Starmer, Burnham and Foreign Aid: A Troubling Inheritance

Sir Keir Starmer’s tenure coincided with a rough time for development work, as the gutting of USAID, and concurrent falls in global aid spending, marked an inflection point for humanitarians, diplomats and security practitioners alike.

While the full impact is still unfolding, cuts have already exacted a heavy toll on emergency relief, climate resilience, human rights and social welfare. Programmes lack liquidity, civic networks are contracting, and there is mounting fear over the loss of trust, talent, expertise and institutional memory. Sudan, host of the world’s largest hunger crisis, saw 1,100 street kitchens shut amid cash-shortages. In Ethiopia, support for rape victims was suddenly suspended. Surges in conflict, riots and protests were documented across numerous Sub-Saharan states; in South Sudanese villages, subcounty chiefs or ‘payam administrators’ recorded a tenfold increase in local mortality rates. On the international level, entities structuring much of aid’s delivery – IOM, WHO, OCHA, WFP, UNHCR and UNDP – are all experiencing existential strain. In short, austerity has distorted development’s entire ecology, with estimates suggesting a possible 750,000 fatalities within the first year of US cuts alone. Projections model anywhere between 9 million to 22 million deaths by 2030.

Of course, these issues must be understood in the context of long running trends and systemic changes. Peace and security programming has dropped precipitously since 2019, hampered by fiscal bottlenecks, while the aggregate share of ODA allocated to technical assistance – essential for revenue generation and sustainable service provision – halved between 2016 and 2025. Analogous trends are evident in resourcing for fragile states, despite a profusion of armed conflict trapping almost 20% of children in warzones.

At the same time, donor markets are increasingly congested, fragmented and (explicitly) transactional, with China, Russia and a variety of ‘Middle Powers’ ‘slicing, dicing and trading’ sovereignty to secure concessions and strategic clout. The corollaries may include the occasional commercial boon, but also co-optation, graft or, as in Sudan, state collapse.

Nor should Labour policies be isolated from the shared ramp-up in defence spending across Europe; a volatile White House; or past skrimping by earlier governments – reductions that have left FCDO forward-planning ‘all but impossible’ since 2020.

But even with this considerable prefacing, the scale of UK cuts announced last year – stripping aid back from 0.5% to 0.3% of GNI by 2027 – sparked serious concerns, not least because almost a fifth of the rump budget covered Home Office asylum costs. Numerous experts have criticised the decision, branding the reductions detrimental to development goals and ‘dangerously counterproductive’ to Britain’s own security, standing and supply chains. Further disclosures released as Parliament rose for summer recess did little to bolster confidence, with Sarah Champion, Chair of the International Development Committee (IDC) casting the UK’s ‘brutal’ drop in bilateral assistance as ‘chilling’.

Familiar Objectives, Less Money

Recycling the ‘modernisation’ language of her predecessors, then-Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper sketched out a ‘new’ development approach in March, stressing a focus on fragile and conflict-affected states (FCAS), humanitarian assistance and healthcare alongside efforts to mitigate climate change and allay violence against women and girls (VAWG). Packaged within four ‘essential shifts’ – donor to investor, service delivery to system support, grants to expertise, and international interventions to local leadership – the reforms were sold as a ‘reflection of both our values and our national interest’.

On paper, this triage subscribes to a promising set of ethics: partnership over paternalism, investment over charity, the dismantling of dependencies and a cascading of agency. Past consultations with Sub-Saharan stakeholders – conducted under the slightly derivative rubric ‘think with Africa, not do for Africa’ – recommended similar principles, and the ‘Global Partnerships’ conference in May borrowed much the same framing, centring system-wide reforms, co-creativity and domestic ownership. Analysts have elaborated on the potential benefits, from tempering elite complacency to propelling experimentation and accountability. Disruption may also yield space to address inherent inequities baked into Western methods, models and assumptions, driving a necessary rethink about how aid is understood and operationalised.

Getting there, however, requires reconciling several contradictions. For all the talk about systemic solutions, the UK appears more preoccupied with palliative needs than long-running structural change. The risk is a prioritisation of symptoms over their causes, leading to the unsavoury paradox of ‘prevent[ing] absolute catastrophe but creat[ing] a permanent emergency’. Aid’s propensity to either sap local capacity or prop up predatory regimes is well documented, as is the perennial problem of sustainability. A cross-party paper by the IDC made the point explicitly, calling for clarity on ‘how the UK will support partners in a fragile or failed state, unable to deliver services [themselves]’.

The mismatch between aspiration and resourcing doesn’t help. Bilateral allocations to Africa will shrink by 58% over four years; climate aid by 14%. Despite an ostensible focus on FCAS, which are set to absorb almost 70% of ‘geographic support’ by 2028/29, real spending on many of these contexts still faces a steep drop-off, especially when considering commitments earmarked for Sudan, Gaza and Ukraine. Somalia is being cut by 49%, South Sudan by 46% and Mozambique by 90%, while FCDO ODA contributions to the Integrated Security Fund (ISF), a cross-government pot for UK strategic programming, has already halved from the initial cap proposed in March.

This could easily leave residual activities piecemeal, reductive and/or ineffective, particularly in the realm of peacebuilding. VAWG projects, a notional priority, may experience diminishing returns if they neglect the wider social milieu that actually permits, shapes and perpetuates gender-based violence. The same is true of P/CVE. Take South-Central Somalia, where militant outfits like Al-Shabaab are enmeshed in a larger conflict ecosystem, emerging as products and propellants of instability rather than the underlying cause. Much of the group’s appeal stems from its disbursal of basic goods and comparatively robust governance, with residents often preferring insurgent courts and checkpoints to those manned by federal authorities. Siloed responses to these problems seem superficial, if not redundant.

Studies show the value of integrating violence prevention (of any stripe) within broader interventions that cross-cut education, economics, social resilience and service delivery. While thrift could incentivise better coordination, the difficulty is ensuring sufficient breadth and access. Specialisms among smaller donors are rarely tenable without a wider framework supplied by the likes of USAID. At the same time, local brokerage is disappearing. With roughly half of the women’s groups surveyed by UN Women ‘at risk of closure’, linkages between sponsor and recipient are steadily breaking down. Assuming private enterprise can plug the gap overlooks the commercial logic slanting coverage towards stable areas. Although research expounds on the salience of business in peacebuilding, experts maintain that investments need ‘“good enough” governance with … a degree of predictability’ – conditions rarely satisfied in conflict-affected states. There are exceptions, but they arguably prove the rule.

Working through multilateral mechanisms – as broadcast in FCDO’s approach – is a pragmatic response to these limitations, staking out the UK’s role in expressions of collective action. They are likely the most expedient means of working at scale and offsetting the diminished clout of British diplomats. But the emphasis on exporting ‘expertise’ and shaping global norms runs afoul of the same fiscal problems, as parliamentarians concede, ‘structural changes within the FCDO leaves [the very] teams managing multilateral relationships vulnerable to cuts’.

The High Price of Cost-Cutting

A further problem is the ‘false economy’ arguably embedded in the UK’s basic assumptions. Contractions in aid spending have been presented as a trade-off in favour of defence spending and national security – hard decisions driven by financial necessity. Yet in 2021, Starmer himself argued: ‘our overseas budget goes beyond . . . moral obligation: it also helps build a more stable world and keeps us safer in the UK’. The full scope of this nexus may be contested, but (well-managed) aid and security can be mutually reinforcing propositions, yielding considerable dividends over time. The IMF, among others, identifies a significant rate of return – up to $103 per $1 spent on conflict prevention – while the UN suggests preventive action could reap between $5 billion and $70 billion a year in net savings.

Importantly, research also stresses the ‘downstream costs of failing to prevent or manage conflicts’, and the opportunities they afford competitors – outcomes seemingly at odds with the UK’s 2025 National Security Strategy.

To take one example, violence can often breed ‘strategic vacuums’ conducive to hostile powers, extremist networks and criminal outfits. Spillover from Libya in 2011 saw a ‘proliferation of [guns], jihadists, traffickers and gangsters’ across the Sahel, which now accounts for half of all terrorism-related deaths world-wide. The disintegration of Sudan – a country saturated with UAVs, missiles and high-tech munitions – may prove far worse. Analysts increasingly refer to a possible ‘mega-war’ subsuming Chad, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Egypt, stoked by a raft of foreign sponsors, while the circulation of third and fourth generation MANPADS poses a direct risk to civil aviation. Multiple drone strikes have hit Port Sudan, a coastal city abutting major Red Sea shipping lanes (an artery for 30% of global container traffic), even as reports track the possible export of materiel to insurgent groups further afield. Crucially, the situation could deteriorate further, with Emadeddin Badi explaining how Sudan’s wartime demand currently absorbs ‘weapons, ammunition and armed labour inward’, thereby masking a ‘larger stockpile effect: warehouses, caches and [circuits] that will not dissolve with the conflict’s de-escalation’. Should this dynamic invert, whether through exhaustion, stalemate or settlement, the regional implications would be dire.

Nor is the impact confined to the immediate neighbourhood. Sudan’s huge displacement rates – 14 million since April 2023, with 4 million fleeing abroad – are already inducing social, economic and political ripples that span continents, from the borderlands of surrounding states to improvised encampments in Calais (where 60% of asylum-seekers are Sudanese). At the same time, healthcare within Sudan itself has effectively collapsed, leaving infectious diseases – cholera, dengue, malaria, measles, hepatitis E and diphtheria – to run rampant. So-called ‘Boko drugs’ (spoiled or counterfeit pharmaceuticals) hamper prevention efforts; the mass transit of people impedes any ability to trace, treat and contain. With local variants of Polio spreading into Egypt and Yemen, and a 70% probability of Ebola seeping into South Sudan over the next three months, the risk of concurrent epidemics will only grow, ‘rendering the response to other shocks more difficult’.

The resulting ‘polycrisis’ alludes to a dangerous pattern, where shifts from prevention to response ‘leave [emergencies] to harden, escalate and spill across borders at a far higher human and security cost’. With short-term relief eclipsing ‘investments in institutions, resilience and human capital’, recovery is slowed and fragility entrenched. Although the UK continues to prioritise funding for Sudan, mostly through humanitarian relief, the fallout underlines the exponential and transnational impact conflicts have when earlier off-ramps are missed.

Then there are the esoteric issues of trust, influence and credibility. In this case, the UK – as UN Penholder for Sudan – has repeatedly framed itself as a champion of atrocity prevention, and yet in the lead up to ‘one of the single largest mass-casualty events’ in recent history – El-Fashar – Whitehall reportedly opted for the cheapest, ‘least ambitious’ approach to civilian protection. Around 10,000 people were killed within 48 hours of the city’s capture – a ‘predicted and predictable’ massacre mimicking those in El-Genenia, Zamzam and across much of the Darfuri interior. The apathy and inadequacy of Western reactions have a long half-life and amplify complaints of hypocrisy when applying international law.

Perception in turn has real world consequences. As authoritarian statecraft exploits notions of ‘identity, grievance and belonging’ to contest the very ‘foundations of truth, science, expertise and certainty’ across recipient societies, national (and global) security is ever more bound up with norms and values. By squandering efforts to showcase principled leadership, or push for real accountability, the UK – and likeminded partners – ‘fail to recognise that today’s volatility and tomorrow’s threats are in part the long-term costs of their own inconsistency over [several] decades’.

Big Questions for Burnham

Whitehall is not alone in pursuing an aid ‘reset’ and there is clearly need for far-reaching change. Seventeen major donors slashed their budgets in 2025; the EU is under mounting pressure; and the UN’s contractions appear ‘siloed, uncoordinated and cut-throat’. However, the scale and pace of UK reductions – the steepest of any G7 country – has undoubtedly contributed to this sudden, system-wide shock – one likely to precipitate further insecurity.

Andy Burham’s premiership offers space to reevaluate, with rumoured pathways back to ‘0.5%’, or even ‘0.7%’, already in circulation. But meaningful engagement should not be reduced to artificial thresholds and financial benchmarks. The priority, as Fleur Anderson writes, must be ‘establishing a credible long-term trajectory that partner governments, multilateral institutions, NGOs and local organisations can plan around’. Resource shortages are compounded by a lack of strategy and protracted FCDO restructuring. Propitiatory bodies like the Soft Power Council ‘fell flat’ without ministerial attention; the ‘new’ development approach remains vague and contradictory. The selection of Ed Miliband as Foreign Secretary - the ninth in ten years – is itself indicative of a wider problem; a ‘revolving door’ of decision-makers that leaves officials’ little stake in reform and policy no time to mature.

Against this backdrop, an injection of cash and political capital is necessary but not sufficient. Aid needs to be leveraged as part of a comprehensive foreign policy; it seems incongruent, for instance, to funnel relief into Sudan while failing to name, let alone sanction, the primary enablers of the conflict, or to prioritise a regional emergency while culling support to the states actually trapped within it. Crucially, a viable approach also calls for horizons that extend beyond triage or crisis management, recognising the ‘tragic irony’ in a response to FACS contexts that comes at the expense of institutions, networks and programmes preventing future violence.

Resolving these issues requires lucidity and strategic thinking. The ‘shifts’ outlined by Cooper are laudable, but Whitehall must develop a coherent theory of change, one that recognises the evolving nature of aid, the UK’s agency and limitations, and the indelible link between global development and national security. Starmer’s cuts leave a heavy burden for his successor but also urgent lessons to draw on.

© RUSI, 2026.

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