Foreign aid boss risks fury after saying Brits oppose his £14billion budget as they don’t understand how it’s spent
Rather than slashing the bloated budget, Mathew Rycroft said he'll 'help the British people understand where their seven pence in every £10 goes'
THE boss of Britain’s foreign aid department sparked outrage last night after suggesting Brits oppose his £14 billion budget because they don’t understand what it’s spent on.
Matthew Rycroft, permanent secretary at the Department for International Development (Dfid), also said the bloated budget was a small proportion of Britain’s national income.
Rather than slashing spending, he vowed to “help the British people understand where their 7 pence in every £10 goes”. And the mandarin told an Institute for Government event yesterday: “We need to demonstrate that aid works.”
Mr Rycroft, who served as the UK’s ambassador to the UN in New York until earlier this year, said Britain had a “sky-high” reputation on international development – but the opposite was true among Brits back home.
He said: “When you come back to the UK you realise that most British people do not know the Government’s impact, people do not know what Dfid does, they don’t know what the aid budget does.
“Our job actually is to help the British people understand where their 7 pence in every £10 goes.”
He admitted many Brits were sceptical towards aid because of widespread corruption with the £14 billion spending and doubts over whether the money can make a difference. The mandarin said: “We need to shine a light on transparency to make sure that we’re cutting out corruption in the aid sector.
“And we need to make sure that we are defining successes so that people can see that what they give so generously does have an impact.
“In short, we need to demonstrate that aid works.”
His claim that Brits fail to understand foreign aid sparked outrage at Britain’s ongoing pledge to send 0.7 per cent of national income overseas.
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Tory MP Nigel Evans, a member of the Commons International Development committee, stormed: “He’s clearly failed in his job and he’s also got it wrong because the British public dig deep into their own pockets and give billions in money directly themselves to their aid projects around the world.
“What they object to is not foreign aid but foreign aid spent badly and that’s what they fail to understand.
“I know school kids who do projects abroad, they give money, they raise funds and if there’s a crisis somewhere people give huge sums of money themselves to help on international development projects.
“So to say they don’t understand it or don’t like it because they don’t understand it just shows you he’s completely out of touch.”
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