I share the Deputy's concern that such a level of unspent balance was allowed to accumulate over many years. Work has started on the backlog and additional staff have been assigned to clearing older commitments. A total of 43% of the pre-1995 commitments have now been cleared, and the global backlog of older commitments has been reduced by 25%. All dormant, i.e. pre-1995 commitments, will be cleared by 2001.
The Deputy will be aware that the current Commissioner is a former Development Minister who is very committed to and has spearheaded the reform process. These unspent balances came to light only after a series of independent evaluations in 1998. They came up for discussion by Development Ministers in 1999, and all the member states were truly horrified at the scale of unspent balances that had been allowed to accumulate.
To clarify one financial aspect of the issue, the huge sum of unspent EU aid is not sitting in a bank account waiting to be spent. About 10 billion of unspent moneys relate to commitments made under the EDF which are intended to assist the Afro-Caribbean and Pacific states. These funds have simply never been called up from the member states by the Commission. In other words, they have been allocated by member states but not called up for use by the Commission. That sort of inefficiency and bureaucracy is due to a number of reasons, many of which are a cause of legitimate concern to parliaments. These are the complex and time consuming bureaucracy in the Commission, leading to very slow decision making and delays in the approval of funding, a lack of decentralisation in the Commission, leaving too little decision making authority with the local Commission offices, and a rigidity in the funding system which makes it impossible to transfer funds from one allocation to another project. In some cases delays were legitimately caused by a freeze in long-term development aid to countries which were considered to be in breach of their commitments under the Lomé Convention. For example, during the 1990s long-term assistance but not humanitarian aid was suspended, inter alia, to Nigeria, the Congo, Angola, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Togo, Niger and other countries, because of conflict. Another reason is the lack of absorption capacity in the developing countries. In other words, the countries did not have the capacity to make use of the allocation which had been given to them.
