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How muchGNIGNI GNIGNIG7 ICAIICAI CGDGDP,CGD.ICAI’ Your browser does not support the element. the British government spends on foreign aid used to be a fairly easy question to answer. Through most of the 2010s, just gesturing to the United Nations target of 0.7% of gross national income () would have sufficed. Fixing aid spending at that level was an early David Cameron initiative, part of a bid to beef up his government’s humanitarian credentials. These days, it’s harder to say. In theory, 0.7% of remains Britain’s long-term target. But over the past few years barely more than half that amount has actually been spent on development abroad. The cuts began under Britain’s last Conservative government, but look set to continue—and deepen—under Labour.Part of that change is explicit: Boris Johnson cut the aid target to 0.5% of , purportedly temporarily, during the pandemic. Labour opposed the move at the time but now plans to maintain it until at least 2030. There has also been another, less transparent, shift. Britain has become a world leader at rebadging domestic spending on refugees as foreign aid, perversely squeezing down what’s left. The combined impact of those two measures has been to yank down Britain’s spending on aid, excluding the asylum system, by almost half to 0.36% of in 2022 and 0.42% in 2023 (see chart 1).International accounting rules for aid say that hosting asylum-seekers for the year after they arrive can count as overseas development aid. But no other country devotes as large a slug of its aid budget to domestic refugees as Britain. Only Italy runs close (see chart 2). Plenty of European countries don’t include primary schooling, social housing or administrative costs for asylum-seekers in aid spending; Britain includes all three. Australia doesn’t count refugee costs in its aid spending at all.The Independent Commission for Aid Impact (), Britain’s aid watchdog, has diplomatically dubbed this approach “maximalist”. Rishi Sunak’s government rejected an proposal to cap the share of aid spent on refugees at home, as Sweden does. The Centre for Global Development (), a think-tank, reckons that if Britain had classified asylum spending the same way in the 1990s and 2000s, and had spent as much as it does today per asylum-seeker, in some years the entire aid budget would have been swallowed up.Labour has promised a reset. Anneliese Dodds, the development (and equalities) minister, announced that “Britain is back on the world stage” in a speech at Chatham House in October. Minouche Shafik, an economist who recently resigned as president of Columbia University, has been tapped to lead a review into Britain’s aid strategy. But so far there has been little indication that any new cash will come.Indeed, Labour has proved even stingier than the Conservatives, who did provide a partial top-up to buffer the impact of refugee spending in 2022 and 2023. October’s budget envisages total aid of £14.3bn ($18.2bn) in 2025—£1bn, or 0.04% of lower than in 2023. Instead, the government says it will make space for more aid spending by making the asylum system cheaper. That is speculative at best, and no quick fix. Small-boat crossings are at near-record levels and the government has been slow to phase out the expensive use of hotels to house migrants.All that still leaves Britain a fairly generous aid donor, compared with its peers. But making the scale of future aid spending a hostage to the success of a border crackdown also sabotages any long-term planning. “It’s impossible for the government to drive growth or affect real change in developing countries if they’re not able to be clear about the budget they have to spend,” says Ian Mitchell of the The clearest immediate fix would be to follow the ssuggestion to cap the share of aid spending that can go to the asylum system. The trouble is, money is tight and foreign-aid spending is spectacularly unpopular. Public First, a research firm, found that just 15% of voters would be willing to pay higher taxes to fund more foreign aid.; 75% would not (see chart 3).That leaves an uncomfortable push-and-pull between spending on poverty relief abroad or refugees at home. Britain has sleepwalked into prioritising the latter. But aid money goes much further in the poorest countries. Britain spends about as much hosting one asylum-seeker for a year as it would cost to save ten lives by expanding existing funding for malaria prevention. Still, shortchanging refugees isn’t a vastly appealing option either. At the very least, the government should be candid about its choices.
