The noble Baroness, for whom I have the highest regard, says, “Good”. I have to say that the European Union does not have a terribly good record in accountability for public money.
Indeed, one of DfID’s objectives is to improve accountability and be less dependent on multilateral programmes.
However, as has been pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, and indeed the Minister, in her short intervention in the debate, the way in which you solve the problem of not being able to reach the target is to put money into multilateral programmes. For accounting purposes—I am sure that the Minister will intervene if I am wrong about this—if the department writes a cheque to a multilateral organisation, it counts as expenditure in year, whereas if it actually supports a bilateral programme, the expenditure accrues as the programme continues. So the perverse incentives will be to put more and more into multilateral programmes or those run by other agencies such as the EU and the UN, where the degree of accountability which I think all of us in the Committee believe we should have would not be delivered.