Commonwealth Development Corporation Bill (First sitting)

Stephen Doughty Excerpts

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

[Richard Graham]

Q Sixty-three countries at the moment. What about Palestine, for example?

Rory Stewart: This very interesting discussion has gone back and forth. As you are aware, the International Development Committee asked CDC to look strongly at investment to deal with the crisis around Syria and at what we can do to help bring stability to the middle east, for example. At the same time, other members of the IDC tabled amendments to the Bill that would not only take us out of middle-income countries in the middle east but would restrict investment to the countries with which DFID has bilateral programmes. My gut instinct is that that is an issue not for primary legislation but for Departments to address through their strategy in response to a changing world.

[Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)]

Q I apologise for my late arrival. I was hosting a general from the British Army. Minister, I want to ask a very specific question about where these figures come from. I want to probe you further on them. You answered a written question from me yesterday—for Hansard, it is 55702—and said that the only capital requests that you received from CDC were for the £735 million. You said that you have not had any others. Can you be clear about whether CDC has requested capital increases to you beyond the £735 million?

Rory Stewart: The process is threefold. We will seek permission from Parliament to be able to recapitalise CDC. We want to know whether you are prepared to allow us to give any more money to CDC—£1, £10, £1 billion or £6 billion. We are looking for the option to give it more money. Then we will produce the five-year forward strategy for CDC, which will come together at the end of the year. Then we will produce a business case in the summer to lay out what we believe, in consultation with CDC, its likely requirements are in order to prepare our promissory notes. The final stage is that CDC will make a request on the basis of the projects it has. That is exactly what we have done with the £735 million.

We have discussed the ceiling that we are proposing to you in detail with Graham and Diana. At this early stage, they believe it is a reasonable maximum limit for the amount that they could conceivably need between 2016 and 2021.

[Stephen Doughty]

Q Who came up with the figure? Was it Ministers or CDC?

Rory Stewart: We did. Our Department came up with the figure.

[Stephen Doughty]

Q Okay. May I ask you a separate question? A minute ago, you said that CDC’s support to India is targeted at the poorest states, but you told me yesterday in a written parliamentary answer—55689—that the majority of new disbursements are still going to the richer states in India. In fact, the top disbursement is to Maharashtra, which is where Mumbai is located. You told me that 42%—that is only this year; it has been going up steadily—goes to the poorest, but the majority goes to the richest. Can you explain why that is, and do you want to clarify what you said earlier?

Rory Stewart: My understanding of what is happening there is that every business case in India needs to be scored against our development impact grid. To achieve the score that we are looking for—I believe it is a 2.3 score, and we are generally crossing 3.0—we have to reconcile on the X and Y axes the number of jobs that would be created through the investment. In other words, we focus on the sector, then on GDP per capita, which is broken down by state, then on the difficulty of investment, and then on the amount of available capital. Any investments, even in the wealthier states in India, will have gone through that grid.

[Stephen Doughty]

Q But the majority is not going to the poorest states. Is that correct?

Rory Stewart: Let me hand over to Diana on this.

Diana Noble: Can I explain our strategy? In a lot of cases, when you want to help poor countries, it is better to back businesses that exist elsewhere and encourage them to expand into those countries. Therefore, a lot of our investment is about the vision that we can create through these investments.

Let me illustrate that with a quick example. Last year, we invested in a mid-size Indian bank—RBL. The vision was to help it expand its business into rural areas, to the rural poor and into poorer states. That is, as I am sure you know, a big priority for the Modi Government. CDC did not just provide capital to RBL; we also helped it with expanding financial literacy training to 25,000 really poor women in Madhya Pradesh to explain to them how they can benefit from savings accounts and bank accounts. There are already results from that. RBL now has 1.9 million new customers in the rural and poorer areas. We are evaluating that by doing a random sample of loans to understand how that translates into new jobs as well. That is a really good example of our having a partnership with a high-quality operator, going to poorer places, helping them and sharing the results.

Rory Stewart: I did not answer your question directly. The answer at the moment is that, from our portfolio, 42% of the investment in India goes into the poorer states. The rest—the remaining 58%—does not go into the poorer states, but into states where we believe the business will benefit the people in India who are in need. Many of those investments are intended to be regional investments, so we may invest in a bank, for example, that is not located in one of the poorer states, in order to benefit ultimately the people in the poorer states.

The best way to evaluate such decisions is by looking at the individual investment and giving us an opportunity to discuss with you the individual company in which we have invested, so that we can discuss our theory of change. It is difficult to decide whether to make a regional investment to help the poorer states or whether to go straight to the poorer states. I think we should be accountable and talk to you about those individual investments so that we can explain why we have a theory of change and investment in a particular company.

[The Chair]

We need to move on.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

She might not. We will draw things to a close now with two more quick questions.

[Stephen Doughty]

Q Some new research by the House of Commons Library suggests that CDC’s new investments, as a proportion, to Africa are actually falling over the past few years, with a majority going to south Asia, largely to India. Are you satisfied with that, given the poverty focus that is supposed to exist?

Rory Stewart: These are all really good questions. Fundamentally, things will change year on year. We would expect that with an investment strategy, because these guys have to make very difficult decisions. The NAO has been very clear that it does not want DFID Ministers micromanaging or interfering in the individual business decisions of CDC. I hope you would agree with that: if we were in the business of signing off on every single investment CDC makes, it would become a political arm of the Government, where we could be directing it to how it invests.

We set the overall strategy and framework; we have taken CDC out of places like China and given it the freedom to invest in south Asia and Africa. We have agreed a development grid; we are conducting a lot of research on how that happens, but I think it is perfectly reasonable that over a period more investment one year might go into south Asia than Africa. I think the way that we deal with that is through the next strategy that we produce, continuing this process of tightening accountability, but I do not think it is appropriate for me to start vetoing individual investment decisions by the board.

[Alison McGovern]

Q In this session, Minister, you said that you do not yet have CDC’s strategy, which we knew. We have discussed the fact that there was not much clarity about investments in India and whether or not they were going to the poorest states. You have explained that you are expecting CDC to increase the risk of the investments it makes at the same time as you are radically increasing the amount of capital available to it. So just for clarity, which do you believe to be CDC’s greatest priority? Is it the reduction of poverty; or is it return on investment, so that the CDC has continuity of capital?

Rory Stewart: The priority of CDC has to be to do good without losing money. The point is not to lose money while doing good, so we are focused on jobs and economic development without losing money. That is the guiding principle that CDC follows in everything it does.

[Stephen Doughty]

It’s not poverty—

[The Chair]

Final question.

Rory Stewart: I am sorry; there was a strange comment coming from Mr Doughty who, when he is not texting, throws things from the chair. We believe very strongly that economic development and job creation are absolutely core activities in the elimination of poverty. The distinction that Mr Doughty is trying to draw between economic development, job creation and poverty alleviation is extremely unorthodox and it is not one that the chief economist of our Department, or indeed any of the officials of our Department, would accept.

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[Stephen Doughty]

On a point of order, Mr Streeter. May I clarify something? The Minister made a comment a moment ago about me allegedly texting. I have actually been checking his written answers on my phone, which allows me to check the parliamentary system.

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[The Chair]

I am sure that those points will come out in further questions; this is becoming a bit of a statement.

Gideon Rabinowitz: I will be very brief. The final point is that, whatever new resourcing authority is given to the Government through the Bill, we want it to leverage a continued focus on ratcheting up CDC’s development performance on those issues.

Saranel Benjamin: War on Want’s position is that we believe that UK taxpayers’ money should not be given to private funds that are going to be investing in projects, because that is basically getting returns on poverty—off the backs of the poor. It makes us very uncomfortable that UK taxpayers’ money is being used for that purpose. However, as we heard from the first panel this morning, the percentage of projects in which CDC is investing in Africa has reduced significantly. We were talking about agriculture; we have moved away from projects that were supporting small-scale farmers to those supporting large-scale agribusiness. That is causing displacement of people whose lands are being taken away and it is also creating a loss of livelihoods. I wonder how that goes together with the whole question of poverty eradication, when we are actually perpetuating it. I will come back to that later and maybe talk about a case study that we are looking at.

[Stephen Doughty]

Q I have a question to the National Audit Office. You have visited a number of CDC projects as part of your review, and you obviously saw some very positive examples in CDC’s portfolio. I think we discussed one in Sierra Leone, but you also visited a number of those in India—I believe it was Terry who visited those projects. Could you say a little bit about the projects that you visited, particularly with regard to the investment in healthcare? I know that CDC is investing in a lot of private healthcare in India, but not necessarily specifically in stuff that benefits poorer people—it is more a kind of general investment.

Terry Caulfield: Yes, we visited two healthcare facilities in Bangalore in India. One of them was perhaps more intended for middle-income families and one was more down the lower end. We came away with the feeling that they were doing a range of things. At the lower end, they were trying to provide maternity facilities for families who would not otherwise have access to them, perhaps for financial or educational reasons or because of other hurdles that they might have had to get over. In that particular case, they were looking to expand the facility in that location and then use that to expand further out. Against the backdrop of an understanding of how access to Indian healthcare works, they were coming in at a number of different levels. There is a diversity there.

[Stephen Doughty]

Q You make a big point about the issue of prospective development impact and whether CDC can prove its impact. Were you concerned when you heard the earlier panel talking about investments in richer places that theoretically will lead to jobs for poorer people, as people perhaps move to cities and take advantage? Do you think that is a bit too hazy? Can you explain a bit more about where you felt the CDC could be doing better to demonstrate impact?

Tom McDonald: One of the things that struck me from the projects that I visited in Uganda and Kenya was the need for a portfolio approach. Some of the projects clearly will have more of a development impact, and some will clearly do better financially. Some of them are harder to measure than others, particularly if the investment is through a fund or an intermediary.

In the report we say that, despite Parliament having expressed some concerns in 2008 and 2009 about how CDC measures impact, CDC has still been a little slow to put together a comprehensive picture of the approach it would expect to take, together with DFID, to provide Parliament and the taxpayer with a good view of what impact looks like. I should say that we are not suggesting that there is some simple way of doing that. Measuring all the different indirect and direct effects of the investments is complicated. For example, to answer your question directly, there was a commitment in 2012 to put together a measure of what quality of employment would look like. It has not made much progress on that. It has plans in place to try to evaluate some of its major investments and to improve the impact reporting, but for us, it is about the pace and comprehensiveness of that reporting.

[James Duddridge]

Q May I ask Sir Paul Collier a question in relation to the amount of capital that CDC has? There seems to be a view that CDC can absorb about £1 billion a year. Given your work on urbanisation and the vast amount of infrastructure investment that is needed, do you think that CDC could be challenged to spend much more on an annual basis or to ramp up to that point? That relates in particular to funding the urbanisation that Africa needs to attract the companies that you referred to earlier.

Sir Paul Collier: Africa is going through a rapid and very necessary urbanisation. Africa’s future is urban, but not all cities are environments in which ordinary people can be productive. You can have a mega-slum. At the moment in Dar es Salaam, the modal enterprise has one worker: scale zero, productivity zero, specialisation zero—doomed. Cities need to become platforms where proper firms can function. They need energy supplies and decent connectivity. That is what the infrastructure is there to do, basically: energy and connectivity. That is expensive.

[Stephen Doughty]

Q CDC could spend £1 billion just in Dar es Salaam.

Sir Paul Collier: CDC needs to scale up and scale up fast. I am hesitant about tying it in knots trying to get precise measures for this and precautionary measures for that, when the reality is that there are no techniques out there. Everyone is trying to build better measures. The International Finance Corporation has just hired for the first time a chief economist at vice-president level, designed to do that. People are trying to develop techniques, but it is difficult. To my mind, CDC’s priority, now that it has got sound, motivated management, needs to be to scale up. The task ahead for Africa is to get both the infrastructure and the private firms in before it is too late.

[James Duddridge]

Q Should not we be encouraging it to give more than £1 billion a year?

Sir Paul Collier: Yes, of course. The future of aid is to get decent firms to go to places where they will not make much money until there are lots more of them.

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[Richard Fuller]

It is, Mr Streeter.

[Stephen Doughty]

Q I have a follow-up question for Oxfam or War on Want. I do not agree with everything War on Want says, but a good point it made was about the differing standards that appear to be applied to the CDC as opposed to non-governmental organisations, other multilaterals and so on. The multilateral aid review is pretty robust on how we should deal with multilaterals—publish every item of spending over £500 and so on. Gideon, perhaps you could say a little more about where a double standard might be going on here in expectations.

Gideon Rabinowitz: I have made the point already: it is clear and on the record that the CDC has a bit of catching up to do on transparency. One of the reasons why it would be helpful for it to make progress on transparency is that everyone would then know a lot more about where it is investing, what it is investing in, what the justifications for those investments are, and why it thinks it is providing financial and value additionality in those investments. We would all be starting this debate from a different position if there was greater awareness of what the CDC was doing and how it is working.

The other point that we are keen to emphasise is that if there is some way in which the Bill can leverage that additional transparency to include encouragement of reporting around a wider range of development impacts and indicators to help secure our confidence that the CDC is focused on the right investments, that would be very valuable. The type of indicators that we have to report against in our programmes could be rolled out more broadly in some of those investments.

[Stephen Doughty]

Q May I ask a separate point, Paul? You said, “Take more risk. Get in there. Get things done.” Are you not worried that the CDC’s profile appears to be declining in Africa and still heavily focused on middle-income countries? Looking at the projects in lower-income countries, there appears to be quite a lot of diversity, but do you think that they ought to be even more risky, more poverty-focused, or more focused on Africa than on, say, India?

Sir Paul Collier: Yes, I do. I should also say that with risk comes an incidence of failure. The CDC is in a risk business in difficult environments; we should all get used to accepting a rate of failure. The CDC should not be judged by the fact that it will have some failures. If it has no failures, it is not doing its job.

[Stephen Doughty]

Q It is too risk-averse at the moment, do you think?

Sir Paul Collier: That may be true, actually. The emphasis on scrutiny, scrutiny, scrutiny, without any understanding of context, drives people into that sort of risk-averse behaviour. Yes, we need transparency and scrutiny, but that has to be in the context of an understanding that the basic mission we want the CDC to do is difficult and will involve a rate of failure.

[The Chair]

Final question: Fiona Bruce.