Rishi Sunak has announced the UK will slash its overseas aid budget from 0.7% to 0.5% of gross national income, a reduction in international aid totalling around £3bn. This announcement comes after Prime Minister Boris Johnson's commitment to increase defence spending by £16bn. In response, Alan Shipman, a Senior Lecturer in Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at The Open University, discusses why switching aid to defence may not increase UK security.

The UK is cutting almost £3bn from its aid budget while assigning over £16bn more to defence, signalling a reversal of priorities since the end of the Cold War. Under pressure to align remaining aid more closely with its foreign policy interests, and hit the NATO defence-spend target (2% of national income), Boris Johnson has allowed the widely-praised Department for International Development (DfID) to be re-absorbed into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.  

To understand why many economists and defence strategists are critical of this redirection read more in Alan Shipman’s blog on the subject