Former UK development minister 'absolutely horrified' by foreign aid cut

A former U.K. development minister has told members of Parliament he was “absolutely horrified” by the U.K. government’s decision to cut foreign aid to 0.3% of gross national income, saying the move was “completely extraordinary” for a Labour government. Speaking at the International Development Select Committee Tuesday, Andrew Mitchell — who served with the Conservative Party as minister for development and Africa from 2022 to 2024 and international development secretary from 2010 to 2012 — told MPs that he couldn’t imagine what former U.K. prime ministers such as Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, and Teresa May would have thought of the U.K.’s newly “emasculated” development budget. “To see this step being taken, particularly by a Labour government, I’m absolutely horrified,” he said. “We had those four prime ministers in a period of time where British development policy led the world. Britain was a development superpower, and we saw the fastest decline in international poverty in human history. For a Labour government to turn its back on all that and cut in this way, I thought was completely extraordinary.” Mitchell, who also served as both deputy foreign secretary and shadow foreign secretary in 2024, insisted that the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office would have opposed the decision to cut the budget. “The Foreign Office never went along with this proposal — this is the Treasury and Downing Street,” he said. “Why was it that support for international development went up during Tory austerity? Because we had a very passionate prime minister making the case frequently. But it’s very difficult to do it if you haven’t got a prime minister championing it — it’s very difficult to combat the headwinds against development.” Mitchell also said that development was a long-term issue and recommended that the government should not abruptly drop the U.K. aid budget from 0.5% of GNI to 0.3% but instead reduce it gradually, “to 0.4% then 0.3%.” He also warned that bilateral development programs would suffer the most as a result of the cuts, with multilateral funds such as the World Bank, vaccine alliance Gavi, and The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria being likely to be protected. The cut was motivated by concerns about national defense, but Mitchell highlighted potential national security concerns of cuts to the development budget. “If we vacate, who do you think will come in? It will be the Chinese and the Russians and terrorists. It will be a rich recruiting vein for terrorism,” he said. “You cut the bilateral programs, you will open the space to people who are not friends of Britain — who wish us ill.” Asked by MPs what sources of funding might be able to replace the funding lost from traditional overseas development assistance, Mitchell suggested that the U.K. should embark on more co-financing initiatives with other countries, for example tackling starvation in Somalia with Saudi Arabia; that it should agree to guarantee billions of pounds worth of the debt of development banks to enable them to augment their development work; and that it should support insurance pools, which are designed to help countries manage climate risks and provide financial resilience in the face of disasters. “Thinking of ways of multiplying the funds is at the heart of this,” he said. Commenting on the hearing, Romilly Greenhill, CEO of Bond, the U.K. network for NGOs, said in a statement: “We saw with the previous UK aid cuts how stop-start funding disrupts development progress and is bad value for money in the long-term.” She urged the government to reduce how much of the U.K. aid budget is diverted to housing asylum-seekers within British borders, saying that would “help prevent a sudden drop in funding and mitigate some of the worst impacts of the cuts on the most marginalised people globally.”