Chancellor should slash foreign aid in the next Budget
FOUR weeks’ tomorrow Philip Hammond – assuming he is still Chancellor – will stand up to deliver a Budget that attempts the fundamentally impossible: to pour more money into public services while avoiding damaging the public finances further. Those who insist that public spending should rise need to understand that the Government is still spending £40billion a year more than it takes in revenue.
Yet there is one way in which Hammond could partially square his impossible circle: to take another look at the international aid budget. There, he will find several billion pounds which could, should he be brave enough to defy the aid lobby, be used to improve public services in Britain – and without compromising our ability to help the world’s needy.
It is bizarre that the international aid budget has been treated as exempt from the severe financial constraint which has been visited on virtually every other area of government spending as a result of the financial crisis and chronic overspending by the last Labour government. While many users of public services were told to grin and bear cuts, the Cameron government jacked up aid spending.
IT DID so in order to hit a self-imposed target of spending 0.7 per cent of GDP on foreign aid – derived from an idealistic figure for aid spending plucked out of the sky by the UN in 1970 when the world was a very different place. Last year the UK was one of only six wealthy countries to reach this figure – spending £13.3billion on aid.
Whether this has been matched by genuine achievements on the ground is another matter. As should have been obvious from the outset, when you define the spending of money to be an achievement in itself, you guarantee waste – because that is the fastest way to get money out of the door.
So it has proved. The National Audit Office has several times condemned the Government for the way it has frittered money in trying it reach the 0.7 per cent target. Last year, it reported that five out of 11 departments had spent more than half their annual aid budgets in the last few weeks of the year in one final desperate