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Commonwealth

My Lords, with the forbearance of the House, on behalf of your Lordships I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Vadera, on not only an excellent but a delightful maiden speech. Her speech and her experience show that she is highly suited to her new ministerial job in the Department for International Development and is very well placed to stand up for the Commonwealth. The noble Baroness spoke most movingly about her earlier years in Uganda and later in India and made the point that she is devoted to the Commonwealth. She worked for 14 years with the City investment bank SG Warburg, later owned by UBS, and worked on many projects from banking to project finance. She has advised Governments of poor and emerging countries on issues such as external debt and public sector restructuring, and she has worked with many Commonwealth countries, from South Africa and Uganda to India, Nigeria and Kenya. Since 1999, as we all know, she has worked at Her Majesty’s Treasury as the personal adviser to the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is now Prime Minister, and was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers as a policy expert on many issues, ranging from business and finance to international development. As we heard from another noble Lord, she has been a trustee of Oxfam for five years. The noble Baroness has excellent experience of economic and developmental issues and of the Commonwealth. On behalf of your Lordships, I congratulate her most warmly on her maiden speech and on becoming a Minister. I wish her well in government, where I am quite sure she will make a positive contribution.