UK Aid is Ten Times More Scrutinised than Other Government Spending

Defenders of foreign aid often claim that aid spending is better scrutinised than most domestic government spending. This sounds reasonable, if we take the large investments by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) in the past, and Foreign Commonwealth, and Development Office more recently in randomized evaluations through organisations such as JPAL and 3ie as an indication of this.

UK aid spending is also remarkably transparent, the DevTracker website includes both simple summaries and reams of detail on individual projects, including ex-ante business cases and ex-post Annual Reviews and Project Completion Reviews. But to date there hasn’t really been any systematic comparative data on the difference between oversight of aid and other government spending.

Last week the government’s Evaluation Task Force published a new Evaluation Registry, putting together all UK government evaluations onto a single searchable website. All evaluations completed after April 2024 are required to be registered.

Overall the database has 205 evaluations by the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO) and its predecessor, the Department for International Development (DFID). (Of these, 132 are impact evaluations). Looking across the rest of the government, there are a total of 1,436 evaluations from other agencies (of which 1,006 are impact evaluations). That means that while aid-spending agencies make up only 1.3 percent of UK government spending, they are the subject of 12.5 percent of all government evaluations.

To put it another way, the UK spent around £15.3 billion on aid in 2023, so that is one evaluation for every £75 million of spending. For the rest of the government, there is just one published evaluation for every £809 million. Or vice versa, for every billion pounds worth of aid spending there are 13 evaluations. For every £ billion of total government spending there is just one evaluation. So per pound, aid spending is over 10 times more evaluated.

Figure 1. UK aid is 10x More Evaluated per Pound Spent

Data from the UK government Evaluation Registry https://evaluation-registry.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/

This is a new database—it's labelled “beta” on the website—and so it's probably not entirely comprehensive. But even if FCDO/DFID evaluations are over-represented here, the fact that they were easily findable by the team putting together the database is important in itself. It's little use doing evaluations if nobody can find them. The database also doesn’t yet include any evaluations by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI), so definitely under-counts at least some aid evaluations too. ICAI conducts around eight evaluations of aid spending each year.

Perhaps also of interest is the fall in the share of evaluations that are impact evaluations, from 70 percent for DFID (roughly in line with the rest of government), to only 47 percent for FCDO. Perhaps the non-aid activity of the FCDO is intrinsically less amenable to impact evaluation, or perhaps impact evaluations are just less prioritised now, but this is a question worth answering.

All in all it is clear that aid spending receives more scrutiny than domestic spending.

Aid critics like to say the government should audit foreign aid spending. It already did. Yet another reason that Starmer’s proposed £6 billion aid cuts are misguided.

Table 1. Number of government evaluations, by agency

Data from the UK government Evaluation Registry https://evaluation-registry.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/