Commonwealth Development Corporation Bill (First sitting)

Fiona Bruce Excerpts

Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

We need to move on.

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

Q I would like to ask Diana about job creation. You say that one of CDC’s key strategic aims is to achieve development impact focused on job creation. How do you measure jobs that are created directly and indirectly? Last week, the National Audit Office said in its report that progress on measuring job quality has been slow. How are you working on that? How are you measuring productivity, quality of jobs and income levels?

Diana Noble: As you rightly point out, we focus on jobs because we believe a job is the first and the best step out of poverty. I think everyone on the Committee understands the difference that a job makes to someone in a poor country: to them and to their family. When we talk to workers it is clear that they also use the income particularly to educate their children, so it has a benefit for future generations. How do we measure job creation? This is something that we take very seriously. Two years ago, in partnership with some academics, we put in place a way to measure job creation across the whole of the Africa and south Asia portfolio.

We are the first DFI to collect data from all our portfolio companies. We do not just collect headcount data; we also collect revenues, supply chain, purchases, work and wages as well. The academic uses that to calculate not just the direct job creation but the indirect job creation. As you can imagine, some of our priority sectors, such as financial inclusion and particularly infrastructure and power, have a far greater job impact beyond the direct jobs. So we have now published the methodology on our website. We are going to go through a peer review process because we want it to become one of the industry standards. We have shown the data from that for two years now. We can start to compare and contrast it. It shows that the portfolio has created over 1 million jobs in the past two years. That is a number we take immense pride in.

You also rightly talked about job quality, because it is not just about volume. Quality has lots of different elements to it. What all of us sitting in this room might consider a good job is not necessarily so with the lens that you should use in the countries where we invest.

On job quality, before we make an investment, our fantastic environmental and social team go and sit down with the company and do due diligence on them. They say, “Are you up to standard, particularly in the areas of health and safety?” If they are not at the right standard, an action plan is agreed with management and put in place.

The second thing we do is collect data across the portfolio on fatalities and serious accidents. We have been doing that since 2008. We have very rich data now and have been able to combine that and give training back to portfolio companies and fund managers about the areas that lead to fatalities and serious accidents. We think that gives huge added value to our portfolio.

We are going further than that. We are collecting information on lost time injury frequency, particularly for manufacturing and construction—places where workers are potentially put at harm. We are looking at staff retention for some of our larger investments, because we are advised that it has a big correlation with job quality. We are doing an evaluation in Bangladesh at the moment—everyone on the Committee will be aware of the issues in garment factories there—to try to understand what workers really want out of their jobs, so that we can build that in. There is a big element of learning. We are on a journey, and there is still a long way to go.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

The question I wanted to ask has been asked, Mr Streeter.

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[James Duddridge]

It is a ridiculous comment.

Saranel Benjamin: No, DFID subjects the development sector to a number of processes involving deep scrutiny of all our work. It does not do that with CDC. The fact is that a case study such as Feronia, for example, can exist. Either CDC can say that it did not know that it was happening or DFID can say that it did not know that it was happening. It seems to me that there is a lack of oversight.

[Fiona Bruce]

Q Can I ask Terry and Tom about value for money? How should CDC be scrutinised by the various bodies that will scrutinise it, assuming it gets this increased money—DFID, Parliament, the International Development Select Committee, ICAI and the Sub-Committee on the Select Committee, which I chair, which scrutinises ICAI? In view of the increased funding, how can we ensure that we scrutinise value for money effectively? What measurements should we be using?

Tom McDonald: That is a very good question. The first duty is with DFID as the shareholder. What we have seen of the reforms that have been put in place since 2012 is an increased volume of reporting from CDC back to the Department, characterised by a no-surprises policy. CDC is very clear that if it is thinking of undertaking something new or innovative it will consult with DFID first. Similarly, it will have quarterly shareholder meetings and with the shareholder produces a significant volume of information. These are all improvements from the previous regime that Members have talked about before and they help to mitigate the risk that CDC at some point in the future might engage in some of the poor behaviour that we saw previously.

That is the first line of defence in terms of scrutiny. Who else might do that? We will clearly continue to have an interest. We have been writing reports on CDC for at least 20 years. Obviously, it is up to Parliament how else it wishes to do that. The difficulty, as with other aspects of DFID’s spending, is following the money. We have this problem with multilateral expenditure. When DFID makes a payment to a CDC or a multilateral body, it is quite for us as the auditors to track that money through to the eventual point of impact. We have to be creative about it and find ways of doing that. It is not straightforward.

[Fiona Bruce]

Q I am probing a little, if I may. You say that it is up to us how we do it, but you have just spent eight months looking at CDC day in and day out. I am seeking to glean the benefit of that detailed insight when the Independent Commission for Aid Impact and our Sub-Committee, which scrutinises it, looks at the issue. What should we be focusing on? Where should we be asking questions?

Tom McDonald: If you look at our value for money conclusion, we essentially divided it between, on one hand, the economy and efficiency with which CDC was being run and with which DFID was overseeing it, and the effectiveness of CDC. Looking at the first two e’s, we concluded that DFID’s oversight of CDC has improved considerably, and that CDC’s operating model is now pretty economic and efficient. It is a pretty good way for CDC to organise itself and spend the money that DFID has allocated to it.

On the subject of effectiveness, which we discussed at the beginning, this is clearly not an easy thing, but we still think there is more to do. There is more on which DFID could press CDC, and there is perhaps more on which Parliament could press both DFID and CDC to give a better picture of what CDC itself says is its ultimate objective: changing people’s lives, not just creating jobs.

[Imran Hussain]

Q Just a further question to Ms Benjamin from War on Want, to follow up from colleagues. I am slightly lost. Are you saying that you are principally against the development finance institution model—that would considerably weaken where I thought you were coming from—or are you concentrating on specific instances where you think the money was not spent well and most efficiently to target poverty alleviation? You gave the example of the Republic of the Congo. Can you elaborate on that and be more specific about where you are heading? I am slightly confused about where you are going with it.

Saranel Benjamin: As I said, we come from very different development backgrounds. For War on Want, a charity that works with partners in the global south, it is not about creating jobs; that is our approach. We are about supporting grassroots communities and organisations to allow them to envision the change that they want to see in their own countries. For me, when I see a private firm like CDC investing or looking for opportunities, I see it looking for an entry point for the UK to make a profit in the global south. For me, that is what it looks like. Given the use of tax havens, those countries are not really benefiting from what is being invested in those countries.

Again, look at the quality of jobs being created. Feronia in the DRC is one example. Workers are being paid less than $2 a day. Are you telling me that that is poverty reduction? Is that job creation? There is a dispute about the land on which Feronia operates; it is a 100-year-old land struggle. The largest investor in Feronia is CDC, which holds 67% of the investments owned in Feronia. The land dispute has been going on for a number of years, and communities have been displaced off that land. CDC claims that it is all legitimate, but it refuses to make the lease agreements or concessions publicly available. We have requested them from CDC, and have yet to have an acknowledgment that the email was received.

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[The Chair]

Final question: Fiona Bruce.

[Fiona Bruce]

Q On scaling up and the challenges of recruitment and retention, which are highlighted in the NAO report, I am interested to know whether you think that CDC will be able to meet the recruiting challenge and what particular skill sets are needed for CDC, as opposed to other international development work, bearing in mind that a lot of people want to work in this field. Why will CDC have particular challenges?

Tom McDonald: CDC does face a significant challenge if it is going to make use of additional capital to recruit and retain the people it needs to manage that money. In the past, CDC has found it to be quite a slow process to recruit people at the senior level, but it gets there. The real difficulty is recruiting and retaining people at the middle levels of management, because CDC is competing, effectively, with other funds and private equity employers who can afford to pay a lot more. What CDC has changed is that whereas it used to benchmark its salaries against the private equity industry and therefore pay people a lot more through their overall benefits packages, now it benchmarks pay against other DFIs, which we think is a good step. The danger is that as average pay has come down, CDC is in the process of reconsidering its remuneration framework with DFID. That would be something we would want to watch very carefully, because the pressures on retention and recruitment might start to force that average pay up again next year.

[Fiona Bruce]

Q I was not so much concerned about pay levels—well, I am concerned about pay levels, but I am particularly concerned about the skill sets that you are saying there is potentially a shortage of, or there could be a shortage of, for these particular appointments.

Tom McDonald: I don’t think there is an absolute shortage of skill sets. It is about finding the right packages and opportunities to get the right people in to do the job. Because of the change in strategy since 2012, CDC needs a lot more people with experience of making direct investments—understanding the context, as Sir Paul was describing, knowing what an opportunity looks like in a local market, and then being able to put a deal together that makes commercial sense, but also has a development impact. There probably are not that many people who have both of those skill sets.

[The Chair]

Thank you very much indeed. That brings us to the end of our sitting—