The aid budget of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) has soared to £400m a year even though it has failed to explain what taxpayers’ money has been spent on over the past 16 months.
The FCO has refused to publish data about its aid spending after it emerged that cash had gone to “frivolous” projects such as teaching Hamlet to Ecuadoreans and a game show for youngsters in Ethiopia.
Critics believe Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary, is hiding behind a review of aid programmes — launched last summer after an exposé in a tabloid newspaper — to avoid further embarrassment.
Figures released to parliament reveal that the FCO aid budget increased from £321m in 2013-14 to £344m in 2014-15, before rising again to an estimated £400m in 2015-16.
However, the latest available breakdown of aid spending from the FCO’s “transparency data” covers only the financial quarter ending on December 31, 2014.
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During that period, the FCO spent £5,000 on “Hamlet education workshops” in Ecuador. It also paid £2,042 for children to see a production of the play in Haiti, where up to 300,000 people died in an earthquake in 2010.
Meanwhile, £6,830 went towards a “Q&A game show” on national television in Ethiopia to highlight “UK values of human rights and good governance”. The scheme appears to have been earmarked to continue until December 2015 with a total allocated budget of £13,888.
In Panama, £4,735 was spent on a plaque ceremony “promoting racial equality”. The sum was a tiny fraction of the £400m-plus that has been spent by the British government on aid for 18 countries regarded as tax havens.
Whitehall is committed to spending 0.7% of national income on foreign aid, much of it delivered through the Department for International Development.
The FCO refused to say when it would publish a breakdown of spending from the start of 2015.
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“In June 2015 the foreign secretary commissioned a review into our spending on aid and we have now strengthened our process for scrutinising projects before any money is spent,” it said. “This has had a knock-on effect on publishing data.”