European Union (Amendment) Bill

My hon. Friend makes a germane point, which is relevant to the amendment. It does not matter what we call the high representative; everybody else in the world is calling him a Foreign Minister, but he was originally described as the European Union's foreign policy Minister. That has been changed to high representative. The fact remains that the post is a new institution, and the holder has been charged with the implementation and delivery of European Union policy, according to strategy and guidelines issued by the European Council. How he implements that strategy is a matter for him and for Foreign Ministers in the Council of the European Union. He has the right to bring initiatives before the Council. The Council then decides on the initiatives, often through qualified majority voting. The point is that we are dealing with an individual who has been charged by the European Union with getting results in the field of foreign policy, and the levers of power have been put in his hands. The high representative is not only a member of the Commission, but chairs the Council of Ministers. He has all the levers of power for implementing European Union policy in his hands. There is therefore a risk that he will get his hands on the lever of European Union aid policy, as my hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh said, and that it will become part of the European Union's overall foreign policy, as opposed to being compartmentalised as development policy, under which development money would be spent according to strict development aid criteria such as relative poverty. I have heard the Government's defence on that point, which relates to the insertion of the poverty criteria in the treaty, but their defence does not seem to be much more qualified than that. It does not strike me that that is something that the Government have been keen to trumpet in the past. Shortly after an initial meeting in June to set out the framework for the intergovernmental conference mandate at the European Council meeting, the Government issued a document called ““The Reform Treaty: The British Approach to the European Intergovernmental Conference, July 2007””. It set out the Government's position after the European Council, and the decisions taken there by the previous Prime Minister. The document was to set the scene for the intergovernmental conference that came later in the year in Lisbon. It goes into detail about the Government's position. It gives a detailed analysis of what the Government regard as being the principal changes made to the treaty—the innovations and the Government's policy towards them. There is barely any mention in the document of development aid policy. When the Minister for Europe winds up, I challenge him to tell me what important announcements are made in the document about European Union development aid policy and our Government's policy towards it. What the Government said about the change in the treaty is very thin indeed. There is mention of poverty, but not poverty in any particular country or the most disadvantaged countries. No refinement or clearer targeting is given. The fear in my mind is that the substantial EU aid funding, which comes in part from taxpayers in this country, will be spent according to wider objectives and not strictly according to development aid criteria. That is a fear for all of us who are concerned about development and aid. Our wish is for aid to go to the poorest countries in the world, without being diverted because of other issues and priorities. It should go to the very poorest people in the world to give them the chance of a better future—to countries such as Bangladesh, to sub-Saharan African countries, to countries that are ravaged by AIDS and have terrible problems. Those are places where it can really contribute to development and to lifting people out of the direst poverty. We do not want it to go towards alleviating poverty in countries that might be poor by our standards but that are in a much better position than the poorest countries in the world. My hon. Friend's amendment hits the nail on the head: there is some risk of desperately needed aid funds being diverted away from the people who need them most.