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Management Board | Development Committee | Audit Committee | Human Resources Strategy Committee | Investment Committee

DFID Management Board

Membership | Terms of Reference | Minutes of Meetings

In working towards the delivery of the Public Service Agreement the Management Board will aim to:

• communicate the vision, role, direction and priorities of DFID to staff and other stakeholders;
• ensure DFID's financial resources and staff are allocated and managed effectively;
• monitor and improve DFID's performance;
• protect and enhance DFID’s reputation as a highly effective international development organisation.

Meeting on 6 December 2006

Corporate Plan

1. Kevin Sparkhall introduced this item. He said that the Corporate Plan was a vision to take DFID to 2013, but it would also contain some more detailed plans for the Comprehensive Spending Review period. The paper outlined a number of key issues where a Management Board steer would be helpful.

2. The Board:

• thanked the team for the high quality paper;
• agreed that the Corporate Plan would be a central reference document which should affect all our business and individual planning processes;
• agreed that the Plan should not duplicate any existing planning work (for example in the Directors’ Delivery Plans). It should:

  • use existing analysis;
  • be directly linked to the Action Planning for the Capability Review and the Directors’ Delivery Plans;
  • focus on the gaps in our existing work, for example: (a) how to deal with the psychological constraints to change, our willingness to prioritise, etc; (b) how to embed communications deeper into our work; (c) the sort of career deal DFID staff should expect;

• agreed the importance of ensuring staff are engaged in the plan, and hence (a) asked FCPD to continue to communicate with staff via insight, and (b) asked Director-Generals to take key issues forward in their discussions with Divisions;

• on the ‘emerging issues’ (paragraph 8 of the paper), agreed that:

  • the decision on whether to pursue delegated cooperation with other donors (tiret ii) would ultimately be up to country offices. But it was the role of the centre to challenge and offer successful examples;
  • better data were needed before a steer could be given on tiret iii (providing resources to multilaterals through country programmes);

• on engaging with other Government departments (paragraph 9, tiret iii), agreed that:

  • we need to identify concrete proposals for how we can help other Government departments, for example on conflict or environment;
  • we can offer to subcontract out certain parts of our aid budget to them, but DFID should maintain ultimate control;
  • our interaction with other parts of Whitehall should be more confident – reflecting the fact that our agenda is the Government’s agenda;

• asked FCPD to come back to the Board in February with an update on this, including on whether the set of programme and administration choices add up.

Diversity

(a) Progress against Ten Point Plan

3. Liz Davis introduced this item. She noted that although DFID was doing well on gender and ethnic diversity, we needed to improve our diversity in terms of disability.

4. The Board:

• agreed that the assessment should be circulated to DCN members early next year;
• agreed that the SCS committee should write to all SCS to clarify the definition of disability and encouraging them and their staff to declare disabilities. But this should not just be a communication exercise – disabled SCS and their staff should be made aware of the benefits of declaring a disability;
• did not agree the suggestion to amend our targets for 2008.

(b) Disability Equality Scheme

5. Liz Davis introduced this item. She highlighted the process that the team had gone through in drawing up the scheme, involving disabled people both inside and outside DFID. There had been positive feedback from our stakeholders.

6. The Board:

• approved the scheme, subject to some textual changes;
• asked HR Division to come back to the Board with some more options on how we could fulfil the duties outlined in para 9.7 of the scheme. One possibility could be to include this in Director’s assurances;
• agreed that there should be three Deputy Director-level disability champions in DFID, one for each of the three business areas (Regional Programmes, Policy and International, Corporate Performance).

(c) Sexual Orientation

7. Charlotte Seymour-Smith introduced this item. She said that relative to other areas of diversity, DFID was performing badly on sexual orientation; the paper identified five steps to improve performance.

8. The Board:

• agreed the paper’s five points for action;
• agreed that Board members themselves should take a higher profile on this issue, including through (a) a spotlight notice from the Board; (b) more public appearances from Board members at fora/ events on this subject; (c) Suma meeting the British Council;
• agreed not to make any posts unavailable for LGBT staff;
• agreed that, as with disability, there should be three Deputy Director-level sexual orientation champions in DFID, one for each of the three business areas;
• asked that the data from the report be updated regularly, hopefully with a larger sample each time.

Security in Hostile Environments

9. Liz Davis introduced this item.

10. The Board:

• agreed the seven issues in paragraph 11, and agreed that these should be tested against our operations in 3-4 countries;
• asked that the legal advice on duty of care for consultants be clarified;
• asked that a tidied-up version of the paper be presented to Ministers;
• agreed that the paper should be sent out from Suma to heads of offices.