Foreign aid fallacy

I AGrEE wholeheartedly that it is wrong that an increase in cash advances through foreign aid will exceed the pensions of many UK citizens who have paid in all their working lives (Letters).

I have worked in international development for 25 years and in 45 countries. I would love to be able to say that a significant number of the projects I worked on had a lasting impact, but I can’t. I console myself with the knowledge that, with many qualified, hard-working and wellmeaning colleagues, I did my best.

Where possible we tried to influence or advise on strategy, but profligacy, corruption, naive philanthropy, vanity projects, virtue signalling, bad design, poor monitoring and evaluation, and political expediency trumped or negated most of it.

The Government should repeal the legislative imperative to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on foreign aid. It should also review and drastically cut the huge amounts we give to the World Bank, the EU Development Programme and the UN.

None of these is properly accountable to the Government. Instead, we should prioritise disaster and humanitarian relief and what is left over should be spent on policing, prisons and defence, and bolstering the UK’s Border Force.

peter reeD, Farnham, Surrey.