One pound in a hundred

Published on: 04/06/2026

In January 2025, IRC was stopped in its tracks. A brusque email from USAID ordered us to cease all work immediately. It left a $4 million hole in our finances and cost good colleagues their jobs — a small fraction of the quarter million jobs lost worldwide. A study published in The Lancet last July estimated that the USAID cuts were causing an average of 103 deaths per hour. 103 human beings, every hour.

We had assumed the UK would be different. The Labour government’s election manifesto had committed not only to maintaining aid, but to reversing the cuts of its predecessors and restoring the 0.7% of national income that the UK had, until 2020, spent on development. Instead, in February this year, Keir Starmer announced it would be cut further — from 0.5% to 0.3% by 2027. The International Development Minister resigned. The aid sector reeled. And the British public, by and large, didn't notice.

The stop-work orders that followed were more politely worded than USAID's — this is the UK, after all. They spoke of deep regret, of force majeure, of the need to rearm in a volatile world, and of the desire to close affected projects "responsibly." But you cannot responsibly terminate a three-year, multi-million pound programme — with partners who have committed their own resources and credibility — in three months. Diplomatic language aside, the effect is identical: contracts rendered worthless, momentum destroyed, trust broken. When is an agreement with a government not worth the paper it's written on? Apparently, when that government is the United States or the United Kingdom.

Over less than a decade, the UK reduced its investment in the water and sanitation sector from over £200 million a year to a fraction of that — but in doing so it had become genuinely effective, shifting away from building infrastructure that typically collapsed within years of handover, towards strengthening the national systems that should have been delivering services all along. It had earned a seat at the table, built real goodwill, and was achieving results that wholly outweighed the sums involved.

It has now been eliminated.

To put what remained in the context of the stated justification for the cuts — rearmament — the entire UK water and sanitation budget amounted to roughly the cost of a handful of Challenger 3 battle tanks. This is what makes the rearmament argument so hollow. At 0.3% of national income, the UK's aid budget will represent less than one pound in every hundred of government spending. Deduct the portion spent housing asylum seekers in the UK — which counts, absurdly, as overseas aid — and Global Britain will be spending proportionally less on international development than illiberal Hungary. The contribution to defence will be real but marginal. The damage to the world's poorest people, and to Britain's reputation, will not be.

None of this needed to happen. More people have been lifted out of poverty in the past two decades than in all of prior human history. Aid did not do this alone — economic growth was the primary engine — but it played a genuine supporting role, smoothing inequalities, strengthening systems, and filling gaps that markets cannot. Six billion people — the entire population of the world in 2000 — now have access to safe drinking water. The UK helped make that happen and was acknowledge and appreciated for it.

There was no great public clamour when the cuts were announced — no backbench rebellion, no serious fiscal argument that less that one pound in every hundred of government spending was breaking the bank. What there was, was a political calculation: that cutting aid was a cheap way to look tough, to gesture towards fiscal discipline, and to neutralise a line of attack from the right — at a cost borne entirely by people with no voice in British politics. That is not fiscal necessity. It is political cowardice. And the people paying for it are the ones who can least afford to.