Foreign aid bill ‘is twisted madness’
Ex-envoy’s fury as £13bn of our cash is given away
BRITAIN’S former ambassador to Washington hit out yesterday at the ‘twisted madness’ of spending so much on foreign aid.
Sir Christopher Meyer spoke out a day after it emerged the UK’s aid budget is ballooning faster than that of any other major nation.
Since 2004, the amount Britain gives foreign governments and aid bodies has rocketed by 144 per cent to £13.2billion – meaning that, proportionally, it spends almost twice as much of its national wealth on aid as any other G7 nation.
Britain is the only major nation to hit the target of spending 0.7 per cent of national income one aid.
Yesterday Sir Christopher highlighted the fact that the Department for International Development’s budget is now ten times that of the Foreign Office, where he used to work.
‘Twisted madness of our foreign policy,’ he tweeted. ‘Foreign aid up 144 per cent in 10 years, aid budget 10 times that of Foreign Office at £13billion.’
Sir Christopher was previously Sir John Major’s spokesman and, from 1997 to 2003, served as envoy to the US.
He has long been critical of foreign policy and has urged the UK not to get too involved in Middle east conflicts following the disaster of Iraq. Last night Tory backbencher Jacob Rees-Mogg said: ‘I agree with Sir Christopher.
‘We know the money is not all well spent and that there is waste in the effort to reach the 0.7 per cent target.’
Aid projects funded by Britain include a scheme to produce ‘Hamlet education workshops’ in the ecuadorian capital Quito. It received £5,000. And £51,564 was spent to fund Serbian nationals to travel to the UK to gain work experience;
An effort to find breeding partners for a pair of rare Mangarahara cichlid fish kept at London Zoo ended badly when the £3,400 project identified a female of the Madagascan species but she died before making it to London.
While the aid budget is ringfenced, the Foreign Office – along with most other Whitehall departments – has been forced to absorb huge cuts. Between 2010 and 2015, the Foreign Office budget fell by around 16 per cent.
Officials in the department have warned George Osborne that further cuts to their budget would force a choice between Britain pursuing traditional statecraft and the economic diplomacy urged by the Chancellor.
The total FCO budget is about £1.7billion a year, but about £400million of that amount is diverted to shared funds with the Ministry of Defence and the Department for International Development. The remaining core budget is £1.3billion for 2015/16 — less than 0.2 per cent of total government expenditure and about 0.08 per cent of GDP.
At the same time, spending on aid has soared, as outlined yesterday by a G7 report.
While our aid budget has rocketed since 2004, the eU and its other member states have ‘severely squeezed’ their public spending during the global economic downturn, the report says.
Some 230,000 people have signed a petition warning that the aid target is ‘leading to huge waste and corruption’. They argue that the budget ‘fuels waste by focusing on targets, not outcomes’.
Critics point out that, if it matched other G7 nations’ aid spending, Britain could save at least £6billion – enough to fund more than 11 hospitals.
They add that for every five pounds spent on aid by the G7, one pound comes out of the pockets of British taxpayers, despite public concern about corruption and waste.
Crispin Blunt, chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee, said: ‘Sir Christopher is right that the department that leads the direction and coordination of our overseas effort, intelligence, diplomatic, defence and development is dangerously starved of resources.
‘Its budget is heavily cross subsidised by DfID, which then leads to misallocation of policy priorities. I believe the budgets of all these departments should be collectively ring fenced and that total funding allocated between them.’
A Government source said: ‘This Government is proud of its commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of gross national income on overseas development. It is firmly in the national interest.’
UK spending on aid grows faster than rest of world