My Lords, I regret that I cannot accept my noble friend Lord Tugendhat’s amendment. Let me explain why. In doing so, perhaps I may correct my noble friend Lord Forsyth and address specifically the point from my noble friend Lord Cormack.
Paragraph 43 of UN Resolution 2626 from 1970 is the target that we have been debating consistently in this country. Indeed, it is the foundation of the Bill. I shall quote from it and perhaps that will answer the question. It states that each economically advanced country,
“will exert its best efforts to reach a minimum net amount of 0.7 per cent of its gross national product at market prices by the middle of the Decade”.
It does not say “gross domestic product”. As the Minister clarified, the UN system of national accounts adopted by the United Kingdom in 1993, during which I think my noble friend Lord Forsyth was a Minister in the Government, had GNI as the successor of GNP as the accepted international comparator of national economic activity. He will know, as he indicated to the Opposition Front Bench, the difference between GDP, which includes foreign economic activity within the territorial area of Britain but excludes those operations owned by Britain externally, and GNI, which includes those and has therefore been considered to be the standard economic comparator. To address the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, that was adopted by the United Kingdom in 1995—I think that my noble friend was in the Cabinet at that point—for European Union payments and as a standard for European Union classifications. I think that he may well have been commenting on that late last year.
As that is now the adopted framework within the OECD and a successor to the obligation that we made in 1970, any change to the Bill would be a retrograde step, as the Minister explained, because under our obligations in the OECD we would still have to report on GNI anyway.
With that explanation, and having answered the noble Lord’s specific point, I hope that he will withdraw his amendment.
Noon