Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Laurence Robertson and Victoria Prentis(3 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Victoria Prentis)
The Government share my hon. Friend’s ambition to improve safety and access for horse riders. Our 25-year environment plan and landscapes review explain how we will help to connect people with nature. Our new environmental land management schemes will include payments to ensure that those goods are delivered.
Mr Robertson [V]
The Minister will be aware that as more and more building takes place in villages, more traffic is put on the road, which presents a danger to horse riders. Just last year alone, 46 horses were killed and 130 riders were injured. One way in which more access could be provided is by allowing horse riders to use footpaths, for example, and there are many other ideas. Will she work with me and others who are concerned about this issue to try to improve access to bridleways for horse riders?
Victoria Prentis
I would be delighted to do that. I have first-hand experience of negotiating bridleways over motorway bridges and level crossings with two small daughters on their ponies, and I very much appreciate that one of the benefits of improving the bridleway network will be increased safety. The schemes we are introducing will incentivise farmers to enhance public access across the piece.
Department for International Development
Debate between Laurence Robertson and Victoria Prentis(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Robertson
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that intervention. He has expert knowledge of this issue. We had a meeting before this debate and it could have gone on a lot longer because we discussed so very many things. Where this spending goes does matter, and it does matter that there is accountability and transparency. That is the important point.
Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)
What concerns me is the issue of which partners we use to deliver our aid. DFID has great relationships with large trusted partners, but I am always concerned that smaller, more effective organisations operating in the most dangerous places, such as the Hands Up Foundation, do not get the funding and support from DFID that they need. Does my hon. Friend agree on that?
Mr Robertson
My hon. Friend raises a good point. It is very important to consider the partners we use. Accusations are made that some of the partners—the intermediaries—might take too big a chunk of the money before that money gets to ground level, and there are concerns about that. With multilateral aid, who we deal with is certainly one of the issues. Sometimes these bodies do not have the same priorities as we have.
Mr Robertson
If my hon. Friend will allow me, I will deal with this immediately. The bilateral aid of DFID was 62.6%, as against multilateral aid of 37.4%, and this has remained steady over the past few years. However, that is still a lot of money going on aid that we do not fully control. There are some good projects out there. The World Food Programme is an excellent example of multilateral aid that saves lives. The hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) mentioned the money going to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and today we had the announcement of this being £467 million a year. As I understand it, that is multilateral aid, so there are some excellent projects we are involved in, but there are delays in reporting by the multilateral agencies, which impedes our ability to analyse the work they do.