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Debt Relief (Developing Countries) Bill

No, not the Treasury Front Bench. The Opposition need to be numerate as well as our own, very numerate, Minister. One of the issues is contractual rights. Of course that is an issue, but I think the Minister dealt with some of the key points. Remarks were made about the need for orderly wind-downs and orderly management of debts. There are arguments on that, and also on the trade-off between the contractual rights of people who hold debts and the public purse, which has to fund public services at the same time. That trade-off has been of acute concern here in the UK, and it also reads across to issues to do with debt management on the international stage. However, this measure involves not just a whimsical ripping up of contracts, but the pulling of vulture funds—the outriders of capitalism, as it were—into a complex, internationally agreed process that calculates how much such countries can afford to pay and then makes arrangements for that amount be paid, while providing the necessary due legal process. So this is not an irrational, whimsical or illogical process but part of internationally agreed—and debated to death, probably—procedures and mechanisms. The hon. Member for Christchurch said that the situation is different if the relationship is Government to Government, but one problem is that we cannot divide off the public and private sectors in this area—or, indeed, elsewhere. Government-to-Government relations for dealing with the debt cancellation that we have undertaken are underwritten by the British taxpayer, and I see no reason why such an arrangement, which is working in a constructive way at our constituents' expense, should be ripped off by firms that decide they are not going to play ball and are going to do something different. Of course, the debts that are being pursued most aggressively—the hon. Member for South-West Hertfordshire raised this issue—are bought on the secondary market. I am not sure, but I think the Romanian debt was a Government debt that was then bought on the secondary market, so the divisions that the hon. Member for Christchurch referred to cannot be quite so neatly drawn. The hon. Member for South-West Hertfordshire also dealt with human rights. Human rights compliance obviously has to be written off or dealt with in the legislation, and that issue will be looked at in Committee. He also raised the question of who this measure will benefit and whether it will benefit developing countries, which is a big issue. Various figures were mentioned, and the one that I have been working on is £1.2 billion, which is the amount currently in process. It can almost be argued that that figure is too small. I think it is about the size of the RBS bonus pot, so from that point of view it is not a vast amount of money to legislate for. However, as has been discussed throughout consideration of the Bill, it is money that is intended to tackle some of the worst poverty in the world, and what it can buy in the way of services in countries where services are needed is absolutely massive.