The UK Government’s decision to count donations of leftover Covid-19 vaccines as foreign aid could effectively slash £300 million from this year’s aid spending, an investigation has revealed.
Critics say that counting donations of surplus vaccines as foreign aid crowds out vital humanitarian spending and squeezes an already strained budget.
“The poorest people in the world have been presented with a dreadful dilemma: accept vaccines but have humanitarian programmes cut,” Lord Purvis, a Liberal Democrat peer in the House of Lords, told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. “The Government should be ashamed of this.”
By law, the Government must spend 0.7 per cent of gross national income on foreign aid, but last year it temporarily cut that target to 0.5 per cent, citing the economic impact of the pandemic.
In July, the Government blocked “non-essential” aid payments because it was in danger of breaching its budget. The Foreign Office has confirmed that it will now revisit aid allocations to ensure spending remained within the lowered cap.
‘Government doesn’t want to spend on humanitarian relief’
Counting vaccines within this budget will therefore have significant ramification. Ranil Dissanayake, a policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, said the approach amounts to aid “cuts by the back door”.
“Getting vaccines out to the rest of the world is in our own interest and shouldn’t crowd out other support that developing countries desperately need,” he said.
“The recent international development strategy had an impressive list of priorities, from global health to supporting women and girls. [The Government] just doesn’t seem to want to actually spend on them if they can help it.”
That the Government is adopting this approach has only just become clear. In a press release in March 2022, officials had signalled that the UK was open to counting a donation of one million vaccines to Bangladesh outside of the 0.5 per cent budget, freeing up money for aid elsewhere.
But in a letter to Lord Purvis, who asked whether the Bangladesh donation would be counted in the aid budget, the Government U-turned, suggesting all donations will be counted as aid spending.
Eighty-five million vaccines donated
The UK is not alone in counting vaccines within the aid budget – only the United States, the Netherlands and Luxembourg have chosen not to.
But other countries do not have the legal budget restrictions, meaning that categorising vaccines as official development aid does not automatically result in reduced spending elsewhere.
Government figures suggest that the UK has donated roughly 85 million Covid vaccine doses in the 12 months since June 2021 – falling short of the 100 million promised during the G7 in Cornwall last summer.
If the international rules for counting vaccine donations – which are set by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – remain unchanged, the Bureau estimates that the UK’s 2022 donations could account for £275 million - £300 million of the aid budget, at the current exchange rate.
This is roughly three per cent of the total and nearly triple what the Government counted for 2021 – and the figure could rise further if the UK donates more vaccines before the end of 2022.
‘Really concerning’
The ONE Campaign, a nonprofit that works to end extreme poverty and preventable diseases, estimates that the UK’s aid cuts since 2020 mean 7.1 million children have lost their education, 5.3 million women and girls have lost access to modern family planning methods, and nearly 12 million children and women have lost nutritional support.
Freeing up £300 million would be enough to reverse £131 million in cuts to the UN’s main reproductive health programme, which the UN says would prevent 250,000 maternal and child deaths, and restore most of the UK’s £200 million funding cut for water, sanitation and hygiene projects.
Romilly Greenhill, ONE’s UK director, said counting vaccines as aid fits a pattern of the Government “providing as little as possible financial support to countries”.
“Everything that they possibly can score as [foreign aid], they are,” she said. “It really is a kind of attempt to squeeze every last drop, so that as little as possible goes to the poorest countries in the world. And that’s really, really concerning.”
A spokesman for the Foreign Office said: “The UK has been at the forefront of the international response to Covid-19. We have donated over 80 million life-saving vaccines to nearly 40 countries to help end the pandemic.”
It declined to say why the UK had failed to keep its 100 million promise. In June, Amanda Milling, the Foreign Office minister, said that fewer than half of donated doses had been “deployed” in recipient countries, with the rest yet to be allocated or delivered.
Earlier this year the committee at the OECD decided that countries could count last year’s donations of surplus vaccines as foreign aid at $6.72 per dose. Critics said this rewarded rich countries for hoarding vaccines early in the pandemic. A decision on rules for 2022 has been postponed until September.
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