Britain will take back control post-Brexit of how more than £1bn a year of aid given to EU is spent, Priti Patel declares

BRITAIN will take back control after Brexit of how more than £1billion a year of aid cash given to the EU is spent, the International Development Secretary has declared.

Priti Patel promised the £400million paid into the European Development Fund and a further £935million a year funding other EU overseas aid programmes would instead be used to support Britain’s “national interest”.

She slammed Brussels officials for wasting our aid cash - telling MPs there “isn’t much oversight and transparency and accountability” of the EU’s overseas aid spending.

And she vowed that the money going to the EU - 10 per cent of Britain’s total aid budget - will be spent in a “very, very different way” than Brussels officials decide to splash it.

Speaking to the Commons International Development Committee she said: "We can absolutely use it for humanitarian, but also for prosperity, Britain post-Brexit, on trade and economic development.

"There are a whole raft of opportunities there where we can use that money for our national interest, or Global Britain's interest, as well as helping to alleviate poverty around the world and doing more in terms of international development too."

Ms Patel added: "I would like much of that money to remain with us so that we can see how that money we now give to the EU comes back to us and then obviously we can determine how it is spent.

"Once we leave the European Union on 29 March 2019, we will look at all programmes.

"We are not going to just write cheques unconditionally, absolutely not, in the way that we have done to the European Commission.

"But what we will of course do is look at where we can have the right kind of partnership working. If it is in a refugee camp for example in Jordan or Bangladesh, that kind of work will continue.

Ms Patel added: "But it will be a very, very different way of working to what we have now where we just give a chunk of money over to the European Commission which we don't have any oversight over."

She also told MPs that global aid chiefs had backed her bid to change international aid rules that currently prevent humanitarian cash helping Caribbean islands wiped out by Hurricane Irma.

Britain couldn’t use its aid budget on the clean-up - because the British Virgin Isles and Turks and Caicos were judged to be too wealthy.

It led Ms Patel to write a furious letter to the Paris-based organisation demanding an “urgent” review of the rules following Hurricane Irma.

But this afternoon she said the head of the OECD - and the chair of its Development Assistance Committee that oversees global aid spending rules - had been “very supportive” of her call to give nations more flexibility over how nations spend their aid cash.