International Development Policies

Lord Cromwell Excerpts

Thursday 19th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, I speak today as I have spent the last 30 years or more involved in international development projects in Africa, Asia and eastern Europe, and I direct the House’s attention to my interests in the register. I will be critical today but first I will pause and acknowledge that international development is difficult and complex work—although absolutely vital in the globalised world in which we live, where hideous imbalances are a threat to us all. We owe gratitude to DfID for the work that it does.

This is a huge topic, and I will focus on just one aspect, based on my experience. There is a pendulum, a fashion even, in this work, that alternates between favouring very large development projects and relying on small projects to deliver. At some stage a Minister will get the idea that big projects are best. These go under many names, but the advent of multilateral donors has caused this tendency to explode. After all, if it was good yesterday to say that you were spending £10 million on a project, how much better to say today that you are part of a £100 million multilateral project. I am afraid that some Ministers tend to like that sort of thing. Large commercial consulting companies like them, too. These large projects, often with quite fuzzy success criteria, provide tremendous fee-earning opportunities that are worth bidding for.

Finally, the Minster’s officials may have a strong temptation to feel the same way, because a few big projects run by large commercial consulting companies are a lot easier to administer than a plethora of small ones run by a diversity of small organisations. I remember officials some years ago—unaware of my presence— punching the air at the news that smaller projects were to be dispensed with in favour of fewer and bigger ones. Perhaps things are different now, but the House of Commons International Development Committee report of March this year said that there is,

“a focus on large programmes, which are outsourced to multilateral organisations and large contractors to manage”—

so it does not sound like much has changed.

However, what is actually wrong with great big grandstand projects? Here are a couple of examples from my own experience. First, I have worked on projects where, by the time the needs assessment has been done, the reports written, the tender drawn up and run, the contracts awarded and the project finally gets started, hundreds of thousands could have been spent. The project can be years out of date, even irrelevant, but the successful bidder is locked into a commercial contract that they are ill-advised commercially to upset. This is a very dispiriting experience, but all too common in large multilateral projects.

My second example: millions of pounds simply disappeared into multilateral projects providing so-called budget support to other Governments. When I asked questions about this, they tended to be met with a shrug or an embarrassed smile. Nobody really knew what the money had been spent on. Of course, large projects may sometimes be justified. However, the temptation in a Government department to opt for too few—big—projects has been too strong for too long.

Smaller, bilateral projects tend to be far more plugged in to real-time needs, nimbler in meeting them, and implemented by people with a commitment that predates and goes on way beyond the project rather than just the project period. They also tend to have long-term relationships with community partners, and others have already touched on that. In short, I have seen millions wasted on big projects and hundreds spent very well on small ones. The House of Commons report suggests that there is a need for a “change of culture” at DfID. I do hope that DfID is listening.