Oral evidence: Beyond Aid: The Future UK Approach to Development, HC 663Tuesday 14 October 2014
Oral evidence, 14 October 2014.
Witnesses
Sir John Holmes, Director, Ditchley Foundation, and James de Waal, Senior Fellow, Chatham House, gave evidence.
Chair
Good morning, gentlemen. Nice to see you. Thank you for coming in to see us and agreeing to give evidence on this inquiry. I think you will have both seen that we are testing the boundaries of this topic here. Could you introduce yourselves for the record?
James de Waal
I am James de Waal. I am a senior fellow in the International Security department at Chatham House. I am not a development expert.
Sir John Holmes
John Holmes. I was a British diplomat for many years, finishing up as Ambassador in Lisbon and then in Paris. Then I went to work for the United Nations as Emergency Relief Co-ordinator and Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, between 2007 and 2010. I currently run the Ditchley Foundation, which is a convenor of international conferences on big international issues. I also chair the UK end of the International Rescue Committee, an NGO, which is mainly humanitarian.
Chair
Thank you, and I have been glad to engage with you in both those capacities in the past. We look first of all at the humanitarian and conflict work, which is becoming an increasingly important part of what DFID is doing. First of all, how can the UK Government operate in this in ways that co-ordinate rather than create divisions within its own objectives? It appears that different branches of government have a different idea of what international security is, so how can you ensure that they operate in ways that are not contradictory? In other words, we may provoke a conflict and then we have to put in a whole load of support for the humanitarian fallout from it.
Sir John Holmes
I have maybe just two initial points. The first is that humanitarian needs in the world are rising, as we can all see, for a variety of reasons, both in terms of natural disasters, the effects of climate change, population rises and so on, which are long-term trends that are not going to go away, and, of course, particularly the humanitarian consequences of conflict, as we are seeing currently in Iraq and Syria and other fragile states. If we are looking at the role of DFID in the future—I would say this, wouldn’t I, coming from a humanitarian NGO, but it is true—DFID should be explicitly suggesting, or projecting spending more on humanitarian aid in different ways than it does now. The traditional relationship between humanitarian and development spending has roughly been 10%. I think it is rather more than that now for DFID, but we are moving into a world where 20% is going to be more appropriate. That is just a reflection of the reality of the rising needs. It is true this is largely skewed by Syria, but I suspect that is a long-term issue that will not go away quickly, and similar issues may be arising. I think there is a need for an even greater focus on this in the future, and more money being spent on this. This would also mean strengthening CHASE, which is the internal division within DFID that deals with this, and, of course, deals with conflict as well. I think this is happening to some extent, but it needs to be recognised more explicitly. Secondly, the problem of how you deal with security and conflict is very difficult for DFID, or any aid ministry, because clearly, and we will need to accept this, if there is to be actual development, you have to have security—security for investment or whatever it might be. There has to be some stability and good governance in a country. Therefore, it is legitimate and right for DFID to be engaged in that, whether that be in terms of security sector reform or other forms of trying to build a functioning state. That is very important. The difficulty always is what you do not want is the aid portion of your government policy and your government expenditure to be instrumentalised by the security sector within government, and therefore just seen as another arm of stabilisation or some kind of security counter-terrorism agenda. This applies particularly to humanitarian aid but it can apply on the development side as well. Spending that money, making that effort without it seeming to be just, as I say, subsumed under somebody else’s security and political agenda is a very difficult balance to strike. I think actually DFID are not bad at striking it. I am not criticising them about this. I am just saying it is a very hard balance to strike and it is probably going to get harder. This is because we are again involved in a counter-terrorism, counter-extremism military action at the same time as we are mounting a humanitarian operation. These two things can co-exist but it is quite hard for them to co-exist sensibly, so we are going to have to manage those things very carefully.
Chair
Before you go on, James, I can perhaps add to that. The Committee was concerned that the consequence of the increasing humanitarian demands in the Middle East had led to a cut in the bilateral programmes in Africa, yet a lot of the bilateral programmes in Africa are helping those countries in post‑conflict situations not fall back into conflict. I take your point that increasing humanitarian expenditure may undermine your capacity to stop other countries elsewhere falling back into conflict. Is that in itself a tension?
James de Waal
I think what I would say about this is that striking a balance, as Sir John put it, and making those sorts of balanced decisions between long-term and short-term investment is precisely what all this is about. One does have to be very realistic about the chances of having a high degree of coherence in Government policy on this, or avoiding the sort of chaos that we might be talking about. These are very difficult issues and it is quite natural also, it seems to me, that different branches of Government will have different aims relating to the different concerns they deal with. It strikes me that particularly when one is thinking about structures we might want to create in order to manage this, these are structures basically for managing these disagreements. They are for brokering compromises and making sure that they are implemented and stuck to. They are also structures for providing one with a way of adapting that policy when it is proven not to be working or when the events have proved it wrong. I would say that it would be probably unrealistic to look for perfect coherence in this process. The British Government and the British way of approaching things is a lot better than a lot of Governments’, in terms of the comparative lack of friction in the various policy directions and the different parts of Government. This is of course not to say that it exists. However, I think in our focus on that friction we neglect first of all the comparatively good situation in the UK, and also the degree to which that friction in itself helps to develop policy, and helps to develop a policy that is compromise and accepted as consensus throughout Government.
Sir John Holmes
I agree with that general point. It is very easy to talk about policy coherence and we absolutely desperately need it, but joined up Government is easy to say and hard to achieve. Just listening to a bit of the last session you were having, there was an impression that DFID can solve every problem in the world. It cannot solve every problem in the world, even though it has a very large budget. It has got to focus on some priorities that it can make a difference in. Then it has got to work with the rest of the Government to address some of the other issues. I agree with James; I think HMG is probably rather better at this than some, but could still be a lot better. The NSC has made a difference. It probably is too security focused and not broad enough. That is probably a legitimate criticism. It is beginning to make a difference, and it is that kind of coherence when you are trying to approach a problem that is very important. There are issues like Syria, like Iraq today, where if there is a lack of coherence it is because the problem is so difficult, not because of necessarily too much infighting or people are being incompetent or stupid about it. It is just genuinely difficult to find a fully coherent, fully fledged policy that is really going to make the difference.
Jeremy Lefroy
I apologise; I will have to leave immediately after asking this question. The make-up of international donors is changing and there are rising powers that are increasingly engaged in conflict-affected states. How should the UK weigh up diplomatic priorities with principles of good donorship, such as protecting human rights, democracy and good governance, which may not necessarily be the priorities of these new donors?
Sir John Holmes
I think it is absolutely essential that we do stick to those principles. What we should be trying to do—which is again quite a difficult balancing act—is to make sure that other countries are stepping up. I mean the Chinas and the Brazils and the Indias of this world, which have very large poor populations of their own but they want to have some benefits through globalisation; they have some responsibilities that go with that. They should be contributing more, and countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia and so on, which are also leaning towards playing this aid game, if you can call it that. We definitely need to encourage them to do that because those traditional donors are not going to have enough resources to deal with the problems we are facing in the future, I fear. At the same time we need to be trying to draw them into the system of values and principles that the traditional aid donors have developed over the years. They may or may not want to be drawn in—some of them clearly do not—but I think we have to keep on trying to do that. I do not think the response is to start behaving like they behave. The answer is to try to make them behave more like we behave, and to make sure that we are sticking to our own principles. Just to make a related point, the opportunity internally in the Government is not that the sort of principles that underlie DFID should be extended to the rest of Government, so the rest of Government takes a much more rights-based approach. The risk is, again, that DFID’s policies and the development of humanitarian policies will again be sucked into a more security-focused agenda, and thereby decredibilised in the rest of the world. That is the danger we have to guard against. Of course that is the value of having DFID as a stand-alone department.
Peter Luff
I enjoyed what you were saying about the elusiveness of joined-up government, which we all know is much more difficult to achieve than to say. However, we do have a National Security Council now—a new creation in Government. There is an SDSR coming up next year, an opportunity to rewrite the rules of the National Security Council and its roles. What could we learn from around the world that would make us still better at this job, if anything?
Sir John Holmes
By and large we probably do do it better than a lot of other countries, but there are countries where it may be easier than others. If you are Norway or Sweden or that sort of country, with a relatively small role in the security side of world governance, it is slightly easier to build a narrowly focused but rather coherent policy than it is if you are the UK. The UK is engaged across the board and still a major player in the military security side. It is just that much harder to balance all these competing demands and these competing things. Many people were very critical of the last SDSR, and I think with good reason in some respects. The idea of having a National Security Strategy and then having an SDSR built on the back of that seems to me the right way round. I hope we can go through that again. We probably need to have a broader concept of national security than maybe the one that was being looked at at the time. The thing that has always struck me about it is if you put counter-terrorism at the top of your national security concerns, you are not really understanding the fundamental challenges of the role. It is a big issue but it is not an existential threat to us in the way that some other things are. One needs to look at those kinds of priorities again. Funnily enough, if you are looking at that broad view of the challenges and the future challenges of the world, the Americans, who are criticised on all sorts of other grounds, have been quite good at producing papers from the Pentagon and the National Intelligence Council. They do take a very broad view and a very broad look at the trends, and take a very broad view of security, for example including the issue of climate change, which they went through a few years ago.
Peter Luff
Can I just challenge you? Do you think the National Security Strategy and the SDSR were really conducted separately last time?
Sir John Holmes
I was not involved, so I cannot speak from the inside. A lot of the same people must have been involved in both, unless the Government has changed a lot since I was last in it.
Peter Luff
They were done very much in parallel, if not simultaneously, and that was probably a weakness.
Sir John Holmes
Yes. You should be getting your National Security Strategy clear and trying to get some conclusions that flow from that, from your security. The problem is that, as we all know, money gets in the way. Therefore, you start from what you can afford rather than what you think you really need. That is a reality we are going to struggle to change.
James de Waal
For full disclosure I should say that I used to be a Foreign Service officer, Diplomatic Service officer, and also an MOD official. I think I have been involved in all of the National Security Strategies, the drafting, that we have had since 2006 or whenever it was. I was involved in the SDSR work as well, although in quite a minor, junior capacity. The only thing I will say about that is I think it has had quite a bad rap, although I would say that. Its reputation is a lot worse than it deserves.
Peter Luff
I was a Minister involved in the SDSR, so I agree with you obviously.
James de Waal
I think it was strategic in a number of important ways, which I will not go into now. On your question about the National Security Council, I have looked at this from the point of view of how it manages defence relationships, particularly the relationships between political leaders and the armed forces, and senior armed forces. It seems to me there are some ramifications that are applicable in other areas. My particular concern is that you can have the structure but you do not necessarily have a similar coherent way of making sure how people use it. You have the hardware but you have not put the same effort into making sure the software works. You have a system where people approach using these structures often in quite different ways. The effectiveness of their input into this structure still depends on a lot of things like personal relationships, presentational skills, and how skilful you are at using the bureaucratic machinery. My concern really is I think that, although we have had this great focus on the hardware, there still needs to be a focus on the software. Elsewhere I have argued for the need for there to be a code of conduct that sets out what the precise roles of various important people in determining national security actually are, so how they should approach and use these structures. One of the things one hears about the current National Security Council is that it seems to be being used very effectively in some respects as a crisis management organisation. It seems to be used quite effectively in ways of making sure that the political and military relationship is functioning. It seems to have a role in overseeing that in terms of, for example, how it supervised the Libya war. It seems to be less good at mixing the longer-term issues, which I think this Government has been quite good at identifying and grappling with, with the tactical level. There seems to be a gap in the middle. My instinct is that whether you are thinking about security, or whether you are thinking about development or some of the other issues that affect broader parts of Government, you do need a structure but also you need a set of directions about how people are to use that structure. It does seem to me this is applicable in this area as well as in security.
Mr McCann
The British Government spends significant sums of money in fragile and conflicted states because it knows that long-term security relies in part on genuine development for those facing poverty, conflict and insecurity overseas. You have touched upon this already, Sir John, in one of the answers you gave earlier. Can you explain how development issues are brought to the fore within the National Security Council? I think perhaps you have alluded to the fact that you do not think they are heard loud enough because they focus too much on security. In particular, do you think they have got the balance right there? Is the Secretary of State a powerful voice for humanitarian and development issues within the NSC?
Sir John Holmes
I do not sit on the NSC and I do not attend their meetings. I can only comment as a general impression from the outside, rather than from any inside knowledge. As I say, it seems to me, just looking at the way they deliberate and the things they deliberate about and the conclusions they come up with, they tend to be sucked into the obvious temptation of getting into the military security issues: what troops should be deploying where and what we should be doing. They are going to be less focused, as James was saying, on some of the broader security issues, if I can put it that way, and the broader coherence of policies towards a particular country in terms of trade and regulation and all those other things. These can make a huge difference: remittances and so on. However, they are not alone in that; that is a very common failing. Particularly when there is a military operation either under way or in prospect, then Governments very easily get fixated on all of that. It is always surprising to me that they take huge decisions involving vast sums of money rather lightly, it seems to me, when they debate pounds, shillings and pence rather more tightly in some other areas. I think that tendency is built into the way that the Government works and built into the way that the NSC works. Therefore, it needs something fairly deliberate, in terms of structure and maybe software, to try to counteract that. That is probably to do with the people who staff the National Security Council. There probably should be somebody at a higher level in the system whose job it is to integrate the development and humanitarian issues in there. The Secretary of State for International Development should be a powerful voice in the NSC, because DFID is present on the ground in most of these places, one way or another. They are going to be committing very large sums to them, one way or another. They have a lot of experience. I think Ngaire Woods was saying earlier DFID is probably the best there is around the world at this, even if all the competition is not as good as you might like it to be, so they should be a really powerful voice. Are they at the moment? Again, from the outside, not so obvious that they are, but I cannot say that from inside knowledge. However they should be a powerful voice and they should be speaking with a lot of knowledge, a lot of experience and a lot of capacity to effect things on the ground through the things that they do. There is absolutely no reason why they should not be. Of course that is another reason why they should be a stand-alone department with their own cabinet minister, I think, because if they were not that, I think the risk of that voice being lost would be even greater than it is now.
James de Waal
The only thing I would add is that the NSC ought to be the forum where the Secretary of State for International Development can say, “I think the course of action that we are discussing to deal with this particular crisis will damage our long-term development aims and our longer-term aims for that country.” They have a debate about it. The Secretary of State may get overruled, at which point then it is, “Okay. Therefore what is DFID’s role in implementing this policy?” That is the forum. It is partly up to the Secretary of State to make that case. The other thing I would add is that, again, structures and having a presence around the table is no good if the personal relationships are not good. Again, you can have the best structure in the world but if the Secretaries of State are not all getting on or they do not get on with the Prime Minister, that is really not going to help. There is a degree of political-level atmosphere that is crucial, and the structure itself cannot compensate for that if it is missing.
Mr McCann
Can I ask a quick supplementary? It is widely recorded that, in terms of some of the military interventions that have been made over the last decade or so, the big gap has been the follow-up. That would be the humanitarian development work that would take place thereafter. I know that has been a huge criticism. Would the fact that it was not done at all well lead you to the conclusion that the voice of the Secretary of State for the Department for International Development has not been heard at all?
James de Waal
My immediate reaction is thinking about, of course, the Iraq experience. It helps there that you have got the inquiry where a lot of the evidence is now being brought to the public. What evidence there is tends to reinforce that view. In particular, there is a certain amount of testimony that says DFID or DFID officials, I think one of the witnesses said, could not conceal their disdain for what was being planned. Also the Secretary of State at the time was accused of setting up the provisional wing of the government. They would doubtless have perhaps an equal view of the military that they were dealing with. It will be interesting to see what the inquiry concludes, but it does seem to be consensus that that sort of not only different culture but also different aims did hamper the post-conflict reconstruction. That is after all why the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit, later the Stabilisation Unit, was set up. It is now in the doctrine of military operations that what you do after you have done the striking phase is now integral in the thinking. This is partly because people have the disastrous experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan to look at. Again, performance probably has not yet come up to that aspiration.
Mr McCann
In terms of more imminent, perhaps, issues, do you think the same danger is going to be repeated in somewhere like Syria?
Sir John Holmes
The difficulty is that you can have this theory that you are going to have an integrated policy and you are going to put all of these things into place simultaneously. However, in the case of Libya you had a very hastily mounted and decided military operation, and then everything else has to fit in after that. You have set the parameter right at the beginning in a very military way, and then you are always struggling to catch up after that, frankly. Maybe the same is going to happen with this current military operation. The one I have got a bit more experience of at first hand, from the humanitarian point of view, was Afghanistan, where my impression was that the conversation had always been dominated by the military political considerations. Then you bolted on a development part of it, and then you bolted on to that a humanitarian issue as well, although not very much—and in the Afghanistan case not enough. There were all sorts of issues there that were not being addressed because they were secondary, supposedly, to the military and political considerations. Therefore, you finished up in the end with not a very sound strategy, a very skewed strategy, badly affected by a lot of happy military talk over many years about how well it was all going. By the time you try to redress the balance it is too late; you have not got those issues about what you are actually trying to do with this country and does it make any sense. They had not been factored in soon enough, so you never get it right. You finish up with a lot of very flawed policies about trying to build a central state or trying to do it through PRTs and all sorts of other failed experiments. If they had been properly reflected on beforehand with a greater degree of local expertise and not, as I say, skewed by the absolute focus at the beginning on the military operation and the counter-terrorism and so on, you might have had a better chance of succeeding. However, I am absolutely sure we are in danger of making the same mistakes again.
Peter Luff
DFID has got a big budget: six times the Foreign Office budget—something like that—and more than a third of the MOD budget. In many countries it is the biggest spender by far. When you come to these issues around security, how do you ensure on the ground these three arms, FCO, DFID and MOD, are properly co-ordinated? Are there turf wars being fought about who should have the influence in practice? What do you do about resolving those, almost probably inevitable, conflicts?
Sir John Holmes
I think they are inevitable. They do not have to be conflicts, but there are always tensions in the system, which you are going to have to try to resolve. That has to start back in London with a coherent strategy to start with, which has to be run now by the NSC. That is an improvement from the days when I was in No. 10. I would have loved to have had an NSC. I wish I had suggested it but I did not. It probably does work a lot better than it did in those days, but it has to start with that so you have a coherent set of strategies on the ground to start with. Then it has got to involve co-ordination. The problem on the ground is who actually does that: is it the Foreign Office, is it the MOD, is it DFID? That can be quite difficult to decide in a physical sense. Therefore, it is quite easy for the tensions to get out of hand and to play out in unhelpful ways. Most of the time, although they have quite a lot of money, DFID will be the junior partner in some of those discussions, I would say. I am not sure that is necessarily the right thing to be happening, but I think that is happening to a large extent. What you need above all if you are going to avoid that getting out of hand on the ground is clarity about: a) what the strategy is; and b) who is in control of it locally. If you do not have that, you are just opening the field for the kind of fighting you are talking about.
James de Waal
You need four things. You need a plan for the country that is, as Sir John says, agreed in Whitehall. You need a local representative—I would say the ambassador, who is accepted as being the co-ordinator in the country. That ambassador does not, it seems to me, have to be a Foreign Office diplomat. They could be a DFID official, they could be a politician, as long as they accept it that they are an ambassador who works for the whole of Government and not just for the Foreign Office or for DFID or for their home Department. That, it seems to me, is the job of an ambassador or a high commissioner. The third thing is that they work explicitly for the whole of Government, as I think the best ambassadors do. Fourthly, they need the personal credibility to keep these various different competing interests in line and accept that, although their interests may not be the top priority at this point, their interests are not being neglected. They need to be someone who is able to trade off those things, rather in the same way that the NSC or the Government system back here manages to do that. I do think, though, you cannot really expect to have various different arms of the British Government operating in an independent way in another country. You need a sense that there is a leader there, even if they do not formally have control over all the activities. It is a leadership and a co-ordination role rather than a directive role, but it does need to be one person.
Peter Luff
I would just like to ask Sir John, as a former ambassador, about that proposal.
Sir John Holmes
Obviously I am sympathetic to it in a way. I am just not sure that would really work. I do not think the MOD, for example, if they are present in a significant way in a country, are simply going to accept the authority of the ambassador, even if he is not a diplomat. The Americans have tried to solve this in a different way by having special envoys, for example AfPak envoys and things like that. I have to say that has not really worked either. What tends to happen is it just becomes an extra element of confusion and competition in the system, rather than something that brings it all together. The idea of having someone who can be an overseer of all three, or however many departments are engaged, trying to bring it all together in a co-ordinated way, is an attractive one. However, you have got to find the right person and everybody has got to accept that person’s authority. That person has got to avoid becoming bigger than the actors even back in London. This is the problem you had, for example, in Afghanistan when Dick Holbrooke was appointed the special envoy. He wanted to run it—everything—and not only the ambassadors and the military but also the state department back in Washington said, “Hang on a minute, this man is getting too big for his boots.” It is quite a tricky thing to pull off. In some circumstances you can have the Secretary-General’s Special Representative, for example, a sort of Paddy Ashdown kind of figure, who has been able to pull things together for a short period of time if the UN has a sufficiently large role so there is a degree of co-ordination. However, I am just not sure that an ambassador, with the best will in the world, is going to have the right amount of authority, because he is the one who controls least resources. Maybe that makes him more objective, but it also gives him less levers to pull himself.
Peter Luff
I am intrigued by this argument. To what extent do you think in Afghanistan there is an effective co-ordination of policies across the three departments? I ask because Oxfam in their evidence have been very critical. They say that Helmand is home to 3% of the population and has got 20% of the aid budget, which is contrary to good aid principles. When I went to Afghanistan as a Minister I was quite impressed by the way those three departments were working together. Was I right to be impressed?
Sir John Holmes
That goes to the problem I was mentioning at the beginning, which is if you are pursuing a security agenda—you are trying to stabilise Afghanistan and your particular troops are in Helmand—it seems logical for the British aid programme to follow that. Then you are giving the impression that the British aid programme is simply an instrument of your armed forces, rather than operating on the basis of need. In the area of development it is reasonable for the aid to follow. In the area of humanitarian aid, if you are not needs based, you are not credible. That is a very tricky balancing act to strike, I think. My impression is that nothing in Afghanistan was well co-ordinated actually, and we are seeing the results of that. There was a failure of strategy as well, but there is lot of different countries, a lot of different organisations within governments and between governments, and the result is a pretty good mess.
Peter Luff
I saw a very good relationship between the armed services and DFID on the ground at a practical level. Was I wrong?
Sir John Holmes
I think they worked hard on it, but it is tricky and these are not, sometimes, easy bedfellows.
Chair
The perception also was that all of our aid was going to Helmand rather than just 20%, and there were complaints that we were not doing anything elsewhere because it was less visible. You cannot win really, I suspect.
Sir John Holmes
Then also you do have to address the question of public opinion. Public opinion may expect that, if you are struggling and you have got troops in the place, and if you can use your aid programme to help that stabilisation, why would you not do that. That is a perfectly understandable reaction. It is quite difficult to try to maintain that balance between, as I say, not allowing your aid programme just to be instrumentalised for a security agenda, without losing wider credibility and the consent of the people you are trying to help. That is the point: if you lose the consent of the people you are trying to help because they choose to think you are playing games, then it becomes too dangerous to operate. Then you build the school and they blow it up again later, which does not help anybody.
Peter Luff
Can I ask the bigger question about our overall budget? There are concerns that Pakistan gets too much of it. There is concern about extremism in Pakistan skewing all our aid objectives as a result. How should we deal with this issue? Africa loses out to Pakistan.
Sir John Holmes
As a general point I would say that I think it is a problem for DFID being so poverty focused, because I think some of the issues they are trying to address, and the Government is trying to address, are obviously not always in the poorest countries. There is a middle-income issue there, which has been there for a long time. It is not an exactly new issue, but I think they need to address that. Pakistan is a very poor country, so you can combine the two of your security wishes and your poverty action in the same country. Again, if you finished up with an aid programme that was not focused on trying to address the development and the poverty issues at all, but was simply focusing on those countries that are most dangerous from our security point of view, I think you would risk the credibility of the whole programme.
James de Waal
First of all, the basic point is that conflict often happens in middle-income countries. Likewise, dealing with conflict there is now a consensus that you cannot do this purely by military means: you need the political, economic and development means. If Britain is going to take part in the non-military aspects of preventing and resolving conflict, it needs to be active in the development area in these countries. If DFID is not going to do it, someone else needs to do it, but again I cannot see the case really for setting up an alternative aid structure to develop assistance in areas that are not the poorest. The second thing is that we have a focus, naturally enough, on Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. There have been some very successful examples of British conflict resolution and conflict prevention recently, I was thinking particularly of Northern Ireland. Also, perhaps the most successful of all, was the post-Cold War reconstruction of Europe: the dual enlargement of NATO and the EU, and, after a lot of difficulty, even extending that to the Balkans. That is a splendid example of where there were lines of development in all sorts of areas as well as the security area, some of which involved DFID, some of which did not. It strikes me that this is an obvious automatic thing that one ought to continue. One should not necessarily focus on the difficulties there were in Afghanistan and say, “We should be getting into that business or getting out of it.” This is what I meant at the start by saying this is always going to be an element of compromise. You do need the purists continuing to argue for the case, but at some point I think there does need to be a level of exchange and compromise.
Sir John Holmes
Can I just put in a bit of a plug also for UN peacekeeping operations? The UN has a poor reputation in general and sometimes deserves it. However, look at some of the peacekeeping operations where they have taken on the bulk of the nation-building role after a disaster or civil war. They are sometimes helped by western military intervention at the beginning, as in Sierra Leone with the British and Liberia with the Americans, and then the UN takes over the peacekeeping force. Of course we are now faced with Ebola, but, before that, these were countries that remained extremely fragile but were beginning to get their act together, with the UN peacekeeping force as a stabilising element. That seemed to work better actually, if we are realistic about it, than NATO peacekeeping forces. We need to keep in mind that the responsibility is not always a bilateral responsibility. There can be multilateral operations that work quite well, and maybe we should even be part of these peacekeeping operations in the future, giving them an even better chance of success.
Fiona O’Donnell
Good morning, gentlemen. I wonder if I could start maybe just with a comment on Peter’s questioning, and feel free to respond to it. I am just keen, Sir John, that your comments were not taken out of context when you said perhaps DFID focuses too much on poverty and thinking, James, about what you said about conflict often occurring in middle-income countries. Is that not sometimes because when economic growth happens people are left behind, especially those living in extreme poverty? Therefore, in fact, tackling poverty is a really important part of improving security, particularly in middle-income countries.
Sir John Holmes
It is, but one of the issues is that DFID looks at whether a country is poor, not at whether the people in it are poor, or many of them. It is a trite thing to say but I think there are more poor people in India than there are in the whole of Africa, depending on how you measure it of course. However, we are no longer interested in those because we do not deal with India with an aid programme now, for reasons I can understand, by the way. However, let us just be clear that that is what we are doing when we exclude some middle-income countries from our aid programme.
Fiona O’Donnell
It makes it harder and harder then to meet millennium development goals and proposed 2015 framework in terms of tackling poverty if you are not working in the countries where most of the world’s poor are. What I really wanted to ask about was the Conflict Pool and how you see that working, because it is one example of FCO, MOD and DFID working together. I was interested in what you were saying, Sir John, about development needing a stronger voice on the National Security Council. We have had some criticism in written evidence of Conflict Pool, saying it is incoherent and opaque. There have also been claims that it has not even produced an annual report since 2010. I wondered how effective you think that joint working has been and if there is any joint working with the NSC as well in the Conflict Pool.
Sir John Holmes
Again, I am not in Government and I have not been for a long time, so I cannot comment from what I have seen personally. The first thing I would say is I think it is much better that there are things like Conflict Pools and Stabilisation Units and stabilisation task forces and joint strategies—BSOS, or Building Stability Overseas Strategy—than they do not exist. They did not exist at all for many years, so the fact that they are there does mean that there is a degree of interdepartmental working and co-operation that was not present in the past. Whether those instruments have been as good as you might want them to be is another question. Usually they are dealing with very difficult problems where they are only one of many actors, so it is very hard to identify exactly what their degree of success is. They usually only get called in when it is such a mess already that it is very hard to find simple solutions. It seems to me that the voice of DFID in some of those areas should be very strong, because they are providing the resources very often. I think very often it is; I am not saying it is not. It does not always appear that it comes out in the end product as strongly as it might do. That is, again, only an impression from the outside. I have not been looking at these things from the inside. James, you might have been much closer to it. There is no reason why that should not work and no reason why the DFID voice should not be a very strong voice in it.
Fiona O’Donnell
James, is there any particular good practice in the BSOS that the Conflict Pool’s successor could draw upon?
James de Waal
Like Sir John, I have not looked at this in any great detail, so take what I say with a high degree of scepticism. As documents, things like the BSOS and also the International Defence Engagement Strategy—that is another document that came out—leave a lot to be desired. In particular, they are largely statements of aspiration with a certain amount of general horizon-scanning of what is going on in the world. They contain very little about resources, and very little about the choices that are going to be made. They are not really strategies; they are statements of aspiration. I agree with Sir John that it helps to have these sorts of statements: that you say, “For the first time ever, the Government is going to have a view on this, and what is more it is a view that is the result of some co-ordinated effort across Government and will be implemented across Government.” Rather like the National Security Council, having that there helps with the profile of that, and establishes that as the normal way in which government works. Whether that actually leads to any particular good outcome, I am just not so sure, particularly if there is no data or no report. The questions I would have would be: is the amount of money involved actually enough to make any significant difference, and is there a focus? Again, if you are scattering the resources over a wide variety of targets, how do you measure whether that is going to have the required impact? To conclude, as ways of establishing a new way of working—a new way of thinking about things in Government—and the fact that the norm is now to co-ordinate this and you do not just wage your own separate wars, I think they are a good thing.
Fiona O’Donnell
That is very interesting, because one of the criticisms of the Conflict Pool was that it funds small groups and so then it is very difficult to monitor the impact. Is there any advice you would give to the successor, Sir John, the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund?
Sir John Holmes
It is good to have these funds there and being run jointly. They were very effective, for example, in Eastern Europe. I am going back a long way now, but nevertheless the Know How Fund and so on were very important instruments and there is no reason why these cannot be too. My proposition would be that where they do not succeed or appear not to make much difference is because the underlying strategy is not coherent, not because of any failures of the people involved in actually managing those relatively small funds. That is the problem. If you are not clear about what you are trying to achieve and how you are trying to achieve it and how you are going to graduate out of it, then you are always going to struggle. In so many of these places we have been struggling with that coherent strategy, in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, and therefore obviously the instruments you are using have struggled as well.
Mr McCann
Witnesses have told us that the UK’s relatively high level of arms exports to poor and undemocratic Governments undermined its development work. How far would you agree with that suggestion?
Sir John Holmes
There are undoubtedly cases where there is giving money to stabilise with one hand and selling arms to destabilise, as it were, with the other. I cannot quote you the examples off hand, but I think it would be unwise to suggest that does not happen. In the ideal world we would not be exporting arms, perhaps. In the real world we are and we are going to go on doing so. There are all sorts of jobs involved and industrial know-how, and we are not going to simply abolish that branch of our industry. The only way you can square the circle is by having very coherent and strictly implemented export controls on arms. That, again, is a matter of compromises the whole time. I remember—this is a long time ago—being a desk officer for a particular country, and you were getting arms export licences coming through. You are usually relatively junior. You are wondering if you know what you are doing, but you are trying to make judgments about, “Is this a sensible thing to be exporting?” if it is handcuffs or rubber bullets. Major weapons systems are relatively straightforward; it is all the stuff around the edges that gets very difficult. The rules are much clearer than they used to be than when I was doing this 40 years ago as a young desk officer for various countries, but you are still going to find problems, as we have found in Syria and Iraq. You have been, in what appear to be good times, letting things through which were not really weapons but were on the edge, and then all of a sudden you find yourself in a completely different position and you wish you had not done it. I am not sure there is any way of avoiding that altogether except, as I say, by having the strictest possible export controls compatible with actually allowing industry to operate, and then making sure those rules are implemented coherently.
Mr McCann
Can I just give you an example? There was a 2012 report by the Committee on Arms Export Controls, and it said that the UK Government had approved more than 3,000 export licences for military equipment worth over £12.3 billion. If I was a constituent of any of the individual MPs that are here, I think I would be surprised to find that Zimbabwe was on that list, because, obviously, of its recent history. The Foreign Secretary said in January 2014 that all the checks and balances are in place to ensure that we do not make mistakes and sell weapons to countries that could misuse them, and use them against their own people, and so on and so forth. Do you think it was fair of him to say that? Even a lay person would know that giving weapons to a country like Zimbabwe does not really seem to make a lot of sense.
James de Waal
I cannot comment directly on this particular question, but I can draw a parallel from the defence and security world in that if you have an arms export programme that is used for political purposes, that can be quite helpful. What I mean by that is if you are using British arms exports to try to build a political relationship or to build a relationship with those armed forces, that can be quite helpful. It can work very well if you are trying to use those exports as a way to contribute to a programme of defence transformation in that country—for example, to democratise it, to modernise it, where it is a country that has been isolated for many years as a pariah state but is now trying to become a responsible member of the international community. As well as helping them with their doctrine for UN peacekeeping operations, you are exporting the equipment, the training processes and some of the soft elements of arms exports. However, there is always, in my experience of this, a conflict between the people who just want to sell all the arms and to hell with the rest of the relationship, or where the exporting relationship becomes such a part in the relationship that it is the relationship. That means that the other aspects of the relationship get subordinated to it. That is rather a long way of agreeing with Sir John’s point earlier on: the key here is what your plan is—what your strategy is for this country—and do the various things that you are doing with this country fit into that. It seems to me that applies as much for development relationships as it does for a political relationship. I am a little bit sceptical about broad figures about arms exports themselves being a trigger for conflict. In many ways people buy weapons as a natural reaction to living in a dangerous part of the world. There may well be cases where arms exports increase the rate of conflict or the likelihood of conflict through an arms race, but I do not think the relationship is automatic.
Chair
The situation in Syria involves obviously a number of Government Departments. I think it is fair to say that DFID’s role is probably the clearest and easiest to understand and has been pretty well praised. How coherent do you think the relationships are? For example, we talk about air strikes. To what extent do you think there is a discussion as to what the impact of those air strikes may be and what DFID is doing? Will it make it better or worse? There is also the discussion between DFID and the Home Office between taking refugees to the UK as opposed to supporting refugees in situ. I think this Committee has been reasonably persuaded, and the argument was put forward that the objective is to get those people back home. Therefore, to take them to a completely different environment may not be the right answer. Nevertheless, to what extent do you think these things are properly co-ordinated and to what extent do you think DFID has an input into what the MOD, the FCO and the Home Office policies are?
Sir John Holmes
Clearly they should be discussed, and I assume they are—the relationships between these different parts of it. We are not actually taking military action in Syria at the moment, although I guess we may be in the future. You can maintain a military operation and a humanitarian operation at the same time in parallel and try to make sure they do not touch each other too closely, but the coherency gets quite difficult to maintain. From an NGO point of view, for example, the IRC is heavily engaged inside Syria in giving aid to people in the rebel-held areas. It is all done very quietly for obvious reasons, but it is happening quite a lot. A lot of those rebel-held areas are now held by people like ISIS or variants of it. As I understand it, for the moment that has not been an issue, but it could become an issue when you are simply not allowed to operate anymore because they say you are US based or UK based or whatever you are. They say, “We are being bombed by the UK and the US, and therefore any organisation from that country is not allowed in to help the people in the area we are holding.” Of course even more alarming is when they start kidnapping your people, probably not expatriates in Syria or Iraq, but nevertheless local people, on the basis that they are working for you. That is when the rubber really hits the road in terms of whether there is an operational effect from the military operation into the humanitarian operation in particular. That needs to be factored in. It may not mean that you do not do what you think you need to do militarily, but you need to have thought about it before, not afterwards. My impression is that too often we think about it afterwards and not before. Therefore, the coherence that should be there is not there, and the humanitarian development broader strategy voice is not as loud as it should be when some of these decisions are taken. Again, that is an impression from the outside. I am not saying that about this particular Syria point. I am not involved, obviously, in the Government’s deliberations on Syria. However, when I look at and read about it, that is the impression I would have: that it becomes very military focused, because that is the sharp end. It is the interesting bit, it is the sexy bit, and some of the other stuff gets rather downgraded. The consequences are not necessarily thought through. The same may be true, to some extent, on the asylum point.
Chair
In a way the military bit is the least sexy bit, isn’t it, given how limited it is? Actually, unless you can change the situation on the ground, the military engagement is not really going to solve the problem.
Sir John Holmes
Absolutely, but nevertheless it is the most visible. It is the one the media are most interested in and are focusing on. It is the easiest to understand for everybody, and therefore very quickly there is too much focus on that.
James de Waal
I would say quickly that in my experience the armed forces are very aware of humanitarian issues as an issue, not just for human reasons but also because of the presentational aspects, and also the way that humanitarian concerns can strongly affect the conduct of the operations they want to wage. Whether that actually translates into full understanding of all of the ramifications of that or the detail of it, I am not so sure. However, it seems to me that DFID has the opportunity at least to engage with the armed forces or through the National Security Council with this sort of debate. Whether they are actually doing that, whether they are able to do that, I am not able to say, but the opportunity is there.
Chair
What about the Foreign Office-led Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative? It is, I think, commended, in the sense that there is a recognition that as soon as you have a conflict the biggest victims are women and girls. To what extent are you aware of how that is operating and, again, how a Foreign Office-led operation is integrating with DFID’s activities? That would apply in a number of places, and that was also true in DRC and in Libya.
Sir John Holmes
I entirely applaud the PSVI, the Prevention of Sexual Violence Initiative. It has focused global attention on the issue in a way that was absolutely crucial. In places like the DRC one hopes that it will begin to make an impact. You can argue whether the ambition of eliminating this altogether is a bit over-ambitious, but I think it is absolutely admirable. We for example in the IRC have been working very closely with DFID to make sure that they, from their point of view, with their resources and their focuses, are putting more emphasis and more resources into preventing violence against women and girls in crisis-affected countries and conflict-affected situations. We have been extremely pleased by the way in which DFID and particularly Justine Greening has adopted this as a crucial element of any aid programme. The argument has been, and I think we have discussed it here before, that you should assume this is happening in any conflict, not wait for the evidence, because the evidence is that it always is. You should be trying to do something about it, in terms of prevention and treatment, right at the beginning of any response, and fund and programme accordingly. That is beginning to happen. That is extremely good. Both those departments are doing good things. Is there an element of competition between the two? Maybe, and there should not be, obviously. They have worked quite hard to make sure they are not directly competitive, but it is slightly odd to have two different initiatives from two different departments that are aimed very much at the same thing that are not completely joined up.
Chair
One final question from me, and then one from Michael McCann. You have already touched on this a little. We have increased our aid budget to 0.7%, and hopefully that will increase when we have an economy that increases, but not on the same scale as it has done. You have already made clear that you think we need to increase the amount going into humanitarian support. Do you accept that that can lead to a cut in some of the other programmes? It also raises the issue from the previous panel: if we are supposed to be looking at different areas and different levels of activity, how does DFID manage to increase its support for humanitarian relief whilst maintaining development in areas of conflict to stop them slipping back, and apparently engaging in lots of other parts of the world in other aspects of development that they currently do not engage in? That is asking an awful lot of DFID, isn’t it?
Sir John Holmes
Obviously, if I am suggesting that they spend a bit more on humanitarian aid, they are going to have to cut something else. I accept that. It seems to me that they have a very large budget. They should be able to do that without making too many sacrifices in terms of some of the other issues we have been talking about in some of the poorest countries, and the most conflict-affected countries. They will always need to prioritise. Even with a very large budget, you have to prioritise. They need to decide which priorities they are. Are they going to be the conflict-affected countries? Are they going to focus on particularly critical systems, like health systems? The Ebola virus crisis at the moment suggests that would be a very important priority for the future. I think that the focus in the future is going to be less on classic forms of development aid, in the sense that you think development aid is what is going to make the difference for this country to suddenly transform itself into a successful, economically prosperous country. The focus will be more on directed interventions, which can be into the security sector, or it can be into the health or education sector, rather than trying to be the catalyst for economic development. That is what aid ministries in general are going to be moving towards, because there are so many other flows that are even bigger than the aid flows. It seems to me that within that context it is not unreasonable to imagine that you are going to devote more to humanitarian. By the way, of course, we should be trying to make sure that there is not some kind of rigid division between humanitarian and development. They are completely blurred at the edges. For example, the number of refugees and IDPs in the world is rising very dramatically, partly because of the Middle East but there are other factors too. Those are dealt with as humanitarian issues, but the reality is that most refugees spend at least 10 years as refugees and probably longer. They become development issues very quickly and not just humanitarian issues. You need to make sure you are dealing with them in an integrated way.
Chair
James, before you answer, just to pick up on that, it is only a few years since we were told sub-Saharan Africa was the priority. We were going to focus more resources there. We have now found the Government is actually cutting its resources in terms of bilateral support and putting it into central programmes, and we have some question marks about how effective they are. More and more is going into the Middle East, which is middle-income countries, because of conflict. We are not saying we do not agree, but the strategy has already been dragged into a different direction, then suddenly the Philippines, which was certainly not a country that we had an engagement in. Again, how should DFID prioritise these things? Isn’t there a danger that it just gets a bit blown around with the wind? Africa was the passion apparently five years ago, and then suddenly the Middle East explodes and we have got to do something there. Then there is a typhoon in the Philippines so we do something there. It may be a big budget, but it rather gives the impression that you can move it around at will. Somebody somewhere is finding their budget suddenly being cut, and the continuity and the predictability will be compromised.
Sir John Holmes
Yes, there are obviously long-term strategies and priorities you should have to certain countries or certain regions. Sub-Saharan Africa is the most obvious one. When you have a humanitarian budget, you have to accept that that is going to follow where the crisis is.
Chair
But they do not have a humanitarian budget. We have tried to ask them for that.
Sir John Holmes
They do. Whatever they say to you, they do. I think they should have a bigger one. That is inevitably going to have to respond to the hurricane in the Philippines or some other completely unexpected crisis, maybe again in a middle-income country if it is so big that it overwhelms the local capacity to cope. It does not seem to be impossible to marry some long-term strategies and a pot of money that is essentially quite flexible and is moved around depending on where the crisis is, the conflict is, the natural disaster is, because that is what the disaster funding is bound to be.
Chair
Our problem seems to be that long-term development funding is transferred to short-term humanitarian response. I do not know whether, James, you have a view.
Sir John Holmes
They are not always completely the opposite of each other. If you look at how you deal with refugees and long-term IDPs, that is humanitarian funding being used for very long-term purposes. There is a big question about how we handle that, particularly, for example, in urban settings, where most refugees and IDPs are. They are not in camps. They do still exist, somewhat sadly, in some places, but less and less. A smaller and smaller proportion of refugees and IDPs are now in camp settings. A bigger proportion are in non-camp settings, particularly in cities, where they are very difficult to find to deal with and to treat. There is a whole debate going on within the humanitarian community about how we reorient our activity to try to deal with it more effectively.
James de Waal
I will just make a quick comment. I am not qualified to talk on the development budget itself, but it does seem the broader picture has relevance, particularly if this increase in development spending is paralleled by a reduction in the budgets of the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence. It does look as if the spending outlook for them is by no means as rosy. This, it seems to me, is important for two reasons. One is that basically we are seeing rather a rebalancing of the way that Britain as a whole engages in the world. That seems to be one of the broader implications of this sort of spending pattern. The other is the degree to which the relationship between DFID and these other parts of Government is harmed by this. You could say, if you were just going to be purist, that actually what DFID wants to focus on is not actually related to whether the MOD or the Foreign Office budget goes up or down or what they do. However, if we are going for a more holistic, joint approach, which I think is one of the concerns behind your inquiry, then it is wrong that these three budgets should be seen as competitive entities. There needs to be a degree of co‑ordination there. DFID in fact, it seems to me, ought to have a view about whether the Foreign Office or MOD’s budget goes up or down and what they ought to be spent on, and vice versa. I think there is a danger of falling back into the old days, as I say, of competition rather than co-ordination between these two. There is also the fact that the spending outlook after the election, if there is too much of a focus on one aspect of it, may bring unexpected consequences for the others.
Mr McCann
Chair, I think we have already touched on this question in response to the question about having an ambassador and one focal point in moving things forward. We have been told that in the Central African Republic the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was entirely absent on the ground, despite the scale of the crisis, and that the Ministry of Defence contributed very little to that particular problem with that part of the world. When there is not any on-the-ground diplomatic capacity, what should we do in order to make a contribution, and should DFID play a role in that?
Sir John Holmes
DFID should play a role and they do play a role. I do not actually know this, but I assume they have an office in the Central African Republic now.
Chair
No.
Sir John Holmes
Have they still not set one up? They are still providing significant funds, I think, although not as much perhaps as other people to this particular crisis, because it is not in an area of our traditional influence maybe. However, they are still funding, I think, operations there, and if you are serious about being needs based, so they should, because CAR is a desperate county, in even more desperate straits. I went there in 2007 and it seemed pretty bad, but that was nothing compared with what it is now, in terms of conflict and disappearance of governance of any kind. It does not seem to me that DFID can stand aside from that just because there is no Foreign Office or MOD influence or presence on the ground, even if it is only a funder of people like IRC or others who are actually active on the ground, as we are.
Peter Luff
Can I just put a thought to you? CAR is a French responsibility and therefore it would be for France to lead. In Syria I know France are not stepping up to the plate, because again it is their fault that Syria has collapsed, you could argue; the colonial history is complex, and there is the issue of money. Why should Britain get into CAR when France has the lead colonial history in that country?
Sir John Holmes
France has taken the lead. France sent troops and they have taken the lead. I was saying the same thing. It is natural that they should do so, but I do not think DFID should stand aside completely just because it is a French lead. They should be ready to fund some humanitarian operations there, given the scale of the need and the scale of the crisis there, which will spread over into other countries in the area. It is quite effective for countries to take a particular interest in the countries that they used to have an interest in, as it were, for example the UK with Sierra Leone in the past. Of course now with Ebola we have sort of taken back responsibility in a way, and the Americans with Liberia. There is a certain logic to that, in a certain sense, and it can be very helpful. In fact one of the problems there can be is if you are an African country that does not have an obvious benefactor or sponsor. It sounds very neo-colonial. DRC is a particular example of that. No one really feels any responsibility for it. Belgium sort of does, but they are not big enough. Therefore, it is a bit of an orphan in many respects. Even though it receives vast amounts of aid, no one has ever quite seen it as their responsibility to make sure it gets fixed.
Chair
Thank you. I do not want to set you any homework, but you might wish to reflect on some of the things that have been said, particularly whether or not better co-ordination just means people working harder together or there are new structures that might need to be considered. It is not just about DFID; there are lots and lots of discussions about joined-up Government, but not an awful lot of idea about how it does it. As Peter has said, turf wars still definitely exist, although there are some good examples of co-operation emerging. I said before the health and DFID one in relation to Ebola might be a good example. If you have any thoughts, we would be more than happy to receive them. We have just started this inquiry and we have set some hares running, I think, which is, I guess, what we intended to do. Thank you very much indeed for coming in. We really appreciate the evidence you have given us. It has been really worthwhile and interesting. Oral evidence: Beyond Aid, HC 663 5