My hon. Friend is right. Nobody could deny that if the recalculation means that we have underspent, everyone will be clamouring for the extra money to be found for a non-existent project somewhere in the world just to satisfy themselves, but if the GDP figure is downgraded, there will not be many in the House calling for some of the money to be clawed back. The Bill, in effect, sets a minimum target for spending, not an amount. That is not what most people have in mind. The public will be confused about why they have to spend an extra £550 million—I have no idea where the money would come from—to meet this arbitrary target because it did not happen to match the projection that was made. That is ridiculous.
My new clause 6 means that none of those adjustments would be made. If the calculation was wrong but the money was spent in good faith on a good-faith calculation, that should be that. There should be no end-of-year recalculation of the budget based on an upgrade or a downgrade—it could work either way and I cannot predict which way it would go. It strikes me as ridiculous that the Treasury should have to dig out money from nowhere just to hit a particular target. That is why the new clause is so important.
The way that GNI is calculated is changing: 0.7% of the old GNI is quite different from 0.7% of the new GNI. For no reason other than statisticians deciding to calculate things differently, the taxpayer will have to find hundreds of millions of pounds extra in order to hit the 0.7% target.