The UK is spending proportionately more of its overseas aid budget on housing refugees than most other major aid donors, new figures from the OECD show.
The figures, published on Wednesday, show that the only two countries spending more than the UK in absolute terms on housing refugees in their home countries are Germany and the US, but their total aid budgets are much larger than the UK.
The UK spent 29%, or $4.54bn (£3.64bn), of its total aid budget on refugees, the provisional figures for 2022 show. Germany spent 12.8% of its aid budget on housing refugees, the US 12% and France 9.4%.
OECD rules give countries discretion to use their aid budgets to cover the first year of the costs of housing refugees, but the rules are flexible on what costs can be covered.
The UK has been criticised for inappropriately loading more of the costs of accommodating and feeding refugees on to its aid budget than other countries. The housing costs largely paid out by the Home Office have been rising exponentially due to the number of Ukrainian refugees, leading to dramatic cuts in UK aid to alleviate poverty in Africa and Asia.
The figures show that only three countries spent proportionately more of their aid budgets on housing refugees in their countries than the UK. Poland spent 64.6% of its aid budget ($2.18bn), Ireland spent 51% ($1.25bn) and the Czech Republic spent 65.4% ($646m).
These statistics do not represent the total that countries spent on refugees but the amount taken from the 2022 aid budget to cover the costs.
The UK is spending three times as much on housing refugees as on bilateral aid to Africa, changing the face of a programme already battered by a cut in the proportion of gross national income spent on aid from 0.7% to 0.5%. Despite the cuts the UK remains one of the world’s largest donors in absolute terms behind the US, Germany, France and Japan.
The OECD figures also show foreign aid from official donors in 2022 rose to an all time high of $204bn, up from $186bn in 2021.
The recorded 13.6% increase in real terms is primarily due to a sharp rise in spending on processing and hosting refugees within donor countries to $29.3bn, or 14.4% of official development assistance (ODA), up from $12.8bn in 2021. Excluding these “in-donor” refugee costs, 2022 ODA only rose by 4.6% over 2021 in real terms.
Another factor behind the 2022 increase in aid was aid to Ukraine rising to $16.1bn – up from just $918m in 2021 – including $1.8bn of humanitarian aid.
Some of the figures will confirm the fears of the global south that Ukraine is proving a diversion for rich countries, leaving less cash available to help the poorest countries in the world. The figures show a 0.7% decline in bilateral ODA to least developed countries (LDCs) in 2022 compared with the previous year.
But ODA to LDCs in 2022 was up by 9% in real terms compared with 2019 – the last year before the Covid pandemic.
The chair of the OECD development assistance committee, Carsten Staur, said: “In a situation with increasing pressures on scarce development resources, we need to keep our commitment to support the least developed countries, many of which are in Africa.
“Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has resulted in a significant increase in funding for receiving refugees in donor countries. Some donors provided all or some of these extraordinary expenditures in addition to their already planned development programmes in 2022, which is commendable.”
Nerea Craviotto, senior policy and advocacy officer at the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad), said: “Today’s figures are nothing to celebrate. The increase in 2022 ODA levels do not meet the challenges the world is facing today and they still stand at just 0.36% of GNI. The ‘all-time high ODA levels’ reported for 2022 are largely reflective of one single humanitarian crisis that many donors were faced with: hosting Ukrainian refugees. The amounts required to address the polycrises needed to be significantly higher.
“Over the past decade, DAC members have made a series of agreements, mostly under the heading ‘ODA modernisation’ – and mostly behind closed doors – which have undermined the credibility, integrity and solid reputation of these statistics.”
