Mr. Healey: To ask the Secretary of State for International Development if she will make a statement on action her Department istaking to relieve the pressure of chronic debts for the poorest developing countries. [57823]Clare Short: The Chancellor and I are working to seek international agreement to speed up the implementation of the Highly IndebtedPoor Countries Initiative so that all eligible countries will be on track for debt relief by 2000. In addition over the lasteighteen months, the Department for International Development (DFID) has cancelled some £30 million of bilateral aid debts, andprovided some £36 million to help the African Development Bank meet its share of the cost of implementing the Heavily Indebted PoorCountries (HIPC) debt Initiative. We are also providing around £100 million to help a number of developing countries meet their debtservice payments to the international financial institutions. We have committed $10 million to help meet Mozambique's residualfinancing gap under the HIPC Initiative; and we have contributed £400,000 to Debt Relief International to provide technicalassistance in debt management to poor countries. We are also funding research on the key issues of debt sustainability and internaldebt.We are also taking action to ensure that the forthcoming comprehensive review of the HIPC Initiative looks at whether sufficientlevels of debt relief is being provided to developing countries. We are pressing for the review to examine in more detail therelationship between debt relief and poverty reduction, to make certain that debt relief will help developing countries achieve theinternational development targets.