Let’s get real about public support for UK aid and development

The new Development Minister, Baroness Chapman, recently linked the decision to cut the UK aid budget to falling levels of public support for this spending.

However, polling suggests that UK public support for aid remains at levels prevailing during the 2010s – when the aid budget was maintained at 0.7% of GNI – although there are long-standing concerns about its effectiveness. This picture suggests that rather than politicising the polling data to justify breaking a manifesto commitment, the government must get back to leading public opinion on the UK’s aid ambitions. It also suggests that the UK development sector must do a better job of communicating the significant impact of its work and in making the case for ambitious UK aid and development efforts.

Alongside the outrage and protest expressed by Bond’s members in response to the savage cuts to the UK’s aid budget (from 0.5% to 0.3% of gross national income) announced by the Prime Minister in February our sector has also been reflecting on what led to this decision and how we need to respond.  Questions around the significance public support for UK aid have emerged as a key theme.

These questions were also put in the spotlight by Baroness Jenny Chapman, the new FCDO Development Minister, during her first appearance in front of the International Development Select Committee (IDC) on 12th May. In setting out how the government will reset its approach to international development, she stated that “Anyone who wants us to have a serious budget in the future knows that we have to rebuild public support”. The implication was that UK public support on aid has collapsed, and that in some way this has contributed to the government’s decision to slash the UK aid budget.

So, what is the significance of evolving UK public views on UK aid for government policy, has there been a recent fundamental change in public opinion on UK aid and what does this all mean when it comes to better engaging the public on UK aid and development?

Firstly, it is important to note that ‘public opinion on aid’ is an extremely slippery concept and needs to be described very carefully. The public are commonly polled on whether they agree with prevailing levels of UK aid, but polls also clearly show that the public usually significantly over-state the level of UK aid. Also, as with any area of polling, the way questions on UK aid are put to the public shape their response, with an emphasis on the causes being supported (and not just how much is spent) eliciting a more positive response.

This caveat notwithstanding, polling undertaken by the Development Engagement Lab (DEL) over more than a decade seems to indicate that, whilst public support for UK aid overall has fallen in recent years, it increased to 53% just after the last round of UK aid cuts, and it is not currently at a historic low. In fact, the 45% of the UK public that agreed in January 2025 that the UK aid budget should be increased from or maintained at the then prevailing level (of 0.5% of GNI), was slightly higher than the average across the period 2013-20, during which UK aid levels were 0.7% of GNI.  

The DEL polling also suggests that one of the main constraints to increasing public support for UK aid efforts may be public perceptions of its efficacy. In her remarks to the IDC, Minister Chapman correctly highlighted that latest DEL survey found that only 18% of those polled thought development aid is “effective” or “very effective” (a figure that has been relatively consistent over a long period), a very worrying statistic for UK aid advocates. It also seems as though the public are more sceptical about Government aid, as 40% of those polled thought the UK Government could make a difference to reducing poverty, compared to 51% for charities and NGOs and 57% for international organisations (many of whom are funded by the UK aid budget).

Finally, it is also the case that in polls exploring priorities for public spending or for political parties to emphasise foreign affairs and development consistently sit a long way down a list headed by many domestic priorities. It is therefore clear, that these issues are very unlikely to be amongst the most important to the UK public, and when politicians present maintaining UK aid levels as conflicting with domestic priorities (such as national security) the public will commonly accept UK aid cuts.

So, what does this all mean for what the UK Government and the development sector need to do to respond to the challenge of engaging the UK public on UK aid and to chart a path towards increasing UK aid ambitions?

Firstly, and most importantly, the UK Government must recognise that it is its commitment and leadership that ultimately determines UK aid ambitions, and that the narrative it communicates on UK aid is a key driver of public opinion. During 2010-20 UK aid was maintained at 0.7% of GNI despite austerity and similar levels of public support for this spending that we see today. It is also not hard to imagine that the negative messaging about UK aid that has emerged from senior Government figures in recent years – including pandering to tabloid caricatures of aid programmes and describing the UK aid budget as a ‘cashpoint in the sky’ and as ‘charity’ – has undermined public support for UK aid. The UK Government therefore needs to get back to leading and communicating a positive, and accurate narrative on UK aid and development. It is important to remember, UK aid is one of the most scrutinised government budget lines and Baroness Chapman stated herself that it would be a struggle to cut programming further to find the money for these further cuts.

Secondly, the UK Government and the wider UK development sector need to do a much better job of communicating to the public the impact of UK aid. There has been a gap in the Government’s efforts on this front in recent years and  a decline in public reporting on the development impact of its UK aid spending, which until the late 2010s was reported in great detail (in a detailed results framework) in DFID’s annual report, providing a valuable resource for Bond members to reference, and now gets a cursory mention in FCDO’s annual report. We no longer know, for example, how many girls have received primary school education thanks to UK aid. For INGOs a key challenge continues to be finding better ways to balance communication about development needs, the progress being made and positive narratives about low-income communities in their engagement with the public, especially when fundraising.

Finally, it is high time that the development community as a whole explores and develops a more empowering, relevant and engaging narrative for communicating to the public on humanitarian assistance and development, looking beyond the moral case to address its value tackling global challenges that affect all our lives. As Bond has long argued, this could (and perhaps should) lead to the term ‘international aid’ being phased out, in favour of one which better captures the evolving nature of this spending and the ways in which partner countries want this support to change.