UK Defence Forces

Earl of Sandwich Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Sandwich (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Soley, for giving me and others this chance to mention conflict resolution. In departmental budgets today, as the right reverend Prelate said, diplomacy, defence and aid are now entwined. Some 16 years ago, the FCO, DfID and MoD were brought together into a new conflict fund, whose life became quite hectic, as I will explain.

Of course, there are always fears that the MoD will have some claim on the aid budget, and one can see the reason for this. One problem is the difficulty of separating events such as refugee movements, which normally come under emergencies, from the need to prevent conflict, which is seen as a form of long-term development. In countries such as South Sudan, the two run side by side, because long-standing attempts at peacekeeping through the regional powers foundered in 2013 when the new SPLA national army and Government fell apart and created yet another world emergency.

The noble Lord, Lord West, although seeing the necessity for aid, has constantly raised this question, asking whether the defence budget is overstretched by our aid commitments. I completely understand his concern about that—although he did not mention it today—but I would say to him, first, that our Armed Forces, being highly trained, naturally do a superb job during emergencies. Secondly, it is surely part of the training of our Armed Forces that they are called upon and carry a degree of responsibility when an emergency occurs.

With Srebrenica in the news again this week, my mind often goes back to our commitments in the western Balkans and the tireless work done by our soldiers in rapidly erecting refugee camps for ethnic Albanians fleeing Kosovo into Albania and Macedonia. You can argue that these were NATO and KFOR defence commitments but they were not yet, to my mind, aid commitments calling on the DfID budget—they were a proper defence responsibility. But increasingly since that time there have been new emergencies and conflicts requiring new commitments, notably in implementing the relatively recent UN concept of R2P, the responsibility to protect.

It was partly for this reason that the Government established the Conflict Pool in 2001. Over the years, as someone who periodically visits countries in conflict such as Sudan, Nepal and Kosovo, I have heard from various sources that there were problems surrounding the Conflict Pool. Its performance was finally reviewed in 2012 by the very competent aid watchdog, ICAI, which rated the programme “amber red” and found that,

“its governance and management arrangements are cumbersome”,

and it has,

“little capacity for measuring results”.

On 1 April 2015, perhaps in response to this criticism, the fund converted into the CSSF—the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund—as mentioned by the right reverend Prelate. In 2016-17, the CSSF had a total budget of over £1.1 billion and funded 97 programmes across the world, with an average expenditure of £5 million per programme.

I am delighted that the fund, in turn, is currently being scrutinised by ICAI. The commission started work in August. It is already collecting the findings and will report back next April. One finding will be that the MoD is contributing comparatively little. In the calendar year 2016, it gave an estimated £14.9 million, compared to the FCO’s £417 million and DfID’s £108 million. However, this was a considerable increase on the previous year.

I hope that the Minister will comment on the importance and the performance of the fund, and say whether he sees the MoD’s role expanding in future. Incidentally, I am delighted that the CSSF’s programme in Mali has been chosen for review, showing that Francophone countries are still a concern of the United Kingdom.