Now aid cash goes on Saddam palace and rock carvings!

MILLIONS of pounds in foreign aid cash is being splurged on ‘cultural projects’ in the Middle East such as turning one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces into a museum, it can be revealed today.

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has been drafted in to help find new ways to spend the ever growing aid budget.

It is using £ 30million of the cash intended for overseas development to pay for schemes including an opinion poll asking people in Turkey whether they value their heritage and training for Egyptian archaeologists.

Ministers are under pressure to improve how Britain spends money abroad after Theresa May pledged at the general election to keep David Cameron’s commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of national income on overseas development.

Critics have argued that it is wrong that the aid budget has spiralled to £13billion at a time when there is a shortage of cash for spending at home.

A National Audit Office report yesterday raised concerns about how Whitehall departments other than the Department for International Development are increasingly being given aid cash by the Treasury to dish out. The watchdog warned about ‘ accountability gaps’ and questioned whether the success or failure of schemes was being properly assessed.

Today the Daily Mail can reveal how the culture department has been allocated £30million of aid cash to spend on protecting heritage sites and traditions in the Middle East and North Africa.

Much of the money is being sent to Turkey, despite it being the world’s 16th largest economy and being classed by the World Bank as an upper-middle-income country. A ‘nationwide survey’ will be conducted in Turkey to ‘map public perceptions’ on their heritage as part of a scheme awarded a £923,660 grant.

More than £1.2million will go on conservation work at two historical sites in south-east Turkey, with a further £100,000 handed to the University of Liverpool to help preserve historical rock carvings in the country. Officials are spending £460,000 on helping to turn Saddam Hussein’s former Lakeside Palace in the Iraqi city of Basra into a museum. The aid cash is being used to pay for extra exhibition space in the building, which opened last September.

Some £1.7million is being used to train up to 100 archaeologists from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Tunisia and the Palestinian Territories.

A further £657,076 will be used to train 40 staff from Libyan and Tunisian national heritage organisations in ‘documentation techniques’ and ‘preventative conservation’. In Egypt, £79,520 has been given to a project to restore a rock-salt mosque in the old fortified city of Shali.

Tory MP Peter Bone last night criticised the use of aid money for cultural projects. ‘What a ridicu- lous waste of aid money,’ he said. ‘It sounds like a scheme where they are spending money just to meet the 0.7 per cent target. We have an absurd situation where they just have to use up the aid budget come what may.

‘None of this spending will lead to the countries coming out of poverty. This is not using aid in a way that is helpful. I’m sure these projects might be very interesting, but they should not be part of our overseas aid spend.’

A culture department spokesman said: ‘The Cultural Protection Fund is providing essential support to countries where heritage is threatened by conflict, including Syria, Egypt, and Iraq.

‘These projects are a first step to helping restore and preserve heritage of global significance.’