Aid? What aid? Why the UK ignores its record on international development

Rarely, if ever, has there been a more parochial election. Apart from the confected row about the renewal of Trident, the two main parties seem curiously indifferent to what is going on beyond Britain’s shores, unless it involves immigration. The assumption is that voters only really care about bread-and-butter domestic issues such as whether they have a job and a roof over their head.

Yet it is not so long ago that people took to the streets of Birmingham in 1998 to demand that the G8 countries provided debt relief to the world’s poorest nations. Action followed because it was obvious plenty of voters cared passionately about international development. When the UK next hosted the G8 seven years later, the agenda at Gleneagles was dominated by Africa and the looming threat of climate change. The people who took part in the Jubilee 2000 and Make Poverty History campaigns are still there. They haven’t gone away.

The calculation, however, is that there are no votes in development - which is why, when the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank meet in Washington later this week, the talks will not impinge on the election campaign. George Osborne and Ed Balls will be looking to see how they can exploit what the IMF says about the health of the UK economy for domestic political reasons, but that’s about it.

This is a shame, not least because the next government will be affected by three sets of issues being discussed in Washington this week. One set involves the current state of the global economy: not just the individual hotspots such as Greece and Ukraine, but how and when central banks start to unwind the unprecedented monetary stimulus provided since 2008-09.

Another set involves the future of the so-called Bretton Woods institutions themselves, where the creation of the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank is a direct result of the US refusal to back reforms that would give countries such as China, India and Brazil a bigger say in the running of the World Bank and the IMF. The AIIB is a Beijing initiative and will be a rival to the World Bank, an institution that the UK helped found in 1944 and has strongly backed with a rising aid budget in recent years.

The final set of issues involves the development agenda for the next 15 years. In July, world leaders will gather in Addis Ababa to discuss how they will finance development. In September, the same cast will gather in New York to set sustainable goals to be achieved by 2030. The caravan then moves on to Paris in December where leaders will try to forge an agreement on climate change.

The meetings are linked. Sustainable development goals will only be achievable if there is money on the table. Developing countries will demand help to deal with the impact of climate change if they are to sign up to tougher emission targets. Jim Kim, the president of the World Bank, was right last week when he said that this was the most important year for global development in living memory.

Both the main parties have a good story to tell on international development. It was under Labour that the UK committed to meet the UN target of spending 0.7% of national income on aid. It was under the Conservative-led coalition that the target was finally hit.

Only three areas of spending have been spared the cuts the government deemed necessary to repair the hole in the public finances left by the recession: the NHS, schools and the Department for International Development. DFID has a programme budget of £11bn a year.

David Cameron’s commitment to the 0.7% target before the last election was part of the rebranding of the Conservative party, an indication that it was no longer nasty. It is to the prime minister’s credit that he has stuck to his pledge. There are only five countries that meet or exceed the UN target and Britain is one of them.

Aid has not always been well spent. Undoubtedly, it could be used more effectively. Without a commitment to mobilise finance, however, the Addis summit will fail. The number of people living in extreme poverty has halved to just under a billion in the past 25 years, but far too many still lack access to the basics of life: electricity, clean water, sanitation and education. The recent Ebola epidemic in west Africa highlighted the inadequacy of health systems. Kim says extreme poverty can be eradicated through a three-pronged approach: grow, invest and insure. He wants aid to leverage in private capital.

The UK’s Overseas Development Institute will publish a paper on Monday [it will appear here] that says the Addis Ababa conference should lay the foundations of a minimum standard of living for all – a global compact with the world’s poor that would guarantee universal healthcare and education, and the creation of a social safety net to support those on the lowest incomes.

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The ODI says the price tag would be $73bn a year, assuming poor countries continue to grow at their recent rates and improve tax collection. This looks ambitious at a time when the latest Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development figures show that donors provided $25bn in aid to the poorest countries in 2014, 16% down on the previous year.

Kevin Watkins, the ODI’s executive director, says the UK will have influence in the Addis talks should it wish to use it. “The UK must prioritise pushing for a strong, ambitious package of support in July,” he said. “Our research lays out a costed plan of what’s needed to improve the lives of the world’s poor. Supporting this plan would send a clear signal that the new UK government will continue to be a global leader in development.”

There was a time when the UK was proud to be a “global leader” in development, even during the last parliament when the then international development secretary, Andrew Mitchell, insisted that higher aid spending had to be matched by greater aid effectiveness, an entirely laudable objective.

The Conservatives, however, are now embarrassed by their record on aid. The increase in DFID’s budget is unpopular with the Tory press. Cameron and Osborne appear to have calculated that there are more votes to be had from potential Ukip supporters who are opposed to Britain spending more on overseas development, than from voters in the centre who are proud the commitment has been met.

Even so, they have enshrined the 0.7% target in law, which means they will get no credit for protecting the aid budget while pledging to continue doing so. The next four weeks will reveal whether this is a masterstroke or a tactical blunder. Certainly, highlighting the government’s track record on aid would make the Conservative’s approach to winning the election look positive and less mean-spirited.