The Chronicle (South Tyneside and Durham)
£4bn of overseas aid spent on UK refugees
THE amount of overseas aid funding diverted to support refugees in the UK rose to £4.3 billion last year, new figures have shown.
Provisional statistics published yesterday showed spending on ‘in-donor refugee costs’ rose by £600million in 2023, while the overall aid budget increased by around £2.6 billion.
Aid spending on refugees in the UK amounted to more than a quarter of the UK’S total aid budget for the second year running, although its share of the overall budget fell slightly from 28.9 per cent to 27.9 per cent.
International rules allow countries to count first-year costs of supporting refugees as overseas development assistance (ODA).
But the practice has been criticised for reducing the amount that can be spent on developing countries, with MPS on the Commons International Development Committee accusing the Home Office of conducting ‘raids’ on the ODA budget.
As in previous years, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said the majority of the increase in spending on refugees was ‘due to Home Office spend,’ which rose by £559 million in 2023.
International Development Committee chair Sarah Champion said the increasing spend on refugee costs in the UK was ‘deeply worrying.’
She said: “We have expressed our concerns on a number of occasions and ministers are still not listening. Almost 30 per cent of our aid is being spent on refugee costs – nearly five times our bilateral spend on emergency international humanitarian aid.
“We do not believe that UK ODA is being spent in the spirit of the OECD rules.”
Shadow international development minister Lisa Nandy said it ‘beggars belief’ that the Government was using the ODA budget to ‘bail out their failing asylum system with a blank cheque.’
She said: “This is sticking plaster politics at its worst, terrible value for money for British taxpayers and is no way to run the development budget or the Home Office.”
Gideon Rabinowitz, from the UK aid NGO network Bond, said the Government ‘seems to have lost its grip on UK aid spending,’ weakening Britain’s ability to respond to global crises.