UN: Specialised Agencies

Lord Judd Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, while I congratulate my noble friend on his initiative in securing this timely debate, I must also thank UNA-UK for the very helpful briefing material that it has provided.

In our now completely interdependent global community, the value of effective international co-operation cannot be overstated. It is essential to generate a real sense of community and of shared challenges and shared objectives in meeting those challenges. We must be ready to learn from each other and avoid counterproductive dangers of competition for influence and power as part of which we may be tempted to misuse our aid programme. That is why the UN agencies, with their representative global membership, are so important. However, I am certain that to fulfil their potential it is essential to improve their integration and co-ordination.

I will concentrate in this debate on three vital agencies facing actual and potential shortfalls in funding. These are agencies that would particularly benefit from strong UK support, financial and political. The UK is on the governing board of all these three agencies.

The first is UNESCO. UNESCO is currently facing a shortfall of at least $65 million and has been forced to temporarily halt some activities as a result of the sad US decision to withhold dues following the acceptance of Palestine as a UNESCO member. Two US laws enacted in the 1990s prohibit the funding of any bodies that admit Palestine as a member. Therefore, the US is not paying the dues that it owes for this year of $65 million and has suspended future funding. The US normally contributes 22 per cent of UNESCO's budget. Israel has also frozen its contributions and Canada has indicated that, while it will continue to pay its regular dues, it will not provide any additional funding.

I warmly congratulate the Government, who have just been elected to UNESCO's executive board, on having indicated that they will not cease funding. The UK could play a significant role in supporting UNESCO during this period. I know that the agency scored poorly in the March 2011 DfID multilateral aid review, but its funding was not cut because the review confirmed its unique contribution to education, development, science, culture and heritage. The agency has since undergone a reform process that has seen, among other things, a stronger focus on girls’ education. The UK should work closely with other executive board members to ensure that UNESCO improves its performance and to encourage other states to plug the funding gap.

The UN Population Fund, which is the UN's lead agency for population matters, reproductive rights and family planning, is also coming under fire in the US. Pro-life Republican representatives have blocked the Senate Appropriations Bill, which contains the US voluntary contribution to the agency. The fund categorically states that it does not promote abortion and nor does it espouse coercive policies such as China’s one-child policy, a claim made by the agency’s critics in the Senate. The agency of course had its funding frozen during the George W Bush era, even though a 2002 State Department investigation absolved it of these charges. President Obama reversed the decision in 2009. Over 90 per cent of the agency’s funding is voluntary.

This year, the global population breached 7 billion people. An estimated 215 million women who wanted to delay or avoid pregnancy were unable to afford or access contraception, and half a million women and girls died from childbirth-related complications. The fund’s work to support family planning and safe motherhood, and to provide essential information on population trends, has never been needed more. Given the UK’s strong focus on women’s and girls’ health, it is imperative that it does all it can to support the fund’s work, both financially and politically. As with UNESCO, the UK is in a key position as a member of the agency’s executive board.

UN Women, the new UN agency for gender equality and women’s empowerment, began work this year. In the past, the four main UN bodies working on gender issues lacked the cash, clout and co-ordination effectively to champion equality and empowerment. UN Women consolidates these bodies, absorbing their mandates and acting as a voice and focal point for gender issues within and outside the UN system. In 2010, the UN General Assembly agreed a budget of $500 million for the new agency—far short of UNICEF’s $3 billion, but significantly more than the combined budgets of the four previous gender entities, one of which of course was UNIFEM. However, the agency has faced a severe shortfall in funding from the outset—just 1.4 per cent of UN Women’s budget comes from the UN’s regular budget, and, six months into operation, it had received a little more than a fifth from member state contributions.

The UK’s decision to provide UN Women with £10 million a year for the next two years is to be warmly welcomed; but it is essential that the UK—which is on its executive board—reviews whether there is more it can do, both financially and politically, to support this new agency. UN Women is not only a vital tool to further the UK’s gender and development priorities but a flag bearer for improved UN co-ordination and reform.

The current world situation, of which the Arab spring is a telling example, means that the ILO is potentially a particularly relevant player in global affairs. I am therefore glad that the UK Government will remain a member and that our basic dues will continue to be paid. However, I am deeply concerned that DfID is no longer to provide additional voluntary funding. This averaged £6.6 million from 2006 to 2010. I fervently hope that it is not an inflexible position, and that DfID will indeed continue to contribute funding for specific in-country projects on a case-by-case basis.

There is room for some concern, lest the criteria used for the multilateral aid review might not always have reflected the remit and mandate of some of the UN agencies under scrutiny. For instance, the criteria appeared to be weighted towards shorter-term interventions in the poorest and most fragile states. Those are utterly worthy and proper objectives in themselves. However, many of the agencies—for example, the FAO—place more emphasis on medium to long-term development. Others have also had wide-ranging programmes that cannot be classified as aid and mandates to operate in developed as well as developing countries. That has always been their purpose. Are we really changing our basic attitude towards organisations that we helped to found?

As I said in my introductory remarks, international co-operation is absolutely essential to our future. The Government seem to be taking a positive and responsible position. If we can spur them on to put even more muscle into the international dimension of policy, particularly as the economic situation recovers—we hope—the better it will be and the more it will deserve support from all parts of the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I was not entirely sure what to expect from this debate. There are a great many agencies, boards and programmes in the world. I remembered when I started to read the briefings beforehand that I used to teach a course on international organisations at the London School of Economics. As I discovered, the students were hoping that this course would help them to get good jobs in international organisations. It evolved over the years into a course that, as I told them in the first lecture, was intended to dissuade them from joining an international organisation.

I did my best to explain the structural problems that all international agencies unavoidably suffer from, and the necessarily good work that they do in some rather difficult circumstances. As the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, pointed out, functional agencies long pre-dated the UN. Some of them were 19th century agencies such as the Universal Postal Union and some riparian bodies. The International Labour Organisation was founded just after the First World War. Then the United Nations sponsored and provided a degree of accountability for a whole generation of new bodies. There are now a great many. Unfortunately, some duplicate each other’s activities and there is some overlap.

That is part of the problem of assessing how valuable they all are. I recall that the FAO, the World Health Organisation and UNESCO had enormous problems in their secretariats and in their effectiveness 30 or 40 years ago. All agencies have suffered from American ambivalence. The Americans wanted agencies to serve the global good, as the United States saw it, which meant, in those days, opposing the Soviet Union; and Russian, Chinese and Saudi ambivalence has been a problem for many years. Agencies are unavoidably imperfect, even more imperfect than national Governments. Recruitment and appointment is part of the problem. The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, said that we should find the best people on merit, not on nationality. He knows very well from his time in the European Commission that that does not apply even in the European Union. It is much harder to apply in organisations that have well over 100 state members and in which the Finance Minister of a particular country wants to get his nephew into a really good job, or the President wants to get his son into a really good job. Those are the problems with which we have to deal.

There are also perverse outcomes, as the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, has pointed out, not just in UN Women but on the Human Rights Council, with which, in this imperfect world, we have to deal. I can recall taking part in a conference associated with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, in which I dared to crack a joke about the Iraqi approach to a number of matters, whereupon I was immediately denounced by the Iraqi delegate at this informal conference and an official apology was asked for. One has to be very careful how one behaves in international bodies.

The United Kingdom is an active and major player in this complex world. We provide between 6 and 7 per cent of contributions to these various agencies and our contributions are rising. The United Kingdom is now the largest contributor to international agencies in Europe. As the United States becomes a more ambivalent player, in a number of ways we are becoming more important; we are an engaged player. I hope noble Lords agree that the multilateral aid review was a very constructive assessment of the limited effectiveness of a range of different bodies. It was extremely complimentary about the effectiveness of some and constructively critical of a number of others.

The noble Lord, Lord Judd, whom I think I remember first meeting at a UN association meeting a very long time ago—

[Lord Judd]

A very long time ago.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

—when I was young. The noble Lord talked about the problems of a number of agencies, in particular UNESCO, with the loss of US funding and with the United Kingdom having just been elected to the executive board. UNESCO continues to have a number of problems with effectiveness. This new blow will be an additional one, but we also recognise that UNESCO carries out a number of functions that are not provided by other international agencies, and it is in all our interests that those functions continue to be effectively provided.

I should perhaps admit to a very small personal interest; I was rather upset that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, did not point out that Saltaire is also a world heritage site. I hope that he will visit it soon.

The UN Population Fund is also under fire from the American right, but that is not a new story. Agencies have been under fire from the American right for as long as I can remember. The Cold War had even more attacks of that sort. The UK is again playing a constructive role on the executive board. UN Women, a reorganised body, is too young for us to be able to see how effective it will be, but we are giving it our full support.

The International Labour Organisation, on which the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, commented, has a number of problems. Only 40 per cent of its staff are currently working in the developed world. The International Labour Organisation, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, will know, has negotiated and agreed a very large number of conventions on aspects of labour, many of which still lack enough national ratifications to be carried into practice. There is a limit to how useful it is to design things on child labour, and other such things, which are not then carried through to ratification and implementation by the majority of the members of the organisation.

The noble Lord, Lord Judd, thinks that we are a little too critical of the Food and Agriculture Organisation. I would suggest that we remain constructively critical of an organisation which has been in deep trouble in the past, and is now improving but has some way to go.

Noble Lords asked about the British approach, and how far Britain should press on its own for improvement. Of course we should work with others, and we do. One of the pleasures of my work in government, as someone who goes to regular Foreign Office ministerial meetings, is to hear how frequently the Foreign Secretary says, “Well, the most important thing in this is that we must work with our European partners to maximise our influence in X, Y or Z”. Of course we do that. We work with all of the partners we can do—European and Commonwealth—through as many networks as we can. However, we often discover that the Western caucus within these organisations has to be careful not to upset what is still seen as the G77 caucus and that tensions within these agencies about who tells whom what to do remains a source of problems. The question of who pays and who does not pay is a rather different thing. The multilateral aid review, as a national contribution, was a constructive contribution. It provides a basis from which we can talk to other Governments about what needs to be done.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, talked about reports to Parliament and parliamentary oversight. He may recall that there have been suggestions in this House in the past four or five years that we might experiment with an ad hoc committee on international organisations which might look at the how Britain relates to international agencies and which ones provide us with the best value for money. That suggestion might again, if he wishes, be raised with the Liaison Committee.

It is right that the British Government should be asking, since we are a major contributor, what value for money we receive from these bodies. Since we are on a rising curve in our international aid budget, and in our contributions to these organisations, we have to have some concern about public acceptability. Perhaps not every noble Lord in this Chamber reads the Daily Mail with as much attention as I do every day, but the Daily Mail is not an enthusiast for rising British contributions to international agencies. It is not enormously enthusiastic about international agencies as such, be they the European Union, the FAO or the UN Population Fund.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, talked about the balance between the FCO and other departments. These are functional agencies and it is therefore proper that the functional departments should provide the lead. A lot of the work, particularly that of some of the environmental and meteorological agencies, is highly technical and expert and there is an expert community, particularly in the climate change world, which works with the Government and with their counterparts in other countries to progress the work that is under way. The FCO does not attempt to duplicate that work. It has a small department which co-ordinates what others are doing and works with them through our representatives and our delegates in those various agencies when they meet. Engagement with outside experts and lobbies is high. At the UN conference on climate change, the number of British lobbies represented has been astonishingly high. It is not something that takes place behind the scenes.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, that I do not see the contradiction he suggested between prioritising bilateralism and downgrading multilateralism. We are doing both and it seems to me that the stronger one’s bilateral relations, the stronger one’s multilateral relations can also be. We are working with others to try to improve these organisations. Building coalitions within organisations such as the European Union, the Commonwealth and many other global organisations seems to be the way forward.

I end where I started. These agencies will never be perfect. As we all know, internationalism suffers from structural problems. We have our own ideas about how the world should be organised and how agencies should be organised, which are not always shared by the Governments of all other countries, so we have to work with them.