Did the UK's 0.7% aid spending commitment backfire?

LONDON — In the development world, the United Kingdom is praised for spending 0.7% of gross national income on official development assistance — one of only a handful of donors to meet this United Nations benchmark. But the country’s aid bubble was shattered by Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s decision to merge the Department for International Development with the Foreign & Commonwealth Office last month. The closure of DFID, while not entirely unexpected, led to questions about the merits of spending 0.7% of the country’s wealth on overseas development, particularly in the context of austerity and, later, the Brexit vote that polarized the country. DFID’s budget grew over the past decade, protected by the commitment, while many of the U.K.’s domestic services were hollowed out. Did this cause such ill-feeling among citizens, ultimately leading to a backlash against development, that the 0.7% commitment — so hard-won by the development community — ended up being counterproductive? “If you didn’t have the 0.7 then you’d have an argument every year about the figure in the budget.” --— Andrew Mitchell, former secretary of state, DFID Unwelcome attention The U.K. has been meeting the 0.7% spending target since 2013, and the commitment to do so became law in 2015 under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government. “There was broad based support across the parties and across parliament. Just seven MPs voted against it,” Justine Greening, DFID secretary of state at the time, told Devex in an email. That year, 40% of Britons agreed that spending 0.7% of national income on overseas aid was the right thing to do, compared with 21% of people opposing it, according to research by the Development Engagement Lab at University College London. Greening described the International Development Act — which enshrined the 0.7% target into law — as “a crucial step forward for Britain.” It made the U.K. the only country in the G-7 group of major economies to meet the U.N. target and is widely seen as having boosted the country’s influence and reputation internationally. “Fundamentally it’s about levelling up in a wider world,” Greening wrote. “There’ll always be a debate on how much money is invested and how it’s spent — that’s normal in a democracy.” But enshrining the target into law has “obviously given it much more attention than if the government had just met 0.7 quietly on its own, and probably that attention has been more critical than helpful,” according to Ian Mitchell, senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development. “It's understandable that when you put something into law that [constrains] the government’s behavior that it draws more attention,” he explained. Nonetheless, Mitchell noted that all the major political parties included the 0.7% commitment in their 2019 election manifestos — a “significant” signal to voters, despite “a very noisy part of the right-wing press that thinks this is too much money.” “I think there’s a disproportionate focus on the very vocal critics of 0.7 in the [governing] Conservative Party and the press, that underestimates the wider support for international aid,” he said. Newspapers like “the Daily Mail have always been suspicious of aid,” added Mark Miller, director of development and public finance at the Overseas Development Institute, a London-based think tank. However, the target made criticism more likely during the years of public finance austerity that followed the global financial crash. In order to meet the target, DFID spending rose by 24% between 2010-11 and 2016-17, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, while the average budget change for other government departments, excluding health, education, and defense, was a cut of 28%. “It’s pretty clear that higher aid levels were maintained in the Osborne years than otherwise might have been the case [without the target],” Miller said, referring to former Chancellor George Osborne, known for his controversial program to reduce public spending. Despite the growing aid budget, just 1.7% of public expenditure goes on aid, according to the House of Commons library. But “when you have this very stark difference between aid going up abroad and being cut at home ... it both emboldens those critics and gives them a stronger argument that … ‘charity begins at home,’” he said. “I don't think that’s necessarily true but you can see how [it] arms and fires those people.” “Like so many other issues in the U.K., positions on both sides have hardened.” --— David Hudson, co-director, the Development Engagement Lab No easy answer Another common strand of criticism is that the target prioritizes quantity over quality, causing money to be wasted. But as Simon Maxwell, former director at ODI, pointed out, “overseas aid is probably the most carefully scrutinized area of government expenditure.” Maxwell campaigned for the target to be passed into law, and remains a strong supporter. He cited DFID’s evaluation department, the National Audit Office, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, and the International Development Committee. “All of them [are] going through the numbers and looking at the quality of programs in fine detail. Overall the evidence is that aid spent by DFID is well managed and effective,” he said. Andrew Mitchell, former DFID secretary of state under the coalition government, also disagreed outright that the 0.7% has been counterproductive. “If you didn’t have the 0.7 then you’d have an argument every year about the figure in the budget,” he said. The target is advantageous because it took the aid budget “out of party politics.” One problem sometimes raised by development experts is that although 0.7% was supposed to set a minimum amount the government could spend on aid, it has come to act as a maximum. That means that when the economy shrinks, it is first in line for a cut. For Mitchell, though, that makes sense. “It's a figure which takes into account the state of the economy,” he said. “That’s important. It means when we’re doing well, our support for the developing world does well. When we’re in difficulties, our support for the developing world reflects those difficulties — as it does now, where the budget is going to be reduced by about two billion [pounds]. We should accept and support that reduction because it reflects our economic conditions.” In 2020, five years on from the Development Engagement Lab’s first survey and with DFID preparing to fold, new data shows public attitudes toward spending 0.7% of GNI on ODA remain broadly similar. But there are signs of polarization. “The overall level of agreement is the same in 2020 as in 2015, with around 4 in 10 people agreeing that the 0.7% target is the right thing to do,” said professor David Hudson, co-director of the Development Engagement Lab. “But within this, the percentage of people saying that they ‘strongly agree’ has gone from 11% to 18% ... On the other side, the proportion of the population who say that they disagree has gone from 2 in 10 in 2015 to 3 in 10 in 2020, an increase of 50%,” Hudson continued. “Like so many other issues in the U.K., positions on both sides have hardened.”