Culture, Tourism, Europe and External Relations Committee

Meeting date: Thursday, June 29, 2017

Official Report 515KB pdf

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International Development

Our next item of business is an evidence session on international development with Dr Alasdair Allan, whom I welcome. I understand that you would like to make a short opening statement, Dr Allan.

Yes, if I may. Thank you, convener.

Following a wide participative public consultation last year, we published our new international development strategy on 21 December. In consulting, we were keen to arrive at a refreshed policy that embraces the UN global goals, and we were clear that we wanted to ensure that the policy built on the best elements of our existing work and our partnership approach. “Global Citizenship: Scotland’s International Development Strategy” delivers on that, and I have been delighted by the positive reception that it has received.

Our strategy is about being a good global citizen. That is why the Scottish Government has maintained and, indeed, increased its international development fund, created a new humanitarian emergency fund, and established—and recently increased—a climate justice fund.

We will focus our international development fund on partnerships with four countries with which Scotland shares extensive historic and contemporary links: Malawi, Zambia, Rwanda and Pakistan. The three sub-Saharan countries form our project base for development assistance programmes and Pakistan is the base for programmes that have a strong emphasis on education through scholarships. In addition to those programmes, we will have two new funding streams for capacity strengthening and investment.

Our commitment to the beyond-aid agenda requires behavioural change by all of us—those in Government in terms of our policy coherence and those outwith Government. Global citizenship is about who we are as a nation and how open, welcoming, diverse, compassionate and fair we will be in the future. Our international development work—the Government’s commitment to working in partnership with others and its work in Scotland to foster, support and maintain good global citizenship—is a key part of that.

I am happy to seek to answer any questions that the committee has.

Thank you very much, Dr Allan.

I should also welcome Joanna Keating, who is head of international development at the Scottish Government and is supporting the minister.

As you will be aware, minister, we recently had an evidence session with international development stakeholders. One of the key things that they wanted the committee to raise was the importance of the UN development goals. They wanted us to ask the Government how those goals are being implemented, not just by your department but across the Government.

We seek to align our policy with the global goals. I seek to do that in my area of Government and, more generally, the Scottish Government seeks at home and abroad to live up to those goals in our policies. I will ask Joanna Keating to say more about this, but that is reflected in our priorities and the projects and programmes that we fund. Non-governmental organisations that apply to our funding programmes have to demonstrate that they seek to live up to those goals. We have sought to put a special emphasis on some of the global goals in our work, particularly those to do with the rights of women, for instance.

What cross-departmental structures are in place to ensure that those goals are delivered across Government?

The bulk of the work that I am talking about is done through the international development side of Government, but there is also a climate justice fund, which the Cabinet Secretary for Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform is involved with, and there is regular co-operation to ensure that the aims match up. There are also the global goals that seek to maintain and develop the dignity of individuals and freedom from poverty. I hope that that characterises all of our work across Government, whether in Scotland or around the world.

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There are crossovers between the work that we do in the developing world and things that happen here. I should say that the work that we do in the countries where we are working is for the benefit of those countries; we do not seek that work to be in Scotland’s national interest. However, there are things that we can learn from that experience. For example, there is the Blantyre to Blantyre project, which was primarily aimed at addressing health problems in Malawi but had the beneficial consequence of our being able to compare health problems in Scotland and Malawi in different ways—both countries, of course, have a town called Blantyre.

Those are a few of the areas in which we try to draw together our activity. Joanna Keating can talk about some of the specific funding streams that are relevant to that.

What we really like about the concept of the sustainable development goals is the fact that they apply to all countries—they apply equally to Scotland as well—which is a big change from the millennium development goals. A lot of work has been going on in the Scottish Government on the domestic side of things and, in our portfolio, in relation to Scotland’s contribution internationally on the global goals.

Two years ago—just before the goals came into force worldwide—the First Minister made an announcement about her commitment and the commitment of the Scottish Government to the domestic and international contributions. On the domestic side, we took the view that the global goals mapped neatly with Scotland’s existing national performance framework, so our work has been very much to do with flowing the global goals through the national performance framework. Two summers ago, we started a programme in collaboration with the United Nations Institute for Training and Research that involved ministers and officials attending training sessions, and we have focused on flowing that through the Scottish Government, taking a stepwise approach and raising awareness of the global goals and what they mean for all domestic policy areas.

For example, global goal 3 concerns quality health and goal 4 concerns quality education. We have worked on aligning those goals and mapping them right across the national performance framework, and the reporting on that will come back through the NPF. Scotland is in the fortunate position of having a national performance framework in place already, and there has been quite a lot of interest in Scotland’s approach to the issue because of the fact that it can use the NPF as one of the monitoring mechanisms. There has also been an on-going consultation on the change to the national performance outcomes, which has been a collaborative process as well.

On the international side, which is our side of the portfolio, we have considered how to embed the goals in our new strategy. One of the main purposes of the refresh of our international development policy was to take into account the fact that the global goals were coming into being and the fact that December 2015 was the 10th anniversary of our programme, which meant that the timing was good, in many ways. Last year, we went out to public consultation and asked questions such as whether we should focus on only one or two global goals or whether we should maintain a wide programme but narrow the geographic focus. The results from the public consultation suggested that we should narrow the geographic focus but keep the approach wide thematically. That reflects the fact that the 17 global goals are interlocking—they are indivisible and they all work together. Because of that, if we target goals 1, 2 and 3 in various countries, taking into account their national priorities, we will also be helping the overall picture with regard to the global goals.

Discussions continue at official, director and ministerial level between my team, the national performance team and the open government partnership team with regard to our international interests.

Thank you. We do not have a great deal of time for this evidence session, so I ask that questions and answers be as brief as possible. We might not get all members in, so I will try to get in those who were squeezed for time during the previous evidence session.

As the minister said, many positive things have been said about the international strategy, but we have also heard concerns about the practicalities and I know that the minister will have read in detail the Official Report of the recent evidence session in the committee.

The administration of the small grants scheme by the Lloyds TSB Foundation has been praised and there are some major projects going on with Scottish Government funding. However, in between, there is an issue about whether the support that the Scottish Government provides is available to organisations as they or their ambitions grow but before they reach the stage of being major programme operators. Will the minister reflect on those concerns?

That is a fair issue for the committee to raise and the Government has sought to address it. We are trying to get as diverse a group of organisations as possible involved in what we do in international development. For instance, the small grants programme, as the name suggests, is designed to be available to smaller organisations, but to be available on a wider basis with regard to the number of countries that are involved, so as not to exclude organisations that are based in Scotland.

We are conscious of the gap that has existed and we seek to close it with regard to the maximums and minimums that apply. For instance, the maximum turnover of organisations that are eligible for the small grants programme is £150,000 at the moment. We are willing to look at the issues to ensure that there is no gap and that as wide a variety of organisations as possible can be involved in our funding rounds.

I presume that that is being done in consultation with organisations across the board.

It is being done in consultation with NGOs and with our core-funded organisations in Scotland.

I should say, minister, that international development is one of the areas in the Government’s agenda that I am most enthusiastic about; it is really impressive. However, I am concerned about whether positive words match up with actions. You are right to highlight the whole-Government approach to being a good global citizen and to the sustainable development goals. Are we achieving that whole-Government approach when, over the past 10 years, the Scottish Government’s economic development agencies have given £18.5 million to companies that are involved in the arms industry? Is that an example of a good global citizen?

You will have heard the Scottish Government and many members in the Scottish Parliament express their concern that whatever we do, whether in Scotland or the UK, we make sure that we are not involved in the proliferation of arms. We have to be very careful about that.

We have sought to ensure that the global goals are reflected in our policy, and we are always open to challenge on that and to new ways of improving it. We have sought to make sure that the end use of anything that is produced in the UK is carefully scrutinised and I hope that, as a Government, we have also done our bit in doing some of that scrutiny.

I understand that, but global goal 16 is peace and justice. Contributing to an industry that depends on there being no peace and justice is not good global citizenship, is it?

I do not take the view that anyone who is involved in any of the defence industries in Scotland should be boycotted. We do not take that view and I am sure that the committee does not take that view. However, as a Government, we take the idea very seriously that the end use of arms or of anything that is produced in the defence industry should be subject to the highest level of scrutiny. You will have heard the Scottish Government and others offer commentary recently on where in the world some armaments from the UK have ended up.

We are always open to looking at doing things in a better way, but I hope that, with others, the Scottish Government makes its position clear on the scrutiny that we think should apply to those industries.

I want to get your thoughts on the report from Dr Eve Hepburn about a differentiated system for immigration. I do not know whether you have had a chance to go through that paper and to see the options that were put forward, but it would be interesting to know whether the Government is preparing a response to that.

Throughout the Brexit process, the Scottish Government has been making the case that different needs apply in Scotland when it comes to migration and immigration. Our problem is to ensure that our working-age population continues to grow, and it is growing only because we are open to migration from other countries. That has been a key message of what we have set out. We are interested in what the committee and others have to say about that, and we have certainly made the case vigorously to the UK Government that a differentiated immigration system would be helpful to Scotland’s economic needs.

What sort of response have you been getting to that message? One thing that was clear from the options that we saw was that some of them are possible in Scotland at the moment, but making that happen depends on political will on both sides. Do you think that it is feasible and that it could happen?

I am not opening up the question of independence, but there are certainly things that are feasible in a UK context. You need only look at Canada to see an example of a country where different parts of the country are perfectly able to have different policies on immigration. In many of the conversations between the Scottish Government and the UK Government about the situation post-Brexit, we have made that very point. You will not be too surprised to hear that the UK Government is not tremendously enthusiastic about Scotland having differentiated policies on immigration, but we will continue to raise those issues. We will also continue to raise the issue of the post-study work visa, which has unanimous backing, as far as I can see, across the education sector and industry, to make the point that Scotland is open for business and open to students.

Has the Scottish Government undertaken any work to establish Scotland’s future immigration needs, and do you intend to publish any papers on that?

In the course of the Brexit conversations that we have been having, we published “Scotland’s Place in Europe”, which went into some of that. I recently attended a conference on migration and I hope that the Scottish Government will be able to comment on and make use of some of the findings from that conference. We have sought to provide information to the UK Government, much of which is in the public domain, about Scotland’s particular demographic needs. We are open to all those things and to pushing all those arguments. I have to be honest and say that the response so far from the UK Government has not been tremendously enthusiastic, but we will continue to make those arguments.

Was the Scottish Government consulted by the UK Government before the Prime Minister’s statement on EU citizens’ rights this week?

There may have been a few hours’ notice, but I would not say that we were intimately involved in the decision. We certainly welcome some of what is in it. We welcome the fact that, a year on, there is at least now some vague shape of what the rights of EU citizens might be in the future, but the point that we would make about that is that citizens of other EU countries who did us the honour of coming to live here did so because they had a right to do so, and we should not take rights away from them. Our country cannot afford that economically or socially.

Have you had any specific contact with the UK Government with regard to the immigration bill?

That is still to come, but issues around the issue of immigration in general have been raised repeatedly at the joint ministerial committee and we keep in contact on that.

Thank you, Dr Allan. I am sorry that your appearance at the committee was so brief today, but we are grateful for your evidence.

11:14 Meeting suspended.  

11:16 On resuming—