UK aid watchdog unable to pay staff amid FCDO 'dysfunction'

The United Kingdom’s aid watchdog has laid bare how the “dysfunction” triggered by the abolition of the Department for International Development left it struggling to obtain information about programs and unable to pay some of its staff. The Independent Commission for Aid Impact, or ICAI, said it had been difficult “to deliver on our mandate” since the creation of the merged Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office — “a much bigger department with many pressing priorities” — in September 2020. “We have faced greater challenges in accessing information, carrying out our country visits, dealing with a continually changing cast of interlocutors, and having to use FCDO’s IT, finance and HR systems which have been dysfunctional for most of the time,” its annual report, published on Thursday, stated. Tamsyn Barton, the watchdog’s chief commissioner, also revealed the impact on the organization itself and its staffing, after an FCDO review “attempted to compromise ICAI’s independence” — a threat it fought off. “In the cases where we finally succeeded in recruiting staff, some gave up waiting for the contracts to be issued,” she wrote in the document’s foreword. “As for the finance,” she added, “We have had to wait until June for clarity on our budget in the same Financial Year, and were unable to pay temporary staff or our contractors for several weeks.” The post of head of engagement “has been vacant for two years because of the problems,” hindering attempts to publicize the watchdog’s work. Barton said the situation had improved since the appointment of Andrew Mitchell — who created ICAI in 2011 — as development minister, with “improvement in the reactions to our work and more appreciation of the value of independent scrutiny.” But she raised the alarm over a likely lengthy halt to the watchdog’s work when the current commission is replaced at the end of its four-year term this year and new researchers are appointed. “Changing the Board and re-tendering for the service provider carries risks of significant gaps in scrutiny,” the annual report has warned ministers. FCDO has agreed to extend the existing commission by three months, until the end of September, to reduce the period without effective scrutiny — a move ICAI admitted would be “helpful” in allowing it to cope with “a pileup of reports.” The outgoing commission has, over the past 12 months, published highly critical reports on U.K. aid to Afghanistan, to India, on aid transparency, and on how much of the hugely reduced aid budget is now spent on refugees in the U.K. While ‘Green-Amber’ scores — meaning “a positive contribution, but could do more” — were awarded for reviews of U.K. support for the World Bank, education and peacebuilding, and the humanitarian response to COVID-19, these were “primarily for the work in the years before 2020,” before DFID was scrapped.