The U.K. is housing so many asylum seekers that more than half the foreign aid budget earmarked for poor countries is now being spent in Britain, new figures suggest. The Telegraph has the story.
In 2023, the U.K. spent £9.9 billion in bilateral aid – yet 54% of this was used domestically, according to the Centre for Global Development (CGD), which analysed data released by the Foreign Office data on Wednesday. This was an increase from 48% the previous year.
Britain’s bilateral aid money is supposed to be spent on helping poorer nations alleviate poverty and respond to humanitarian disasters.
However, in recent years, an increasing proportion has been spent within Britain itself to support the rising number of refugees entering the country.
The cost of housing asylum seekers in hotels alone is £8 million a day, according to Home Office data.
Sarah Champion, Chairman of the International Development Committee, said the rising trend in spending foreign aid domestically was limiting what could be allocated overseas and was “deeply worrying”.
“We [the committee] have expressed our concerns and ministers are still not listening,” the Labour MP said.
The Foreign Office’s latest figures show that the amount of financial aid given bilaterally to poorer nations in 2023 fell by nearly 10%, dropping to £4.1 billion from £4.6 billion in 2022.
The largest cuts were made to aid spending in Asia, which received £619 million from Britain in 2023, down from £925 million the previous year.
Gideon Rabinowitz, Director of Policy and Advocacy at Bond, a U.K. network of NGOs, said the figures demonstrated that “the Government seems to have lost its grip on U.K. aid spending”.
Worth reading in full.
Perhaps this explains why the Government seems so relaxed about the enormous and growing cost of housing asylum seekers. If hosting asylum seekers is a handy way of being allowed to spend the bloated foreign aid budget within Britain, it’s not hard to see why it would appeal to a Government that wants to shore up its ‘foreign aid’ credentials while keeping the money in the U.K. And hang the consequences for communities and public services.
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But infections peaked at 55,000 in July and have since fallen to around 35,000 per day.
That should be positive “cases” not infections. You need symptoms for an infection.
That should be claimed positive test results, not cases. You need tests that are better than a coin flip to be able to claim a case.
Sadly, too many ATL articles reinforce the propagandised vocabulary.
Exactly… tune up the PC cycles = next wave…
Tune them down… no COVID. Convenient eh? Lockdowns on demand
Was outsourced to India. According to a friend who got the virus despite being vaccinated she was having calls from people who could barely speak English and were quite obviously reading from a script. Turned the phone off so she wouldn’t be bothered.
That’s hardly conclusive, given how strengthened the UK has been by diversity.
They might have been Scottish…
Naughty….Lol!
They are still busy importing more of these “important” people, mainly via Dover, and ably assisted now by the RNLI it seems.
Were they ever “needed”?
This will be such a blow for the public, third and salaried sector slackers desperately clinging to their Spy-n-Snitch app and hoping for more 10-day “free” holidays. Those Netflix queues aren’t going to binge themselves.
They’ll rehire them all this autumn, if Israel is anything to by.
It’s one of those very rare occasions to celebrate people losing their jobs.
It’s just a bit that the bureaucrats with sinecures who authorise their pay are not also receiving their p45s.
Mind you, there are quite a few who would satisfy that in Westminster!
Perhaps those laid off can now do something useful e.g. work in a care home, drive delivery lorries and/or use the delivery lorries in any blockades
interesting story
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58336998
woman cons billions out of investors for a disease diagnosis technique that was utterly fake
funny none of them asked for an independent audit of the technique. only got themselves to blame
If she beats the rap, perhaps there’s a place for her at Pfizer.
she was a psychopathic con artist who went to huge lengths to perpetuate her fraud. The podcast The Dropout has a lot more info than the BBC article and is a good listen.
There’s a great book about this whole scandal
Bad Blood
Non-jobs in the first place! Now get on and do something useful in your life and leave people alone and stop bothering them.
A few more million pissed up the wall because of Ferguson’s predictions. I wonder if he has any liability insurance? On no sorry the man’s a Saint for saving so many lives.
“Wrong in the right way”. The man should be heading to prison.
My friend reckons he received fifteen phone calls, some lasting as long as forty five minutes from T&T because he was ‘honest’ about his movements (on holiday) in the days before feeling a ‘little groggy’ (his words, symptoms lasted for one day).
This is what complicity does. Trapped and harassed by your own stupidity – and I said that to him.
Surely people only make this mistake once before they block the number too?
You’d forgive a few people for doing this yeh. Hopefully once bitten and all that.
This is not “news” to most people. The fact that it is only now being reported by a newspaper is yet another shocking element of the collusion between the government and the media. One of my friends worked in the Test & Trace office in Exeter before he gave up after 3 months having been so bored by making about 5 calls per day. When the NHS came to “audit” the staffing and activity the staff were all told to attend the office and pretend to be making calls to “ill” people. I wonder how the annual accounts of companies such as Serco and Sitel will look at the end of the financial years covering 2020 and 2021?
DHSC (T&T) are spending millions on temporary recruitment. Some of it is going through Public Buying Organisations (PBO) solutions so not all of it is made public through contracts finder. Public sector is required to publish notices on any contract over £25k on contracts finder. A lot don’t realise that this also applies to contracts awarded under PBO solutions so it’s often not made public.
Slightly out-dated, but a lot of these PBOs still exist – https://bid-better.co.uk/2018/10/16/what-are-collaborative-procurement-organisations/
“Dear,dear,what a pity,what a shame, never mind”.
With apologies to the late lamented “It ain’t half hot,mom”.
Weird, as I didn’t receive a single call in my 10 day quarantine post holiday.
I did and it was on my Thai phone number.
gave her short shrift and removed the sim from my phone.
‘Vaccine’, ‘Vaccinated’, ‘Vaccination’ NO. NO. NO. – anyone who tries to jab me, my family and my loved ones with that *monkey gunk* will learn the ultimate lesson. This is the hill I die on: FIGHT. BACK. BETTER. – Updated information, resources and useful links: https://www.LCAHub.org/
And how much does this all cost us?
Excellent.
Good riddance.
You must have a very low IQ if you still have the trick and trap app on your phone. (I never had it and I blocked the phone numbers they used as a double insurance).