I, too, want to place on record my thanks to the Clerk of Bills and all my colleagues on the Front and Back Benches who have taken part. We have heard excellent contributions from both sides of the House in what has been a very informative and useful process of scrutiny of this Bill through Second Reading, Committee and Report.
I was pleased to hear the Minister setting out a little more detail on the period over which we can expect the CDC to be drawing down monies. His suggestion that it will be a five and 10-year period in two tranches is much more reassuring than some of the earlier suggestions. There will, however, be a temptation to draw that down at a faster rate because of changes in reporting how our aid is calculated and what proportion the CDC counts towards that. So while I take what the Minister said with great sincerity, I urge him to caution against those who would suggest dumping money, as it were, into the CDC as a way of artificially meeting the 0.7% target. He should only go there with a clear plan and business case, and a clear understanding of how that is going to contribute towards poverty eradication.
I am concerned that we are still not going far enough on tax havens. I listened to what the Minister said and will look with interest at that strategy and what practical steps are taken to see us moving resources out of those jurisdictions, and the secondary effects we can have there.
I wholeheartedly agree with the hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) about the role that the CDC should play. It should not go for an easy life by going where commercial resources already go. There was some suggestion in the debate that we were almost the only source of funding for many of these investments, but that is patently not the case. In our development spending overall, and certainly in the case of the CDC, we ought to be acting as a catalyst for the very best in poverty eradication, for placing the very best focus on difficult
sectors, areas and countries where others will not go, and for achieving the highest standards in sustainability and human rights. We ought to be acting as a catalyst in the world, not just going for an easy return and an easy life.
There is something that I still do not quite understand, and I hope that Ministers will reflect on this. The Secretary of State set out some good principles in her letter of 16 December on transparency, on open-book breakdowns of salaries, tenders and material costs, on due diligence in supply chains, on tax status and compliance, and on disclosures of conflicts of interest. I do not see why those principles cannot be applied equally to the CDC, just as they will be applied to other spenders of our aid spending. I urge Ministers to look carefully at this again. That is a reasonable set of requirements and it would be helpful if they could be applied to CDC.
On the question of the countries that CDC focuses on, there has been a shift. It is important to recognise that the CDC is investing more in the poorest countries, but it needs to go much further. I urge Ministers not to have any poverty of ambition in setting the framework and parameters for the CDC, particularly in relation to future disbursements, to ensure that the money goes to the poorest countries and not to middle-income countries that can often draw down other sources of funding and finance.
It was reassuring to hear many positive voices today making the case for our wider role in international development and for our 0.7% aid target. Indeed, it was good to hear the Prime Minister the other day rejecting the more shrill views from some on her own Benches and from the likes of the Daily Mail that we should scrap the aid target and that we should not be spending any international development money at all. She rejected that. This is not a zero sum game. It is not only morally wrong for us to ignore gross poverty, instability and insecurity, as the Minister said; it also fundamentally goes against our national interest and security and global security and stability. Those are good reasons why, with reasonable scrutiny and with reasonable questions being asked about all areas of our development spending, we must maintain our wider commitment to the poorest people and countries in the world.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.