Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, how her Department monitors the delivery and spending of UK aid in the Palestinian Territories.

As for all DFID programmes, officials regularly monitor and review our programmes in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) to ensure they are delivering results and that UK aid reaches the intended beneficiaries and achieves the best development outcomes, with a strong focus on ensuring value for money for the UK taxpayer. This includes comprehensive annual reviews and project completion reports. These reviews are available on the DFID Development Tracker at https://devtracker.dfid.gov.uk/. DFID has due diligence assessment processes to provide assurance over the expenditure of our funds, and DFID’s OPTs spending is subject to regular auditing by DFID’s Internal Audit Department and the UK National Audit Office. We have strong controls in place to monitor spending, including mapping the flow of funds to beneficiaries, regular audits of programme spending and where required, tight earmarking of funds. DFID has a zero-tolerance approach to fraud and has robust controls against diversion of aid to terrorist groups.