Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what progress he is making on improving the transparency of the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund.

The CSSF has now published two Annual Reports, 83 programme summaries for 2018/19 (in addition to the 62 programme summaries published for 2017/18) and 64 Annual Review summaries for 2017/18 (in addition to the 49 published for 2016/17.

The CSSF is working towards meeting a “good” International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) rating by 2020 in line with the government’s commitment. There is a presumption to publish programme information for all CSSF programmes, and for 2018/19 83 out of our 90 programmes, had programme summaries published. The two key reasons why we may not be able to make programme documentation public are to protect national security and to protect the safety and security of beneficiaries, partners and partner governments.

The latest Annual Report and programme summaries took on many of the suggestions received from stakeholders in the development sector. The Annual Report included a chapter on spend with break downs by ODA and non-ODA, department, region, theme and discretionary and non-discretionary budgets. In addition, Programme summaries broke down project spend by ODA/non-ODA splits.

We are also working to publish more Official Development Assistance (ODA) spend information on Devtracker. We have published data for all FCO and DFID CSSF programmes for the last six quarters and are currently working on the next quarter.