Ex-Foreign Office adviser says aid cuts are ‘dreadful moral choice’

Dercon predicts less than a third of the UK aid budget will be spent on bilateral overseas aid next year. Photograph: Stefan Wermuth/PA

British aid cuts have been imposed in a totally chaotic and unethical way depriving the aid budget of any coherence, the former lead development policy adviser to then foreign secretaries Liz Truss and Dominic Raab has said.

Stefan Dercon, who also worked as the chief economist at the Department for International Development between 2011 and 2017, claims ministerial decisions to load more of the costs of asylum seekers in the UK on to the aid budget has “got out of hand”, and led to “dreadful moral choices”.