Top award goes to £12bn foreign aid mandarin
THE Whitehall mandarin who presides over the bloated foreign aid budget is to be rewarded with a knighthood.
Mark Lowcock will be knighted in the New Year’s honours for ‘public service’, despite widespread anger over how the Department for International Development spends its vast £12 billion budget.
The decision comes just weeks after MPs criticised the £165,000-ayear bureaucrat for being ‘evasive’ over who took the disastrous decision to build a £2 5million airport on the remote island of St Helena where it is too windy for commercial planes to land.
Tory MP Philip Davies said Mr Lowcock, 54, should be known as ‘Sir Waste-a-Lot’ after presiding over a department that had become a byword for inefficiency. He said: ‘He certainly hasn’t been knighted for services to the UK taxpayer. If squandering billions of pounds on greedy consultants and corrupt countries, and having the highest paid staff in the Civil Service gets you a knighthood these days, then God help us.
‘It certainly detracts from the other very deserving people on the list.’
While it is common for longserving Whitehall mandarins to be handed honours, the timing of Mr Lowcock’s knighthood looks set to revive anger over the foreign aid budget.
He is a close friend of Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, and is said to have shared a flat with him when they were starting out in the Civil Service. He has spent his entire career at Dfid and its predecessor, racking up a £1.1 million pension pot.
For the past five years he has been the department’s permanent secretary.