Should Britain really be cutting foreign aid now?

Faced with a black hole in the public finances, chancellor Rishi Sunak has targeted the foreign aid budget. Is he right to do so? And will it save us much money?

Rishi Sunak ©
Rishi Sunak: struggling to save
(Image credit: © Jessica Taylor/UK Parliament handout/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

What’s happened?

Last week, chancellor Rishi Sunak set out details of the fiscal hole facing the UK as a result of the pandemic and associated slump, and announced a cut in the foreign aid budget from 0.7% of gross national income to 0.5%. The exact size of the cut will depend on the size of the slump, but it adds up to a third – from about £15bn a year to £10bn. The move breaks a promise most recently reaffirmed in the Conservatives’ 2019 election manifesto to keep the target. All five living ex-prime ministers (two Labour, three Tory) criticised the move. It prompted Baroness Liz Sugg to resign as a foreign office minister, while the Archbishop of Canterbury branded the cut “shameful and wrong”. Andrew Mitchell, a former international development secretary (whose old department has been swallowed by the Foreign Office) warned it would mean four million people losing access to clean water and “100,000 preventable deaths, mainly among children”. He plans to lead a Tory rebellion when MPs vote in January; some expect the numbers to be close.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.