Speeches by Cooper.

“We used that process, which Jenny had initially used before I am was appointed as Foreign Secretary. She had been using that through the summer to already make some adjustments. When we looked at it again together, we made further adjustments to restore funding for some of the areas affecting women and girls in order t…”

“Yes.”

“The reason I am going to pass this to Nick is because I think the detail of the staffing decisions within the FCDO needs ultimately to be done by the Permanent Secretaries. In terms of the overview we maintain on it, we are clear that we need to maintain skills, and we need to make sure that have proper equalities impa…”

“I will let Melinda pull out any individual figures that we have. But look, in terms of the overall sense, the reality is this: because development supports women and girls, any reduction in development spending will, of course, have an impact. What we have tried to do, however, is to make women and girls a priority acr…”

“I will pass to Nick on the detail of that.”

“Ultimately, Ministers. The fact of us giving a three-year budget to countries helps to develop that sense of the plan. This is not just, about hand-to-mouth decisions that they are going to be making in the short term, but about what is the plan over a three-year period. The idea is that the country-based teams will be…”

“There are risks involved in change but there are also risks involved in not changing, and there are global risks that we are dealing with that have massively changed in a short period. We are trying to adapt the institution and the workforce to be able to respond to those huge, changing risks and also change in respons…”

“No.”

“We have made the decisions about funding allocations. If we had not made the decisions about funding allocations until we had done the overseas network, we would have been in trouble because we would then have been starting the financial year and the spending review processes without the allocations being set out. If t…”

“Exactly. Previously, we would have had a centrally directed programme that countries would still have drawn down from but it would more likely have tended to be provision or grant funding from a centrally given programme as opposed to the provision of expertise.”

“For the detail of the—”

“The process that we need to go through is about both developing and increasing the skills and the capability, and making sure that we can have more focused and agile teams. Of course the process of change has challenges while it is being implemented, but that is a good reason for us to complete the process as rapidly a…”

“The fund is still centrally managed but the fund will be able to fund these kinds of expertise country-by-country. Jenny can set out further detail. We still have effectively what is a centrally managed fund but it means that from one country to another, what it funds may be different. What individual countries want to…”

“Not far off; £677 million in total. That is a reduction, and that is partly because the three countries we have protected in full are Sudan, Palestine and Ukraine. In addition, we have fully protected the development bank funding for Africa and we have increased the IDA funding for Africa.”

“Of that, 75% also goes to Africa. For Africa, the total bilateral direct funding has reduced. The total figure ends up being £680 million, from memory.”

“The whole point here is part of the shift in how we do things, and it is about providing expertise rather than simply funding the delivery of services that countries want to do for themselves. The idea is that this should not simply be about FCDO staff. This should be about the network of expertise that we have across …”

“The hon. Member rightly mentions Lebanon, where as we speak there is a huge humanitarian crisis. That is why in the past two weeks we announced an additional £15 million this year, particularly for Lebanon but also for some of the nearby areas, to provide urgent additional humanitarian and crisis support this year. It …”

“I welcome my hon. Friend raising the issue of education. There is a particular issue with girls not being in education. It is also an issue in conflict areas, such as Sudan or Ukraine, where children’s education has been held back. That is why we are continuing the funding for Education Cannot Wait, because it provides…”

“We have to both increase our defence spending and champion international development in order to maintain our security here at home. That means focusing in particular on the areas where conflict is greatest. I worry that continued instability in Sudan, for example, allows extremist groups to flourish, which creates reg…”

“I welcome the hon. Lady’s point about aid match and how we can ensure that we help to use UK Government funding to lever in additional donations and support from huge numbers of people across the country, including through philanthropy. There is a strong commitment to that support. We will continue to have aid match ag…”