Commonwealth Development Corporation Bill

My right hon. Friend is quite right to slap down the former Foreign Office Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Devon (Sir Hugo Swire), on his implied suggestion that we should go back rather than forwards and put DFID under the Foreign Office: that is basically what he was saying. We have long ago said that that is the wrong way to proceed. Let me point out that there are already pooled funds of the type that he describes. In my day at DFID—I have every reason to believe that this continues—whenever there was eligible funding under the ODA rules that the Ministry of Defence or the Foreign Office wanted to spend, they would always have access to those funds. The huge amount of DFID money that goes through the Foreign Office now bears testament to that.