UK to spend aid budget on helping EU cut asylum-seeker arrivals

The United Kingdom plans to use its aid budget to help the European Union cut the number of asylum-seekers arriving from Africa, in the first development policy shift made by its new Labour government. The two parties are seeking to strike an agreement to work together to stem unauthorized crossings of the Mediterranean through measures to “deter people from leaving in the first place,“ said U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy. Lammy announced a deal would involve “combined aid budgets,” without revealing whether the money would come from within the existing official development assistance allocation or from a top-up to it. “Because we do make a substantial aid commitment in our country, the question is how can we combine efforts,” he said, arguing the entire “European family” must confront the challenge of the continent’s over 1 million asylum applications in 2023. Later, the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office announced an initial £84 million ($109 million) of aid for employment, education and skills projects in countries in Africa and the Middle East where emigration to Europe is high, alongside “plans” for future partnership with the E.U. The EU’s own economic deals with North African countries — including Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, and Mauritania — have been criticized for funding the harsh treatment of asylum-seekers, to keep them out of Europe, in addition to investment projects. Joint working might also involve signing up to Brussels’ new Migration and Asylum Pact to stiffen border defenses through, many NGOs fear, greater use of arbitrary detention, racial profiling, and pushbacks of migrant boats. Lammy, speaking to the BBC, described the challenge as “how we upstream deal with the source of the problems with our combined aid budgets in countries to deter people from leaving in the first place.” The announcement, made at the 44-nation European Political Community summit the U.K. is hosting, is Lammy’s first significant policy move since he retained control of the development brief within FCDO. The Labour Party, which took power two weeks ago, opted not to restore a separate aid department and has ditched talk of “a new model” in favor of retaining the structure it inherited from the Conservatives — but with a part-time development minister. Although the aid budget has crept back up to 0.58% of gross national income, Labour has rejected calls to reverse the 2020 cut from the United Nations-recommended benchmark of 0.7% and will do so only “when fiscal circumstances allow.” Furthermore, £4.3 billion of that £15.4 billion aid pot in 2023 was spent on hosting refugees in the U.K., rather than on aid and development projects abroad — another policy Labour will not change in the near future. Keir Starmer, the new prime minister, has made cooperation with EU countries to combat illegal migration a foreign policy priority, rebuilding links lost when the U.K. left the bloc in 2020. Key to that is enabling British border officers to have full access to EU security arrangements such as the fingerprint records of asylum-seekers — the price for which may be helping to fund the bloc’s anti-migration measures.