The U.K. government has been criticized for wrongly claiming it is forced by international rules to divert billions of pounds from its aid budget to pay the hotel bills of a vast backlog of asylum seekers.
Aid organizations reacted with astonishment after the Home Office’s top civil servant told an inquiry last week: “It is not a choice of the British Government to score that money as official development assistance; it is just part of the rules.”
In fact, the Paris-based Development Assistance Committee — which oversees official development assistance spending — has urged members to recognize that they “have the option to decide that such costs are additional to their planned development budgets,” as many countries have chosen to do.