What a pleasure to have heard three such effective maiden speeches! I commend Joe Powell for surviving not only the election, but the birth of twins. I wish his family well. I wish Lee Pitcher a happy birthday. I do not think that making a speech in the House of Commons on future birthdays will have the same allure, somehow.

I regarded Virendra Sharma as a great friend in the House of Commons. I never quite saw him as a mafia don, but I did see him as a very effective operator. All new MPs, and indeed returning MPs, could learn a lot from Virendra about how to get things done in Parliament.

I commend the new teams at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the Ministry of Defence. I am particularly pleased to see the noble Lord Collins of Highbury becoming an Under-Secretary in the Department. I have worked closely with him on development-related issues over the past five years, particularly as his co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on nutrition for development. Lord Collins championed those issues in opposition; I am confident that he will now do so within the FCDO, along with the Minister of State, Anneliese Dodds, whom I congratulate on her appointment.

I want to concentrate on international development, although I note that there was no specific mention of it—nor any ambition to return to spending 0.7% on it—in the King’s Speech. I commend my long-standing right hon. Friend Mr Mitchell for his efforts in the previous Government. Not only did he bring his usual vigour and drive to his time as Minister for International Development, but he stabilised what all the evidence presented to the Select Committee on International Development showed had been a chaotically managed merger of the Department for International Development and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the thinking behind the merger, we cannot pretend that it was well executed, or that the randomness of some of the decisions and the scale of the funding cuts were not seriously damaging to frontline programmes and the UK’s reputation as a reliable development partner.

Thank to my right hon. Friend, that is behind us. I listen to his warning about the need for a plan B, although the last thing those delivering aid on the frontline need is the distraction and disruption of further organisational change in the FCDO. However, I am sure that they want to know this Government’s criteria and anticipated timescale for returning to 0.7%. In opposition, Labour Members rightly highlighted the cuts to the aid budget, and the impact on that budget of spending on refugees in the UK, but in government they need to put their money where their mouth is, so I look forward to hearing some detail on that spending in the Minister’s winding-up speech.

If we are to make meaningful progress on achieving the sustainable development goals by 2030, the Government should embrace the White Paper published by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield. It was well received across the development community in the UK and internationally. Although it is understandable that a new Government might want to put their own bells and whistles on it, I hope the core objectives of ending extreme poverty and tackling climate change will remain, along with the framework for doing so.