In the middle of May, Baroness Jenny Chapman appeared before the international development committee in what turned out to be a frosty affair. Barely in post for two months—a consequence of the resignation of her predecessor, Anneliese Dodds—the new international development minister had upset the chair, Sarah Champion, after prepared remarks found their way into the morning papers.
Champion opened the session by expressing her frustration. “I was more than unhappy,” she tells me via video call. “We don’t normally let people have the opportunity to grandstand. It was done as a favour so the fact that before she came to the committee it had been pre-released to the journalists, it’s just rude.” The minister promised it wouldn’t happen again.
Chapman told the committee—as she had told the newspapers earlier—that the UK must become “an investor, not just a donor”, and that the “days of viewing the UK government as a global charity are over”.
Context is everything. Chapman’s remarks and the spiky session that followed were framed—and dominated—by February’s decision to cut aid spending from 0.5 per cent of gross national income (GNI) to 0.3 per cent. The move, which will take effect from 2027, has been presented by the government as a pragmatic choice, designed to help fund defence spending in a time of geopolitical uncertainty. Yet it’s a decision that appears to run counter to Labour’s 2024 manifesto pledge to restore “development spending at the level of 0.7 per cent of gross national income as soon as fiscal circumstances allow.”
Champion, Labour’s MP for Rotherham, admits she was “completely blindsided” by the spending announcement. (Dodds was, too, and swiftly resigned). On its substance, Champion says: “From a political and PR point of view, linking defence and the cut was… what’s the right word? … just wrong. That’s the only word I can use. Wrong because it showed a fundamental lack of understanding about what development does.
“Development stops conflicts, stops terrorism taking hold, prevents the migration of people, and keeps people safe. It’s absolutely up to the government of the time to do what they want to do with their departments and their spending but putting those two things together left them wide open to criticism.”
What did Champion make of Chapman’s “global charity” remark? “It kind of stuck in my throat because a very small amount of aid—the humanitarian stuff—is charity,” she says. “Aid is much more about building alliances, international reputation, long-term relationships. It’s about international PR and how you want to be seen. It is a very, very effective form of soft power.”
Soon after her select committee appearance, Chapman told The Guardian that future aid and development decisions must be made through the prism of a “0.3 world”. This is “the new normal”, she said. Does Champion agree? Or is she hopeful that funding will rise in line with Labour’s manifesto ambitions? “I have very little to no hope that [spending] will be coming back up any time soon,” she says, the wood-panelled walls of parliament’s annexe, Portcullis House, on the screen behind her.
Champion’s pessimism is derived not just from the announced cut but from a less publicised decision to partially decouple the budget from national income. In March, it emerged that future aid and development budgets will be fixed, putting them, in her words, “on the same footing as any other department”. Crucially, they will no longer fluctuate yearly according to the size of GNI. At the time Champion expressed her nervousness about the move. While acknowledging that the measure could prove a positive—"Unshackling aid from percentage targets could protect aid spending from drains on its resources like reckless Home Office spending on asylum hotels at home,” she wrote—some questions were left unanswered. Explicitly, Champion wondered whether budgets might fall even when income forecasts improve.
Today, Champion continues to question the logic of move: “When the Treasury is optimistic that our economy is going to continue growing why wouldn’t you want to keep going with that measure [which tracks the aid budget to GNI]?,” she asks rhetorically.
Set against the make-up of the current parliament—335 MPs out of a total of 650 were newly elected in 2024—Champion is something of veteran. The 56-year-old first became an MP during the coalition years, winning a byelection in 2012. After serving as a shadow minister under Jeremy Corbyn, in 2020 she was voted in as the first female chair of the select committee on which she still serves today.
How does she describe her role to people who don’t spend their time thinking about the mechanics of parliament?
“The primary thing to hold in your mind is that you are elected by the whole of the house,” she says. “You’re not a political appointment. You’re not a party appointment. My job is to represent all colleagues of all parties and I take that pretty seriously. It makes me want to do the job of scrutiny as well as I can, and to be as even handed as I can. That doesn’t mean to say that I don’t also have Sarah Champion MP who might comment on things but that’s a different person to Sarah Champion chair of [the International Development Committee].”
She continues: “There’s a misperception that we are a dual policy-making body. We’re not. We are literally there to scrutinise the government departments that have ODA [official development assistance] spend.”
Among the things that have changed in her time as chair is the level of experience of those who serve. Nine of today’s 11-person committee were elected to parliament for the first time last July. There has been some learning to do. “[At the start they] thought they were a shadow foreign office and that they were there to support their parties,” says Champion. “It took a while for them to figure out what their job was. Since Christmas, the committee has got into its groove.”
Is it easier or harder to chair the committee today? Champion chooses a different word. “More enjoyable,” she says, “because it’s nice to see people digging into their personal strengths but working as a team. One person will ask a question from their background and then you’ll see another person coming in and building on that from a slightly different perspective. And that’s happening cross-party, it’s not happening on party lines.
“Ultimately our job is to try and get to the truth of the situation and make recommendations based on that. When you’re working in that collective way, it’s very satisfying. It doesn’t make it easy—we’ve got strong personalities on the committee—but it does make it fun.”
Within months of her initial election as chair back in 2020, Boris Johnson confirmed that the Department for International Development (DfID) would be folded into the foreign office, newly named the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). In his statement to parliament, the then prime minister compared foreign aid spending to “some giant cashpoint in the sky”. For a time there was a suggestion that the committee tracking DfID should be disbanded, too—before that idea met cross-party opposition.
DfID’s demise came 23 years after it was originally formed. Its creation was one of the first acts of the New Labour government, and Clare Short led the department from 1997 to 2003, before she resigned over the Iraq War. In their book, The Rise and Fall of the Department for International Development, Mark Lowcock and Ranil Dissanayake note how early “assessments of DfID in this period are full of plaudits … The Economist said it was ‘a model for other rich countries’. Oxfam described it as ‘the best bilateral development agency’.”
Does Champion regret DfID’s fate? “As a committee we didn’t take a position on it,” she notes. Personally, however, she believes the separation of foreign office and development department is “very helpful” for those operating on the ground. It allows diplomats and politicians to conduct “challenging conversations” and “quieter conversations” simultaneously. “If you just have one person managing [both] that starts to get compromised and messy,” she says.
Perhaps Labour missed a tricked in not bringing DfID back as an independent department when elected last year. Champion has some sympathy for the idea. “It would have been a very good way internationally to show that we’re a very different government with a different approach,” she says. While not directly calling for the merger to be reversed, behind the scenes she argued for three things—a development minister who attends cabinet, a dedicated development permanent secretary (something that had been reintroduced when Andrew Mitchell returned to the Conservative government as development minister in 2022, and was subsequently retained by Labour), and a separate development budget. “I can see the logic of having one front door,” she argues. “But the lack of autonomy, that’s not helpful.”
Three months after DfID fell under the umbrella of the newly expanded foreign office, a commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of GNI on aid was downgraded to 0.5 per cent. Now that 0.5 has become 0.3. Meanwhile, Labour politicians who were critical of the Conservative decision to shutter DfID half a decade ago are embracing the emerging status quo. Chapman’s “new normal” includes a tactical move towards “partnership not paternalism”, while foreign secretary David Lammy wants “a long overdue conversation about the future architecture of aid”, and for spending to be “smarter and sharper”.
Champion offers two ideas for reforming foreign aid and development within the constraints of the new aid budget. First, she believes it’s worth assessing whether the United Nations and other large multilateral systems are delivering value for money. She has set up an inquiry to this end and describes herself as “slightly fixated” on the subject, suggesting that the influence of these institutions has only diminished as their size has grown. “We only need to look at Sudan or Gaza to see how, if somewhere chooses to ignore the UN system, it very effectively can.”
Second, she says the UK needs to “move away from the idea that we can outspend China and others”. What the UK can offer, instead, is “skills, expertise and support”, she argues. “We should be leaning into these things a lot more.”
While skills and expertise don’t come for free, this approach does suggest that, in light of the imminent foreign aid cuts, it is possible to do more with less. “Absolutely,” says Champion. “The sector is horrified that I’ve never been wedded to 0.7 [per cent]. What I’m wedded to is having some underlying principles.” She offers, by way of example, the mission to make poverty history. “One year that might be 0.3 per cent, the next year it might cost you 0.21. But if you set very clear targets it gives you a goal, something to be measured against—but it also sets out your [intentions] internationally.”
In other words, the UK needs to choose its aid and development battles and match those to its principles. “We still have this rather colonial idea that we need to be doing everything for these poor unfortunates… What we actually should be doing is looking for partnerships where we can really add value.”
Jon Bernstein is a freelance editor and writer
