Treaty of Lisbon (No. 6)

I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving me the opportunity to intervene again. One could have made exactly that point when the Overseas Development Administration was part of the Foreign Office. Those of us who were junior Ministers in the Foreign Office at the time will remember that the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs controlled the international development budget. Those budget and policy arrangements were very different from the kind of creative tension that now exists in the Cabinet between the Secretary of State for International Development and the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Under the Lisbon treaty, international development will be put under foreign affairs, and my concern—and that of many non-governmental organisations—is that that will skew the way in which international development is seen in the European Union, particularly in regard to supporting middle-income countries in northern Africa and elsewhere.