Aid cash could fund military action

The suggestion will alarm aid charities and NGOs (non-governmental organisations), who fear that the UK’s achievement of the long-standing United Nations target to spend 0.7 per cent of national income on overseas assistance will be undermined if any of that cash is diverted to defence activities.

As Whitehall departments fight it out for scarce resources in the upcoming Spending Review for 2015/16, Mr Cameron said it was right to look for ways in which the Department for International Development (DfID) can work more closely with the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence.

Initiatives that provide the basic level of security needed for development to take place can be an “important” use of aid funds, he said.

With defence among a number of departments threatened with further cuts in the Spending Review, the Prime Minister is coming under pressure from Conservative backbenchers to drop the protection he has so far granted to the aid budget.

Overseas aid is one of a handful of priorities – alongside the NHS and schools – that have been shielded from cuts under Chancellor George Osborne’s austerity programme, and are slated to be preserved in the Spending Review, due by the end of June.

Any cut in the DfID budget would threaten to breach Mr Cameron’s pledge to meet the 1970 United Nations target of spending 0.7 per cent of national income on overseas aid, which Britain will meet for the first time in 2013.

But NGOs fear the PM may meet his pledge while reducing the funds available for aid activities, by reallocating some of the responsibilities of the MoD or Foreign Office to the DfID.

Asked whether he felt there was room for money in the aid budget to be spent on defence activities, Mr Cameron said: “I think we have to demonstrate that the DfID budget is spent wisely.”

International Development Secretary Justine Greening was “rightly keen” to focus on countries that have been affected by conflict and war, none of which have achieved any of the UN Millennium Development Goals for 2015, he said.

“We should be thinking very carefully about how we help states that have been riven with conflict and war,” said Mr Cameron.

“I think it is obviously true that if we can help deliver security and help provide stability and help with stabilisation, that is the basis from which all development can proceed.

“DfID and the Foreign Office and the Defence Ministry work increasingly closely together. If you are asking me can they work even more closely together, can we make sure that the funds we have at our disposal are used to provide basic levels of stability and security in deeply broken and fragile states, then I think we should.

“That is an important part of development.”

But Oxfam’s head of policy, Max Lawson, said the aid budget should be spent on “hospitals and not helicopter gunships”.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The millions of people up and down the country who support the fantastic stance the Government is taking, protecting the aid budget when every other G8 nation is not doing that – they expect this to be spent on schools and not soldiers.”

Sorcha O’Callaghan, head of humanitarian policy at the British Red Cross, said: “Blurring the lines between aid and military objectives will not only reduce the resources available to meet the needs of the most vulnerable, it also risks the access and safety of aid workers.”

Comment: Page 12.