My Lords, I support my noble friend and very much agree with his remarks in respect of the conduct of the business today. The only thing in his excellent remarks on which I disagree with him is that he kept referring to a legally enforceable target. On my reading of the Bill, there is no legally enforceable target; there is a requirement for the department to try to spend exactly 0.7% of GDP in any one year, and a failure to do so simply requires it to produce yet another report to Parliament explaining why it has failed to do so. It is very important that we are clear on that because in the outside world it is being sold as something else, and the damage that is being done is the implementation of the 0.7% target.
The noble Lord, Lord Purvis, suggested that my noble friend go back and read the reports but that is not the point. This amendment is about seeking to ensure that we are aware of the influence of the 0.7% target on the quality and oversight of, and the opportunities for corruption from, UK aid. That is a really important point. The system is being changed. Until now, the
department has had a budget. Part of the overseas development budget has been with other departments, including the Foreign Office—some of it might be associated with climate change, which I find a great mystery—and these departments have been able to spend on their programmes accordingly. The fact that between them all they now have to reach the target of 0.7% within a calendar year, as opposed to a financial year, will create and—the evidence is quite clear—has already created substantial problems.
Therefore, it is very important that we look at the impact of the inclusion of this target on the quality and effectiveness of the ODA programme and, similarly, at the degree to which DfID has been able to provide oversight of the other departments. If, as we discussed earlier, the effect of the target is that more has to be given to other organisations over which it has no control and from which there is no accountability, that will have an impact on proposed new paragraph (b) in the amendment, which concerns,
“the Department for International Development’s oversight of UK Overseas Development Programmes”.
I do not want to go over the same arguments at this hour but, as my noble friend Lord Lawson pointed out, there have recently been some quite disturbing reports from the NAO suggesting that money for programmes is being used by criminal elements on an international scale.
I think that the amendment is very sensible. If the Minister or the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, feel unable to accept it, we may have to return to this matter in rather more detail on Report because the impact of the department having a target of 0.7% will, in my view, have a seriously deleterious effect on the effectiveness of the overseas aid programme, and that needs to be monitored.