George Osborne pledged help for the world’s poorest and those in warzones by safeguarding the UK’s spending on overseas aid.
Against the backdrop of a worsening refugee crisis in Europe, the chancellor said the move to continue to spend 0.7% of the UK’s national income on development put the country ahead of its western peers in combining aid with defence spending.
Osborne used his spending review to change how the aid budget is spent, as the government acknowledged that “aid spending has sometimes been controversial at home, because people want to know that it is squarely in the UK’s national interest”.
Osborne said in his autumn statement speech: “We will re-orientate that budget, so we both meet our moral obligation to the world’s poorest and help those in the fragile and failing states on Europe’s borders.”
“It is overwhelmingly in our national interest that we do so ... Britain is unique in the world in making these twin commitments to funding both the hard power of military might and the soft power of international development.”
The chancellor said his pledge meant aid funding would continue to increase and reach £16.3bn by the end of the decade.
Defending the decision to continue to ringfence aid spending while cutting other areas, the Treasury vowed to prove “there is no distinction between reducing poverty, tackling global challenges and serving our national interest – all are inextricably linked”.
Osborne had announced in September that up to £1bn of Britain’s overseas aid budget was to be spent over the course of this parliament on protecting the “national interest” by tackling the consequences of failed states such as Syria. At the time, he promised a fundamental rethink of the aid budget.
As the government sought to head off criticism that it was acting less generously than Germany, Osborne said in September that the housing and living costs of the extra people will be met from the UK’s £12bn international aid budget.
In the spending review, the Treasury said a new strategy on aid spending reflected changing needs.
“Our aid budget will be restructured to ensure that it is spent on tackling the great global challenges – from the root causes of mass migration and disease, to the threat of terrorism and global climate change – all of which also directly threaten British interests,” the government said in a policy paper.
The Treasury and Department for International Development said the new aid priorities were “strengthening global peace, security and governance”; strengthening the response to crises, with “more support for ongoing crises including that in Syria and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa region”; promoting economic development and tackling extreme poverty.
