Development Minister Kirsty McNeil said she has “great faith in the bailout”, reiterating Labour’s manifesto pledge to return to the 0.7% national income spending target.
McNeil, a former adviser to Gordon Brown and a senior Save the Children executive, declined to give any timetable, repeating the formula that the government would work toward the target “when financial circumstances permit.”
But she made a compelling case for the benefits of aid and also promised to build new “flexible partnerships” to address development challenges.
“I’m a big believer in aid; I’m a big believer in the quality of UK aid and when you have more of it you can have a bigger impact. And I think it’s important that colleagues hear that,” she said.
Repeating Labour’s pledge ahead of the 2024 general election to return to the 0.7% level (rather than cut aid next year), McNeil insisted that in Burnham’s government “everyone, from the Prime Minister onwards, believes in the spirit that has animated this manifesto”.
McNeil will outline his priorities in an address to charities and campaigners at the New Economics Foundation think tank on Monday.
She will announce that the government will provide up to £15 million through its Humanitarian Crisis Fund to support preventative action in countries most at risk from El Niño.
“It will just do very practical things like vaccinate livestock and give farmers money to supply supplies,” she said. The UN has warned that the climate event is likely to be the most severe in 1,000 years, exacerbating the risk of wildfires and floods.
The 0.7% bailout target was adopted by the Blair government and became cross-party consensus until it was scrapped by Rishi Sunak at the height of the Covid pandemic as the government rapidly increased domestic spending.
Charities have warned that Labour’s recent aid cuts, which took spending to 0.3% of national income, are leading to sharp cuts in Britain’s bilateral support for some of the world’s poorest countries. McNeil’s predecessor, Jenny Chapman, took over the role after Anneliese Dodds left due to the scale of the cuts.
At the time of Starmer’s decision, some Labor strategists were concerned about what they saw as the unpopularity of aid spending among voters. But McNeil said Labor should not be afraid to make a straightforward case for development.
“As we’ve lost our confidence, we’ve started trying to make a lot of different arguments for development that go beyond what I think is the core argument, which is that if you have the opportunity to save people’s lives and change people’s lives, you have to be ambitious about pursuing that opportunity,” she said.
“I think aid is a really good tool for saving children’s lives. And the impact of British aid, whether through immunization or feeding children who would otherwise starve, is something I have in every conversation I have with the public, whether it’s with a constituent on the doorstep or in my previous job at Save the Children, when you say, ‘Do you think if we can do it, we should do it?’ people say, ‘Yes, we should.’
Voters are more concerned about value for money and the effectiveness of aid spending, she said, vowing to “go the extra mile” when it comes to getting the most out of current limited resources.
She said she saw her role as using the full range of expertise and leverage of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) to influence what she called the “five pillars” – “health security, climate security, food security, human security and economic security”.
“The focus on securities is an attempt to reimagine my work by focusing it on global cooperation and how we create security through solidarity,” she added.
“This will mean reforming some of the international organizations that spend UK aid, as well as forming ‘tailored partnerships’ to work on specific issues.”
A veteran of the Make Poverty History campaign in the mid-2000s, McNeil contrasted this approach with that of the Blair government, which used Britain’s 2005 presidency of the G8 group of industrialized countries to secure significant debt relief for developing countries.
“Many of us came of age at a time when there were summits with big announcements and scrutiny from the UK government, and what I really want is to be held accountable: have I done all the work, the diplomatic work, to get the best out of our relationship?”
McNeill has been MP for Midlothian, south of Edinburgh, since 2024, winning the constituency for the Scottish National Party.
Her boss, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, has signaled that he wants development to be a more prominent focus of the FCDO’s work, including by directly taking the UK’s seat on the World Bank board.
“The Foreign Secretary has made it very clear that both development and climate will be at the heart of British policy: they are not add-ons, they are at the heart, which I’m obviously very happy about,” she said.