The hon. Member for Chichester (Mr. Nelson) made an interesting speech; I agreed with parts of it and disagreed with other parts. I hope that he agrees with me, however, that, when the House has only an hour and a half to discuss the orders, it is a bit unfair for the Front-Bench spokesmen between them to take up most of an hour, leaving the rest of us only half an hour between us. I shall try to be as brief as possible, in fairness to others.

I think it right to give the measure a general welcome, and also to note the speed with which it has progressed from original promulgation to completion. I believe that President Mitterrand first suggested it in October last year; by May this year, the organisation was agreed on. This, surely, is a sign that the European Community is working with a sense of unity and urgency to tackle the serious problem of further aid for eastern European countries.

The hon. Member for Chichester made a valid semantic point: I, too, do not regard the organisation as a bank. It is not what is meant by a bank in normal parlance. Speaking from my experience, and having read the articles, I would say that it is much more like the Scottish Development Agency than anything else. That agency, which survived under successive Governments until very lately, has some quasi-banking functions, but it is an agency of government—in this case, we are discussing an agency of Governments in the plural—set up to carry out a specific programme of assistance.