Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what steps his Department is taking to improve the transparency of Official Development Assistance spent by his Department.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) is committed to meeting the target for Official Development Assistance (ODA) transparency laid down in the UK Aid Strategy and we routinely publish data on gov.uk. The FCO has brought in changes to the way we publish data, including upgrading computer systems, streamlining the data entry process and reviewing the level of detail we include in our data publications. Many of these changes are strategic and long term in nature, and are intended to facilitate much better data publishing by 2020. The FCO will continue to discuss the detailed findings with Publish What You Fund to identify further areas for improvement. We are confident that we will meet HMG’s transparency commitment by 2020 and are making sure that UK taxpayers’ money is spent well in ways that advance the UK Aid Strategy’s objectives.