Asked by: Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour - City of Durham)
Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what recent steps he has taken to improve the transparency, effectiveness, and fraud prevention of Official Development Assistance spending by his Department.
Answered by Alan Duncan
All FCO ODA expenditure conforms to the department's robust management and assurance processes to ensure it delivers value for money for the UK taxpayer. This includes following the processes for monitoring expenditure, as laid out in Her Majesty's Treasury's document, 'UK Official Development Assistance: value for money guidance'. Any allegations of fraud are swiftly investigated and if substantiated projects will be terminated.
Asked by: Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour - City of Durham)
Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, whether the Rt. Hon. Alastair Burt, was aware that money from the Access to Justice and Community Services programme in Syria had fallen into the hands of terrorists when he responded to a question in the Chamber by the Rt. Hon. Emily Thornberry on 24 October 2017.
Answered by Alistair Burt
I was not aware on 24 October of the allegations subsequently made by the Panorama programme. HMG is not aware of any evidence of UK funding directly fallling into the hands of terrorist groups through the Access to Justice and Community Services programme in Syria.
Asked by: Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour - City of Durham)
Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what steps he is taking to ensure that projects led by his Department and funded through the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund do not contribute to human rights violations or enable funding to be diverted to terrorist groups.
Answered by Rory Stewart
All Conflict, Stability and Security Fund (CSSF) funded programmes managed by the FCO have robust monitoring processes in place to mitigate the risk of funds being diverted. We take appropriate action on all allegations of misuse of funds. Where specific human rights concerns are identified, an Overseas Security and Justice Assessment is completed to identify risks and mitigating actions.
Asked by: Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour - City of Durham)
Question to the Department for International Development:
To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what assessment her Department has made of the potential effect on its strategy on trade and aid of the establishment of the Institute for Free Trade; and if she will make a statement.
Answered by Rory Stewart
I welcome the establishment of the Institute for Free Trade, which fully acknowledges the vital role trade can play in boosting developing countries’ economic development and lifting people out of poverty.
This Government is committed to engaging with a broad range of stakeholders as we further develop our trade and development policy. I look forward to considering the work of the Institute as this progresses.
Asked by: Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour - City of Durham)
Question to the Department for International Development:
To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, with reference to recent reports of sub-standard teaching and unsanitary learning facilities and the decision in the High Court in Kampala in August 2016 to order the closure of 63 Bridge International Academies in Uganda, whether her Department has taken steps to change Government funding patterns to that organisation.
Answered by Alistair Burt
In Uganda, the Bridge International Academies (BIA) schools remain open with BIA and the Government of Uganda in dialogue to ensure that BIA meets the requirements set out.
There is no set funding pattern to BIA. CDC has a total UK investment in BIA of $7.1m, made in 2014. The investments made were long term and will be returned to the UK taxpayer, they are not specifically for any country of operation. A DFID £3.45m grant, awarded competitively, was also provided to open 23 Bridge academies in Lagos, Nigeria. This grant is now completed.
Any future funding decisions will follow DFID’s due process that aims to achieve best value for money and developmental impact, taking into consideration a broad range of evidence.
Asked by: Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour - City of Durham)
Question to the Department for International Development:
To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what assessment her Department has made of the effect of growing drug resistance upon the globally-agreed target of reducing malaria cases and deaths by 40 per cent by 2020.
Answered by Alistair Burt
Our assessment is that drug resistance, along with insecticide resistance, pose a real threat to the recent progress seen on malaria. This is why DFID is a leading global funder of efforts to tackle malaria, through research funding, bilateral treatment and control programmes and our funding to multilateral institutions such as the Global Fund. This support includes developing new drugs in response to current levels of drug resistance. We also support drug management programmes that decrease the chances of resistance building up, and other measures of tackling malaria, such as the use of bednets.
Asked by: Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour - City of Durham)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, pursuant to the Answers of 18 September 2017 to Questions 10212 and 10213 on Erasmus+, whether the Government will underwrite successful bids submitted for Erasmus+ for those students with a mandatory year abroad in 2019-20, including the bids that are signed after the UK leaves the EU.
Answered by Lord Johnson of Marylebone
The Government has stated publicly that the United Kingdom (UK) is committed to continuing full participation in the Erasmus+ Programme up until we leave the European Union. We will underwrite successful bids for Erasmus+ that are submitted while the UK is still a member state, even if they are not approved until after we leave, and/or payments continue beyond the point of exit.
Bids for higher education study periods submitted before the exit date will include mobility in the 2018/19 and 2019/20 academic years. The underwrite will cover funding for those successful bids which are submitted before exit and we are encouraging participants to continue to apply for funding until we leave.
Asked by: Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour - City of Durham)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the effect of the capped expenditure process on funding for NHS trusts.
Answered by Philip Dunne
As set out in the Spending Review 2015, National Health Service funding will increase by £8 billion in real terms by 2020-21, compared to 2015-16. In this year alone, real terms NHS funding is £1.7 billion higher than last year and £5 billion higher than it was in 2015-16.
As with all public services, local NHS areas need to live within the budget agreed – otherwise they effectively take up resources that could be spent on general practitioners, mental health care, and cancer treatment. As part of their financial planning, NHS England and NHS Improvement have been running a process to look at how a small number of areas could do more to balance their financial plans, as many already have.
It is important that these plans are consistent with constitutional standards on waiting times and patient choice. It is right that the NHS should consider efficiency savings such as reducing delayed transfers of care, or reducing running costs – because this improves patient care overall.
Asked by: Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour - City of Durham)
Question to the Department for International Development:
To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what assessment her Department has made of progress towards the amount the Government pledged for education in Syria at the London donor conference in February 2016.
Answered by Alistair Burt
Since 2012 the UK has pledged £2.46 billion in response to the Syria crisis, the UK’s largest ever response to a single humanitarian crisis. As well as supporting children with food, shelter and healthcare, the UK helped to launch UNICEF’s No Lost Generation Initiative, which provides education, protection, and mental health support for children in Syria and neighbouring countries. At the 2016 London Syria Conference we did not make a specific pledge for education inside Syria, but in 2016/17 alone DFID helped ensure that over 350,000 children accessed formal primary and secondary education in Syria, and that over 80,000 benefitted from non-formal education.
Asked by: Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour - City of Durham)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what progress his Department is making on implementing the housing white paper of February 2017, Fixing our broken housing market; and if he will make a statement.
Answered by Alok Sharma - COP26 President (Cabinet Office)
Our recent Housing White Paper sets out a long term, comprehensive strategy to fix our dysfunctional housing market by tackling failures at every point in the system, whilst also taking more steps to help people now so that housing is more affordable and people have the security they need to be able to plan for the future.
Since its publication in February 2017, the actions we have taken include the following:
Launched the £2.3 billion Housing Infrastructure Fund. The fund will unlock up to 100,000 new homes by helping to fund much needed infrastructure in the areas of greatest housing need. We are currently assessing bids from local authorities.
Launched the £45 million Land Release Fund to ensure local councils release some of their unused or surplus land for housing. This will help to meet the ambition to unlock enough council-owned land for at least 160,000 homes by 2020. Closing dates for bids is 3 November.
Consulted on changing planning policy to support more Build to Rent homes, including affordable rental homes, as well as providing a £65 million boost to the biggest development of homes built specifically for private rent in the UK. Located at the Wembley Park Development in Brent, this will contain 6,800 homes for rent.
Consulted on a range of measures to help tackle unfair and unreasonable abuses of the leasehold system. We are considering the responses and will respond in due course.
On Affordable Housing, to deliver more affordable homes and to ease the way for councils to build more social housing, including at a social rent, we will invest a further £2 billion in funding for housing associations and local councils in England.
On letting fees, we carried out an eight week public consultation to seek views on how the ban on letting fees paid by tenants should be implemented and enforced. The consultation closed on 2 June. We will be publishing the draft bill shortly.
We are consulting on proposals to reform the planning system to increase the supply of new homes and increase local authority capacity to manage growth. The consultation closes on 9 November.
Going further, we will bring forward a green paper on social housing in England which will be a wide-ranging top-to-bottom review of the issues facing the sector. The green paper will be the most substantial report of its kind for a generation.