Government role in aid agency scandal needs close scrutiny

For years, this country’s generous aid budget has been mired in controversy. Should Britain really be spending almost £14 billion a year on overseas development when “austerity” has for so long been the grinding watchword at home? But such purely budgetary questions pale into insignificance when compared with the moral outrages which a leading charity – funded greatly by the Department for International Development (DFID) – is now being accused of.

Former DFID secretary of state Priti Patel, writing elsewhere in these pages, puts the charge in unvarnished terms. It is, she says, about “children [being] raped by aid workers”. That some people should pose as do-gooders to inveigle themselves into the lives of vulnerable, suffering people to sate their own warped desires is grotesque enough. But the fact that taxpayer money – to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds – might be helping to finance these terrible abuses is a double disgrace. And this is unlikely to be the end of it.

As more and more is revealed about the behaviour of depraved aid workers and the scale of the scandal is exposed further, suspicion will grow that Whitehall mandarins were aware, more or less, of what was going on. On how much they did or didn’t know, and on what action was or wasn’t taken, careers may now hang. So they should. What could be more vital than the protection of children from sexual abuse? What could collapse public trust in charity work – the vast majority of which is noble in intent and delivery – faster than wrongdoing of this nature?

There is a feature common to many cases of corruption, no matter how different their individual details. This is that when groups that are supposed to operate as checks and balances upon each other instead fall into cosy complicity, misbehaviour inevitably follows. The relationship between DFID and the charities to which it routinely hands over huge sums needs to be one that ensures the utmost accountability. The history of that relationship must now be scrutinised in the most exacting detail, and if – if – it turns out that mandarins who should have been demanding transparency and driving the highest ethical standards were instead kicking over the traces of criminality, then there should be hell to pay.

We know already that this is an outrage. What we do not know yet is whether it is a scandal that will run to the heart of government.