Plans by the UK government to cut international aid below 0.7% of GNI, that renege on both international and manifesto commitments, have continued to draw widespread criticism.
The Government is arguing that the financial toll of the coronavirus justifies a temporary cut to the foreign aid budget – despite Britain’s aid budget being enshrined in law by the International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act. Many fear that any cuts will be made permanent.
More than this, as noted by Chairman of the Spectator Andrew Neil, the logic of making foreign aid spending a percentage of GNI is that total spend automatically decreases – or in his words “slumped” – in times of economic downfall. This led him to question whether further reductions to the budget were truly necessary.
Two former prime ministers – David Cameron and Tony Blair – condemned the move and in
November 2020, Foreign Office Minister Lady Sugg resigned after the chancellor announced the planned cuts. In her resignation letter, Lady Sugg wrote:
“Many in our country face severe challenges as a result of the pandemic and I know the government must make very difficult choices in response. But I believe it is fundamentally wrong to abandon our commitment to spend 0.7% of gross national income on development.”
Just days earlier, the International Observatory of Human Rights reported that MPs from seven different parties launched a united appeal calling on the government to scrap their plans.
Discontent with these plans within parliament – including within the Government’s own party – does not appear to be abating. On 11 December 2020, Stephen Crabb MP and Pauline Latham MP jointly penned an article for The House magazine titled: The government’s cuts to UK aid will lead to the preventable loss of life around the globe.
The two Conservative MPs argued:
“These budget cuts will undoubtedly lead to further, preventable loss of life. This announcement shows the UK government reverting on both our manifesto commitment to 0.7%, as well as weakening our promise to ‘end the preventable deaths of mothers, newborns and children’ and to ‘lead the way in eradicating Ebola and malaria’.”
Similar arguments were posited by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health the very next day, who stated that cutting the UK’s overseas aid budget will result in a significant number of children dying “with negative impacts lasting generations”.
Going on to add: “In the rich world, we are largely insulated from the horror of children dying needlessly. These rates of death are neither inevitable nor natural.”
UNA-UK, the “country’s foremost advocate for UK action at the UN; the UK’s leading source of analysis on the UN; and a vibrant grassroots movement of 20,000 people from all walks of life”, released a statement which said:
“As the Prime Minister said at the UN General Assembly this September, the unprecedented crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic requires a deepening of global cooperation, and an investment in the strength of our global system. UNA-UK is therefore concerned by plans to reduce UK aid spending from 0.7% of GNI – the longstanding global target that the UK enshrined into law in 2015.”
Later adding that:
“It is vital that developing countries receive the support they need to contain and eradicate the virus. This effort is already imperilled by rich countries buying up the overwhelming majority of vaccine stocks. The Government has announced it intends to make the fight against COVID-19 a priority area for aid spending, but the extent of the cuts to development spending cannot but impact some of the myriad and interconnected services upon which our global response to the pandemic applies.”
In December 2019, on the eve of the UK general election, UNA-UK and the International Observatory of Human Rights co-hosted a high-level roundtable of experts in the overseas development field. The overwhelming consensus was that the 0.7% target was crucial in protecting and enhancing human rights abroad.