The UK is spending a third of its overseas aid budget on supporting migrants and refugees who actually are inside the UK, according to official figures. Meanwhile, its aid to foreign countries is shrinking.
Figures from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office show that the country spent nearly £3.7 billion (€4.23 billion) in total on supporting refugees and migrants in 2022.
That is more than three times the amount it allocated in aid for the whole of the African continent; development and aid payments to alleviate poverty across Africa amounted to only £1.1 billion that year.
The previous year, the UK spent only £2.6 billion on assisting migrants within the country, making the rise from 2021 to 2022 equivalent to the entire 2022 aid budget for Africa: £1.1 billion. That is less than half the budget the UK spent in aid to Africa in 2020.
The same year (2020), Britain spent less than £600 million on migrants, making this a three-year rise of more than 600%.
The total amount of UK's overseas aid spending in 2022 came to £12.8 billion, with a third of that budget going towards migrants already in the UK.
That is 0.5% of its gross national spending, according The Guardian newspaper.
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Hotel Britannia for migrants
The Foreign Office said the figures reflected the support the UK offered to war refugees from Ukraine as well as for financing the resettlement program of Afghans after the August 2021 Taliban takeover.
The majority of these skyrocketing expenses, says The Guardian, are linked to the cost of having to provide accommodation to more than 200,000 refugees and migrants, using mainly hotels in the absence of sufficient infrastructure to house asylum seekers.
While many of them do come from Ukraine and Afghanistan, about a quarter are thought to be made up of people who reach the shores of the UK using irregular means — usually migrants who cross the English Channel mainly from France on rickety boats.
In March 2023 alone, the UK Home Office used more than 386 hotels across the UK to house migrants and refugees; figures reveal that at least 29% of the funds went to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, which is in charge of organizing accommodation solutions for migrants.
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OECD 'loophole' allows for creative accounting
The Bond campaign group, which is a UK network of more than 400 NGOs and other organizations operating in international development, says that no other major country in the world has applied cuts to its aid budget to cover the cost of housing refugees as the UK has.
Ian Mitchell from the Centre for Global Development meanwhile told The Guardian newspaper that few European governments, with the exception of Sweden, move such a big proportion of the cost of housing refugees and migrants on to their aid budget as the UK.
The practice of accounting for migrant and refugee costs this way is considered to be controversial, as it makes use of OECD rules, which are not defined narrowly enough.
According to the OECD, the financing of refugee and migrant programs within a country can indeed come out of its budget for aid and development.
These are technically referred to as "in-donor refugee costs: (IDRC)," which, according to rules set out by the OECD Development Assistance Committee, provide what watchdogs around the world regard as little more than an accounting workaround.
Tamsyn Barton, chief commissioner of the Independent Commission for Aid Impact — the UK watchdog in charge of scrutinizing government spending — said that "[w]hile it is permitted within the rules, allowing the soaring costs of asylum seekers and refugees in the UK to take such a high proportion of the aid budget meant that very little was available for humanitarian emergencies like the Pakistan floods and the drought in Somalia."
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A decisive shift in direction
The new figures revealed by the government resulted in reactions from charities helping refugees and migrants as well.
"Today's figures provide a further stark reminder that this is a government robbing Peter to pay Paul," said the chief of UK advocacy of the Christian Aid charity, Sophie Powell.
"We must reject the false choice between responding at home and fulfilling the UK's responsibilities to the world's most in need," she added.
Ranil Dissanayake from the Centre of Global Development referred to the development as a "complete break with the past, and a total transformation of our aid budget."
"No one could possibly justify these allocations on development grounds," he added. "[W]e now spend more on aid at home than in the poorest places in the world."
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Further cuts ahead
The Foreign Office meanwhile also published projections on its budgets for the next two financial years, which reveal a continuing focus on dealing with migrants who already are in the country than helping people on the African continent who — if greater foreign aid were to be made available— might not feel the need to migrate in the first place.
Aid to Africa will therefore drop further from £1.1 billion last year to a minimum of £764 million. The next financial year, it is pegged to be cut down to a minimum of £648 million.
There are no forecasts beyond that point, partly because the UK is due to hold general elections in 2024, which may possibly result in a new party forming the government.
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with AFP