International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Bill

Again, my hon. Friend is right. Information is power. If the information is available, it will ensure that political pressure can be put on to achieve more effective spending. Amendment No. 16 is expressed in an alternative form to amendment No. 11. It is less far-reaching, but goes further than the existing wording of the Bill. It would require the Government to identify 20 countries that are recipients of the greatest amount of United Kingdom bilateral aid and then report on the effectiveness of that aid. The same principle applies to that as to amendment No. 11: if the Government do not have that information available already, surely they should have. We are talking about taxpayers’ money going in large tranches to foreign countries. Surely we should require the Government to report to us on the effectiveness or otherwise of that public expenditure. We know that the Government talk a lot about delivery in public services and not just inputs. The Bill is an opportunity for the Government to impose requirements on themselves to deliver and to show the outputs from the investment, or expenditure, of taxpayers’ money. Amendment No. 9 is an alternative to amendment No. 16, which in turn is an alternative to amendment No. 11. It is a weaker alternative because it accepts the existing wording but increases the number of countries in respect of which the reports would have to be produced from 20 to 30. In Committee, the Minister undertook to increase the number to 25, but the Government’s approach in that respect is, in my submission, self-serving, because it is linked to the public service agreement targets—and who decides what those public service agreement targets are going to be, but the Government? Particular countries have been selected so that the Department can assess the effectiveness of expenditure, but, surprisingly, those targets are not concentrated on the countries where we have the largest expenditure of taxpayers’ money but chosen according to some other set of criteria. The Bill gives us the chance to increase public accountability. We should require the Government to increase the number significantly from what is already contained in the Bill. I do not support amendment No. 9, because my earlier amendment is better. Amendment No. 10 is even weaker, but yet again, it is stronger than the provisions in the Bill. On amendment No. 13, why should not the Secretary of State include everything in his assessment, rather than just what he thinks is appropriate? Why should it just be left to the Secretary of State to decide what he thinks is appropriate? Why should not some more objective standard apply? Amendments Nos. 17 and 19 extend the requirements imposed on the Secretary of State to report on the programmes being pursued by Government agencies, as well as Departments and non-departmental public bodies. I will wait to hear what the Minister says in responding to those two amendments. However, the original clause 2 as it was passed on Second Reading contained the expression ““across all departments””. Many of us thought that that added to the coherence of what the provisions sought to achieve. The Minister has not really given a satisfactory explanation of why the expression ““across all departments”” has been dropped from the revised version of the Bill as it has emerged from Committee. I wonder whether ““Government departments”” is meant to include Government agencies and non-departmental public bodies. If it already includes them, I would welcome that assurance from the Minister. If it does not, surely it should. Amendment No. 15 relates to the issue that my hon. Friend the Member for Stone is interested in: corruption. It would require corruption to be addressed specifically in the annual report. It is worth referring to the text of the amendment, if I can find the right page of my notes. My pages have turned over; obviously it is getting windy in this part of the Chamber.