Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)

My Lords, I was not intending to speak but as there seem to be so few people here, I will just say a few words. I draw noble Lords’ attention to an organisation called the Procurement Files, which is actually very good at looking in detail at the 300,000-plus contracts on the UK government public database. When you have a glance at that, it raises a lot of questions. Whenever the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office makes a procurement with a contractor for something happening abroad, does every single Minister sign off on it or is it done by officials? I am particularly interested because £25 million has just been agreed to one contractor to do green urban growth in Somalia. I looked at the detail of what that meant and thought, “My goodness, that is surely not a priority for what is happening in Somalia at the moment”. There is another one where it is spending half a million pounds to send 15 Porsches to the embassy in Tirana to be distributed to prisons in Albania. There are a whole range of these things. I appreciate that most of what has been said so far is about what is happening in this country. However, if the Minister is unable to respond today, could she send me something about how these decisions are made? Quite honestly, it looks like we need some detail of the goings on, as is happening in the United States of America. I think the public would be horrified if they knew the detail of what some of their taxpayers’ money is going on.