Witnesses
Rt Hon OBE MP, Secretary of State for
International Development; , Director General, Economic
Development and International, Department for International
Development.
:Returning to what we
talked about earlier, climate and your ambitions for climate, this
is the really important bit. The problem we have is that we have
one Department, for example your own, that is really ambitious
about increasing funding, while in another Department, for example
UK Export Finance, 99% of the funding goes towards fossil fuel
projects in the developing world, which then leads to long-term use
of fossil fuels by other countries that we have invested in, which
completely undermines your Department in what you are trying to
achieve here. Do you agree that this would be far more effective
for SDGs if there was proper policy coherence? We have heard
repeatedly on this Committee about the lack of coherence, where one
hand is not speaking to the other.
: Your logic is
correct, but the choices here are choices in which we need to
explain to people what that means. For better or worse, we have a
huge number of people in this country employed in oil and gas
exports. Essentially, the decision that you are making there
comes right down to whether you support a small SME from Aberdeen
providing—
: Sorry, I might have
got this wrong. What I was aiming at was UK Export Finance.
: No, but that will be
for the small SME from Aberdeen going to Basra to provide the oil
infrastructure support for BP on the ground. If you look at the £1
billion that has been put in export finance to Iraq over the last
few years, which is a very good way of looking at this, some of
that is on water and sanitation infrastructure. An enormous amount
of that is on fossil fuels, and that is connected, yes, partially
with big British‑owned companies such as BP and Shell, but has an
enormous amount to do with the supply chain in oil and gas, and
exploration.
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