The UK’s overseas aid cuts were effectively more than twice as large as the government announced last year, according to a fresh analysis of official figures.
The effective cut was at least £1.2 billion, at least £700m more than the £500m reduction announced by ministers, according to an estimate from Bond, the UK network for development organisations.
In 2025, the government announced that it would cut overseas aid by £500 million as it reduced spending from 0.5 per cent of Gross National Income (GNI) towards 0.3 per cent by 2027, with the savings helping to fund increased defence spending.
Official figures show the UK spent £13.04 billion on aid in 2025, equivalent to just 0.43 per cent of gross national income – significantly below the 0.48 per cent level expected for the year.
The additional cut was partly caused by the government changing the way the aid budget is calculated. Under the previous system, aid spending was adjusted when forecasts for the size of the economy changed, but that system ended in 2025.
The aid budget did not increase when the UK economy proved larger than expected, Bond said.
It estimates that the UK’s higher-than-expected national income in 2025 resulted in more than £500m in aid spending being lost because the budget was not increased accordingly.
A further £200m or more may have been lost because spending on refugees and asylum seekers in the UK, some of which can be counted as overseas aid, was lower than expected.
The Treasury and Home Office had refused to provide data showing exactly how much aid had been affected, Bond said.
Gideon Rabinowitz, Bond’s director of policy and advocacy, said the 2025 aid budget had been “significantly less than expected as a share of GNI” as a result of policy changes introduced in the Spending Review.
“This stealth cut leaves communities suffering the impacts of conflict, crisis and climate change worldwide paying an even higher price,” he said.
He said that while asylum seekers and refugees in the UK should be supported, diverting funds from the already-sparse UK aid budget meant less money for communities overseas.
The Home Office should not be able to retain savings from lower refugee-related spending rather than returning them to the aid budget, Mr Rabinowitz added.
He urged the prime minister to rule out further cuts to the UK aid budget and “honour Labour's manifesto commitments on UK aid through credible and transparent targets”.
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office told The Independent that the figures from Bond did not represent an additional £500m cut, arguing that the comparison was not like-for-like. It said around £500m related to British International Investment (BII) funding being treated differently in the final figures, although the money remained available for BII activity.
The department also stressed that bilateral country allocations represented only part of the UK’s overall aid programme and should be considered alongside multilateral spending.
This article has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project
