Speeches by Cooper.

“We have done a partial review in the process of making these decisions. We have had to do an assessment of which organisations have the biggest impact and also which we can influence by contributing where we have the greatest influence. I think that probably some of these further questions we will also be assessing as …”

“May I add one thing about the way the shifts apply to some things? If you take the fragile and conflict-affected states, somewhere like Sudan, for example, when you cannot work with a Government in the same way because of the scale and nature of the conflict, in a country like that you might be working directly with lo…”

“Yes.”

“We had to make that difficult decision initially and it is affecting the funding for the next three years, but we have deliberately set out three years of funding and three-year agreements that allow people to plan, and that is now clear and announced. Don’t get me wrong. I still think we need to go further on defence …”

“It would be very easy, faced with the kinds of reductions we have had to make, and the difficult decision to increase defence spending—would be simply to step back. That decision on defence was taken over a year ago, and we then had to implement it and still put together the best possible programme going forward. It wo…”

“I wrote an article and we have had the announcements and the information that we published last week as part of this. This Committee, in its scrutiny, also does part of the communication about our approach. I think you are asking about our explanation to the public about why this is so important and why we continue to …”

“We cannot lose capacity and voice for women and girls. We have been part of the UN80 discussions, which are about ensuring that the UN as a whole can have maximum impact. That includes looking at different agencies and structures. We are very clear that women and girls need to be a central part of what the UN does and …”

“Do you mean through the central programmes?”

“Yes. LGBT issues are another area that was picked up as part of the equalities impact assessment. Once we got the impact assessment in, we shifted some of our decisions to make sure that some of that funding could be restored.”

“Prioritising women and girls across the FCDO allows us to respond if there is a sense of there being challenges in particular countries. Prioritising allows us to be champions worldwide, to continue to be a voice and to not get drawn into being part of a sense that all countries are somehow pulling back or going backwa…”

“Thank you very much.”

“We strongly disagree with that approach. It runs completely counter to our approach. Matters such as sexual health services, direct support for women and girls, or for LGBT rights are hugely important parts of our development work rooted in core values and core UK values as well. There are many Governments and services…”

“Most of the issues raised in that report are already Government policy—both in terms of our approach to illegal settlements and the serious humanitarian concerns we have. I would also say that I am particularly concerned right now about what is happening in the West Bank. I am also deeply concerned about keeping the Ga…”

“Yes, in the appropriate way. Yes.”

“We used that process, which Jenny had initially used before I am was appointed as Foreign Secretary. She had been using that through the summer to already make some adjustments. When we looked at it again together, we made further adjustments to restore funding for some of the areas affecting women and girls in order t…”

“Yes.”

“The reason I am going to pass this to Nick is because I think the detail of the staffing decisions within the FCDO needs ultimately to be done by the Permanent Secretaries. In terms of the overview we maintain on it, we are clear that we need to maintain skills, and we need to make sure that have proper equalities impa…”

“I will let Melinda pull out any individual figures that we have. But look, in terms of the overall sense, the reality is this: because development supports women and girls, any reduction in development spending will, of course, have an impact. What we have tried to do, however, is to make women and girls a priority acr…”

“I will pass to Nick on the detail of that.”

“There are risks involved in change but there are also risks involved in not changing, and there are global risks that we are dealing with that have massively changed in a short period. We are trying to adapt the institution and the workforce to be able to respond to those huge, changing risks and also change in respons…”