The humanitarian situation in Idlib is extremely serious. DFID continues to closely monitor the situation in Northwest Syria, and we are concerned about the impact of recent escalations of violence on civilians. So far this financial year we have allocated £40 million in support for the region, and are keeping this under active review as the situation on the ground develops.

Our support in this region continues to provide Syrians with shelter, clean water and sanitation, mental health services, as well as aiding health workers and facilities that have been affected by escalating violence. DFID partners are working tirelessly to meet the growing needs among displaced people.

In 2018 alone, DFID support in Idlib provided approximately 836,000 people with access to clean drinking water, 873,000 medical consultations, 69,000 food rations and access to formal education for 110,000 children.

Since the Yemen conflict started in 2015, our partners have reported two UK funded assets have been damaged by alleged airstrikes. These are a Norwegian Refugee Council warehouse in the Harradh area of Hajjah governorate on 21 June 2015 and a UNICEF water and sanitary health facility in Sahar district on 22 July 2018.

We closely monitor such incidents, but we are not able to conduct investigations which would allow us to conclude which parties were responsible.

Losses to DFID following the Norwegian Refugee Council warehouse incident were £3,127, while DFID suffered no direct losses as a result of damages to the UNICEF facility.

In order to prevent DFID Myanmar funds going to military owned companies we already have enhanced private sector due diligence in place. We are constantly working to strengthen this process. DFID Myanmar has recently written to its partners asking them to review their supply chains to check UK money is not being used to purchase goods and services from companies identified as military owned by the recent UN Fact Finding Mission report on Myanmar.

None of the UK’s £5.8 billion international climate finance is provided through the European Commission budget or European Development Fund.

​Almost all of the Government's investment in Brazil through the Prosperity Fund has been allocated from Official Development Assistance. There is a small non-ODA budget allocated by the Treasury to the Prosperity Fund to support Secondary Benefits work.

Recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Reports state that global temperatures and sea levels are rising and are expected to continue doing so. Least Developed Countries are expected to be most vulnerable to the impacts of future global temperature increases, being least able to cope with the impacts.

The UK remains committed to help developing countries build their resilience to the impacts of climate change and support low carbon, sustainable growth. The UK has committed to provide £5.8 billion of International Climate Finance from the UK aid budget from 2016/17 to 2020/21, and at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in September 2019 announced a doubling to £11.6 billion from 2021/22 to 2025/26.

In 2018 the UK provided International Climate Finance directly to the following Least Developed Countries through its bilateral programming in country, and expects to spend across a similar geographical footprint in 2019:

Of the countries above, Bangladesh, Madagascar, Mozambique, Myanmar, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan and Tanzania are coastal and are likely to be adversely impacted by rising sea levels.

The UK remains committed to helping developing countries build their resilience to the impacts of climate change and support low carbon, sustainable growth. The UK has committed to provide £5.8 billion of International Climate Finance from the UK aid budget from 2016/17 to 2020/21, and at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in September 2019 announced a doubling to £11.6 billion from 2021/22 to 2025/26.

In 2018 the UK provided International Climate Finance directly to the following Least Developed Countries through its bilateral programming in country:

In 2018 the UK also supported several multi-country and regional bilateral climate programmes and contributed core funding to the climate multilaterals the Green Climate Fund and the Global Environment Facility.

If we are to meet the ambition of Sustainable Development Goal 3 and ensure no-one is left behind, countries need to invest more public resources in health. The UK strongly supports the commitments in the United Nations Political Declaration on Universal Health Coverage. This calls on countries to increase public spending, with an emphasis on primary health care, noting World Health Organisation recommendations of an additional 1% of GDP or more. We provide technical assistance to countries as part of our health system strengthening programmes through our country offices and through funding to the World Health Organisation. The UK will step up our efforts to end preventable deaths of mothers, new-born babies and children in the developing world by 2030. This will include boosting our support for developing countries to make progress towards universal health coverage, focusing on ensuring sexual and reproductive health and rights and helping the most vulnerable women such as survivors of female genital mutilation, and working with our global partners to deliver Gavi’s new strategy that will vaccinate a further 300 million children in the world’s poorest countries by 2025.

If we are to meet the ambition of Sustainable Development Goal 3 and ensure no-one is left behind, countries need to invest more public resources in health. The UK strongly supports the commitments in the United Nations Political Declaration on Universal Health Coverage. This calls on countries to increase public spending, with an emphasis on primary health care, noting World Health Organisation recommendations of an additional 1% of GDP or more. We provide technical assistance to countries as part of our health system strengthening programmes through our country offices and through funding to the World Health Organisation. The UK will step up our efforts to end preventable deaths of mothers, new-born babies and children in the developing world by 2030. This will include boosting our support for developing countries to make progress towards universal health coverage, focusing on ensuring sexual and reproductive health and rights and helping the most vulnerable women such as survivors of female genital mutilation, and working with our global partners to deliver Gavi’s new strategy that will vaccinate a further 300 million children in the world’s poorest countries by 2025.

Good development takes account of climate change and environmental sustainability, and DFID is increasingly putting climate and environment at the heart of the UK aid agenda in line with the Sustainable Development Goals.

The department’s rules for designing and implementing programmes charge staff with considering sustainability and resilience, including climate change and environmental shocks. As well as informing the appraisal of new projects, staff are expected to manage environmental risks throughout implementation, in line with DFID’s environmental and social safeguards. DFID has a cadre of specialist climate and environment advisers who support teams to meet these requirements.

In July this year, the Government committed in the Green Finance Strategy to align our Official Development Assistance with the Paris Agreement, that is to support low-carbon and climate resilient development. The Prime Minister also recently announced that the UK would be doubling the quantity of International Climate Finance we provide to support developing countries from 2021.

Since 2011, UK aid has provided 26 million people with improved access to clean energy, and helped 57 million people to cope with the effects of climate change. It has also reduced greenhouse gas emissions internationally by 16 million tonnes – the equivalent to taking three million cars off the road for a year.

DFID takes issues of plastics pollution and environmental degradation seriously. At the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, the UK Government committed £70 million to boost research into how to reduce the use of plastics and help countries prevent plastic waste entering our oceans. DFID is contributing up to £39 million, providing technical assistance to governments in developing countries who have committed to taking action, and testing practical approaches to increase plastic recycling rates through pilots in Bangladesh, Ghana and Uganda. At the recent UN meetings, the Prime Minister made several announcements on increasing the funding that the Government will provide to protect the environment and biodiversity and doubling the UK’s international climate finance to at least £11.6 billion over the period 2021-2025.

Between 2009 and 2018 DFID’s spend on education doubled from almost £500 million to nearly £1 billion. The Prime Minister has publicly stated that education, particularly girls’ education, is a priority for the UK. He announced £90 million for education in emergencies and protracted crisis including £85 million to Education Cannot Wait at the G7 Summit, and last week the UK announced a £515 million package of support for education, including a £300 million pledge for the new International Finance Facility for Education. In total, these announcements will support 6.3 million girls. Alongside our commitment to the Global Partnership for Education, the UK is now the leading bilateral donor to all three major multilateral education funds and continues to be one of the leading bilateral donors to basic education. At the UN General Assembly last week, the UK has been calling for others to step up and follow our lead.

DFID and HMT routinely work on the rules and requirements governing the use of Official Development Assistance (ODA), including the central contribution to poverty reduction through established governance structures such as the ODA Ministerial group and supporting Senior Officials group. Ultimately, Secretaries of State for any Government Department spending ODA under the International Development Act are responsible for ensuring that this spend meets its statutory obligations including ensuring that it is likely to contribute to poverty reduction. All UK ODA must also meet OECD Development Assistance Committee eligibility criteria – that is, ODA must be administered with the promotion of economic development and welfare of developing countries as its main objective.

In 2018, the UK provided £1.2 billion of humanitarian aid. This is additional to the international climate finance we provide. With Egypt, we led calls for greater action to build resilience at the UN Climate Summit, where we announced a further £175 million to help protect up to a billion people from the impact of disasters.

My Lords, the noble and right reverend Lord makes a very good point about ensuring that we target aid to the people who need it. DfID Pakistan continues to review its support to poor and marginalised people in Pakistan and we aim to better disaggregate our results data in future. We recently had some success in collecting more and better-quality data on people with disabilities in Pakistan, and this also picked up other minorities. We have learned from that and will build on it to focus our energy on collecting data from these other groups.

I thank the Minister for his reply, particularly for saying that DfID focuses on the most vulnerable, but in Pakistan this is simply not happening. There are communities there which are twice distinguished by their poverty; first, on religious grounds, as either Hindus or Christians; secondly, because they are Dalits. Of course, if they are women, they are discriminated against on a third ground. Is it not possible for DfID to disaggregate its aid in order to identify, focus on and target such minorities?