Clause 1 - Development Assistance
International Development Bill [Lords]
10:30 am
Mr Hilary Benn (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for International Development; Leeds Central, Labour)
Thank you, Mr. Griffiths.
I am sure that no hon. Members will need reminding of the debate that we almost concluded on Thursday afternoon. I have the opportunity to respond to the points raised by the hon. Members for Meriden (Mrs. Spelman) and for Richmond Park (Dr. Tonge).
First, I address the question of the need for an annual report, which is the substance of one of the amendments. As the hon. Member for Meriden acknowledged, when I lifted the weighty copy of the annual report and waved it in her direction, the Department for International Development publishes an annual report, the latest copy of which relates to 2001.
It might help if I point out that that departmental report is published under an arrangement established in 1991, when the Treasury required each Department to prepare an annual report as part of the public expenditure survey process. The Treasury sets out the core standard requirements each year and, together with the Public Accounts Committee, takes a close interest in the reports and their formats. Before 1991, each Department's activities were described in a chapter of the public expenditure White Paper. The current system was introduced in response to concern from Parliament that more information was needed about the activities of Departments. That concern may lie behind the hon. Lady's comments, and I am sure that all members would agree that such a need exists. Following the establishment of the Department for International Development as a separate Department in 1997, we began to publish our own report.
One might describe the requirement of 10 years' standing that an annual report is made as a relatively long-standing requirement. To that extent, the requirement is part of our unwritten constitution. After the report is published, it is scrutinised by the Select Committee, as the hon. Member for Meriden knows. This year, it contains a lot of information relating to the international development targets or millennium development goals, and to the public service agreements.
The hon. Lady referred to degree of detail, and to under-five maternal mortality and the percentage of children in primary education. I guide her to page 26 of the Department's annual report, which reports indications of the progress that we are making against the public service agreement in respect of those three targets, in relation to the United Kingdom's top 30 development partners. The report contains a lot of information, and we are keen that information of that type should be available to the House for scrutiny.
I address, too, the point raised my hon. Friend the Member for Crosby (Mrs. Curtis-Thomas) about the need to follow up the benefits of spending—a point that was referred to by the hon. Member for Meriden. I accept my hon. Friend's point, but we must clearly strike a balance between our desire to follow through the process and to audit the use to which the money has been put—in other words, to achieve the accountability that all hon. Members would like—and the need to do so in a way that constructs systems that do not overload the Government of the developing country.
That problem became apparent to me on my recent visit to Malawi. We are the largest donor to that country, but there are other bilateral donors and multilateral institutions as well. In countries where capacity within government is a big issue—Malawi is a good example, not least because of the scourge of HIV/AIDS on a range of occupations in that country—we must consider the extent to which donors can unwittingly impose an excessive burden, because of the different forms of accountability that we seek to our own Parliaments and institutions. To ensure that we do not create difficulties for the developing countries instead of assisting them to make progress, we need to work further on ways to bring together donor activity and donor accounting and accountability systems.
The hon. Lady drew attention to the issue of the effectiveness of the spend. We will produce a more comprehensive review of the effectiveness of our development assistance in a new publication early next year, which will be called ``Development Effectiveness Review''. It will not only assess the performance of continuing projects, but bring together the results of evaluation studies. We all rightly have an interest in ensuring that the money that we invest is used in the most effective way possible.