London: A parliamentary report claims that the British government is housing refugees in the UK with up to a third of the country's foreign aid budget.
According to a study by the international development select committee, the amount of aid given to each refugee in the UK nearly tripled in just three years, from £6,700 in 2019 to £21,700 in 2021.
Members of the committee claimed that when they tried to get precise information on current spending, the government resisted. Nevertheless, it is claimed that in 2021, more than £1 billion, or about 10% of the total aid budget, was spent on refugees in the UK.
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The government's political decision to spend so much money on refugees in the UK, despite the fact that international laws defining legitimate aid do not require it to do so, was described by the committee as unsustainable and unprecedented, according to the Guardian.
According to government regulations, the Home Office may use funds from the Foreign Office's foreign aid budget to pay for a refugee's first year of living expenses in the UK.
The report claims that between 2018 and 2021, per capita spending on refugees is greater than that of any other OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) nation and is roughly three times the DAC average of £7,400.
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Nearly £2 billion more than the main estimate, the Home Office's supplementary estimate includes plans for more than £2.6 billion in ODA between 2022 and 2023.
The Guardian reports that the number of asylum seekers living in "contingency accommodation," primarily hotels, increased from less than 2,600 to more than 37,000 between March 2020 and September 2022.
The UK cut its bilateral aid spending to least developed countries (LDCs) by 50% in 2021 as a result, in part.
The committee instead cited claims made by the reputable Center for Global Development, which predicts that aid for internally displaced persons could exceed £3 billion in 2022, an increase of more than 300% from 2020, in place of the government's failure to provide complete data.
According to the UK-based nonprofit Save the Children, these expenses could total £4.5 billion in 2022–2023—or one-third of the entire aid budget.
The committee's chair, Sarah Champion, told the Guardian that there had been a "determined effort" to keep the committee from seeing the whole picture.
"The government has deliberately tried to stop us from performing our oversight role.
We encountered a brick wall in our attempts to obtain simple information about how the UK government is allocating its ODA budget.
According to a statement from the Foreign Office, "the government has acted decisively and compassionately to support the people of Ukraine and Afghanistan as they seek refuge in the UK and at the autumn statement we provided an additional £2.5 billion to help meet the increased costs of this support.
"We disclose all aid expenditures in accordance with OECD regulations, which permit funding to be used for housing and food for refugees and asylum seekers during their first year in the UK.
The UK government continued to be one of the largest international aid donors in 2021, spending more than £11 billion on aid, the majority of which was still used to help the world's poorest communities, fight deadly diseases, and enrol millions of girls in school.
