UK's Labour calls to reform OECD DAC's rules on assistance

The United Kingdom’s Labour Party have called for reform of the OECD Development Assistance Committee, which sets rules on aid spending. “It's certainly something I want to push for,” said Preet Gill, the shadow international development secretary, to an audience at a Wednesday event by the Centre for Global Development think tank in London. Discussing the idea for the first time, she said: “This is about actually our leadership standing up for the very things that we think are important.” At the same event, former DAC chair Richard Manning — who led the committee from 2003-2008 — also criticized it, saying DAC had “questions to answer about its professionalism.” U.K. International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell has repeatedly voiced his opposition to reforming the DAC rules and he warned in December that “once you change the rules, you are opening Pandora’s box and everyone will try to get a bit of it.” Gill said she was considering advocating for reform of the DAC’s scoring of official development assistance, “because I think there’s been so much abuse of ODA and how its been raided. This idea that somehow the government can offset vaccines at a much higher rate than at what they procured them, I think is quite scandalous.” She cited a recent parliamentary response from Mitchell, who said the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office was “awaiting final OECD-DAC guidelines on reporting Official Development Assistance expenditure on vaccine donations in 2022. Once agreed we will use this guidance as we did with our expenditure for vaccine donations in 2021.” “They still haven't made a decision,” Gill told the London audience. “And I think that's really worrying because … Britain should be leading on the OECD, we should be absolutely saying it is scandalous and pushing back on those finance ministries [of other members] that we can't balance the books on the world's poorest.” She was responding to questions for Mark Lowcock, former United Nations under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs — who also said he was “ashamed of the DAC for allowing this interpretation of the rules,” describing it as “an abuse.” The OECD DAC controversially allowed donors to charge donated surplus COVID-19 vaccines to their aid budgets at a higher cost than that at which they were purchased, having set a guideline price of $6.72 per dose. In the U.K., this cost was part of the already significantly reduced aid budget, with the potential to squeeze an estimated $232 million of funding meant for other international development and humanitarian programs, researchers from CGD estimated. The cost to the aid budgets of Canada, the U.K., and the European Union was estimated by NGOs at $1.7 billion. Manning, who was also speaking at the event, told attendees: “I think that the OECD has questions to answer about its professionalism in this area and I would like to see the OECD not allowing itself to be pushed around by the interests of individual members within committees,” said Manning. “And if it can’t do that job better, then the world needs to think about a better way of accounting.” Manning blamed the increasing influence of financial ministries “wanting to count everything [as ODA] and you can see the effects of this in a very practical way” on “squeezed” development and humanitarian programs.” “Some pressures arise from the way the definition is managed,” added Manning. Newly elected DAC chair Carsten Staur, who takes office in March, said in December that “The concept of ODA will evolve over time as the world evolves, but it is clear that we have to be very careful and cautious about changing it, and make sure that we do so in a manner that respects the legacy that has been entrusted to the DAC.” Decisions about ODA reform, such as all those settled by the DAC, would be made by consensus.