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The UK’s large-scale aid cuts will have a “huge impact”, the new development minister has admitted to MPs – but that the days of viewing Britain “as a global charity” are over.
Jenny Chapman replaced Anneliese Dodds as development minister in February. Dodds resigned in protest at the prime minister’s plan to cut aid spending from 0.5 per cent to 0.3 per cent of the UK’s gross national income (GNI) – a measure of the nation’s total wealth. That amounts to roughly £6 billion cut from a current budget of £15.4bn.
Addressing the international development select committee, Baroness Chapman said the UK needed to “sharpen our focus” on health, the climate crisis and humanitarian aid in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, “which is actually where the public expects us to lead”.
But this would likely come at the expense of programmes around women and girls’ education, she said.
“There will be a huge impact, I’m not pretending otherwise,” Chapman said “I can’t promise to protect every good programme”.
Baroness Chapman went on to claimthere was an "absolute crisis" in public support for international aid, adding that "many of our partner countries" also wanted to "move on from this model". Monica Harding, the Liberal Democrat spokesperson on the committee, said other polling suggested UK residents did support foreign aid when it is, “within their interests, when it supports defence and security and soft power”.
Arguing that the UK needed to focus more on sharing expertise than providing cash, Baroness Chapman said: "While our commitment to helping those living through emergencies is unwavering - for countries developing, we need to be an investor and not just a donor.
"It's about partnership and not paternalism."
An explicit plan to spend less on gender might appear to mirror the rhetoric coming from across the Atlantic, as Donald Trump has ruthlessly slashed any spending he considers to be in the service of “gender ideology.”
Trump’s cuts are already having wide-ranging destructive effects from leaving millions on the brink of famine to derailing the end of the AIDS pandemic, driving millions of preventable deaths.
But Chapman was keen to put a distance between Labour’s plans and the US’s blitz on all aid - especially any project that has a whiff of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Asked by Harding whether these plans were “just following the US”, Chapman denied the claim.
“We have made our choice for very very different ideological reasons. This is about necessity and having to shift some spending to defence,” Baroness Chapman said.
“We maintain our commitment to go back to 0.7 [per cent] when we can”.
In the future, the UK should offer its “expertise” from its education, health, tech and financial sectors to support countries to build their own systems, Chapman said.
The alternative would be to “salami slice without strategy,” which would be “wrong”.
An analysis by Save the Children previously shared with The Independent found “savage” cuts to UK foreign aid would leave 55.5 million of the world’s poorest people without access to basic resources.
Chair of the international devleopment committee, Sarah Champion, said development money - which usually sits in a different pot from humanitarian money - is “how you prevent conflicts in the future. It is how you prevent terrorists in the future”.
The plans will be finalised by 11 June when the spending review, setting out government departments’ budgets, closes.
Baroness Chapman also pushed back on estimates from The One Campaign which suggested UK aid cuts could lead to 600,000 preventable deaths and 38 million fewer children being vaccinated, saying the government hadn’t got the point of making those decisions yet. More clarity on where the UK’s aid cuts will fall will come in the summer.
This article was produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project
English (US) ·