Campaign and petition email responses

Urgent Support Needed for the Official Development Assistance

Under the Conservatives, the Overseas Development Assistance budget has fallen from 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) to 0.5%, which represents a cut of over £4.9 billion year on year. Spending 0.7% of national wealth on overseas aid is the United Nations target and the Tory Government have abandoned that at a time of increased income, climatic, health and conflict-related insecurity worldwide.

The full list of tragic cuts can be viewed here.

Last week the Executive Director of Water Witness International went on record to say that the Tory Government’s decision to cut aid to Malawi by £90 million in 2021 led directly to a major cholera outbreak in the country that has killed more than 1,000 people because this country previously funded the early warning systems.

In recent months, the budget for life-saving projects overseas has been squeezed further by the increased spending of ODA domestically rather than abroad - mainly on housing for refugees, mostly from Ukraine.

The UK is now – astonishingly- spending more of its foreign aid budget at home than in poorer countries, and it was reported that UK ODA being spent domestically passed the £4 billion mark compared with estimates that the UK will spend only around £3 billion in ODA this year on direct bilateral payments for development and humanitarian projects in poor countries.

Whilst the SNP wholeheartedly support increased funding for refugees and asylum seekers here in the UK, it is completely unacceptable to divert money from the ODA budget to do so.

Our unwavering support for those fleeing war and persecution in Ukraine, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, should not come at the expense of International Development efforts. Instead, the ODA budget should be ringfenced for spending abroad, and the Home Office should be given increased funding to drastically improve its asylum processes.

The current Conservative Minister for International Development, Andrew Mitchell MP, has put on the record in November 2022 “We used to be a foreign aid superpower, but our reputation has declined.” That is an astonishing admission, but it is also the truth.

Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak’s Government currently has no bills in Parliament to improve the UK’s aid offering. We would of course support such efforts in principle and await detail on the specifics.

We are also appalled to see that Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary shamefully using the same language about a uncertain return to spending 0.7% of GNI on aid.

Given the UK’s fiscal outlook, this is increasingly looking like an indefinite cut. As a priority, the UK Government must immediately re-instate the ODA budget to 0.7% of GNI, maintaining their manifesto commitment, and categorically rule out any possibility of further cutting the ODA. We hope this features in the upcoming Spring Budget, but we are not optimistic.

We are in this place because the UK government say they can no longer support more international aid. The shameful socio-economic picture we find ourselves in now as a United Kingdom is entirely of the Conservative Party’s making. As a Party, we strongly believe that despite Tory-induced hardship felt at home, funding to support the world’s poorest and most vulnerable should not stop; International solidarity, burden-sharing and being a good global citizen are cornerstones of the Scottish Government’s recently refreshed Global Affairs Framework.

The UK Government continues to fail to use its reserved powers to tackle the cost-of-living crisis and meet its international obligations to the world’s poorest. ay by day it is demonstrating that independence is the only way for Scotland to boost incomes and build a fairer society at home and globally.

When the cuts were announced, the SNP have led the charge in the House of Commons opposing the cuts to aid at every turn. We will continue to fight for what is right.

The pandemic should have been a rallying cry to this Tory Government, encouraging more robust and urgent investment and prioritisation to meet the Sustainable Development Goals, including Goal 1 that focuses on ending poverty in all its forms everywhere and that is at the heart of what the Borgen Project works towards, but instead it is choosing to turn its back on the world’s poorest. The covid-19 pandemic has wiped out 4 years of work to reverse global extreme poverty. The UK government should be stepping up, not turning its back.

In doing this, Boris Johnson’s, Liz Truss’, now Rishi Sunak’s Tory governments are reneging on a legally binding aid spending commitment and are breaking yet another one of their manifesto promises.

The SNP-led Scottish Government sees international development very differently as we seek to put people and extreme poverty-alleviation at the heart of our international development policy not seeing the developing world as purely a trading opportunity.

With the Scottish parliament’s incredibly meagre devolved powers, the SNP-led government have taken wide-ranging, positive action detailed in their Global Affairs Framework and International Development Strategy.

In the 2021 SNP manifesto, the SNP promised to double our International Development Fund and commit to increases in line with inflation and in an independent Scotland we would pledge 0.7% GNI to foreign aid – the UN target – with a view to that rising to 1% in time.

The full detail of the SNP’s international development offering can be viewed here.

Please rest assured that myself and my fellow SNP colleagues at Westminster will continue to push the UK Government to, as a bare minimum, meet their commitments on Overseas Development Assistance.