Gordon Brown’s publicity stunt won’t help the poor

LONDON, 15 January – Gordon Brown today pledges to push through a law obliging the UK to increase its foreign aid spending to 0.7% of GDP by 2013. IPN, a London-based think tank, warns that increasing spending without ensuring that it is actually helping the poor makes little sense.

Caroline Boin, IPN Research Fellow and development policy analyst, said,
“Measuring the success of foreign aid by how much we spend is ridiculous.  Spending more on poorly managed programmes, or even the salaries of DfID’s civil servants, would satisfy Brown’s law—but achieve nothing for international development.”

This is especially worrying given that the UK’s Department for International Development – which already spends over £5 billion every year - has proven to be highly inefficient and unaccountable.

Two recent IPN studies* have revealed how UK-based organisations such as the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the National Union of Teachers (NUT) receive millions of pounds from DfID, some of which funds advocacy work within the UK.

“In these lean times, the British taxpayer should be wary of any proposal to increase DfID’s budget. The idea that the government should plough even more money into this wasteful institution merely amounts to pre-election pandering on the part of Gordon Brown and his ilk.” said Boin.

CONTACT: Kendra Okonski, +44 20 3393 8410 (IPN) or +44 7795 844 685
media |AT| policynetwork.net

*Fake Aid (September 2009) & A Closer Union (January 2010)

IPN (www.policynetwork.net) is a global think-tank based in London, and is a non-profit, non-partisan organisation. IPN runs campaigns seeking to educate the public about the importance of markets and market institutions in the context of global policies relating to development, trade, health, the environment.