Public mistrust of foreign aid budget is ‘valid criticism’

PUBLIC criticism of foreign aid spending as “corrupt” and wasteful is “valid”, the civil servant in charge of the multibillion pound Department for International Development (Dfid) has admitted.

Matthew Rycroft, Dfid’s permanent secretary, also suggested that politicians were out of touch with ordinary people by not being more sceptical about the aid budget.

Dfid is so concerned that it is trialling a new programme which involves British aid workers telling their own stories in local papers about the value of their aid work.

Mr Rycroft said that opinion is split three ways on aid: those who will never support aid abroad; those who support the current approach; and those, which Mr Rycroft estimated at about a third of the population, who are open to persuasion but not convinced. He said: “When you ask them why not, they say they don’t think it works – the scale of the problems are too big so no matter how much we do, we will never solve them.

“Or they think the whole thing is corrupt and money never ends up where it should. Those are both valid criticisms and we need to address them.”

The Government is legally committee to spending 0.7 per cent of national income on aid. This works out as around £14 billion a year, of which £10billion is spent by Dfid and another £4billion by other departments.

Last year the House of Commons’ financial watchdog said the Government’s claims of low levels of fraud in Britain’s overseas aid budget did not seem credible given mounting evidence of missing money.

Mr Rycroft, a former British ambassador to the United Nations who became Dfid permanent secretary in January, said he had been struck by the disconnect between all the political parties and the public on the spending target.