Speeches by Cooper.

“You do.”

“I will let Melinda and Nick supplement my answer with the precise figures, but effectively there are three central sources of funding for Africa. There is direct ODA bilateral funding. There is also our contribution to the African Development Bank, the multilateral development bank funding, which we have maintained at …”

“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…”

“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…”

“Thank you very much.”

“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.”

“Yes, in the appropriate way. Yes.”

“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…”

“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…”

“Ultimately, Ministers. The fact of us giving a three-year budget to countries helps to develop that sense of the plan. This is not just, about hand-to-mouth decisions that they are going to be making in the short term, but about what is the plan over a three-year period. The idea is that the country-based teams will be…”

“No.”

“We have made the decisions about funding allocations. If we had not made the decisions about funding allocations until we had done the overseas network, we would have been in trouble because we would then have been starting the financial year and the spending review processes without the allocations being set out. If t…”

“Exactly. Previously, we would have had a centrally directed programme that countries would still have drawn down from but it would more likely have tended to be provision or grant funding from a centrally given programme as opposed to the provision of expertise.”

“For the detail of the—”