A third of the UK’s international aid budget was spent supporting refugees in the UK in 2022. A new report by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) details the £3.5 billion expense, a threefold increase on 2021, and about 12 times the amount spent in 2015.
An enquiry by a parliamentary committee published in February expressed concerns about the government’s increased spending on refugees in the UK. The committee called it a “political choice” that comes “at the expense of vulnerable and marginalised people living in the world’s poorest countries”. But the ICAI report is the first to provide a detailed analysis of how much is being spent.
The ceiling on the UK’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) budget was cut from 0.7% to 0.5% of gross national income in 2020. This means that as the overall budget is shrinking, the share spent in the UK is growing. This is bad for international development, since programmes supporting some of the poorest people in the world have been cut.
