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Cuts of £5bn to the UK overseas aid budget cannot be challenged in the courts, government lawyers have said, even though ministers have no plan to return spending to the legal commitment of 0.7 % of UK gross national income (GNI).
The assertion by Treasury solicitors that ministers are immune from legal challenge over aid cuts comes in preliminary exchanges with the aid advocacy group One Campaign. It is the first step in what could prove a highly embarrassing judicial review.
In the spring statement in March the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, said she was slashing aid from 0.5% to 0.3 % of GNI. The international development minister, Jenny Chapman, recently said in a Guardian interview that this level of spending was the new normal.
The 40% cut, due to be imposed by April 2027, is being billed as necessary to fund a new permanent increase in defence spending required by long-term changes to the security landscape.
The previous aid cut, from 0.7 % to 0.5 %, imposed by Dominic Raab, the then Conservative foreign secretary, was billed as temporary. It was accompanied by aspirational timetables for aid spending to return to 0.7%, the target set out in the 2015 International Development Act entrenching that figure as the government commitment on overseas aid.
One Campaign says that for ministers to comply with the law, they face a choice of either repealing the act, a vote that some Labour MPs will be reluctant to justify to their electorates, or to set out a credible pathway to return to the target.
The campaign said it is impossible for ministers to keep legislation on the statute book that places duties upon them they intend to defy.
In their legal defence – a written exchange on the legal merits between government and One Campaign prior to a potential judicial review – government lawyers claimed a section in the act shields ministers from all legal challenge.
They said the act’s only mechanism for securing accountability is through a ministerial report to parliament. They pointed to a section of the act on the ministerial duty to report to parliament that states the reporting duty “does not affect the lawfulness of anything done or omitted to be done by any person”.
The lawyers told One Campaign that “this puts beyond doubt that parliament intended the courts would have no jurisdiction”.
This interpretation is being contested by the Liberal Democrat peer Jeremy Purvis, who helped draft the legislation and steered it through parliament.
He said ministers cannot hide behind the narrow section of the act on minister’s reporting duty to claim it ousts the courts. He added: “This government has not just missed the target but is changing it, and there is no scope to do this.
“The simple fact is the government is seeking to avoid a vote in parliament, avoid the courts and avoid all accountability for reneging on all requirements under the act.” He added the government had set out no pathway to return to 0.7 %.
One Campaign says the cuts are likely to be devastating. Its director, Adrian Lovett, said there was no evidence that ministers had met the requirement to undertake impact assessments of the cuts on poverty reduction and gender equality.
Ministers say they only have to make such an assessment when cuts to specific programmes are being made.
