An open letter to Penny Mordaunt about foreign aid
DEAR PENNY (if I may), I’m sure you’ve been bombarded with advice in your first week as Development Secretary. Forgive me for adding to that. My guess is that much of that advice is about how you should spend your vast budget – set at 0.7 per cent of GDP. This year that figure is £13.6billion. On current estimates that will rise by another billion pounds by 2021. But I don’t want to focus on how you should spend the money – I’d rather discuss how you shouldn’t.
Because the real problem with aid spending today is that it’s the wrong way round. As a wealthy country it’s absolutely right that we give away some of that wealth to what is, in effect, charity. When there’s a real and obvious need for help in poorer countries, we should offer it.
That might mean when there’s been a natural disaster, such as the recent storms in the Caribbean. Or it could be longer term projects designed, for example, to prevent famine. But we don’t spend our aid like that.
Indeed, as you probably now know, the mad aid rules meant that any money we sent to help islands devastated by Hurricane Irma couldn’t be counted as part of our aid spending.
INSTEAD the way we spend our aid is to take that entirely arbitrary figure of 0.7 per cent and then scramble around to find ways to reach the total. As a result we end up giving money in some of the most inappropriate and wasteful ways imaginable. That’s not my assertion. It’s the finding of a devastating report this summer by the spending watchdog, the National Audit Office.
Although you are now responsible for that £13.6billion budget, Penny, the decision over how it is spent isn’t yours alone. Just over a quarter of the spending allocation – 26 per cent – is now decided by other Whitehall departments. And it is a grotesque farce.
According to the NAO, these other departments – such as the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy which handed over £687million in aid, the Home Office which spent £382million, the Treasury which gave away £71million and the Department of the