Development Initiatives

UK continues its commitment to aid

Written by: Rob Tew

Aid levels remain more or less constant in UK Chancellor Alistair Darling’s budget, released on 24 March.

Development Initiatives, through the Budget4Change programme, had initially feared that the Foreign Office budget would be cut in 2010-11. This could possibly have been bad news for aid volumes, as more than 5% of the Foreign Office budget is spent on ODA activities. Instead, the Foreign Office budget, initially forecast to drop from £2.3 billion to £1.8 billion by 2010-11, has grown slightly, and is now estimated at £2.4 billion for the 2010-11 year.

Elsewhere, the text accompanying the budget re-iterates the government’s commitment to the 2013 ODA targets and the DFID budget for 2010-11 remains the same as initially estimated, at £7.8 billion. The outturn for DFID in 2009-10 is now predicted to be £6.7 billion, just £0.1 billion lower than stated in the December PBR.

Although the majority of the UK’s ODA comes from DFID’s departmental budget, aid from the budgets of other government departments remains an important issue. Whilst the DFID budget is set to increase by almost 15% in 2010-11, the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) stated that UK ODA would increase from £7,477million in 2009-10 to £9,140million in 2010-11, an increase of over 22%. This therefore means that departments & agencies other than DFID will be expected to shoulder a larger portion of UK ODA in 2010-11 than in 2009-10.