The UK’s bilateral overseas aid budget will start to increase in 2024-25 after taking a “terrible hit” over the previous three years, Andrew Mitchell, the minister for development and Africa, has said.
The overall aid budget, covering multilateral and bilateral aid, is to rise from £7.4bn this financial year to £8.3bn next year, he said. It was £6.9bn in 2022-23.
Official projections being published on Monday by the Foreign Office showed bilateral aid funding to the lowest-income countries would nearly double in 2024-25; as would bilateral aid to Africa as a region, from £646m this financial year to £1.36bn next year. Mitchell added he would budget for £1bn in humanitarian aid.
He said bilateral spending had taken “an enormous hit” in 2023-24 to maintain the government’s multilateral aid commitments.
However, he said he was confident the projections for 2024-25 were reliable, reflecting economic growth, tighter control of the budget and expected cuts to the costs incurred by the Home Office of housing and feeding refugees arriving in the UK. He said a joint Foreign Office-Treasury star chamber was helping to bring down spending on refugees by hundreds of thousands of pounds.
“Because we managed to exert that control over the budget, the figures next year are very sharply up,” Mitchell said.
This would allow bilateral aid to Afghanistan to rise from £100m to £151m next year, still below the £246m in 2022-23. Aid to Pakistan, which has experienced severe flooding, would rise from £41m to £133m.
Other big projected rises include Ethiopia, from £89m to £214m; Somalia from £90m to £138m; and South Sudan from £47.9m to £111m. Few of the rises would fully compensate for past cuts.
Mitchell said the permission to publish the planned allocations for next year was a sign of Treasury confidence that his team had got spending under control, and would give officials a chance to make the long-term plans required in development.
With plans to publish a white paper well advanced, Mitchell, who was a fierce critic of aid spending cuts from the backbenches, and a vastly experienced aid minister going back to 2005, said he hoped he could convince the aid community that he made the right decision to return to government last year to fix the budget and to try to restore the UK’s lost reputation as an aid superpower.
“Officials have been through the most ghastly period with three sets of cuts before, as a result of budgets being cut back. It has been a terrible time for some officials, who will have found it unbelievably difficult to effectively break promises and go back on programme commitments.”
Mitchell did not recant his past opposition to the merger of the Department of International Development and the Foreign Office, engineered by Boris Johnson in June 2020. “If you’re asking me whether the merger was an ocean-going disaster, my personal opinion is that it was and it should never have happened. It was a great, great mistake in my personal opinion.
“However, I’ve been asked by the prime minister to come back here, make it work. And there is a way of making it work.
“One thing I learned in the City as a kid working for [the financial firm] Lazards is that there’s no such thing as a merger. One side wins, and one side loses. And, frankly, meeting different old DfID officials in this building, when I came back, was like meeting people coming out of the rubble from a nuclear blast. But if officials were now told they are to go back to DfID they would pass out. It is infinitely better to make this work.”
Critics will say the projected rises are welcome, but will still not return aid spending to anywhere near the levels spent when the budget was set at 0.7% of GDP, instead of the current 0.5%. On current projections the government will only meet the conditions it has set for the aid budget to rise again to 0.7% in 2027-28.
Mitchell said he hoped to publish a white paper in the autumn that could attract cross-party support to rejuvenate British thinking on climate change and the sustainable development goals. He said he hoped it would go some way to answering the global south’s anger about the amount of money being channeled to Ukraine by the west. “They see the rich world spending money on humanitarian needs in Ukraine when children are dying in the Horn of Africa. And they resent that.”
