Britain demands return of unspent tsunami aid David Hencke, Westminster correspondent Wednesday March 1, 2006
Millions of pounds of taxpayers' aid money destined to help victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami is still stuck in the bank accounts of World Bank and United Nations organisations a year after the disaster, a report by the National Audit Office, Parliament's financial watchdog, revealed today. The Department for International Development has now asked all the organisations to either account for the money or return the cash to Britain so it can be reallocated for fresh disaster work. Britain originally allocated £75m to help the millions of victims of the disaster which struck on Boxing Day in 2004 and killed 300,000 people. But they held back £3.9m in reserves and diverted £7.5m to other disaster efforts when it became clear that not all the money was being spent. Some agencies, notably the Red Cross and the Red Crescent which received £3.5m between them for emergency supplies, acted swiftly and have spent all the money. The Red Cross organised an emergency airlift of supplies 24 hours after the disaster struck. Other organisations, notably the World Bank multi-donor trust fund for Aceh in Indonesia which was given £4m in September, were hit by bureaucracy. By December last year it had still not spent much of the money on reconstruction programmes and £1.1m has yet to be allocated to specific projects. Sir John Bourn, the comptroller and auditor-general, said today : "The speed of DfID's response after the tsunami was impressive, and demonstrates the importance of planning for disasters. "The scaling back of expenditure against the £75m of humanitarian assistance promised was justified, given the generosity of other governments and people from around the world. "But it remains important to keep control over the £50m paid in grants to other organisations, and to know how it is spent." Edward Leigh, the Tory MP who chairs the public accounts committee, joined the praise for the quick response, but said ongoing doubts about where the money went were unacceptable. "One year on from the disaster, the department don't know where that money went. They don't know if it was used, where it was needed or if it's just sitting idly in a bank account. That is not good enough. The department must look much more closely at how these considerable sums of money are being used by the agencies involved." A spokeswoman for DfID said : "DfID only provided funds for tsunami relief work to trusted third parties - aid agencies, NGOs, many of which we work with often - and only after agreeing a detailed programme of work. "... Burdening our partners with too much red tape, in the form of even more stringent reporting requirements could have constrained their ability to deliver urgent humanitarian relief. "Clearly this would have defeated the object of the exercise - to help the many thousands of people in desperate short-term need. "Now the immediate disaster phase has passed and rebuilding and reconstruction work has begun, DfID has asked partners to fully account for their spending and to return any unspent funds." http://politics.guardian.co.uk/development/story/0,,1720261,00.html Post message: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe : [EMAIL PROTECTED] List owner : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage : http://proletar.8m.com/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
