Oral evidence: Independent Commission for Aid Impact’s Annual Report 2014-15 and ICAI’s Reports on (i) How DFID Works with Multilateral Agencies to Achieve Impact, and (ii) Follow-up of ICAI Reviews from Years 1, 2 and 3 HC 423Tuesday 20 October 2015
Oral evidence, 20 October 2015.
Witnesses
Nick Dyer, Director General for Policy and Global Programmes, Gwen Hines, Director for International Relations, and Beverley Warmington, Director, Asia, Caribbean and Overseas Territories Division, DFID, gave evidence.
Chair
Welcome. Thank you very much indeed. It is great that you were here to hear the evidence session with ICAI. We will follow broadly the similar path that we did with them, so we are going to start with some questions that relate to ICAI’s annual report of 2014‑15, and I pass over to the chair of the Sub-Committee, Fabian.
Fabian Hamilton
I wonder if I could start with this question. How do you feel the relationship between ICAI and DFID has developed over phase 1 of the existence of ICAI, now that we are into the second phase? Do you think that ICAI’s work has been useful in improving DFID’s working methods? That must have been one of the aims of setting it up in the first place.
Nick Dyer
Yes, indeed. Just to introduce myself, I am Nick Dyer, Director General for Policy and Global Programmes, and I am accompanied by—
Beverley Warmington
Beverley Warmington, Director for Asia, Caribbean and Overseas Territories.
Gwen Hines
Gwen Hines, International Relations Director.
Nick Dyer
Looking at the last four years, my perception, and I think the perception of the Department, is that ICAI has been a very positive experience for us. Any organisation with the depth and the complexity DFID has should, and we certainly do, embrace the external scrutiny, and the independent scrutiny indeed. ICAI has come at a time when we ourselves have faced quite a lot of challenges. Many of the issues that ICAI have pulled out of their reports, particularly the more recent thematic report, mirror some of the challenges that we face internally around results, around risk, around programme management, around capability. What it has done is both to help us give momentum to some of those issues, but also to challenge us to reflect a bit more on those issues and to see how we are going to address them. Overall, it has been very positive, yes.
Jeremy Lefroy
One of the common themes identified by ICAI over the last year has been the need for the Department to develop a stronger, as they call it, overarching strategy in key areas. Could you perhaps explain what you are doing to ensure that that happens?
Nick Dyer
Clearly, any organisation needs to be clear about what its priorities are, and the Secretary of State has been pretty clear about her priorities. Over the next period, we have our manifesto commitments that we need to deliver, so those are very clear in terms of the expectations of what we are trying to deliver. It is notable that, in many of the ICAI reports, there is a call for more strategy, more guidance. My reflection is that there is a balance to be struck. In many cases, our experience of strategies is they are not read. The multilateral report for the World Bank demonstrates how little of their own policy guidance is read. Quite often, they get out of date very quickly, and they quite often codify things that, a bit further down the line, with experience, you wish you had not codified in that way. I am as attracted to the other challenge from ICAI, which is how we get the organisation learning better, sharing knowledge and experience and using that as a way of getting the organisation to learn, to adapt and to respond. There is a balance to be struck between codifying things and learning as we go, while working within that broader framework that is set out by the Secretary of State and her Ministers.
Jeremy Lefroy
I am very glad to hear that, because I certainly would share the view, as I am sure colleagues would, that there is the need to have that. That brings me on to the question of learning and the long‑term nature of programmes that so many people have already referred to. I think of the afforestation programme that we saw in Nepal, which had been going on in co‑operation with the Nepali Government for decades, and how impressed we were with that and the clear, visible results that it had had. There has seemed to us often too short‑term an approach to too many of the programmes, and I think this will probably come out later on when we talk about multilaterals, for instance the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. That is a long‑term approach to a problem. Is there a sense in DFID that there is a need to look much more long‑term? You might say that that is something to do with strategy. You might just say it is something to do with effectiveness. If you take a problem and address it over the long term, you are more likely, in co‑operation with the Government, to achieve the results that you wish to than if you just go in for a two or three‑year programme, achieve a few results and then move on.
Nick Dyer
My colleagues may have a view on this, but I would approach this from a number of levels. If you look at our country poverty reduction diagnostics, what many of them say is that the real long‑term transformation in the country is not going to come from individual interventions. Actually, it is going to come from political change, social change and some of the policy issues that affect the country that will not only be delivered by aid. There is a broader context. To look at whether we are addressing the long‑term challenges of a country, you have to look at the wider portfolio rather than just an individual project. Does the portfolio capture many of those wider challenges that we think are important for the long‑term development? Within a particular project, there are issues around sustainability. How can we ensure that this project is going to be sustained after we have withdrawn? We have had many examples, and the world is littered with failed development projects because there has not been that attention to sustainability. We are giving a lot more attention now—you mentioned the Global Fund—to country‑level sustainability, so should we continue operating in that country at that kind of scale? I would look at it both in the broader context in terms of the range of things you need to do, but also in terms of the individual projects and countries, the financial and institutional sustainability of the project and the intervention and making sure that those are in place.
Gwen Hines
To add a couple of comments, all of us have run DFID country programmes. There was a comment earlier about quantitative versus qualitative. It is very difficult to capture qualitative impact. It is very difficult, as we know, and as previous ICAI reports have said, to capture the impact of influencing, including things you stop happening. We definitely do that in the work we do at country level. It is a fair point that it is very hard to capture that and therefore to recognise it in terms of results frameworks and other things, but it is something we do very much at the country level. There are also a couple of things worth flagging that we have done in recent years. The Better Delivery Taskforce and the new smart rules are very clear. There is nothing to stop people doing longer‑term projects. This is something that comes out across a lot of aid agencies, and the World Bank has the same, in terms of whether we have too many short programmes. There is nothing that stops people doing long‑term projects, and so part of the cultural shift is encouraging teams to think about that and use that space. Equally, with the new senior responsible officer, you have the continuity mechanism between people working on projects and programmes, which gets carried through. One of the criticisms from ICAI, which we have recognised ourselves, was that we have a lot of staff turnover over a 10 to 15-year period, and you need to make sure you have got that continuity following through to tackle these long‑term issues.
Nick Dyer
Yes. There are some good examples of 10‑year programmes that we have got.
Beverley Warmington
We are looking at the moment in Vietnam, as we close our programme there, at what we have achieved over the period at a meta level, so that we can see at that level the sustainable work DFID has done, how we have helped the country as we exit and what we consider a success story for development. That is something we are looking at. I was really pleased to hear what you said about Nepal. It is obviously in my patch, and I agree with you there are some long‑term programmes where we really feel we have made a difference, and in India as well. I also wanted to come in on this point, though, about our results. At a very high level, where we have aggregated a number of results, they will always be probably looking at more of the numerical. They are an aggregation of country operational plans, which are in themselves an aggregation of our project‑level work. At the lower level, there are always going to be lots of different types of indicators. You are looking at a summary of those, and a very small number, but the overall projects and the way we evaluate those are going to have a much broader range and subset of indicators, which will probably explain a bit more about some of the longer-term work we do at that level.
Chair
We are going to move on—we are obviously covering a lot of ground in one session—to some issues around follow‑up of ICAI reviews.
Pauline Latham
ICAI found evidence that DFID were poor at tracking the implementation of the recommendations. What are you doing to rectify this and to ensure that the lessons learned are being taken on board for the long term?
Nick Dyer
Each of the recommendations is tracked on an annual basis. Each of the teams who are responsible for the ICAI report annually is required to provide an update in terms of how it is getting on and progressing against the recommendation.
Pauline Latham
To whom?
Nick Dyer
Then that is transmitted to ICAI, and actually the IDC, and we put it on our Government website. The tracking system is there for us to demonstrate what we are doing in terms of follow up.
Pauline Latham
That is all you do, then.
Gwen Hines
I am responsible for the follow‑up to the learning report, and learning obviously came out very clearly as a theme across a number of different ICAI reports. There was also a deeper report looking specifically at learning, which recognised that DFID is doing a lot of good practice but challenged us, rightly, to make that more systematic. In following that up, we are following up, in the narrow sense, the recommendations that came out of there, but we have a learning team, a network of learning champions across the business. We are working very much on a five‑year timescale, because we have that recognised one of the challenges there is about leadership and culture and changing the way that people operate so that they really think about learning as part of impact and the way they work. A report like that has led to a much broader process and an ongoing set of issues. We are, through that team, picking up learning and other recommendations that come out of individual ICAI reports, because we are very interested, with the kind of issues flagged in the annual report from ICAI and looking across all the different reports, in the common themes and what we do about them. The learning team we have cuts across the business. I sit in international relations; there are people who work on the programme delivery side, people who work on the research and evidence side, people who work on the systems side, because we are also trying to make sure our technology is fit for purpose. That is a cross‑DFID initiative following up a number of different ICAI reports.
Chair
Can I probe a bit further? The report from ICAI gives us an example, and perhaps Beverley is best to respond to this, of the report on DFID’s health programmes in Burma. ICAI say they did not fully reflect some of the challenges in implementation, such as the proposed baseline survey. Can you respond to that and talk to us about what the follow‑up has been from DFID on that specific proposal?
Beverley Warmington
Yes, of course. Nick was talking about the tracking, and we were asked how we track, but responsibility for the delivery will obviously lie with the head of the business unit that has been assessed. If it is particularly a Burma issue, then it will be the head of the Burma office’s responsibility for the delivery, and, as director, ultimately I am then responsible to ensure it has been done. The particular issue on the health programme was that we were looking to do a consultation. What we decided to do was, with the change in approach from the Government, which we were quite pleased about, that we should try and work with Government. We decided to join up with Government on this piece of work on local consultation, and so obviously it got slightly delayed because we wanted to work closely with Government. We are now moving forward. It just got delayed a bit while we waited for Government to get their systems in order as well, so we are now doing this in conjunction with Government, and it will be completed soon. We wanted to delay it to make it a more comprehensive piece of work and a bigger piece of work that was done with the Government, which was an opportunity we thought we should take up. We are not ignoring it; we are delivering it. There has just been a slight delay in the time of doing that.
Fiona Bruce
ICAI have produced quite substantial comments on the education reports that they produced and then you commented on. I would like, if I may, to ask you one or two specific questions, because you are quite right, Nick, that long‑term change will come from addressing fundamental issues like education. In response to ICAI’s review of the education reports, you have partially accepted two of the three recommendations, and I wonder if you could give us more detail, because there was a limited amount of detail, in the acceptance, on your plans to address these points. Could I take them in turn? The first one is recommendation 1, which is on page 15 of their follow‑up review, and this is the recommendation that says you should look at intensifying your support for Governments to set targets and timelines that reflect realistically achievable rates of improved educational attainment. So you are, in other words, providing not just more but better education, and that would include the scaling‑up of teacher training. Could you give a specific and more detailed response than perhaps has been given before as to how you are following that up?
Beverley Warmington
Yes. This is linked to the ICAI report, which said that we should not just focus on getting children into school; we should also look at how much they are learning. This is something that DFID has been doing. We started it in India. We are doing it across all of our country programmes now, and it is something that we have been keen to do. There is now data on learning in all the DFID countries in which we work, and we are working with partner Governments to prioritise what works and track progress in learning. For example, in Rwanda and Ethiopia, we are looking at setting targets on learning and then linking funding. We are also on track to train 190,000 teachers in this current reporting period. We have, in our research programme, a research in systems of education programme called RISE, where we are improving our system approach to education programming by looking at what the systemic issues are. It is something that we are keen on doing to improve the quality of data and look at learning—not just getting children into school—and we are rolling that out across. We have data on that in all our country programmes.
Fiona Bruce
That is something that you have done since these recommendations came out.
Beverley Warmington
Yes. We are responding, but we had started to do it before the recommendations. It is an area that DFID was working on. We have continued to roll it out since the recommendations have come out, yes.
Fiona Bruce
You mentioned data. Can I refer then to the second recommendation that we want to highlight? It is actually No. 3. This is the recommendation that you intensify your support for local government to improve the use of data systems, quality control, analysis and performance review to support locally determined actions for improving pupil learning. I would be very interested to know specifically how you have taken that forward, if at all, and particularly in the different countries that you are working in.
Beverley Warmington
Yes, sure. As I say, we now have data on learning in all the countries in which we work. We are successfully working to improve the quality of data in education, so we are looking at the data on learning outcomes. For example, following the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone, we have helped the Government redesign the education programme so that we can get district‑level data to inform local districts on outcomes in education. It is something we are working at with different Governments to try and improve their data so that they can work this down at district levels.
Fiona Bruce
Are you finding it challenging that different Governments have different resources? One of the things ICAI said was you needed to be sensitive to that. How are you addressing that recommendation?
Beverley Warmington
We will work in the context of the country and always be aware of what their limitations are and what kind of data they can collect. Clearly, for example, Sierra Leone, the example I gave you, do not have that. Resource‑wise, they are very constrained at the moment, so we are trying to help alongside the Government in what we can do to fund it there, but it will very much depend on the context of the country.
Fiona Bruce
You are looking at each one individually as to how you work to help collect that.
Beverley Warmington
Yes.
Nick Dyer
Can I just add to that? The biggest challenge, of course, is the capabilities and having the systems in place, and we do have some interesting examples of using mobile phone technology to collect data in real time. There is a good example in Sudan on an education programme where it is actually tracking attendance of teachers and pupils on a daily basis. Testing and leap‑frogging the need to put in deep capabilities and systems is something we are quite keen to keep exploring.
Fiona Bruce
Can I ask you then about the results‑based funding? ICAI concluded that the wider case for that had not been proven, but you are carrying out three pilots. Is it Rwanda, Ethiopia and Tanzania? I believe the final report is due in 2015. Are you able to share with us any early conclusions from those pilots?
Beverley Warmington
Yes. Very early conclusions on these are that it takes time to build trust with local communities and to encourage communities and teachers to believe that the financial incentives linked to student learning and the provision of grants are real, so it is about the timeline. We have realised that sufficient time is needed to embed a different approach to the delivery of aid. It has highlighted the complexities of getting the initiatives right, which with respect to indicators and targets has been very difficult, and the importance of political economy analysis. For example, in particular in Ethiopia, year on year we have discovered that more girls and boys are sitting and passing grade 10 exams, which triggers the release of funds to education officers and schools. Early results from the 2015 exam appear to show dramatic improvement, particularly in the poorest regions of Afar and Somali that have previously lagged. These results are currently being interrogated by independent verifiers, but we are forecasting that we will disburse against these. The receipt of this flexible funding by schools is seen as being very good. Some schools are receiving a 100% increase on their non‑salary recurrent budgets, and they have been used for a wide variety of initiatives. We are seeing some good outcomes and we have learned lessons across these. However, what we are really learning, as I said earlier, is the difficulty in evaluating the impact of these pilots. It is proving very difficult to ascertain whether the improvements in the availability and the quality are attributed to the pilot or due to a Government’s overall push in education. The attribution is going to be very difficult, so that is something that is coming out of the early pilots that we are looking at. How we can verify the attribution is a piece of work we are doing at the moment. We are talking to DFID’s evaluation department, the Ethiopia team, about how we can do that better to quantify exactly what difference these are making and that broader picture, where the Government in Ethiopia are having a big push on education themselves. How you look at that is going to be interesting. Those are the early findings of our pilots.
Fiona Bruce
In terms of any plans to take results‑based funding forward in the future, in a sentence, you are still looking at it.
Beverley Warmington
We are still looking at it. These are the early findings from the pilots.
Chair
We have decided as a Committee to do a major inquiry into education, not least because of the global goal on education and the bigger focus on quality, but moving into secondary and tertiary. These will be issues we will be pursuing in the new year. What I would like us to do now is to move on to how DFID works with multilateral agencies. We have a number of questions of substance but I want to start with some of the process issues that arose in the evidence from ICAI. Mark Foster told us that he had very constructive discussions with senior DFID staff as ICAI developed their multilaterals report, and he was therefore surprised at the rejection of four of the recommendations. Can you tell us how that came about?
Nick Dyer
The process of responding to recommendations is one where initially the team will review a recommendation. They will look at it in terms of its acceptability, in terms of how much work we are doing on the area already, and then look at the proportionality of the costs and benefits. They consider, if we implemented it or did more follow‑up work, whether it would make sense given how much it would cost us, and whether it is just generally proportionate. That probably explains to some extent the perceived inconsistency of some of the recommendations across the reports. Some of the recommendations cover more than one issue, and our judgment in terms of whether this is proportionate may or may not be related to how much action we have already taken. The team will come up with a recommendation. It will be reviewed by me and we will have a conversation around whether these responses are right. It will then go to Ministers, and there will be another conversation with Ministers about what they think about the responses. Ultimately, it is a ministerial decision, but there is an opportunity for the officials to have a conversation with Ministers about the outcome of the recommendations, the response to the recommendations. Ultimately, as the responsible director general for this report, I am comfortable with the response that we have given.
Chair
Are you surprised that he was surprised?
Nick Dyer
This is one of those areas where some ambiguity and inconsistency with previous recommendations might have made this a smoother conversation. If we had said, “We partially accept this because we are already working on these things”, we might have had a different conversation, but what we are saying here is that we do not think this necessarily reflected all the work that we are doing. We do not think that it is proportionate to follow up some of these recommendations in the way that they were accepted, so we stand by the response. Am I surprised? Well, maybe I am not surprised, because people will always be unhappy when you reject a recommendation.
Chair
Do you accept the point that there is a problem in terms of the relationship between ICAI and the Department, and therefore between this Committee and the Department, if there is that sense in good faith that a particular response is going to come from the Department and then four of the recommendations are rejected?
Nick Dyer
This is a process of us receiving the report and having conversations internally. We have had conversations with ICAI before. We are not judging ICAI on the quality of its report. That is for others to judge. We are responding to how we think the recommendations can be proportionately applied, and if they cannot, then we will say so. We think in this case that, for four of the seven recommendations, we have already got plans in place or are already acting in a proportionate way.
Chair
You heard the evidence earlier, and Mark Foster actually said that had there been a sense from the Department of the kind of response you were going to give, then ICAI might have given a different, more negative rating. How do you respond to that?
Nick Dyer
These things are process, and there are many people involved in the conversations on the report and on the recommendations, and in not all cases are they the same people.
Wendy Morton
I just wanted to touch on the point you made when you said you feel that the report did not fully reflect the work that had been done. Do you feel therefore that you did not have the opportunity to feed the evidence into the report or that the process could have been slightly different? I just really wanted to probe that area and get some thoughts on that.
Nick Dyer
Gwen may want to put a view on this as well. A good example would be the recommendation on the number and seniority of staff. I understand how that conclusion was drawn, because it is taking the number of people who work in central departments, but our judgment is that we have more people working out in our delegations; we have people who we seconded into these organisations; we have people on the ground who deal with these organisations through their non‑core funding. Senior people in the organisation are engaging these bodies all the time. Just two weeks ago, we had bilateral talks with the European Commission. About a few months ago, we had bilateral talks with the World Bank. These involved Ministers, senior people, so our view is that there is a lot more senior engagement than was reflected in the report.
Wendy Morton
Thank you for that example.
Gwen Hines
If I can add, just to be really clear, we found the report and the discussion and analysis that went into it very helpful. I would like to be clear: it is not a wasted opportunity, which somebody earlier suggested they feared it might be. These are issues we are working on. It is not that we are rejecting the idea that we should be strategic. It is not that we are rejecting the idea that we should engage very much with other donors in working on the multilaterals. It was a difference of opinion over the extent to which we are already doing this. The ones that we rejected were the ones where we felt we are already doing this to a sufficient extent, and the ones we partially accepted or accepted were where we recognised we should go further. Another example, just to build on Nick’s, was that, where it said we should be more strategic in our engagement, again I do think there are a huge number of examples, whether it is the nutrition summit or the girl summit, where the UK played a really key role in mobilising global action and then driving that through multilaterals. We are playing a similar role at the moment in thinking through the world humanitarian summit next year. We played that role on financing for development in the global goals summit. We used those strategic moments to really drive forward what that means then for the multilaterals. Of course, with the multilateral aid review, the MAR, there is a huge amount of policy work that goes into the individual policy discussions we have around replenishments or individual agencies. It is not just about nuts and bolts and spending targets. It is very, very much focused on policy.
Fabian Hamilton
I note that DFID rejected the recommendation from ICAI that it needs clear objectives for working with multilaterals in its country‑level strategies, but I wondered whether you had done anything about improving the way in which the country offices work with multilaterals to make clearer and more coherent working methods.
Gwen Hines
I would be happy to respond to that. The DFID country strategies and the country operational plans, as they were called in 2010, talk a lot about how DFID is going to work with multilaterals at that level. As Nick has already mentioned, heads of offices and heads of delegation do a lot of work at that level. We are now in the process of reviewing all those country strategies. We are also looking again at multilaterals, and we are looking very hard at the links between those two to make sure that they add up to more than the sum of their parts. We have also taken a number of steps over recent years. For example, in the past there was a concern about so‑called multi-buy trust fund money, so we have nominated leads within the Department to help those working at the country level who are doing a trust fund with the World Bank, for example. There is now a lead person they can turn to for advice on how to do that. We have collected good practice and shared that across the business in terms of lessons learned and how best to work with the Bank to get that done. We have also done a lot of education across the Department on what is happening in different multilaterals and what those headquarter-level policy priorities are that we are looking for people help us drive forward. There are a number of things which have been done, and we continue to build on that.
Fabian Hamilton
I am slightly baffled, because it seems from what you say, Gwen, that you have done an awful lot, so I wonder why you rejected that recommendation in the first place.
Gwen Hines
As I say, it is a difference of interpretation. We rejected it because we felt it was asking us to do something we were already doing.
Fabian Hamilton
Why did you not say that?
Gwen Hines
A point was made earlier that, in terms of the way DFID responds to the recommendations, it does not always capture the full extent of what we are doing. Having read all these reports in great detail, there is a huge wealth of detail and analysis in them, and similarly the recommendations when they come out in black and white often do not capture that wealth of detail. It might be something to look at going forward in terms of how that interaction between the report, the recommendations and the response can be improved to capture more of that qualitative detail.
Fabian Hamilton
If I was in your shoes and somebody was saying to me, “Look, you should be doing this, this and this”, and I knew I was already doing it, I would say, “We are doing it, so why are you recommending it in the first place?” I would turn the question back to ICAI. That might be helpful to us to understand why you rejected some of those recommendations in the first place: “Look, we are doing them and, yes, we always welcome information and advice as to how we can do them better, but we are doing them and you clearly do not realise that.”
Nick Dyer
As Gwen says, this may be an area of conversation to have in the second phase with the new commissioners.
Fabian Hamilton
I am sure we will.
Chair
As you know, we have decided to do our own piece of work on allocation of resources, including the next multilateral aid review, and to ask ICAI to work with us on that. Learning from this process, what do you think might be different this time to prevent some of the issues that we have been addressing with you today?
Nick Dyer
On the multilateral aid review?
Chair
On the multilateral aid review, but also on the communication with ICAI, and then, in a sense, communication with us, because ICAI work for us.
Nick Dyer
On the multilateral aid review, there have been a number of studies done by the NAO and the IDC that were quite positive about the multilateral aid review process that we go through. They also challenged us, as have some of the multilaterals themselves, on how we capture the agencies that set standards rather than spend money, how we capture a sector rather than an individual organisation. Those are all issues that we are thinking through in terms of how we respond to those in the MAR. In terms of working with ICAI and the Committee, there are some lessons we need to reflect on as we go into the second stage, such as whether the conversations we are having through the processes leading up to a report being done, and after recommendations have been made, are sufficient, whether we are comfortable with that and whether we need to change that in any way. I know the new commissioners are thinking about that, and we look forward to engaging them in having that conversation.
Jeremy Lefroy
Can I raise something that is nothing to do with the questions on the paper but that I really think is important? It has been brought to my attention that the Indian Government has placed great restrictions on imports into Nepal. I do not know how much you are aware of this. I am sure you are probably more aware than I am. In the context of our recent report on Nepal and the recovery from the earthquake, I wondered if you could give us your reflections on the impact that is having on Nepal at the moment. I gather that there are huge restrictions on the imports, for instance, of fuel. Is that the case and, if so, what is going on and what is DFID Nepal’s response to that crisis?
Beverley Warmington
There are issues at the border between India and Nepal. As you know, a new constitution has just been agreed in Nepal, something we are pleased about. There are issues with some of the border areas, and people who live in the border areas feeling that their concerns have not been adequately reflected in the new constitution. There are issues around the borders, and this has led to problems in Nepal, and particularly with fuel but also with other commodities, and prices are increasing. The office is aware of that. We are doing what we can with the India office as well and with the High Commission, at political level as well as at working level. We are, as you know, continuing to respond to the humanitarian issues from the earthquake, and we continue to do that. This piece of work is being taken forward as well as looking at what we can do to help alleviate this crisis, in particular with our own local staff, so it is something that we are looking at.
Jeremy Lefroy
Is there any indication of the impact it is having on Nepal’s recovery from the earthquake?
Beverley Warmington
It is obviously not helpful to have this at the same time, but it is different areas. This is a crisis affecting everyone, because it is a fuel crisis and it is goods coming in. The humanitarian response that is going on is in quite hard to reach and remote areas anyway, and we continue to get goods into those areas.
Chair
Jeremy, thank you for taking the opportunity to raise it. It might be helpful if we could have a letter to me, which I can share with Committee colleagues, setting out in a bit more detail the Department’s view and the Government’s view of the current situation there, because it is of great concern to all of us on the Committee. Thanks, Jeremy, for raising it. Thank you to all three of you for coming to give evidence to us today. That brings today’s meeting to a close. Oral evidence: ICAI Reports, HC 423 2