Anger as Boris Johnson 'hands Foreign Office' power to spend aid budget

Ministers have been told to come clean on the future of the foreign aid budget, after the Foreign Office was quietly handed power over how to spend it.

Senior MPs raised the alarm after a leaked memo revealed that department for international development (DfID) staff have been told to report directly to Dominic Raab’s department.

Directors in poorer countries, responsible for allocating British aid to local projects, have always answered directly to DfID in London – but the Foreign Office will now control spending, the memo reportedly said.

Sarah Champion, the chairwoman of the international development committee, warned the change would undermine the UK’s strong reputation for aid being free of “political interference”.

“Anything that is seen to undermine that independence will undermine our reputation among partners and must be avoided at all costs,” she said.

And Andrew Mitchell, the former Conservative international development secretary, argued ambassadors are not the right people to make decisions about aid projects.

“The value of our ambassadors comes from their relationships and diplomatic acumen, not their eye for details or experience of value-for-money programming of multimillion-pound taxpayer investments,” he warned.

The criticism comes just weeks after Boris Johnson was praised by aid groups for deciding not to axe DfID in his botched Cabinet reshuffle.

However, it then emerged that all its junior ministers will be shared with the Foreign Office – and senior officials were reportedly warned a “full merger” would follow, if that arrangement did not work.

Senior staff at Dfid criticised the new chain of command in comments to The Times, which revealed the details of the memo.

They said that, even under the present arrangements, they had to fight off requests from ambassadors for projects to be funded for political reasons or to help British companies operating in the region.

“Ambassadors are not development specialists and should not be providing oversight on how aid is being spent,” one senior figure said.

Another told The Times: “DfID is over. It will just be the Foreign Office now. If it eats grass, produces milk and is black and white ... it's a cow. We are just pretending it's called a horse.”

Doubts about DfID’s long-term future have remained, not least because the prime minister backing scrapping it last year, saying: “If ‘Global Britain’ is going to achieve its full and massive potential then we must bring DfID to the FCO [Foreign Office].”

He also accused the department of “inevitable waste as money is shoved out of the door in order to meet the 0.7 per cent target” – raising fears its budget will be slashed.

The new international development secretary, Anne-Marie Trevelyan is also a known sceptic, having once calling for its cash to go to “hungry kids” in the UK instead.

In 2017. she highlighted Priti Patel, a former holder of the job, saying that a “waste of cash in vanity projects in far-flung lands kept me awake at night”.

However, a government spokesperson insisted: “DfID ministers retain authority over spending decisions and accountability for all financial resources remains within existing departmental lines.”

Mr Johnson “wants all aspects of the government’s international operations to be integrated fully to promote Global Britain”, the spokesperson added.