Labour is still spending 20% of the foreign aid budget in the UK – despite all its ‘pledges’

On Thursday 3 April the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO) published its provisional statistics on how UK aid was spent in 2024. It shows that the UK continues to spend 20% of the foreign aid budget on asylum seeker costs in this country – despite the Labour Party government’s planned cuts to the budget.

Foreign aid budget: still being spent domestically

This annual publication provides an overview of the provisional UK aid spend in the calendar year 2024 and has revealed that the UK spent £2.8 billion Official Development Assistance (ODA) on costs associated with asylum seekers in the UK in 2024 (20.1% of total ODA), compared with £4.3 billion (27.9% of total ODA) in 2023 and £3.7 billion in 2022.

The UK’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) dropped from £15.34bn (0.58% of GNI) in 2023 to £14.07bn (0.5% of GNI) in 2024.

The statistics also reveal that the Home Office spent £2,384million of the UK aid budget in 2024 (17%), £2,954million in 2023 (19.3%), while in 2022 this was at £2,397million (18.7%). This is a decrease of 19.3%. While this is a decrease from the all-time high of 2023, Home Office spending for 2024 is barely a change compared to 2022.

Bilateral spending saw an increase of 12.6% from £10bn in 2023 to £11.3bn in 2024 – making up 80.1% of total ODA in 2024. Region-specific spending saw a 35% increase from £2.1bn in 2023 to £2.87bn in 2024. This included:

• Regional-specific bilateral ODA to Africa in 2024 was at £1.48bn, an increase of 41% from £1.05bn in 2023
• Regional specific bilateral ODA to Americas was £85million – a 14% decrease from £100million in 2023
• Regional specific bilateral ODA to Asia was £1.04bn in 2024, a 48% increase from £705million in 2023.
• Regional-specific bilateral ODA to Europe was £217million in 2024, a 15% decrease from £257million in 2023.
• Regional-specific bilateral ODA to Pacific was £45million, a 844% increase from £5million in 2023.

“Unsustainable”

Meanwhile, Humanitarian Assistance was £1.4bn in 2024, a 60.5% increase from £882million in 2023.

However, multilateral spending has seen a sharp decrease by 47.5%, from £5.3bn in 2023 to £2.8bn in 2024 – its share of total ODA is only 19.9%. The only time since SID data from 2009 that the UK multilateral spending was less than 30% of total ODA was in 2022 (24.6%).

Gideon Rabinowitz, Director of Policy and Advocacy at Bond, the UK network for organisations working in international development and humanitarian assistance, said:

We welcome the reduction in the amount of UK aid spent domestically on asylum costs, but this figure remains far too high.

As the government slashes the UK aid budget, continuing to spend £2.8 billion of UK aid in the UK on escalating asylum accommodation costs is unsustainable, poor value for money and comes at the expense of essential development and humanitarian programmes tackling the root causes of insecurity and displacement. It is vital that we support refugees and asylum seekers in the UK, but this requires its own budget and the ending the use of expensive and inappropriate hotels as accommodation.

At a time when the world is increasingly unstable, the government is abandoning marginalised communities and damaging its credibility as a reliable global partner. We urge them to rethink the cuts or at the very least ensure that the remaining limited budget is used for its intended purpose, to support communities in lower-income countries who face conflict, climate change, and poverty.

Featured image via the Canary