Red tape restricts aid to world's poor

Millions of the world's poorest people are suffering because Brussels bureaucracy is slowing the payment of aid, EU officials admitted yesterday.

Poul Nielsen, the EU commissioner for development, is urging action to "unblock" €11.2bn (£7.6bn) in response to complaints from charities that money needed for Aids, TB and malaria projects remains unused years after being pledged. But Mr Nielsen insisted that progress had been made, and said the union's 15 member states found it easier to criticise Brussels than to improve their own performance.

"We are making serious efforts to reform the way the system works," he said. "We will never avoid the difference between commitment and spending."

Aid spending in the EU has long been beset by difficulties, but progress has been made to streamline procedures and eliminate dormant projects.

The backlog is in the spending of the European Development Fund (EDF), a programme which allots aid to 78 former colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific. Its funding regulations are complex, and often micro-managed by the member states which control the purse strings.

The commission has repeatedly been attacked for failing to clean up its act faster. EU officials point to the difficulty of switching EDF funds from one recipient country to another - something which was achieved recently, however, in the cases of Zimbabwe, Togo, Liberia and Haiti after aid was suspended for political reasons.

The commission says the €11.2 bn backlog figure is artificially inflated by an inevitable time-lag between money being pledged and actually spent.