was quite a big project—£40 million—and, as a result, when the money was transferred to the Foreign Office the project was signed off by both the Permanent Secretary and the Foreign Secretary. The same was the case with some of the big Afghan programmes, which were signed off by the Minister. It depends on the amount of money and the individual departmental accountability processes.

For the CSSF, the key instrument is the regional boards. Those are the ones that sit in a cross-Whitehall mechanism, decide whether a programme or project is worth supporting or not and make choices between programmes in that region.

Lord Powell of Bayswater: I think I am right in saying that when you took charge of this the programmes were already in operation. Do you not feel a bit frustrated at the complexity of it, and would you not like to see it simplified rather and for there to be more direct accountability? Why do we not have a single budget for the whole programme, with one Minister in the Cabinet Office and you as the Permanent Secretary accountable for it? Conflict is a very difficult area, and one also needs more flexibility between different programmes. That would be much easier to achieve, surely, if you had a simpler structure.

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: It is complex; you are right, Lord Powell. In an ideal world, one would not have all the ring-fences that one has within the CSSF, for instance. However, it is work in progress and it is an evolution. It is an improvement on the Conflict Pool, but the Treasury likes to retain some control over some of the individual elements, so it has built into the CSSF some mechanisms that I, as the SRO, have to abide by. We should not forget that almost half the CSSF is non-discretionary spending; it is made up of UN peacekeeping and other military spending, which is ring-fenced. It is a sign of the success of the fund, I think, that dependent-territory spending has been brought into it, but it is ring-fenced. Counterterrorism has come into it, but it is ring-fenced. The good governance fund has come into it, but it is ring-fenced. There are quite a lot of ring-fences in the overall fund.

Are you asking whether I, as the SRO, would prefer it to be much easier and more flexible? Yes, I probably would, but I understand the Treasury rules, and we have to work within them.

Lord Powell of Bayswater: So there is a risk that Whitehall turf wars take precedence over the effectiveness of projects.

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I do not think so. There is a risk that if the non-discretionary spending increased significantly, your discretionary spend would be reduced. Happily, in the two years for which the fund has been in existence, there has been a small underspend on UN peacekeeping, thanks to the negotiating ability of my successors. That means that we have a bit more money to spend on discretionary funding from the CSSF, but the reverse could happen and we could be squeezed. That is the nature of the beast.

Q32            Lord Mitchell: Sir Mark, may I address this question to you personally? We are quite interested in how much time you spend on the CSSF as a percentage of your working week—just to get a feel for it.

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: It is not a huge percentage; I could not give you an exact percentage. I am secretary to the National Security Council, which meets weekly and normally looks at two national security strategies a week. Then I chair the National Security Council (Officials) committee every week, which sometimes looks at the same national security strategies—to prepare for the National Security Council—but sometimes at separate national security strategies. That is a weekly engagement that is a significant percentage of my time.

In terms of the CSSF, I receive from my deputy six-monthly reports on the overall effectiveness and direction of the CSSF. On the back of that, I chair a specific National Security Council (Officials) committee to look at the CSSF and consider allocations for the following year. That meeting was held last week. This week or next week, I will write to the National Security Council members and the Prime Minister making proposals for allocations for the next financial year. In between that regular process, individual issues might come up where Melinda or Robert, who oversees the programme hub, consult me about a particular programme or a particular concern about a direction of travel, or they may be a direction from the Prime Minister that she would like to see whether some funding can be made available for a particular programme, whether that be organised immigration crime, modern slavery or migration—whatever it happens to be—and I would get involved at that stage. Overall, in terms of direct management of the CSSF, it is not a high percentage of my weekly time. It is a higher percentage of Robert’s time and it is full time for Melinda.

Lord Mitchell: So you are saying 10%, or something like that?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: On a yearly basis, I would say between 5% and 10%.

Lord Mitchell: We are interested in the chain of accountability between you and the regional boards. How does that work?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: Robert sits on most of the regional directors’ boards and acts as my deputy SRO, if you like, in an informal capacity. I would rely on him to come to me if he felt that things were going wrong. My deputy, Gwyn Jenkins, will report formally to me in writing every six months with his evaluation of the six months of the CSSF and make recommendations as to whether he thinks the direction needs to be changed or we need to do a deep dive into some particular area that is not working.

Lord Mitchell: Who holds you to account, if I may ask?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I am held to account by you but also by the Prime Minister and the National Security Council.

Lord West of Spithead: Can I jump in on that? So you would see yourself as being liable to be called before the PAC or the NAO as the person whom they would hold to account for this fund?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: For the funding of the fund, yes. I am the senior responsible officer for the Prosperity Fund, for the CSSF and for the soft power fund. For the three main cross-Whitehall funds in this area, I am responsible to Parliament.

Lord West of Spithead: Has the PAC asked to see you about it yet?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: It has not.

Lord Mitchell: Finally, how frequently does the NSC engage with the CSSF?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: On a formal basis, once a year in relation to the allocations for the following year. Informally, all the CSSF funding flows from a National Security Council strategy and therefore every week.

Lord Harris of Haringey: You mentioned that you might get involved if the Prime Minister said that there was some particular project that she wanted implemented. By implication, that must have happened. Are there other senior Ministers who might ask for something to be funded from this fund?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: Yes, I would imagine so. They may come to me; they may go to their own officials who are represented on the NSC(O). I cannot cite an example today.

Q33            Crispin Blunt: In 2011, the Building Stability Overseas Strategy underpinned the use of the Conflict Pool. In your submission to us, that strategy is not mentioned, and you state that the CSSF is delivered in support of the National Security Strategy, SDSR 2015 and the 2015 aid strategy. Is Building Stability Overseas still valid or not?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I think that the Building Stability Overseas Strategy has essentially been subsumed by the SDSR 2015. That set out the clear threats and challenges to British national security, which included the risk of instability and conflict. That is now the key document and the BSOS is, I would say, no longer valid.

Crispin Blunt: Is there any other central documentation to guide departments’ work in this area?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: The three that you mentioned—the national security strategy, the SDSR and the aid strategy—are the three defining documents.

Crispin Blunt: So why is DfID updating the Building Stability Overseas Strategy?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I was not aware that it was.

Crispin Blunt: It would appear that the Foreign Office, the MoD and the other NSC departments are not involved in that. Have you any advice as to how that should be reconciled?

The Chair: It sounds as if they ought to stop.

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: Thank you for bringing it to my attention.

Crispin Blunt: Delighted.

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: Melinda may have a better answer to that.

Melinda Simmons: The document is not the Building Stability Overseas Strategy. As you all know, DfID committed to spending up to 50% of its programme on fragile and conflict-affected states. That DfID document is advice for DfID programmes on how to do that within the context of its development programme. It is not a cross-Whitehall strategy. Any department may decide that it wishes to issue guidance for its own programmes on how to do this on a broader level. As Mark said, the CSSF is not the only deliverer of funds in conflict-affected and fragile states. So this is a DfID document.

Crispin Blunt: Do you think that it should be just a DfID document? Given the vast scale of money that it has, should it not be engaged in drafting its version of the strategy with the FCO, the MoD and other NSC partners?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I think that DfID’s work in all the fragile states will flow from one of the three documents that I mentioned, which are cross-Whitehall documents, whether it is the aid strategy, the SDSR or the National Security Strategy. I do not think it would pursue an independent policy, but if it has updated its own guidance or policy document for specific DfID programmes in those countries, I see no particular problem with that.

Crispin Blunt: Would you anticipate having sight of a draft of that for approval?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I do not know about approving a draft, but now that you have alerted me to it I will certainly make inquiries.

Q34            Lord Ramsbotham: Carrying on from where we were on trafficking, who is responsible in Whitehall for the policy development in the joint strategies in the security and justice areas?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: The migration strategy that you referred to is a cross-Whitehall strategy. I co-chair something called the migration steering group with the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office. The Home Office is primarily responsible for most of the migration strategy, but there are different leads on the different strands that I mentioned earlier. For instance, DfID leads on the global agenda, but they all report back to the migration steering group, which then reports to the National Security Council.

On some of the law enforcement work, it is the NCA that takes the lead in some of the upstream countries. On the migration steering group all relevant Whitehall departments are represented. As I say, there are six subgroups of that steering group, all of which are chaired by different individuals from three different government departments: the Foreign Office, the Home Office and DfID.

Lord Ramsbotham: How is all that translated into the regional board programmes and projects that you mentioned? What co-ordination is there between those on major issues, such as trafficking?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: On trafficking, Melinda might be able to say how much CSSF money is funding specifically on trafficking, but it is one of the strands of the migration strategy. It is led by the Home Office and the NCA. I am not sure whether they asked for funding from the CSSF for specific projects or programmes.

Melinda Simmons: They have not yet.

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: But at some point they might make a bid to fund a particular project that they want to do in those areas. That will then go to the thematic board or the regional board accordingly. However, the migration steering group might take a view on whether it is a good direction of travel.

Lord Ramsbotham: Do you have sufficient sources of expertise to draw on in refereeing that process?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: That is a good question. It is a relatively new area for a lot of government, but there are some pockets of expertise both in the Home Office and the NCA that we can draw on. For the CSSF, this is where departments such as the Stabilisation Unit come into play. The Stabilisation Unit is one of those departments that help to deliver CSSF programmes. It has a roster of around 1,000 experts—non-governmental experts in most cases—whom it can look to deploy in support of programmes and projects overseas. I do not know how many of those 1,000 experts it has in immigration crime or human trafficking, but I think it has some who could be deployed overseas if the need warranted.

Lord Ramsbotham: Finally, because this is very much a cross-nation area rather than cross government, is there international co-operation, and how do you feed into that?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: The Prime Minister announced at the UN General Assembly this year an initiative on modern slavery that incorporates human trafficking. The National Security Council has discussed this. The Prime Minister has established a modern slavery task force; it is a ministerial-led task force which she chairs and I sit on. The NCA and other government departments sit on it too, as do a number of individual experts from outside government, Europol and elsewhere. That task force is drawing up a strategy both domestically and overseas. It will meet again in the new year to look specifically at the global strategy for modern slavery, which will incorporate how we plan to roll out and interact with other countries on human trafficking. The issue is already integrated into country strategies in the sense that when Ministers visit other countries they will raise the question of human trafficking and modern slavery. We have taken a deliberate cross-government decision to raise the profile of this issue in our bilateral relations with key countries. That is part of the strategy that I am preparing now for the next meeting of the modern slavery task force in the new year.

Crispin Blunt: How many permanent staff does the Stabilisation Unit have?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I think there are about 100.

Crispin Blunt: What does it actually do in relation to the CSSF? Perhaps you could illustrate your answer by saying what it is doing in light of the challenge that we are about to face, or are facing, in Mosul.

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: The Stabilisation Unit has a number of functions. Its essential role is to move from strategy to delivery: to help us to implement strategies. It does that in a number of ways. One is to provide the advice and expertise necessary to go out and deliver that strategy. At any one time, of the roster of about 1,000 experts that I mentioned it would have 120 or 130 or so, and one or two Stabilisation Unit people themselves, deployed overseas implementing a project or programme funded by the CSSF. That is an absolutely core role, because they can move very fast. If we needed someone with experience in criminal justice, immigration crime or human trafficking, we would go to the Stabilisation Unit and say, “Do you have someone available who can be deployed very quickly?” Its job is to have those people on the roster and to get them out to wherever it is in very short order.

A second key role for the Stabilisation Unit is the lessons learned and challenge function for strategy. It will look at the programmes—it has reviewed nearly 50% of the CSSF programmes—and have a cross-cutting approach so as to say, “Look, this has not worked for this reason. If you followed the example of this other programme, maybe it would be more successful in the future”.[4]

Crispin Blunt: Could you illustrate what it is doing about the challenges that we face around Mosul? What is its role there?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: Stabilisation in Mosul is part of our overall Syria strategy. I chair a weekly meeting on our Syrian and Iraqi counter-Daesh strategy. The head of the Stabilisation Unit sits on that committee. It has drawn up a paper, together with the Foreign Office and DfID, on stabilisation and governance in Mosul after it is taken by the coalition. That policy document has been approved by the committee that I chair and has been shared with our coalition partners, in particular with the Iraqi Government, to explain what we think: “Here are some ideas on how Mosul might be stabilised and governed after it is taken by the coalition”. That document originated from the Stabilisation Unit. 

Crispin Blunt: Could you make that document available in confidence to this Committee or to the Foreign Affairs Committee?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: Let me look at that, if I may, and take it away.

Crispin Blunt: Thank you. Which Minister is responsible for the Stabilisation Unit?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I think it is a joint unit of the Foreign Office and DfID.

Melinda Simmons: It is funded from within the CSSF and reports through the DNSA, Gwyn Jenkins’ panel, to the NSC.

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: But in terms of the Minister responsible—

Melinda Simmons: Yes, then it is DfID and Foreign Office.

Crispin Blunt: So who gets to answer a question on it?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: It is a joint unit. As you perhaps know, Mr Blunt, there are a number of joint units in the national security space—I think that 10 or 12 new ones were created in the SDSR; the Stabilisation Unit was created much earlier than that. As it reports both to DfID and the FCO, I think that either Minister can respond in Parliament.

Crispin Blunt: You would never drive a ship like that, would you?

Q35            Dr Julian Lewis: Some things that government does are necessarily secret. Do the CSSF’s projects fall into that category? If they do not, why do you not publish a list of its programmes and projects?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: The answer is that some of them do and some of them do not. The difficulty with publishing some but not others is self-evident. As Melinda said, we are looking at transparency. I recognise that a Written Ministerial Statement once a year is not a huge act of transparency, and the fact that only the regional funding is published is not ideal from your point of view. I am looking at possible options for how we might increase the transparency of the CSSF.

Some projects and programmes are clearly secret and we would not want it known, or the country involved might not want it known, that we are doing them. Even with publishing country strategies, some countries might feel aggrieved that there was a strategy towards them and some countries might feel aggrieved that there was no strategy towards them. There is a slight risk of offending people if we publish which countries have strategies and which do not.

Having said all that, I am looking at the question of transparency and I do hope that we can publish more material than we are publishing at the moment. In addition, I am happy to repeat an offer I made earlier that there will be opportunities to brief you in confidence or in closed session, where we might be able to give you more information about particular programmes or projects that are more highly sensitive or classified.

Dr Julian Lewis: It seems that at the moment there is a high degree of ambiguity about the status of this fund. This year, this fund will spend £1.1 billion on a series of projects, and we on this Committee are told that we provide parliamentary accountability for taxpayers’ money spent on this fund. So should we not make up our minds—we are two years into it now—that either the expenditure of £1.1 billion in this financial year will be disclosed in full to this Committee, even if it has to sit in private, or we tear up the fiction that we can in any way hold you to account as to how you are spending this very large sum of money?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I understand exactly what you are saying. If we meet in private, it might be possible to share more information with you.

Dr Julian Lewis: Do you agree that if it is not possible to share more information about these projects with us, or indeed a total breakdown of them, we ought to state honestly that we cannot hold you to account for the expenditure of this money? Otherwise, you will carry out projects, at some stage in the future some of them might become public, we will not have known about them, yet we are charged with responsibility for supervising this expenditure. Those things cannot all be right, can they?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I understand exactly what you are saying.

Dr Julian Lewis: I hope I speak clearly enough so that you do understand what I am saying. What I want you to do is to answer the questions that I am putting to you in my very understandable way.

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: But this Committee meets in public and this is a public session. I give evidence to the Intelligence and Security Committee, which is entirely private—for obvious reasons. One option is that the ISC has the oversight of this fund rather than the JCNSS. I am not suggesting that that is the right option, but it is obviously an option. If you are saying that you do not think that this Committee can carry out its work unless you get full public disclosure, that might be the most sensible option. If there is a middle ground whereby you can be assured in some private sessions that the money is being properly spent and that things that need to be kept secret can be kept secret, it may be possible for this Committee to continue to have its oversight mission. I am just saying that there are a number options here. I take your point, and we will look at this.

Dr Julian Lewis: Yes, but this Committee would not want to be a patsy to take the incoming fire for some project that has gone wrong, and which we knew nothing about, when we were charged with oversight of it. By all means take away that particular part of our terms of reference if you like, but if it is going to stay there, we need to be able to do it.

As for private meetings, there was supposed to have been a private session with the Deputy National Security Adviser, but that got cancelled, so we have not been doing too well so far, whether we are looking at this in a public or a private capacity.

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I apologise for that. The offer of private meetings is on the table, and I, or my deputy, will be happy to take it up if we can find the right time.

Dr Julian Lewis: Can you throw some light on what happened when a list of non-DfID CSSF projects was published on the FCO’s website in August but was taken down 24 hours later without explanation?

Melinda Simmons: I cannot tell you for sure, because that would have been handled by the Foreign Office communications directorate, but I think it had to do with the ODA classification exercise that was going on at the time. As part of that exercise, the Foreign Office went through its bilateral programmes but not its FCO programmes on the CSSF line. As I say, I cannot be sure, but I think that is what happened.

Q36            Dr Julian Lewis: Okay. Let us stick to what is made available to the public: namely, your annual reports. You did not produce an annual report on the fund for 2015-16. Do you have plans to produce an annual report for 2016-17? There was some information in departmental annual reports for 2015-16, which gave varying levels of detail about fund expenditure and projects. How can you ensure consistency of reporting across departments in future? Would it not be sensible to have a single, central, dedicated report, rather than just leaving us to piece together what we can from different departmental reports, not all of which are congruent with one another?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: We are planning a published annual report in the future.

The Chair: That is helpful.

Dr Julian Lewis: Chair, do you want me briefly to refer to the human rights points that were touched on earlier, or do you want to persist with this?

The Chair: I am happy for you to do that in a moment. First, I want to check with you, Lady Buscombe, whether you want to come in on the points that have just been raised, or whether you feel that they have been dealt with.

Baroness Buscombe: No, I am very happy with that.

The Chair: In that case, I will come back to you in a second. May I say, for the avoidance of any doubt, that this Committee has always been willing to hear evidence in private if there are good reasons for that? Of course, the chair of the ISC sits on this Committee and is a member of it.

Lord West of Spithead: I think we have got there already, but for clarification, Sir Mark, going before the PAC, you would probably not be happy to be responsible for this if you did not have full visibility of what it actually was, so I am sure you can understand why we believe that we need full visibility if we are to be held responsible for it. Some of that might well have to be done in non-public session, but I am sure you understand that we need to have that or we cannot carry out that role.

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: Yes, I understand that.

The Chair: Shall we go on to human rights? Dr Lewis.

Dr Julian Lewis: Very briefly, because Lady Falkner has already touched on the human rights aspect in some detail, how many of the countries that we are helping from the CSSF have questionable human rights records? We have been lobbied—I do not use that word too lightly—in relation to one country, namely Bahrain, but there are plenty countries, are there not, which we are helping that have questionable human rights records?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: The definition of a “questionable human rights record” leaves rather a lot of scope for interpretation. As Melinda has said, we are operating CSSF programmes and projects in more than 40 countries. By definition, those countries are at risk of instability, or are in conflict or at risk of being in conflict, and are fragile in some way. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that there will also be human rights questions in a certain number of them.

Dr Julian Lewis: In applying these funds, I take it that our primary aim is to try to do things that, directly or indirectly, will improve the national security of this country, but presumably you would acknowledge that if that were to involve supporting regimes that behaved unacceptably, that could defeat our objectives.

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: Certainly the overall purpose is to promote stability, because we believe that stability and conflict prevention are in the British national interest, and funds are allocated accordingly. So, yes, we would not spend money in a way that we felt damaged our own national security. There may be different political views about whether particular programmes would do that or not, but that is a judgment that the Government make on individual cases.

Dr Julian Lewis: Would it be true to say that if a country was well known to use torture, for example, we would not wish to spend money from this fund in support of projects in that country, or would we still do so?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: That rather depends on what the project is, its purpose and whether it will help to improve the rule of law and human rights in that particular country.

Dr Julian Lewis: Finally, can you give me an example or two of an occasion when we were quite rightly meeting all the different standards that you had set yourself, investing money in projects in a given country, and then the human rights situation deteriorated? Presumably we would consider stopping and then actually stop that funding if it became inappropriate. Has that ever happened?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: We might well do that, but you are slightly assuming that all the programmes and projects work with host Governments. One of the biggest country recipients from the CSSF is Syria. It is manifestly obvious that there are complex human rights concerns there, but we are not working with the Government in any of those programmes.

Dr Julian Lewis: But of those occasions where you have been working with the Government, has there been any occasion on which misconduct by them has led you to stop the project?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I mentioned earlier that we had discontinued a project in Saudi Arabia on prison reform, for instance.

Dr Julian Lewis: Is that the only one?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I cite that as an example. I do not know whether Melinda has others.

Dr Julian Lewis: Do we know of any others?

Robert Chatterton Dickson: We have an overseas security and justice assessment, which is a piece of work that we do before we start working with a country, to look at specific risks. This is done in great detail and very specifically. It looks at mitigating factors. A specific piece of work is done on how we would work with a Government, so we are taking account of that risk in the way that we go forward.

Dr Julian Lewis: So you can see the potential for embarrassment if no one knows what projects are being carried out if it then emerges that we have been funding something that has inadvertently or at least surreptitiously assisted a major breach of human rights.

Robert Chatterton Dickson: We have a piece of work in hand to stop us working with Governments in a way that would increase the human rights risk and to make sure that we have the right mitigations in place.

Lord Powell of Bayswater: I have one supplementary. Surely stability is most at risk and conflict most likely in countries where human rights are at risk. Therefore, we should not be too embarrassed about occasionally having to intervene in the hope of weaning them off unacceptable behaviour and so on. To just give a blanket view that, “Oh, human rights are at risk there. We can’t do anything about it”, would be to fly in the face of the whole purpose of the fund.

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I agree with that. I cite the example of Burundi, which I mentioned earlier. We had a project in which we supported NGOs in looking at accountability and evidence questions about human rights abuses by that Government. Indeed, it was the work which the CSSF funded that proved to be the basis for securing sanctions against them. That is an example of working in a country where there is a poor human rights record but where the fund was designed particularly to bring some of that to light.

Lord Harris of Haringey: You mentioned the Saudi Arabian prison project that was discontinued. Was that not because it became a matter of public debate in the UK rather than anything else, or were there some principled issues that would have kicked in to lead to that project being discontinued otherwise?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: Those sorts of projects are obviously under regular review and the decision was taken to discontinue it at that particular time.

Q37            Baroness Buscombe: Perhaps this is a more controversial question. How do you deal with issues relating to bribery? We have rules that we must apply under the Bribery Act in this country. To what extent is it sensible, possible or realistic to try to apply those same rules when we are allocating funds?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: A certain amount of the CSSF is allocated through NGOs and the private sector, and we have specific mechanisms in place to ensure that we work with bodies that are applying proper standards. Melinda may want to say a little more about how the procurement framework works.

Melinda Simmons: Sure. The top line is that the rules governing the management of programme funding through the CSSF are not different from those governing programme funding anywhere else. In terms of identifying partners, the procurement framework, which is one way in which we procure activity for the fund and is new this year, prequalifies private sector companies, public bodies, NGOs and charities through pre-questionnaires and evaluation—it is pretty rigorous peer evaluation across Whitehall requiring board agreement—and then we post within one of three pillars. So partners will have been through a pretty rigorous process before they even start bidding for activity through the fund.

Q38            Lord Trimble: On the question of your procurement framework, the Government’s written submission says that 75 organisations, ranging from large development consultancies to small civil society organisations, were accepted as framework suppliers. We had evidence from one NGO called Forward Thinking that said that, although it had worked with the Government in the past, it was not aware of the need to apply to be a framework supplier. There is a question of process there. There is also a question as to whether it is necessary for someone to be a framework supplier in order to access funding. If that is the case, when will you review the position of framework suppliers?

If I may, I will give you a couple of comments from other NGOs. Coffey International Development said that, “the scale of ambition … exceeds the procurement and project management capability currently found across diplomatic missions around the world. The result is a patchy and inconsistent supplier experience”. Another group, Aegis Defence Services, said that this was, “a valuable procurement process which is under-performing due to an inability to discard legacy views and arrangements”.

Melinda Simmons: Thank you for those. I have three comments. On whether a NGO should be on the framework, I take the point. In setting up the framework, we did pretty wide outreach and ran an event that has now become annual. We ran one last year and we ran a suppliers event just two weeks ago in which we reached out as broadly as we could across all our networks. They were both incredibly well attended. Some NGOs may have missed that. If they have missed it, they do not have to be on the framework to bid for programmes that are tendered through the framework, but they need to work with an organisation or a company that is. That is not a difficult relationship to develop. As I said earlier, an awful lot of projects, particularly the multiyear programmes, are often run on a roster basis—there will be more than one supplier. We have those sorts of relationships being developed. So you do not have to be on the framework, but you do have to work with an organisation that is.

That said, the procurement framework is only one of several ways in which the CSSF disburses funds. In some cases—it was the case this year—accountable grants may be made to NGOs for smaller-scale activity in country. The NGOs that we make aware of the fund—it is a constant communication process—are also in touch with the programme boards at post and not just with the procurement team in London, so that they are fully aware of the range of ways in which they can engage in the fund. We are always reaching out to organisations that we might have missed in any way, so I take that point for that one NGO.

As for the evidence from Coffey and Aegis, I take that feedback. They were both present at the most recent suppliers event that we held three weeks ago. What was interesting about it was that we made it a learning event on both sides. Before attending it, all suppliers filled out a questionnaire giving us their views both on the procurement framework and how it had worked structurally for them, and on the programmes that they were delivering. Again, let us not forget that this is a new fund. It has been running for only 18 months, and the procurement framework has been running for only about six months. Among other things, we had a conversation about that point: that for some programmes the annual reviews were looking at whether the ambition matched the delivery. That is an ongoing conversation that we have with suppliers.

On the legacy event, I can only refer you to my earlier comment that in the first year of the CSSF and the last year of the Conflict Pool we had closed down over £1 million-worth of legacy activity. That was a lot of small-scale single-issue projects in countries that were of lower interest to the NSC. That, too, was an ongoing journey, but the percentage of legacy activity is now a lot smaller and confined to just one or two regions in the CSSF.

Q39            Lord Hamilton of Epsom: Can I come back to the question of the total budget and its control? I am interested in the process of how people access funds. We have talked about these framework people. They know that there is money, so they make bids for some of that money. How does each country work? Are embassies invited to create programmes and then to bid for funds, or are they told that they can have a certain amount of money as long as they can justify spending it?

Melinda Simmons: The heads of mission in embassies overseas run their programme boards and are responsible for operating the programme in country. They will agree among all the departments that are present at post how they want to run that programme: what needs to be tendered, what may be single-issue smaller projects that can be delivered by accountable grant and what may be delivered directly by government representatives. If they want to tender any part of their programme, that contact will be made from the departmental representatives, having gone through their own departmental approval process for the project.[5] They will put it out to tender via that procurement framework. When a project or programme is put out for tender, if you have qualified for any one of the three pillars of the procurement framework, you will be alerted if you are looking at the ongoing list of projects that are coming up. If you are on the framework, you will know; it will come to you that way. The procurement hub that runs the framework gathers in that information from posts, so that posts are not having to do this singly. That saves them a lot of time and process.

Lord Hamilton of Epsom: Let us tease this out. Every country in Africa, for instance, can bid for some of this, even if there is nothing of particular interest going on in that country as far as we are concerned for our strategic purposes.

Melinda Simmons: Countries in Africa that qualify for CSSF funding—that is not every country in Africa—will have been given one allocation for that country via the regional boards, which will have been given one envelope. If we take Africa as an example, they will have been given one number for the region, with a recommended breakdown for each of the countries that the NSC has prioritised in Africa. The director board will agree the allocations for each of those countries and the heads of mission will be told what that number is. They then work with their board at post to determine how they will run that programme. We should not forget that the representatives on those boards are, for example, DfID and MoD at post, which are also running bilateral programmes. The CSSF is required to operate in a way that complements what DfID might be doing in a country or what MoD might be doing in a country. They will decide whether they want to procure for those programmes centrally, whether they want to break it down or whether there are existing mechanisms in the bilateral route on to which they want to add their CSSF activity, for example. It will need to be country context-specific. It is up to the head of mission and their board at post how they run the programme, but their country allocation is determined by the director board. If they need more, they have to go back to the board for it. If they cannot spend, for any reason, they also have to go back to the board to inform it. They cannot freelance outside the terms of reference for that money.

Lord Hamilton of Epsom: A final point on that: could we be given a list of all the countries that can apply for this so that we can see which ones are benefiting and which ones are not?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: That goes back to one of my earlier answers. At the moment, only the regional list is published, but we are looking to see whether we can do more on transparency and break it down into individual countries.

Q40            The Chair: I have one final question, if I may. Do any parts of the CSSF budget count towards the Government’s targets both on defence and on aid spending? In other words, is there anything that may be seen to be double-counted?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: That is a complicated question. I will leave it to Melinda.

Melinda Simmons: I cannot give you an exact figure, I am afraid, but only a very small proportion will count towards the 2% and the 0.7% activity. That will be about activity that is delivered largely by the Ministry of Defence that is ODA-able and therefore qualifies under an OECD definition—it holds the OECD definition of ODA—but is security-related activity and would also therefore fit the NATO definition. But only a very small proportion of the fund is counted for both.

Lord West of Spithead: What is a very small proportion of £1.1 billion?

Melinda Simmons: I am sorry, but I do not have a figure for you.

Lord West of Spithead: It is quite relevant, because we are very squeezed in that 2%.

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: The figure that I have seen is around £10 million, so it is a small figure. It comes about because, as you know, the definitions of the 2% and the 0.7% are made by different bodies and there is a small overlap, but it is £10 million out of the £1.27 billion.

The Chair: Although I said that it was the final question, Lord Hamilton wants to come in.

Q41            Lord Hamilton of Epsom: I want to ask a quite separate question. In Afghanistan, the American army had its own budgets to spend on local aid. There seemed to be enormous advantages to this, in that the army could operate in areas that were extremely dangerous when others would not be prepared to do so. Also, they would seem to be pretty reliable people to manage the money. Have you ever thought of our Armed Forces playing that sort of role?

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I do not know whether the MoD has some funding that is spent through the military directly in Afghanistan. As far as the CSSF goes, its great advantage is that maybe for the first time Ministers can take policy decisions on the basis of what the right policy is and then look at the funding. That has not always been the case, frankly, in Afghanistan. I have attended many Whitehall meetings on Afghanistan over the past 20 years. Policy decisions are often constrained or shaped by the amount of funding that might be available for one particular activity over another. The whole rationale behind originally the Conflict Pool and now the CSSF is to get away from that, so that policy can be taken in its own terms and the funding then flows from it. The CSSF gives the ability for policies to be funded properly without distorting the policy-making process.

Lord Ramsbotham: If I may comment on that, I know from talking to military commanders in Afghanistan that they were extremely frustrated at not having a small pot of gold with which they could have delivered instant funding to support projects, particularly community projects, but had to refer to the DfID person who was with them, after which it got referred to London, whereas their American and Italian counterparts, for example, had funding that they were able to distribute immediately with much greater effect. That is worth considering seriously in the future.

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: Most ambassadors would say the same.

Lord West of Spithead: It is a lovely thought that one can do policy without any thought to financial constraints—we would all love to do that in all sorts of policies, such as the ones I was involved with in the military. This goes back to my concern about how one pins down and judges exactly what the effects are and what results we are getting out of money that is spent. It makes me nervous that someone is saying, “Our policy is to do this now”, when there is no way of measuring what that is, but they have a pot of money that they can utilise. We would all love a slush fund of money, so that we could say, “I think I fancy this”. It worries me slightly how that is tied down and how at the end of the day you can say, “Yes, this has helped to stop war here”, which, as we know is very difficult. I am nervous about that, if that was the aim of this fund.

The Chair: Let me just say that many of us recognise the dilemma that you have identified, Sir Mark. It is good to think that there might be a way of addressing that without just saying, “Well, we’ll do the policy”. I can recall occasions when the question was not whether there was money but which department’s money it was going to be. If this was a way of tackling that, that would be good. That feeds into this Committee’s wish to have as much information as you can give us that shows that that is actually happening. That would be an important and worthwhile change, it seems to me.

Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I understand that and I hope that, as the fund becomes increasingly mature and we have more programmes coming to fruition, we will be able to demonstrate the real impact that this spending has on the outcomes that we are trying to achieve through the strategies.

The Chair: Thank you very much indeed, all three of you, for coming this afternoon and for giving us evidence. We appreciate it and look forward to hearing from you in the future.