Commonwealth Development Corporation Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Patrick Grady and Richard Graham

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

[Richard Graham]

Q So you do not believe that creating jobs through business is a constructive way of meeting development aims?

Saranel Benjamin: I don’t think that that is the only thing that should be done in terms of development, but from CDC’s point of view, that seems to be not just about job creation, but about supporting projects that have absolutely nothing to do with poverty reduction. I cannot see how supporting top-level real estate in Kenya, for example, is about poverty reduction.

[Patrick Grady]

Q I just want to ask any panel member who might want to reflect on the levels of transparency in CDC and the opportunities for parliamentary scrutiny. I particularly want to ask the reps from War on Want and Oxfam how their transparency in reporting requirements from DFID have changed in recent years and whether they have any views on how they should apply to CDC.

Gideon Rabinowitz: Oxfam is a signatory to the international aid transparency initiative, which is the comprehensive aid transparency framework that is applied across the development community. The initiative was started and promoted by the UK Government, who have obviously played an important leveraging role in promoting transparency across the world.

We are ambitious implementers of IRT and in our dialogue with DFID right now, we are being encouraged to look at how we can apply those standards and the standards introduced by the initiative further down our supply chain with our local partners. It will be a challenge, but one that we shall pursue head on. Throughout the chain of delivery partners we work with, we will look at ways we can address those standards.

One of the questions we think it would be really useful for the Committee to think about is, how—whatever is agreed through the legislation—can we help to ratchet up the level of transparency of CDC? It has made progress, but the last time it was assessed against IRT standards, it scored “poor”. We have not seen a fundamental change in the level of information that is currently reporting, so it has some catching up to do. We hope this legislation can help.

Saranel Benjamin: That is a really good question, because while listening to everybody talking, I was thinking that when we have to apply to DFID for funding, there is absolutely no way we would get funding if we just went and said, “Can I have £500,000 and I will give you the strategy later?” That would never happen for the development sector.