Foreign Affairs committee  I have three quick points. The first is that there's a difference between having a risk appetite and being foolhardy, so you need to be able to demonstrate that you have a good risk assessment procedure in place and a good risk register. Second, the value of well-informed and a

Foreign Affairs committee  It's certainly true that you can aspire to leverage large amounts of private sector capital. A figure that's often used is 20:1, for example in the climate field, where one pound of government money can leverage 20 pounds' worth of private sector money. In principle, you'll get m

Foreign Affairs committee  We all have views on that. Paddy, why don't you start?

Foreign Affairs committee  Let me come in before Diana rounds up. This is one instrument among many. When I last looked at a DFID's private sector work, they had something like 30 to 40 different instruments available to them for working with the private sector—some large, some small. There is a large num

Foreign Affairs committee  We live in a world of market failure. If the markets were perfect, then we might not need organizations like your DFI or CDC. However, there are information failures, misunderstandings of risk, and coordination failures in markets, and DFIs help to overcome those failures. One k

Foreign Affairs committee  That sounds entirely plausible to me.

Foreign Affairs committee  But don't stand for any nonsense—

Foreign Affairs committee  I would like to say very briefly that one of the things that happens as you get going with a DFI is that you start to generate your own funds. For many years CDC was able to self-finance quite a lot of new investments because it was receiving payback on loans or was selling off e

Foreign Affairs committee  If I may, Mr. Sidhu, first of all on CDC, it's just worth googling CDC, and I'm sure Diana won't mind my saying this, just to see how controversial the kinds of decisions she's been talking about can be, and why it is so important to have the political cover that she talked about

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you for having us, first of all. ODI is very pleased to be here. I am Simon Maxwell. I am formerly lots of things, including director of this institute and, until the election, specialist adviser to a counterpart committee of yours in the British Parliament, the House of C