The announcement yesterday by the Prime Minister that the UK Government will cut the international development budget further from 0.5% to 0.3% of Gross National Income is beyond the pale. Never before has a Prime Minister so explicitly linked punishing the world’s poorest and most marginalised people with the production of bullets and bombs. Defence spending must increase if we are to meet the geopolitical challenges of today, but it is unconscionable that it should be done at the expense of those who most need our support.
Gross National Income (GNI) is one of the most common metrics used to measure the size of an economy, and many Government programmes are linked explicitly to a percentage share of GNI (for instance, the 2% NATO defence spending target). The International Development Act 2015 enshrined the OECD’s target of 0.7% of GNI for Official Development Assistance (ODA) into British law.
In 2024, the UK’s GNI was approximately £3.14 trillion. As such, UK law dictates that we should have spent £22 billion on international development. In direct opposition to this, the last Government cut the development budget from 0.7% to 0.5%, meaning we should have spent £15.7 billion. Did this happen? No; we spent £13.7 billion. Now, this Government wants to cut a further £6 billion from the development budget, meaning the new figure will sit at £9 billion per year for ODA – 59% below the legally-mandated target.
Governments always face competing demands on public spending. They make political choices about what to prioritise and what to cut that reveal much about their values and vision of who we are as a country. This Government’s political decision to pursue even more drastic cuts to the ODA budget, leaving the other 99.7% of government spending untouched, is short sighted, appalling and will cost lives. This level of cut cannot be achieved by efficiencies; entire programmes will have to be scrapped.
To add insult to injury, the Prime Minister has given no timetable to when we might return to the 0.7% commitment. His statement was warmly welcomed by much of the House of Commons, but it will not be welcome news to the 1.4 million people who receive British development assistance in Sudan and Chad, nor to the 2 million children who receive their education through development-funded programmes. Without thought or consideration for other sources of funding that could make up this shortfall, the world’s poorest are once again expected to bear the brunt of political expediency.
You do not have to look far to find the means to replenish this £8 billion cut.
In 2024, the Government spent £3.4 billion on management consultants, including £344 million for Deloitte and £228 million for KPMG. Instead of eliminating this, the Government has decided to eliminate vital vaccine programmes that prevent children from dying from easily preventable diseases.
According to HMRC, the Government loses £5.5 billion each year from tax evasion. Instead of ruthlessly chasing down this money, the Labour Government has decided to cancel programmes that provide malaria nets to children.
£21 billion was stolen from the public during the COVID-19 pandemic by fraudulent actors. Rather than recovering that money, the Government has decided to find savings by cancelling programmes that provide fresh, clean water to areas affected by drought.
Right now, the British Government holds seized Russian assets to the tune of roughly £20 billion. Instead of liquidating the wealth of the very people responsible for starting the war in Ukraine, this Government has chosen to take from those who need it most.
According to Tax Justice UK, £2 billion a year in taxes is lost from just seven big tech firms shifting their profits out of the UK. Instead of closing these loopholes, our Government’s ODA decision will cancel de-mining programmes in former conflict zones.
We accept that the Government needs to increase defence spending; we vehemently reject this Government’s position that it should do so by further squeezing the already diminished development budget. Just days ago, the Foreign Secretary said that a reduction in the ODA budget would be a ‘big strategic mistake’. Following Tuesday’s statement, opposition MPs from the Liberal Democrats and the SNP called the Prime Minister’s decision a moral mistake. Now the Foreign Secretary, in his article in The Guardian today, deems the cuts necessary and firmly in line with his personal commitment to the values of ‘progressive realism’.
The Government is happy to go back to the bank to cash what little morality they had left. We will not be standing with them.