Halve the aid budget and boost defence, says Robert Jenrick
Robert Jenrick has urged the Government to halve Britain’s foreign aid budget in order to spend 3 per cent of GDP on defence.
The former immigration minister said the Trident nuclear deterrent had been “appallingly neglected” as he called on Rishi Sunak to counter threats from Russia, China and Iran by allocating more money to the Armed Forces.
Mr Jenrick argued this should be done by curbing many of the “incoherent and wasteful” overseas spending programmes that make up the foreign aid budget, which is set to rise to £8.3 billion – or 0.5 per cent of GDP – in 2024/25.
The UK currently spends 2.27 per cent of GDP on defence, while the British Army has shrunk to its smallest size in centuries, with around 72,500 fully trained soldiers.
Writing in the Mail on Sunday, Mr Jenrick said Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, record Chinese military funding and Iranian-backed attacks on British ships by Houthi rebels represented “the greatest [security threats] in a generation”.
“The cost of sustaining Trident is cannibalising the rest of the Armed Forces budget. We have no choice but to increase defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP to deliver the uplift we need to defend ourselves. If Greece and Poland can do it, why can’t we?”
The MP for Newark said it was “ludicrous” that China, India and Pakistan continue to receive hundreds of millions of pounds in foreign aid despite possessing nuclear arsenals.
“We should cut the foreign aid budget and redirect that money to defence. While the aid budget does outstanding work alleviating extreme poverty that we should continue to support, a significant chunk of our ‘development’ spend is incoherent and wasteful.
“Halving the aid budget would free about £7 billion a year and immediately push defence spending above 2.5 per cent of GDP. When growth returns, or a crisis unfolds, we could make carefully targeted increases in aid spending.”
Mr Jenrick, who quit Mr Sunak’s government last year in protest against the Rwanda Bill, backed allocating 3 per cent of GDP to defence by 2030.
Backlash from former defence secretaries
The Prime Minister and Mr Hunt, his Chancellor, faced a backlash from several former defence secretaries after no new cash was given to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) in the Spring Budget.
James Heappey resigned as an Armed Forces minister amid the row and has gone on to call for 2.5 per cent of GDP to be “urgently” spent on defence.
Mr Heappey, who is quitting the Commons at the next election, told MPs last week: “Both main parties should strongly consider a further increase in defence spending in the next Parliament.”
In a highly unusual move, Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, and Anne-Marie Trevelyan, a minister at the Foreign Office, also called for Mr Sunak to raise spending to 2.5 per cent by writing a joint article on LinkedIn that appeared to criticise the Budget.
While the Government is required by law to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on foreign aid, this was temporarily reduced by Mr Sunak in an attempt to claw back spending during the Covid-19 pandemic and it has remained at 0.5 per cent ever since.
Lord Cameron, the Foreign Secretary, last year endorsed a plan to shelve what had been his own flagship 0.7 per cent pledge and said Britain’s approach to foreign aid must “adapt to new realities”.
