Ross Clark

rush. One wheeze has been to shower the poor with cash – effectively setting up Britain as the world’s welfare office, albeit with a lot less control of how money is being handed out abroad than at home.

Last year, £200million of British taxpayers’ money was spent in this way. In one case cited by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact claimants in Nigeria were found to be providing fake urine samples in order to claim handouts meant for pregnant women.

There is little point in looking to the Department for International Development to stop fraud. It claims that a mere 0.03 per cent of the aid budget is lost to fraud – something the NAO calls “implausible”.

It simply isn’t trying to sniff out misspending with anything like the zeal it should be doing, given that a lot of aid is spent in countries with kleptomaniac governments and with a corrupt business culture. One of the Government’s favourite channels for spending aid money – the British Council – has a £1billion a year budget but until recently had a counter-fraud department consisting of just one person.

When the Government tries to justify its aid budget it likes to speak of earthquake victims being rescued from collapsed buildings and famine victims

HERE, the Government gave up trying to pick economic winners decades ago, yet it thinks nothing of showering money on efforts to build industries such as crab fisheries in Zanzibar. In one bizarre project aid money was used to help tribal “rainmakers” in Kenya to produce a “consensus weather forecast” with that country’s Met Office. It is as if the Government was paying a bunch of mystics to produce the weather forecast after the television news.

With astonishing hypocrisy, the Government has been spending money trying to help its counterparts in developing countries to manage their finances. What on Earth makes the Government which is running a thumping overdraft of its own think it has any useful advice to offer anyone else?

Some long-term development projects no doubt do help the poor but more particularly they are helping line the pockets of a western-based aid industry which bids for the contracts to run these projects.

The Government is frequently asked: what happened to the £350million a week which the Leave campaign promised the NHS? We haven’t left the EU yet. But the Chancellor could boost the NHS by £100million a week by trimming the aid budget and concentrating resources on emergency and medical aid to make a genuine difference to the world’s poor.

‘Billions could go to public services’