I did; I have read the whole report. It also states:
“It remains a significant challenge for CDC to demonstrate its ultimate objective of creating jobs and making a lasting difference to people’s lives in some of the world’s poorest places.”
It goes on to make other serious criticisms. On reporting impact, the NAO says:
“Changes in reporting development impact over the last four years have made it difficult for CDC and the Department to set out a consistent picture of what has been achieved.”
It criticises the CDC’s failure to deliver on the evaluation contract, which was a key part of the business case for the last recapitalisation involving more than £700 million. It criticises the CDC’s claim to have created 1 million jobs, stating that
“in 2015 it reported that more than one million direct and indirect jobs had been created…CDC does not attribute these jobs directly to the investment it makes in the company. Since 2012 it has been considering how to measure job quality but has not yet established an overall methodology to do so…its progress has been slow”.
Worryingly, the NAO warned that
“recruitment and retention challenges remain a significant risk to CDC’s operations.”
That is crucial for an organisation planning a massive financial expansion.
The CDC has indeed clamped down on excessive pay, although the CEO still takes home more than £300,000 a year, which is significantly more than the Prime Minister. However, the NAO also reports that
“the Department and CDC will shortly be negotiating a new remuneration framework”.
Could we expect salaries to go back up? Particularly worrying, one would think, for a Secretary of State who thinks that most of our aid is being “stolen” or “squandered” is some of the NAO commentary on the CDC’s efforts to tackle fraud and corruption. The NAO tells us that the CDC has
“only recently established systems to consolidate records of all the allegations it receives…This made it harder for it to provide comprehensive reporting to the Department. ”
The NAO report states that DFID’s own internal audit team concluded that the figure of just four allegations of fraud and corruption at the CDC in the entire period from 2009 to 2016 was “surprisingly low”. At the very least, the CDC is worthy of the same level of robust scrutiny and criticism that is levelled at other development funding outlets.