Penny Mordaunt makes a good start on foreign aid – EXPRESS COMMENT
FOLLOWING this newspaper's Stop The Foreign Aid Madness crusade, new International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt has pledged to take action and has also said that in future the Government must prove that the money "cannot be better spent" on anything else.
Steve Reigate
She is also sending a message to the countries which are the recipients of British aid, warning that the sums they receive will be slashed if they do not "take responsibility" and invest the money in their own people's welfare.
This is good news and a sign that ministers are finally becoming aware of the public's anger at the spending for spending's sake which characterises our development aid budget.
What Penny Mordaunt is unable to do is alter the commitment that allocates 0.7 per cent of national income to foreign aid. As Daily Express reader Robert Barnes has said: "What the public would like to see is the abolition of the 0.7 per cent target and the money spent at home."
While this is, for the moment, outside her remit she will make a case for the aid which saves lives after a natural disaster, which tackles malnutrition and which helps developing countries build up their own health and education infrastructure, enabling them to, as she says, "stand on their own feet".
Fair enough. But the public is sick of seeing money paid into the hands of chaotic and corrupt regimes
And last week a poll commissioned by the Daily Express found that 84 per cent of voters want foreign aid money to be diverted to help the NHS through its winter crisis.
That would be money well spent.
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