Stephen Pollard

Environment, Food and Rural Affairs which handed over £67million – didn’t have a clue how to spend their aid allocation. In its report in July, the NAO said that Whitehall departments were “struggling” to find ways to spend their aid money.

They ended up scrambling around at the end of last year desperate to get rid of it – to the extent that more than half of their annual aid budget was only spent in the final three months of the year.

And one department – the Department of Energy and Climate Change – spent 98 per cent of its aid budget then. That’s not just a grotesque farce, it’s waste on a truly epic scale. Look at some of the projects that our aid budget supports. China is the second wealthiest nation on earth. And yet we send it aid.

The Foreign Office has given £3million to help the Chinese develop football. Never mind that their premier league pays some players over £600,000 a week.

Or take Pakistan. This year we are handing over £373million to the Pakistanis – the biggest single recipient of British aid.

This is the same Pakistan that spends millions on its own space programme – and billions on its armed forces, including a new submarine fleet. In fact

FOR a decade the EU had an embargo on sending any money to Zimbabwe because it would end up in the hands of Mugabe and his cronies – and could be used to entrench his dictatorial rule. Yet we hand it over gleefully.

Such is the vast scale of our aid spending that one pound in every five spent by the G7 nations on aid comes from British taxpayers.

Your officials will tell you, Penny, how this is all dangerous nonsense and that aid is a wonderful thing that we do brilliantly. But then that’s what they are bound to say, since they work in a department whose entire purpose is to hand over taxpayers’ money.

Don’t be taken in by it – stick to your sensible instincts. Your predecessor, Priti Patel, had made a good job of that, refusing to be cowed by the aid lobby in her own department.

But if you’ve got the interests of the British people at heart – and as a former navy reservist, I’m sure you have – then you’ll see that the whole purpose of the department is wrong, and your job should be not to fight its corner in Cabinet but to persuade the Cabinet that we need a new approach to aid. A new approach, as pushed for by the Daily Express’s Stop the Foreign Aid Madness crusade.

Good luck, Stephen.

‘What we need is a new approach to aid’