After a significant amount of contentious debate, the British government has published its development aid budget for 2025-2026, which includes drastic cuts of around 40% toward overseas recipients.
According to Development Minister Baroness Chapman, the UK is switching toward a more “impactful” approach by prioritizing donations to multilateral organizations such as the World Bank and GAVI (the Vaccine Alliance) rather than bilateral aid. The threshold for the new development aid budget is 0.3% of the country’s Gross National Income (GNI), a substantial drop from pre-COVID years when it was 0.7% of GNI and even the 0.5% of GNI target under more recent governments.
Despite this dramatic reduction in aid spend, the British Development Minister claims that the new budget will still result in 1.9 billion people around the world benefiting from UK development assistance.
“The UK is moving toward a new relationship with developing countries,” said Baroness Chapman. “We are going to become partners and investors rather than acting in our traditional role as a donor of aid.”
World Bank President Ajay Banga welcomed the new British development aid budget, saying:
“We are grateful to the United Kingdom for honoring its pledge to the World Bank. Every pound from the British taxpayer will be multiplied many times over through our ability to mobilize capital and partner with the private sector.”
The significant drop in funding for development aid programs comes at a time when the British government has promised to increase defense spending following pressure from the United States.
Widespread pushback from stakeholders
As expected, slashing the development aid budget by such a large amount was met by pushback from across the spectrum.
The chair of the International Development Committee, Sarah Champion, said:
“These cuts will come at the expense of some of the world’s most vulnerable people.”
Likewise, Monica Harding, spokesperson for international development affairs from the Liberal Democrat party, said:
“Reducing UK aid to the lowest level this century will have an appalling impact on the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. And this is only the beginning – the cuts will be even deeper and more cruel next year when most of the reductions kick in.”
BOND, the British umbrella network for international development organizations, said:
“It’s clear that the UK government is deprioritizing funding for countries experiencing humanitarian crises such as South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Surprisingly, this also includes Palestinian territories, which the government promised to protect.”
Philip Goodwin, the UK chief executive for UNICEF, the UN agency that provides aid to children, said:
“The cuts will have a devastating impact on women and children. This move is deeply short-sighted, and we urge the government to adopt a new approach that focuses on protecting vulnerable children.”
Street Child, a British charity, said that its work on helping children get access to education in Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan will be terminated because of the announced cuts to the UK aid budget. CEO Tom Dannatt said that the new budget is “sad and short-sighted. Children who used to go to school will no longer go to school, so children will be roaming the streets.”
Lisa Wise, the director of global policy at Save the Children UK, said:
“The government has confirmed our worst fears. These reductions in aid will result in deaths of the world’s most vulnerable people, including children.”
Chris Law, the international development spokesperson for the Scottish National Party, said the cuts were “short-sighted” and undermine Scotland’s values.
“The decision to rip up our international commitments directly damages our influence and security.”
The former British minister for international development, Anneliese Dodds, resigned from her position in protest over the cuts to development aid.
A downward trajectory
Somewhat ironically, it was the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown which first set the target of 0.7% of GNI for development aid spending, which became enshrined in law in 2015. That target continued even under Conservative governments until the year 2020, when the Boris Johnson government “temporarily” reduced development aid spent to 0.5% in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic, saying spending levels would return to the previous 0.7% target when the country’s finances “allowed it.”.
The cuts made in 2020 also received significant pushback, with Andrew Mitchell, a former development secretary, warning at the time that they would “cause 100,000 preventable deaths, mainly among children.” And former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt said:
“Cutting our aid budget will not just make millions of people poorer but us poorer in the eyes of the world. We are abandoning noble ideas.”
Since then, the government has further reduced its role in delivering overseas aid by increasingly using the equivalent of accounting tricks to divert much of its existing budget toward accommodating refugees and asylum seekers. From 2020-2024, between one-fifth to almost one-half (43%) of the UK bilateral aid was spent domestically on costs related to refugees and asylum seekers.
In 2019, the British total ODA spend was £15.2 billion under the old 0.7% of GNI target. In 2020, that figure fell to £14.4 billion. In 2021, it sank even lower to £11.4 billion. In 2022, it rose slightly to £12.7 billion. In 2023, it climbed back to just over £15 billion and remained largely unchanged in 2024 despite inflation. According to the official government figures, while no fixed amount has yet been determined, annual aid spend for 2025 and 2026 will likely be around £8.2 billion annually, with much of that continuing to go toward domestic costs relating to refugees and asylum seekers, which amounted to £2.3 billion last year.
With development aid spend now set at just 0.3% of GNI for the foreseeable future, Britain has largely shifted away from a mission to directly alleviate overseas poverty and suffering to a standard by which a financial return on investment is the key metric. Furthermore, the government has specifically stated that savings from the development budget will be used to increase spending on defense and security. Prime Minister Starmer has vowed to spend 3% of GDP on defense and security this year, increasing it to 4.1% by the year 2027.
