Just googled and found some shocking news:
Countries including China, Russia, Brazil, Iceland and Barbados are benefiting from funds intended to help the world’s poorest, despite a pledge for it to go only to the neediest.
Among the schemes being paid for are a Turkish television channel, a scheme promoting tourism in Iceland’s national park, and a hotel training waiters in the tourist destination of Barbados.
The situation was described by one MP as “farcical” last night. The Government is now under pressure to reform aid spending - and to axe a commitment to increase it at a time when every other area of government bar the NHS is due to be cut.
Meanwhile a new poll today by ICM for The Sunday Telegraph showed that 70 per cent of people questioned said o
verseas aid should be scaled down, not increased. Two-thirds said a ring-fence, which protects it from spending cuts, was wrong.
Separately, one charity last night warned that it was time to find an “exit strategy” from the current system of spending aid money, in a sign that even recipients of the funds are losing confidence in how they are spent.
The new disclosures come after the Sunday Telegraph last weekend revealed how the international aid industry had made millionaires out of so-called 'poverty barons’ - consultants running aid programmes abroad. At an event for consultants held last Thursday in Whitehall, the chairman of the meeting told participants: “There’s lots of money! We’ve all got money!”
Another delegate urged consultants to come to Barbados to benefit from the largesse of aid donors, saying “the beaches are lovely but so’s the business!” while a third said: “I hope nobody from the Telegraph was here tonight.”
Now this newspaper has uncovered how:
* A sixth of the money spent by the Department for International Development (DfID) goes straight to the European Union’s aid programme;
* The EU spends about half its aid budget of £10 billion on middle and higher income countries - even though Britain believes those countries are too wealthy to merit support;
* Brussels has committed £30 million to 22 aid projects in China, a country with almost 150 billionaires, despite DfID closing its Chinese aid programme over a year ago;
* Brazil, which will spend £9 billion on the Olympics in 2016, received more than £10 million in European aid for schemes including £660,000 spent on the social integration of women living in fishing communities and £120,000 on the 'integration of indigenous city dwellers’.
DfID has set a target of spending 0.7 per cent of national income on overseas aid and UK money spent in Iceland, Turkey and other relatively wealthy nations such as the economic powerhouses of China and Russia count towards that goal.
Dominic Raab, a leading Tory Eurosceptic, said: “It is farcical that the EU spends nearly a billion pounds of UK taxpayers’ money and a significant proportion of Britain’s aid on middle income countries.
“Not only does that conflict with British aid priorities - which are increasingly focused on the world’s poorest - but EU development funds have been plagued by maladministration and fraud. This is a clear example of the folly of moves towards a single European foreign policy, and a prime candidate for repatriation to UK democratic control.”
Pauline Latham, a Tory MP and member of the International Development select committee, said: “It is time to renegotiate the amount of money we give to Europe for aid. If the public really knew that our money was going to countries like Turkey, China, Russia, Iceland and Brazil they would be furious.
“It is astonishing that European aid is going to middle income countries when there are so many countries that are so much poorer.”
Iceland, Turkey and Croatia are among a number of countries given EU aid to help bring their institutions into line with EU member states ahead of possible accession.
Other countries such as Ukraine, which received £120 million in 2011, are given vast sums simply as neighbourhood states.
Russia, with more than 100 billionaires, was given £40 million, including £240,000 for an arts project in St Petersburg. The results of the project entitled: “Listening to Architecture, Composing Spaces” will be presented at the St Petersburg Architectural Biennale in 2013 and at a conference at the hermitage Museum in 2014.
Iceland receives about £4.2 million including £400,000 for a scheme to promote tourism in Katla national park; while Georgia is earmarked £80 million including £400,000 for a mayoral project in Tbilisi, which gives the capital responsibility for organising “Sustainable Energy days”.
Outside of Europe, Argentina, one of the G20 major economies and whose relations with the UK remain strained over the Falklands, was earmarked £9.5 million in aid.
Thailand gets funding for 22 projects, totalling £13 million, including £360,000 for the “Holistic Approach of Public Partnership for Environment” - a project that promotes social cohesion in Chiang Mai. Kazakhstan, which is ruled by an autocrat and which has huge stocks of oil and gas, also receives EU aid including £100,000 spent on a human rights seminar in the former capital Almaty.
Some of the the spending likely to raise even greater concern is on Turkey, whose economy enjoyed one of the fastest growth rates in 2011, but was the biggest recipient of EU aid with £620 million pledged in 2011. Projects including funding for a television series about the EU.
Iceland, a country officially wealthier than the UK and which refuses to re-pay £2.3 billion owed to Britain in the credit crunch, receives funding for at least three projects including promoting tourism in a national park, and Croatia received £120 million in 2011 while the west African state of Mali, whose population is four times the size but 20 times poorer, was given £13.5 million from the EU.
Details of the spending are contained in a draft EU report on international aid and on a EuropeAid internet database.
Stephen Booth, research director at the think tank Open Europe, which has analysed European aid giving, said: “That UK taxpayers’ money can be handed over and spent in a way that the Government actively disagrees with, perfectly illustrates the lack of accountability inherent in the EU budget. In on-going EU budget talks, the Government must seek to re-establish the link between UK objectives and EU spending.”
The European Union channels its aid money largely through EuropeAid and the European Development Fund.
Money can either be given in the form of grants or contracts and paid direct to foreign governments or else to international aid organisations. DfID contributes about 15 per cent of the total EU aid budget but has no real say on how that money is then spent.
DfID’s own 'root and branch’ review of its spending after the Coalition took power in 2010 concluded money was being wasted on countries such as China and Russia and that aid would instead be concentrated on the world’s poorest countries and conflict zones. The number of countries receiving DfID’s aid was slashed from 43 to 27.
The EU’s anti-fraud office OLAF noted in a report in 2009 that its aid programme was vulnerable to fraud. The report concluded: “In the external aid area, OLAF investigators often encounter modus operandi typical of organised fraud.”
A DFID spokesman said: “The new Secretary of State will be taking a close look at all DFID spending and has asked for an internal report into the use of independent technical experts.
“We are determined to get the best value for the British taxpayer and as a result of pressure from the Coalition Government, the EU is reviewing its entire approach to aid: cutting funding to countries that don’t need it, refocusing its aid on results; and ensuring much greater transparency, value for money and accountability – just as the UK has done. We are pressing the EU to re-write its rules to focus aid on value for money and results as part of our current negotiations over the EU budget.”
An EU spokesman said EuropeAid had a much wider 'field of responsibility’ than DfID but that the UK government “participates in setting EuropeAid’s priorities”.
The spokesman said that from 2013 one of its aid funds will stop giving money to middle income countries.
* The ICM poll of 2,029 people found that an overwhelming majority of voters (64 per cent) believe the Government is wrong to ring fence the international aid budget while other departments suffer cuts. The figure is nearly identical for Conservative voters (63 per cent), indicating support across the spectrum for reform, with only 14 per cent endorsing the policy. THe rest did not know.
An even higher number (70 per cent) believes the planned rise in the foreign aid budget to the 0.7pc of GDP recommended by the UN should be scaled back, while just 16 per cent said the commitment should be met. The rest did not know.
ICM Research interviewed a sample of 2,029 adults aged 18+ online on 20 and 21 September. The results have been weighted to the profile of all adults.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9560326/British-still-giving-hundreds-of-millions-of-pounds-in-aid-to-wealthy-countries.html
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