Building Stability Overseas Strategy

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Tuesday 30th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne]

My Lords, the Written Ministerial Statement of 17 July this year on building stability overseas was very welcome. I am delighted that the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, has secured the opportunity to debate this important topic.

The Government’s emphasis on the importance of fragile and conflict-affected states, and the building stability overseas strategy, is exactly the right direction in which UK policy should be set. I congratulate the Government on it, for no low-income country that has been experiencing repeated violence, weak governance and instability has yet achieved a single millennium development goal. The roughly 1.5 billion people in fragile and conflict-affected states are more than twice as likely to be undernourished, more than three times as likely to be unable to send their children to school, twice as likely to see their children die before the age of five, and twice as likely to lack clean water as those in other developing countries.

We learn in the Government’s Written Ministerial Statement of their,

“approach to selected priority countries”,

of their,

“highest conflict and stability priorities”,—[Official Report, Commons, 17/7/12; col. 126WS.]

and of their focus on the Arab partnership, Somalia, Pakistan, the Balkans, the Caucasus and Cyprus. I am aware of DfID’s 28 priority countries and, within those, the 21 countries that it considers fragile and conflict-affected. There are glimpses in government documents of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the National Security Council also having priority countries. Pakistan is often mentioned in this regard but there is no other list that DfID provides. Which, then, are the Government’s selected priority countries? Are they the same as the DfID priorities or are they different? Perhaps more importantly, could our teams on the ground tell you whether they were in a selected priority country? I suspect that that would be unlikely in most cases.

Secondly, the Statement indicates that proposed conflict resources allocations through the Conflict Pool for 2012-13 to 2014-15 will be available shortly. Considering that allocations for 2011-12 to 2014-15 were published on 5 April 2011, can the Minister provide us with an update on when the latest allocations will be published and why it has taken so long to do so? Early publishing of resource allocations for each year would be in line with the recommendations of the Independent Commission for Aid Impact on reducing volatility in the Conflict Pool’s budget and how it is implemented, and it would be in line the National Audit Office’s recommendation to,

“ensure future funding decisions are made sufficiently in advance of the start of the new financial year to maintain continuity of activity and governance of funds”.

Thirdly, in the light of the amber/red assessment that the Independent Commission for Aid Impact gave of the Conflict Pool, and in particular its call to highlight the Conflict Pool’s comparative advantage and its view on how to far better integrate its tri-departmental structure, can the Minister provide noble Lords with an update on the current status and thinking of the Government towards their Conflict Pool strategy, which is due out at the end of this year?

Fourthly, in the light of the Government’s only partial success in achieving coherence in conflict and stability, set out by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, I would have wished to see a far more ambitious review of the Stabilisation Unit than is set out in the Statement, which at best seems somewhat superficial. As I recall the discussions around its birth, the Stabilisation Unit was going to be the focus of our work in difficult and fragile environments so as to overcome conflict between departments. That has not been the case and it is disappointing, because I thoroughly believe that there is a vital role for the Stabilisation Unit in doing just that and in leading our response in such situations.

Fifthly, the Statement highlighted that three-quarters of DfID’s priority countries are fragile and conflict-affected states and that its target is to direct 30% of overseas development assistance to such countries by 2014-15. Yet, despite this target, DfID does not have a definition for fragile and conflict-affected states and instead relies upon three external lists on governance capability, fragility and conflict to calculate whether it considers a country fragile. These lists are the World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment, the Failed States Index from the Fund for Peace, and the Uppsala conflict database. However, the breadth of DfID’s calculation is not mirrored by either the OECD or the World Bank, which from their own lists consider respectively only 18 and 12 of DfID’s priority countries as fragile and conflict-affected. This does lend itself to a conclusion that an exceptionally broad understanding of fragile and conflict-affected states is being used in order that the Government can hit their 30% target and that it can logically be argued that fragile and conflict-affected states present a standard development challenge. However, the fact that no such state will meet any millennium development goal demonstrates that such an understanding is flawed and that such states make up a special category of concern. I wonder whether the Minister might agree that having DfID use a much tighter definition and understanding of such states, in order that the Government’s focus and expenditure on such states can truly go where it is most needed, would be a welcome development.

I am a firm supporter of this Government’s serious concerns and deep focus on how to advise and support Governments and peoples in fragile and conflicted states, since it is the people there whose lives exist in a continuing, complex emergency. I thank the Government for their focus but I draw attention to the points I have made in a spirit of mutual support and agreement that we can and must do better.