Daily Mail Report: Here’s where the UK’s foreign aid is going

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Daily Mail Report: Here’s where the UK’s foreign aid is going – The Expose

March 31, 2025

Originally posted by: Exposé News

The mind-boggling magnitude of Britain’s ‘wasted’ foreign aid spending was laid bare in extraordinary detail in a dossier published by the Daily Mail yesterday.

“Almost £14 billion of UK taxpayer cash will be funnelled across the world this year, with China, Palestine and Afghanistan among the beneficiaries of our millions in handouts. Funds will even be directed to countries wealthier than three quarters of boroughs within the UK, MailOnline’s DEEP DIVE unit can reveal,” the outlet said.

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The following are some highlights from the Mail Online’s report. You can read the full report HERE.

Armed with the Mail Online’s dossier of waste, experts and MPs across the political spectrum have demanded ministers immediately reassess how foreign aid funding is spent. Ministers are under pressure to create a UK equivalent of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) to gut unnecessary expenditure.

Lee Anderson, Reform MP, told MailOnline: “Every year, billions of taxpayers’ money is wasted by being sent to governments around the globe. The UK is not a charity. Labour continues to prioritise other countries over its own citizens.”

During 2023/24, the most recent financial year full expenditure figures are available for, the Government spent £15.3 billion on foreign aid. Receipts for 2024/25 won’t be totted up until this autumn, although Labour only allocated £13.3 billion towards aid. The pot will rise to £13.7 billion in 2025/26.

Close to £4.3 billion was spent on so-called “in donor refugee costs” in 2023 – a nine-fold rise since before covid, reflecting the soaring toll of immigration, including illegal small boat crossings. Up to £8.2 million per day goes towards accommodation for asylum seekers, with the rest of the pot divided towards education, health and other social needs.

British taxpayers will sink £11.6 billion between 2021 and 2026 into aiding developing nations prone to weather-induced disasters to improve their infrastructure.

Labour has also committed to handing nearly £2 billion to the International Development Association, an arm of the World Bank. Another £310m will be handed to the World Health Organisation between 2024 and 2028.

Under Labour’s proposed budget for 2024/25, Britain will hand out £3.16 billion to regional programmes. Five of the top 10 national recipients are in Africa, led by Ethiopia, which has been mired in a civil war since 2018. As part of the budget increases, an extra £113 million of humanitarian support will be sent to civil war-stricken Sudan.

An additional £15 million is being given to the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Downing Street insists it will not directly fund Hamas, which runs the Gaza Strip and is designated as a terrorist organisation. Instead, the cash is directed through third-party relief workers like the Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (“UNRWA”) and WHO.

Syria was also granted an additional £50 million following the collapse of Assad’s regime.

Funding for Pakistan, which was the biggest recipient in 2019 at £305 million, has been drastically cut to just £98.8 million.

Individual projects counted within the regional programmes have sparked outrage, including one that saw taxpayers spend a staggering £99m on encouraging families in Africa and Asia to cook using electricity. Most of the cash is going to Loughborough University to carry out research into clean cooking, with 650 reports expected by 2030. The academics have written “eCookbooks” to show families how to make traditional dishes using electric appliances, as well as a “multi-dimensional framework to assess and monitor gender equality, equity and women’s empowerment.”

The UK government is also paying for 20,000 electric pressure cookers to be handed out in Tanzania and Uganda, while a handful of air fryers have been given away in other countries.

Having scoured through thousands of currently active funding programmes, MailOnline can reveal several other questionable sites of huge government spending abroad (see more details in the Daily Mail’s report).

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (“OECD”) Development Assistance Committee decides which countries get handouts based on their GDP. The UK’s foreign aid is going to 30 countries, such as China and oil-rich Guyana, that are richer than 75% of the local authorities in the UK.

In total, these 30 countries received at least £1.8 billion between 2009 and 2023 – yet the true toll could be much higher because the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (“FCDO”) only tracks bilateral official development assistance (“ODA,” foreign aid) spend, with any cash filtered through other agencies that may fund individual nations not tracked.

Read the Daily Mail report HERE or archived HERE.