My Lords, I speak as somebody who was part of the aid programme for a number of years with the Commonwealth Development Corporation and who was subjected to Treasury discipline. At the time, in today’s money we were responsible for about £3 billion of assets. Under the statutory arrangements of the day, we were partly responsible to the Foreign Office and partly to the ODA. The ODA arranged the monitoring meetings at which we would account for
how we were getting on with the income and expenditure related to £3 billion of assets. In the run-up to the meeting, the discussions we had within CDC were all about what the Treasury official would ask us in the meeting which followed. From our point of view, in formal terms, the Treasury official had no right to be there, but of course the Treasury has a way of being where it wants to be.
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In particular, when we discussed what might happen in the meeting, we did two things. We speculated on whether there would be two Treasury officials, and we knew that if there were, we had better be even better prepared than we had decided to be before. The second thing we did was to say to our minute taker, “Will you please say nothing and listen very carefully? If the Treasury man writes a note, make a little mark so we know at what point he made that note, because afterwards we will consider what he or she had in their mind at the time”. That monitoring and discipline was absolutely essential to the proper conduct of our affairs. I cannot understand why anybody would think that the Treasury should not be in at the beginning of all these processes as well as throughout them and at the end.