Oral Answers to Questions

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Thursday 2nd March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom]

The hon. Lady is not correct when she says that people are reluctant to come here. In fact, the Office for National Statistics figures for last year show that there were more migrant workers coming from the EU than ever before, so that is just not true. As my hon. Friend the Minister of State has pointed out, free movement will continue until the point at which we leave the EU. We are working closely with the Home Office to assess, understand and put in place good systems to ensure that we continue to thrive in this important sector.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

14. Recent EU regulations such as the three crop rule have tied farmers up in red tape but not delivered for the environment. As crop rotation has been around in Lincolnshire for rather longer than the EU, does my right hon. Friend agree that the first thing we do when we leave the EU should be to get rid of burdensome regulation on farmers?

[Andrea Leadsom]

I agree with my hon. Friend. The three crop rule is exactly the sort of measure we should change once we have left the EU. Of course, we want farmers to manage sustainable rotations, to optimise yields and to protect soil, but we can do that without forcing them to grow a specific number of crops on a specific acreage of land.

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[Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)]

3. What scrutiny of the official development assistance budget the National Audit Office has undertaken in the last 12 months.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough)]

The NAO audits the financial statements of the Department for International Development annually, and it issued an unqualified opinion on the Department’s accounts for 2015-16. The NAO also produces a number of reports each year on different aspects of DFID’s expenditure. It last reported specifically on official development assistance in 2015. Its January 2015 report, “Managing the Official Development Assistance target”, looked at DFID’s management of its increased budget and at the target to spend 0.7% of the UK’s gross national income on overseas aid.

[Martin Vickers]

I thank my hon. Friend for that reply. He will be aware that our constituents in Lincolnshire have growing concerns about the aid budget. They will be reassured that the NAO is looking closely at it. Can he commit the NAO to looking much more robustly at many of the aid projects, which are of growing concern to our constituents?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

I can assure my hon. Friend that the NAO will indeed look robustly at all aspects of DFID’s expenditure. For instance, its reports on the CDC and on St Helena both identified challenges for DFID in overseeing expenditure outside its core area of expertise. The Public Accounts Committee’s report on St Helena concluded:

“Thus far, the Department has unquestionably failed the residents of St Helena and the British taxpayer.”

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

Under the Government’s new aid strategy, an increasing proportion of the 0.7% is being spent by Departments other than DFID—it is estimated that the proportion will be 30% by 2019. Will the NAO also look at how that money is spent and address concerns that it is being siphoned off, undermining DFID’s core objectives?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right that an increasing proportion of the aid budget will be spent by other Departments. That is clearly a challenge for audit, but one that the NAO is capable of undertaking, because DFID remains responsible for reporting to the OECD on official development assistance spending and for reporting to Parliament on the Government’s performance against the 0.7% target. I can reassure her that the NAO is scrutinising that expenditure extremely carefully.

The hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South, representing the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission, was asked—