Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, pursuant to the Answer of 25 January 2017 to Question 63588, what assessment her Department has made of the potential merits of providing support to the Middle East Desalination Research Centre in Oman.

DFID has not specifically assessed the value of providing support to the Middle East Desalination Research Centre. Desalination is not a focus area for DFID’s water, health and sanitation portfolio and given the scale of private sector investment in this area, we do not have a strong comparative advantage that would support our involvement.