I apologise to the Committee for detaining hon. Members for perhaps longer than they might have hoped, but financial accountability and especially annual reporting are vital matters. I want to talk briefly about why I believe them to be so important. Most people know that my background is in a business environment. Annual reporting creates a discipline that simply is not created in any other way. It creates an accountability that gives credibility to a project.

The second thing that annual reporting provides is the ability to put things right if they are not going right. We have seen too many projects from Governments of all political persuasions that have gone wrong because they have not been properly managed. It is all very well seeing a problem, putting money into it, and, finally, setting targets, but that is not the secret of management. The secret of management is managing the process thereafter. Very often it does not mater whether the decision made about a specific issue falls within a set of parameters, but it clearly matters if it is managed, fine tuned, tweaked and the subject of drastic effort in a way that changes a process that is clearly going wrong. Financial reporting allows a process to be looked at in a clearer way than almost any other mechanism.

As I said, a company would have to proceed along the lines that I have described, but it is not clear that that applies in this case, even if we bear in mind the constitution of the package that we are talking about with regard to Crossrail. I want to ensure that it does apply. Putting the new clause into the Bill offers a protection not only for respective Governments—because it is likely that this process will be undertaken by respective Governments as it goes on into the future—but for the taxpayer, who will contribute sizeably to the project. It is not only the taxpayer in London who will contribute, but also those throughout the rest of the country.

I therefore urge the Minister, whom I know to be keen on transparent government, to consider the process, even if on this occasion he does not accept it. At the very least, will he come back on Report with a mechanism that would accede to this request, which I am sure that he feels in his heart is sensible?