Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of not permitting representatives of organisations which apply for Darwin funding from serving on (a) Darwin Initiative Extra and (b) the Darwin Expert Committee.

Under its last three funding rounds, the Darwin Initiative received applications from 915 organisations.

To robustly assess applications against published criteria, Defra requires technical experts with relevant experience and knowledge. If we were to prevent experts with links to these 915 organisations from joining the Darwin Expert Committee, we would significantly compromise the Committee's capability to technically assess and make recommendations to Defra.

This is why Defra put in place a robust conflicts of interest policy, where members are required to declare their interests and recuse themselves from the assessment of any application in which they have an interest.