International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Bill

I hope that my hon. Friend will have a chance to participate in the debate. As he knows, the word ““corruption”” is included in at least one of the amendments in the group. In Committee, the promoter of the Bill, the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr. Clarke), was chided for allowing the Bill to become a Government Bill. Of course, until it left Committee, the measure was vulnerable to Government dirty tricks, but now, collectively, we have the opportunity to strengthen it and I hope that nothing will stand in the way of our achieving that objective today. Why do not we have a collective Back-Bench rebellion against the Government, who have been reluctant to make the Bill as strong as it could and should be? The promoter of the Bill is to be congratulated on having rescheduled Report from its original date of 12 May so that we have a full day for discussion. The essence of the Bill is to achieve public accountability and to encourage public discussion of important issues. Over the next few hours we have the chance to do just that and to demonstrate how concerned we are and how much importance we attach to greater transparency and accountability in the spending of taxpayers’ money on overseas aid. This group of amendments is, in effect, a shopping list. We shall not be able to vote on all of them, but I hope that in the course of our discussion we shall be able to agree collectively that some of them are worthy of support and inclusion in the Bill, which can then in that amended form achieve Third Reading. Before I discuss new clauses 5 and 7 in detail it may be more convenient for the House if I go through some of the more technical amendments seriatim, so that Members can begin to assess which ones should have the greatest priority for inclusion. Amendment No. 2 would leave out subsection (4) of clause 1. Why should an annual report be able to revise"““anything contained in a previous annual report””?" That smacks of rewriting history, and for the Bill to include a provision to facilitate and achieve such an objective demonstrates just how unusual it is in legislative terms. Are we suggesting that companies should be able to rewrite their annual reports, or that all annual reports may be changed willy-nilly? If there is an error in an annual report, especially a report to Parliament, why cannot we have a system whereby it is corrected immediately and brought to the attention of the House rather than being held over until the next annual report? The current provision refers not even to correcting a report but to revising it, which is much wider; it provides for the revision of anything contained in a previous annual report.