UK aid under pressure A synthesis of ICAI findings from 2019 to 2023

This synthesis of our findings also pulls together the evidence from our reviews providing “difficult lessons” on the performance of UK aid in the last few years: the disruption and losses from the merger of DFID and FCO and the damage to the UK’s reputation from the succession of budget reductions, a reduced emphasis on targeting aid to assist those in greatest poverty and therefore on the overar. [...] The merger of FCO and DFID 2.6 In the early months of the pandemic, on 16 June 2020, the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, announced the merger of FCO and DFID.10 In his speech to Parliament, he stated that the pandemic had shown the distinction between “diplomacy and overseas development” to be “artificial and outdated”, and that the division into two departments meant that no single decision-m. [...] While providing access to protection in the UK for refugees is an important international obligation, the reallocation of resources away from supporting people affected by humanitarian crises worldwide to meet soaring costs for asylum seekers and refugees in the UK is an inefficient use of the aid budget and undermines the previous UK policy of supporting refugees in their region of origin. [...] The most pronounced of these is the redirection of around £3.7 billon of the annual aid budget away from developing countries to support asylum seekers and refugees in the UK (partially offset by increasing the aid budget by £2.5 billion over two years), which has severely undermined the government’s ambitions for the aid programme. [...] In June 2019 the then prime minister, Theresa May, delivered a speech promising to “put the UK at the forefront of climate action at the G20”, including through the UK’s hosting of the COP26 international climate conference in Glasgow in 2021.86 The government worked closely with multilateral partners to raise their ambitions on climate finance and to improve the quality of their climate work.