Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what steps he is taking to ensure the (a) transparency and (b) accountability of development spending while updates to (i) Development Tracker and (ii) International Aid Transparency Initiative are paused during January and February 2023.

The FCDO remains committed to Aid Transparency, which we confirmed in our response to the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) Review of Transparency, published in 2022. The implementation of new systems has required that we pause publication of the FCDO's monthly programme data to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) and the Development Tracker (DevTracker) website. These systems must be fully integrated in order for FCDO to resume our regular publication of programme data. As soon as the system changes have been successfully completed and the systems enable effective publication, FCDO will resume publication of new data and documents (within the next four months). This will include publication of historic data and documents for the period of the pause. Other government departments continue to publish throughout this period - and the FCDO has and will continue to publish programme documents to IATI and DevTracker, including business cases, annual reviews and programme completion reports, on a monthly basis for programmes which are already being reported on.