Foreign aid chiefs given £175,000 in bonuses for spending YOUR money

Top officials at the foreign aid department have been handed £175,000 in bonuses.

Twenty-one senior mandarins shared the cash – receiving up to £10,000 each – while another £616,000 was split among 514 more junior staff.

The news will anger Tory Mps when aid budgets are being pushed up by 10 per cent.

Spending is rising so it can stay in line with the target of sending 0.7 per cent of national income abroad.

The pM has staunchly defended the policy but suggested the definition of what counts toward the target could be widened.

It emerged last week that the Department for International Development has drafted in 155 extra staff to help spend its money.

The size of the workforce has gone up from 2,823 to 2,978 over the past year.

The overall pay bill rose by £6million to £166million in 2016-17, according to DfID’s annual report.

The bonus payments, revealed on the department’s transparency log, shows 21 senior civil servants – or a quarter of the total – split payouts of £175,000 this year as a reward for their work in 2015-16.

The highest award was £10,000, and the average was around £8,000. Director general Joy Hutcheon was among those who received the highest payment.

Another £616,800 in ‘ non- consolidated performance related pay’ went to 514 lowerlevel staff – an average of £1,200 each.

The wage bill at the foreign aid department has soared by 40 per cent in seven years. The department’s top mandarin Sir Mark Lowcock received a pay rise of up to £5,000 to put his salary in the £165,000£170,000 band. He had no bonus and has since retired with a pension pot of £1.2million.

DfID hands out the highest salaries in Whitehall, averaging £53,000 a head, and it is one of only three of all 19 government departments to keep recruiting.

Former minister Robert Halfon, who was sacked by Mrs May after the election, has said scrapping the 1 per cent public sector pay cap should be funded by sacrificing part of the aid budget.

‘people recognise that many public sector workers have had to struggle over the past few years,’ the Tory Mp told the BBC. ‘We have to look, potentially, at sacred cows. ‘What I’m suggesting is that we look at some of the overseas aid budget,

A government spokesman said: ‘All government departments operate performancerelated pay – this is a normal part of ensuring civil servants are incentivised to perform well and deliver value for the taxpayer. policies on providing performance-related pay and the budget for these payments are set by the Cabinet office and not DfID.’