Sustainable Development Goals — House of Commons, 2015-01-28
Topic: Mixed Topics
Mary Helen Creagh (Labour, Centre-left): Shock, horror! The right hon. Lady’s multi-annual review in 2011 talked about that programme and found that it was working well. The payments I refer to were made between July 2011 and May 2013—on her watch. The commission said: "We are…deeply concerned that…a private company is managing a £30 million DFID programme without any formal contract with…DFID." That is a direct quotation from ICAI. It details serious weaknesses in financial management, with 90% of all expenditure undertaken in cash, without securement or contract—for example, a $20,000 cash payment with a hand-written receipt from an off-the-shelf receipt book; a request for a $100,000 petty cash fund; and a request by newly recruited staff to be paid tax free, which is against South African law. As I say, the review of the capital budget that the Department carried out in October 2011 found that most outputs had been achieved, but after three years of the current Secretary of State being in charge, the third annual review found that DFID was not on track to meet its financial forecast—on her watch To her credit, the Secretary of State has shut down that programme, but similar problems persist elsewhere. ICAI’s report into DFID private sector spending published eight months ago found that it was "impossible to identify how much DFID actually spends on private sector development…because it is not captured as a discrete category of expenditure in DFID’s financial system." That leads to the question: "If you don’t know where it’s going, how can you measure if it is working?" The National Audit Office has criticised another private sector project—the Private Infrastructure Development Group. The NAO criticises the right hon. Lady’s Department’s decision to scale up PIDG funding from a total of £49 million in 2010-11 to £258 million in 2012-13. Her Department will allocate £700 million-worth of taxpayers’ money to that fund between 2012 and 2015. The UK now accounts for 88% of all contributions. The NAO criticises the fact that there was no change to PIDG’s governance and that the business cases for projects were not assessed by DFID’s quality assurance unit—despite the risks involved. The NAO concluded that DFID has inadequate financial control and oversight, lacks robust information and was unable to prove value for taxpayers’ money I share the NAO’s and ICAI’s concerns about where and how this £1.8 billion is being spent. I have put a series of parliamentary questions to the Secretary of State about where the funding for her strategic framework for economic development is going. I asked the right hon. Lady how the money would be "targeted on economic development", and how it would be "allocated to different activities and countries." The Secretary of State did not answer. The public deserve to know if and how much of the money is being paid to the private sector directly. I asked the Secretary of State that question, only to be told: "This information is not available in the form requested." Perhaps that reflected the concerns expressed in the NAO report. I asked how much of the £1.8 billion had already been spent; no answer. I asked what the purpose of the money was; no answer.