The Digby Jones column: Overseas aid must be on our terms

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Our approach to overseas aid is badly in need of a shake-up.

Its £1.7bn budget is ring-fenced from all the cuts – only the NHS is being treated similarly.

Andrew Mitchell, the international development secretary, has said: “We will not balance the books on the backs of the poorest people abroad.”

But how often does it reach those genuinely in need?

The Blair Government gave annually (and the Coalition currently still does) £250m of your and my money to nuclear-armed India which is in the course of quadrupling its defence budget and has a space exploration programme!

The last 13 years has seen hundreds of millions of pounds of much needed UK taxpayers’ money being given to Russia and China.

This is at a time when the UK is flat broke!

We are going to bring discomfort and hardship down on our own people with the cuts being set out and, whilst such hardship is not in the same league as what we can see in parts of India or Africa, if we really want to develop universal engagement and buy-in to long-term overseas aid I suggest we first “fix it” at home and simultaneously give less but better-directed funds overseas.

Mr Mitchell insists we as a country are wiser “dealing with the consequences of conflict, immigration and disease upstream at the cause rather than dealing with the much more expensive symptoms later on”.

He has a point but it won’t wear with parents who have just been told their children’s school will not be repaired if they see UK aid going to corrupt regimes, to finance the follies of a ruler’s whim or to countries that, frankly, can afford to provide the money themselves if they only wanted to.

And it is not as if many British companies benefit on the back of our generosity.

In 1997, the incoming Labour Government untied our overseas aid at a stroke.

So, unlike any other developed economy other than Denmark, we give taxpayers’ money away without any conditions at all – no stipulations that UK companies get to do the work.

So your taxes regularly keep the French, the Americans, the Germans or the Japanese in business with no reciprocity at all.

It is a socialist shibboleth that aid should not be used to interfere in the right of sovereign nations to choose.

All very noble … but no-one else plays the game.

So the question is – what do we get for our money?

UK jobs is the desired answer but I would settle for “no corruption and directly helping the poorest people in countries that genuinely can’t afford it” to coin a Mitchell phrase.

Overseas aid never gets the headlines the NHS does, but £1.7bn would rebuild a lot of schools and recruit a lot of policemen.

If we are to keep doling out the cash then it needs to be far better targeted.

And in the meantime cough up those taxes Birmingham, suffer those cuts Newcastle because some country needs a new bridge and you’re paying!

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