Inter-agency Misconduct Disclosure Scheme

(asked on 12th March 2021) - View Source

Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, if he will make an assessment on the potential effect on The Inter-Agency Misconduct Disclosure Scheme of planned reductions in UK aid.


Answered by
James Cleverly Portrait
James Cleverly
Home Secretary
This question was answered on 18th March 2021

DFID and now the FCDO have been consistently supportive of the Inter-Agency Misconduct Disclosure Scheme (MDS) since it was launched at the October 2018 Safeguarding Summit. FCDO's Safeguarding Unit is a member of the MDS Steering Committee.

The September 2020 UK strategy: Safeguarding against sexual exploitation and abuse and sexual harassment within the aid sector stated that we are actively encouraging organisations to sign up to the MDS. FCDO Ministers, including the Secretary of State, publicised the MDS during events in Parliament in November 2020 and January 2021. Senior officials from FCDO's Safeguarding Unit regularly encourage delivery partners, including aid charities, to sign up.

We have not provided any funding to the MDS.

We have not carried out an assessment of the effectiveness of the scheme, but data published in February shows that in the two years since the MDS began, over 7,600 sets of misconduct data have been shared thanks to the scheme, resulting in 75 hires being stopped and so helping keep individuals safe from potential risk of sexual exploitation and abuse and sexual harassment linked to the delivery of aid.

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