Labour’s new Development Minister has committed to more than doubling spending on foreign aid in a move that would cost taxpayers billions of pounds a year.
Kirsty McNeill declared herself ‘a huge believer in aid’ as she recommitted to Labour’s manifesto pledge to return to sending 0.7 per cent of national income overseas.
The International Development Minister’s vow comes as Labour faces criticism over its failure to commit to increasing defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP by 2030.
Chancellor John Healey quit as defence secretary in June over Sir Keir Starmer’s refusal to commit to the 3 per cent target, saying it was the minimum needed to keep Britain safe.
But under Labour’s current plans, defence spending will nudge up from 2.6 per cent next year to 2.7 per cent by the end of the decade.
Despite this, Ms McNeill has recommitted to increasing aid spending from its current 0.3 per cent up to 0.7 per cent of Britain’s gross national income (GNI), without setting any timetable to do so.
‘I’m a huge believer in aid; I’m a huge believer in the quality of British aid, and when you have more of it, you can have more impact,’ she told the Guardian.
International Development Minister Kirsty McNeill declared herself ‘a huge believer in aid’ as she recommitted to Labour’s manifesto pledge to return to sending 0.7 per cent of national income overseas
Ms McNeill promised to ‘press for reform of some of the international bodies that spend UK aid’ and said she would ‘sweat the asset’ to make the best of constrained budgets.
But she said that Labour should not be afraid to make a straightforward argument for foreign aid spending and that the Government should ‘deploy that capability ambitiously’.
She added: ‘The foreign secretary [Ed Miliband]’s been very clear that both development and climate are going to be at the heart of British policy: they’re not an addition, they’re right at the beating heart, which I’m obviously absolutely delighted about.’
The last Conservative government cut spending on foreign aid to 0.5 per cent and this was slashed further to 0.3 per cent under Sir Keir Starmer in order to prioritise defence spending.
Britain is still set to spend £9.2billion on foreign aid in 2027 and meeting the 0.7 per cent target would cost an additional £11billion a year – dwarfing the £4billion rise recently agreed for defence spending following a year of Labour infighting.
Labour’s 2024 manifesto committed to returning aid spending to 0.7 per cent and the Development Minister insisted that, in Andy Burnham’s Government, ‘everyone from the prime minister down is a believer in the spirit that animated that manifesto’.
Ms McNeill’s comments came ahead of a speech at the New Economics Foundation on Monday in which she set out Labour’s vision for a modern approach to international development.
In the speech, she said that the biggest global challenges demand a new focus on ‘mutual interest and shared resilience’. She added that ‘the global problems we face today are not ones that any one country can deal with alone’.
