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Somewhere on the new British prime minister’s desk sits a document. It was quietly published last week, in the dying hours of his predecessor’s government. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s annual report cements how the UK aid budget will be allocated until 2029.
It was released at the moment of least political scrutiny: parliament rising for the summer, one prime minister exiting Downing Street, the other waiting for the keys. Anyone asking whether the new PM, Andy Burnham, will – or even can – restore Britain’s 0.7% aid commitment should begin with this document, which appears designed to lock in three more years of retreat from the world’s poorest communities before Burnham could take office.
Malawi embodies the cuts. A country where three-quarters of the population still has no access to electricity will see its £50.2m allocation fall to £5m by 2028-29, on a continent losing over half of its bilateral support in the same period. Overall, an already diminished £13bn aid budget is seen falling a further £6.5bn in the four years before Burnham must call the next general election.
The outgoing administration knew the human consequences. To its credit, the Foreign Office’s equality assessment is candid, conceding the cuts will “inevitably have negative impacts”. The Wish reproductive health programme, for instance, cut by 30%, will now avert 9,500 maternal deaths rather than 11,900 across fragile African states. Among its final acts, then, Keir Starmer’s government signed off on a policy that, in the case of Wish alone, will mean 2,400 more maternal deaths and 600,000 more unsafe abortions than current funding would prevent, in one of the very few programmes it described as “relatively protected”.
That projected rise in maternal deaths sits uneasily beside the Starmer administration’s simultaneous pledge that 90% of bilateral aid programmes will “contribute to gender equality” by 2030. When a government publishes its own estimate of deaths and carries on regardless, that “contribution” begins to sound less like a policy than an alibi.
Need is no longer the primary organising logic of UK aid. Geopolitics is, with budget cuts going to fund defence. As for what replaces the old model, the latest blueprint sits in the UK’s modern development approach, published alongside the 2026-29 allocations, with its revealing shift in lexicon: “donor to investor, service delivery to system support, grants to expertise”. In the paper’s own words, this means moving away from directly funding frontline services – the clinics and classrooms whose closure the FCDO impact assessment counts in lives.
Increasingly central to this transition is British international investment (BII), the government-owned body that puts overseas development assistance (ODA) money into businesses in developing countries. Its 2026-31 strategy, Building Markets, Transforming Lives, commits up to £8bn of BII capital over five years, no more than it invested in the previous five, and aims to attract a further £6bn to £7.5 bn from private investors.
This money is different in kind, not just in scale. Investments must be repaid, so they flow to whatever turns a profit – banks, power grids and telecoms, by BII’s own reckoning – and away from health, education and other essential services. Here lies one of the first tests of convictions. Burnham is expected to bring more failing services like Thames Water into public ownership at home because he believes markets alone cannot be relied upon to deliver essential public goods. However, he inherits an aid policy that, through BII, increasingly depends on those same market forces to improve life for the world’s poorest people. Reconciling those positions will require an explanation.
Surviving funds will also travel further from those they are meant to reach, routed through multilaterals like the World Bank. Government, in its own words, takes a “shareholder” role pressing for “reform” from a “seat at the table” – a boardroom voice rather than a builder of clinics.
These institutions are not villains. They are accountable to their boards, members and auditors. But while British voters can hold a bilateral programme to account through parliament, they have no equivalent leverage over a pooled contribution channelled through an institution in Washington, controlled by a board they did not directly elect and cannot unseat.
If the Burnham government continues on this path, it risks handing critics of UK aid an argument that appears to have gone unnoticed. The idea of additional billions in taxpayer money flowing into unelected institutions abroad, beyond the reach of those who provided it, has proved potent in the recent past – look at Brexit.
Channelling more through the multilaterals is no mere paradigm shift in policy. In today’s political climate, it is an explosive grievance waiting to be deployed. Better it be examined honestly first.
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The Starmer administration was not simply trimming the UK aid budget; it was continuing a transition in its underlying purpose that has spanned multiple governments. Britain’s emphasis appears to have shifted from supporting those most in need to seeking a return from the world’s poorest countries. Burnham has inherited this choice.
The case for reversing that creed is strategic, not sentimental. Aid cuts in the name of security becomes a security cost elsewhere: a region responding to Chinese soft power is not one where British influence grows, and the next Ebola outbreak will spread regardless of any spending review.
The road back to the 0.7% commitment required by the International Development (ODA Target) Act 2015 will demand more than fiscal arithmetic; it will require political judgment about the role Britain wants to play in the world.
The timing of the publication of the 2026-29 aid allocations means the incoming prime minister need never look at them. He should. The £5m left for Malawi tells Burnham more about Britain’s development priorities than any ministerial briefing ever could.
