'Savage' aid cuts to impact more than 55 million people

Slashed budgets will see a scaling back of the UK’s overseas projects for education, family planning, water and food aid, report Kate Devlin and data correspondent Alicja Hagopian

- Alicja Hagopian

“Savage” cuts to UK foreign aid will leave 55.5 million of the world’s poorest people without access to basic resources, The Independent can reveal.

Analysis by Save the Children, shared exclusively with this publication, lays bare the true impact of repeated cuts to the budget, the latest of which will see spending fall to just 0.3 per cent of gross national income – the lowest level in 25 years.

Women and girls will suffer the most as the government is likely forced to scale back programmes across global education, family planning, water and food aid. This could leave 12 million people without access to clean water or sanitation and result in 2.9 million fewer children in education, compared to 2019 when aid spending was at its peak at 0.7 per cent.

Save the Children warned the loss of funding would “devastate lives across the world”, while MPs from across the political divide condemned the government for abandoning the world’s poorest people.

Labour MP Sarah Champion, the chair of the Commons international development select committee, told The Independent: “The cuts made to UK aid over recent years are nothing short of savage. The prime minister told me at the liaison committee that his recent decision to slash the aid budget even further wasn’t a choice he wanted to make. But is he fully aware of the true cost of that decision?”

The latest cuts – announced by chancellor Rachel Reeves to pay for a boost in defence spending – will reduce the foreign aid spend to just £9.22bn by 2027, a substantial drop from £15.3bn in 2023. But the scale of the cuts is worsened by the fact that the UK’s asylum-seeker housing costs continue to come out of the same budget.