It is no small thing for a Realm to look outward, and to extend a hand of charity to peoples poorer than itself. Your servant doth hold it for a virtue, and one becoming to a Kingdom that would think itself Christian, that we should not stop our ears against the cry of those who hunger, nor turn our faces from realms that lie under famine, war, or pestilence. This impulse is good, and ought to be preserved.
Yet the present custom is grown strange. The Treasury is bound by solemn promise to disburse each year a fixed portion of the wealth of the Realm — seven parts in every thousand of the kingdom's whole produce — upon the affairs of foreign nations. The number itself was set by no great deliberation, but agreed at a council of nations near three score years past, and hath since been treated as a matter of holy writ, not to be examined nor questioned.
And worse: because the sum must be spent, the question that ought to come first — what is worth the spending — cometh last. The clerks must find programmes to fit the purse, when the purse should rather be drawn to fit the programmes. So it is that monies are sent into realms which possess wealth enough to relieve their own poor, but choose to spend their treasure upon engines that fly above the heavens, while we, less rich than they, do labour to feed their hungry on their behalf.
These proposals therefore set down a different ordering. The principle of looking outward is kept, and a public commitment retained. But the figure is opened to honest debate, the figure is treated as a limit and not a duty, and the spending is directed to three ends only — the relief of the genuinely poor, the answering of sudden calamities wheresoever they fall, and the advancement of works whose fruits accrue to all mankind.
I. The Principle
A Kingdom should look beyond its own shores. The question is how, and to what end.
Britain is a wealthy nation in a world where most are not. A country in our position which spends nothing on the relief of poverty beyond its borders is a country that has chosen narrowness over seriousness. The instinct to look outward is sound and should be preserved as a matter of national character, not justified anew each year against the demands of domestic politics.
A public commitment serves this purpose. It signals that the principle is not for sale to whichever party most needs the money for something else. Without such a commitment aid becomes the first casualty of every fiscal squeeze, and the principle is hollowed out by attrition rather than openly abandoned.
II. The Target — Ceiling, Not Floor
The 0.7 per cent figure is a political artefact and should be treated as such.
The 0.7 per cent of national income target is widely treated as though it were the product of deep economic analysis. It is not. It originated in the Pearson Commission of 1969 and was adopted by the United Nations the following year as a negotiated political target. It was not derived from any rigorous account of need, of capacity, or of what sums could be effectively absorbed by the world's poorest economies. It was a number chosen because it sounded ambitious without sounding impossible.
An arbitrary number that has hardened into orthodoxy distorts the work it was meant to enable. Because the figure must be reached, programmes are designed to spend it. The order of reasoning runs backwards: instead of asking what good might be done and then funding it, the FCDO is left to find ways of disbursing a sum already fixed. Spending pressure of this kind produces marginal programmes, top-up grants to bodies that have no clear plan for the additional money, and a willingness to fund work in countries that are not in any meaningful sense poor.
The target should be reframed. A public commitment is worth keeping, but as an upper bound of intent rather than a quota to be filled. In a year where the available programmes are strong and the absorptive capacity is high, the country spends to the ceiling. In a year where they are not, the country underspends without apology. Underspending is preferable to misspending. The figure describes our seriousness; it does not compel disbursement.
What the right successor figure should be — whether 0.7 per cent is too high, too low or about right once the framing shifts from quota to ceiling — is a separate question and an open one. The point of these proposals is that the figure itself ought to be reasoned through, not inherited. The Treasury and the Foreign Office should be required to lay before Parliament an analysis of need, absorptive capacity and programme quality, and to defend a chosen figure on those grounds.
III. Direct Aid to Genuinely Poor Realms
The first category: assistance to countries that lack the means to look after their own poor.
The primary purpose of aid is to assist countries which do not have the resources to relieve their own poverty. The filter is national wealth, measured by income per head, supplemented by a judgement of state capacity. The poorest countries of sub-Saharan Africa, parts of South Asia outside the major middle-income economies, and fragile states emerging from conflict are the natural recipients.
The argument for help in such places is straightforward. The government cannot provide the basic public goods of public health, primary education, sanitation and food security at the scale required, and there is no realistic prospect of it doing so within a generation by its own resources. British support can make a real difference at the margin, particularly where it is patient, long-term and coordinated with the recipient government rather than substituting for it.
What This Means in Practice
- Aid concentrated in countries below a defined income-per-head threshold
- State capacity considered alongside income — a poor country with a functioning state is a better partner than a slightly richer one with none
- Long programme cycles rather than annual grant rounds, so recipients can plan
- Coordination with multilateral donors to avoid duplication and competing priorities
- Honest accounting of what works and what does not — programmes that fail are closed, not renewed for the sake of continuity
IV. Humanitarian Response
Emergency relief held as a category of its own.
Famine, earthquake, flood, the displacement of peoples by war: these are events for which no annual budget round can prepare. They arrive when they arrive, and the response must be immediate. Britain should hold a standing humanitarian reserve, ringfenced and held apart from the development and global public goods budgets, available to draw against at speed when a crisis appears.
Development aid is judged on long-run effectiveness in countries selected for their poverty and capacity. Public goods are judged on scientific merit and breadth of benefit. Humanitarian aid is judged on the speed and adequacy of response to a specific event. These tests do not sit comfortably inside a common budget, and the temptation to raid one for the others is real and damaging.
The reserve is delivered through whichever combination of multilateral bodies, established humanitarian agencies and direct support best fits the situation. Eligibility is determined by the nature of the emergency, not by the income status of the affected country — a humanitarian crisis in a middle-income country still requires a humanitarian response.
V. Global Public Goods
The third category: investment in work whose benefits accrue to all.
Some of the best uses of aid money have nothing to do with bilateral transfers to particular countries. They are investments in goods whose benefits cross every border: vaccines, treatments for the diseases of poverty, clean energy technology, agricultural science suited to poor-country conditions, climate adaptation research. The poorest people in the world benefit disproportionately from these things, but so does everyone else. That is the point.
The model is exemplified by GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, which has saved millions of lives at a cost per life saved that no bilateral programme can match. Similar reasoning applies to investment in solid-state battery research, in low-cost desalination, in drought-resistant staple crops, in the next generation of antibiotics. Britain should fund this work on merit. The best work is funded wherever it is being done — in British universities, in international consortia, in research institutes in poorer countries — without regard to where the lab happens to sit.
The condition attached is open knowledge-sharing. Public money produces public results. Findings are published openly; intellectual property arising from publicly funded work is licensed on terms that do not lock out poor-country users. This is the discipline that distinguishes a global public good from a subsidy to a particular industry.
Domains for Investment
- Vaccine development, procurement and delivery (GAVI and successor models)
- Treatments and diagnostics for the diseases of poverty — malaria, tuberculosis, neglected tropical diseases
- Clean energy and storage technology, including non-rare-earth battery chemistries
- Agricultural science suited to small-holder and dryland farming
- Climate adaptation — water security, flood resilience, heat-tolerant crops
- Antimicrobial resistance research
VI. What Falls Outside
Two categories of spending that should no longer count as aid.
The first is bilateral assistance to countries that are wealthy enough to look after their own poor and choose not to. India is the obvious instance. India contains many millions in poverty, but India also runs a space programme, maintains nuclear forces and is among the larger economies in the world. The argument that British aid should fill the gap left by Indian government priorities turns Britain into the safety net for choices made in Delhi. That is not generosity. It is the subsidising of one government's preferences by the taxpayers of another. The same reasoning applies to other middle-income countries with comparable choices to make.
The second is aid that is really industrial policy with a development label. Funding British firms to develop technology that might benefit poor countries is not aid in any honest sense. It may be good policy on its own terms, but it should be funded from the appropriate departmental budget and defended openly as what it is. The aid envelope is not a slush fund for domestic priorities dressed in moral clothing. The test is simple: does the money produce a global public good with open knowledge-sharing, or does it produce a British commercial advantage with humanitarian framing attached?
VII. The Question of Influence
Soft power is a welcome side-effect, not a basis for choosing programmes.
It is sometimes argued that British aid buys influence in the countries that receive it, and that abandoning middle-income recipients cedes ground to other powers — China most often cited — who are willing to spend for influence without moral pretence. The argument is not without force. Aid does build relationships, and relationships do matter.
But influence should not drive allocation. A programme chosen for its strategic value rather than its developmental merit is a programme whose first failure of judgement is at the point of selection. If the United Kingdom wishes to fund influence operations in middle-income countries, the appropriate budget is the Foreign Office's, and the activity should be named honestly. Aid should be defended on the ground that it works, not on the ground that it makes friends.
Where well-targeted aid also produces goodwill, that is welcome. The two are not in tension. But the order of priority matters: choose the programme for its impact, then accept the influence that follows. The reverse order produces bad aid and indifferent diplomacy.
VIII. Summary
The principle of looking outward is preserved. The 0.7 per cent target is opened to debate, treated as a ceiling of intent rather than a quota, and underspending is accepted where good programmes are scarce. Within that envelope, money flows in three directions only.
The first is direct assistance to genuinely poor countries, filtered by income per head and informed by a judgement of state capacity. The second is humanitarian response, held as a ringfenced reserve and released on the criteria of the emergency rather than the wealth of the country affected. The third is investment in global public goods — health, climate technology, public-interest research — funded on merit wherever the best work is being done, on condition of open knowledge-sharing.
Spending that does not fit these categories is no longer aid. Subsidising middle-income governments that decline to fund their own poor is not generosity. Funding British industry under the cover of development is not aid. Both may exist as policies in their own right, but they should be named for what they are and paid for from their proper budgets.