Dear Ms Hillier,
I write to offer the Office for National Statistics (ONS) response to the Public Accounts Committee’s report on ‘The effectiveness of Official Development Assistance expenditure’.
The Committee made one recommendation to the ONS:
“All ODA spending departments should report back to us in 6 months’ time on the extent to which they will increase the proportion of their ODA-funded programmes that use performance measures based on impacts and outcomes.”
With apologies for the delay in our response, the ONS has been allocated around £300k of ODA directly from HM Treasury and we also receive a much larger grant (£2.7m in this year) from the FCDO (previously DFID). We have established robust M&E processes for our ODA eligible work and use performance measures based on impacts and outcomes to report to FCDO. Our latest annual review will be published by FCDO on DevTracker in September.
We do not specifically and separately monitor the impact of the £300k, as it pays for some of the administration which complements and supports the FCDO funded work. We are hoping for increased ODA funding from HMT in SR20, to use our now established M&E approaches to ensure that we monitor outcomes and impacts for all ODA funded work and report these transparently.
Please do let me know if you have any further questions, and we will be happy to keep the Committee updated on our progress.
Yours sincerely,
Professor Sir Ian Diamond