Policy Updates

On April 17, 2024, UK Shadow Foreign Minister. David Lammy outlined the Labour Party’s vision for UK foreign policy if it were to win the next national election in the autumn of 2024.

Lammy grounded the party's vision in progressive realism. He lamented how the Conservative governments since 2010 have turned the UK inwards, threatening its standards of upholdingupholding international law and damaging the UK’s reputation as a global development leadership. In particular, Lammy highlighted the Conservative Party's mismanagement of DFID and the FCO merger, ODA budget cuts, and the exodus of development expertise.

To deliver progressive realism, Lammy argued that the UK needs to be realistic about the state of the modern world. This would begin by recognizing that the previous common consensus that economic globalization would lead to more liberal democratic values was wrong. Democracies have become more dependent on authoritarian states, with the share of world trade between democracies declining from 74% in 1998 to 47% in 2022.

Lammy also pushed to recognize the rise of China's economic and military power, the decline of US hegemony, and the rise of key regional powers non-aligned with specific blocs, able to strike deals with all the great powers as and when they like. This group includes Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, which are capable of ignoring the US, EU, and UK as they conduct business. He noted rising insecurity at the global level, with a strong focus on Russia and the ever-growing climate emergency as significant challenges.

Looking ahead, Lammy asserted that security will remain the central task of British foreign policy, and the two most important allies for ensuring security will be the US and Europe. He acknowledged that the UK must show willingness to share in the collective global security burden, but also noted the need to strengthen its foreign and security ties with Europe. Lammy called for a new geopolitical partnership with the EU driven by closer coordination in military, economic, climate, health, cyber, and energy security issues.

Beyond Europe, Lammy called for a focus on building relationships in the Indo-Pacific region, noting the need to maintain and strengthen ties with Australia, Japan, South Korea and India as pivotal partners. With regard to China, Lammy noted the UK must simultaneously challenge, compete against, and cooperate with China on the world stage.

On development, Lammy called for the UK to partner with the 'global south', particularly fostering engagement on tackling climate change, without which the global climate agenda will fail. He called for the Commonwealth to be revitalized as part of this engagement. As progressive realists, Lammy asserted that the UK needs to also look ahead at the future and how its relationship with other continents will change. He cited that by 2050, one in four people on the planet will live in Africa, yet the continent remains troubled by poverty, necessitating a new 'Africa strategy' beyond ODA to develop win-win partnerships based on mutual self-interest.

Beyond security, the Foreign Office will play its role in revitalizing the UK economy and trade through economic diplomacy. Lammy noted that if he becomes the next Foreign Minister, he will convene a new business advisory council to ensure that the needs of companies inform British diplomatic thinking.

Lammy finally called for putting climate diplomacy is at the center of UK foreign policy, noting that a Labour government would make advancing the fight against greenhouse gases central to its agenda. He advocated for the creation of a new clean power alliance, what he described as a reverse OPEC, of states committed to leading the way on decarbonizing power systems. A Labour government would also help reform international financial institutions to provide far greater support for climate adaptation.

On April 16, 2024, UK Deputy Foreign Minister Andrew Mitchell announced an additional GBP100 million (US$119 million) in humanitarian assistance to Ethiopia.

The funding is slated to be used to support Ethiopia’s access to primary healthcare services, support communities in becoming more climate resilient, and provide help for people displaced due to drought and extreme weather.

The pledge was made at the UK co-hosted Ethiopia pledging conference with OCHA. Ethiopia is facing one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises, with over 21 million requiring assistance, 15 million people facing food insecurity, and 4 million people internally displaced.

On April 4, 2024, UK Minister for International Development and Africa Andrew Mitchell committed GBP27 million (US$32 million) to improve family planning care and MNCH in Tanzania and a further GBP6 million (US$7 million) to boost vulnerable communities access to green energy in the country.

The announcement was made in anticipation of Mitchell's four-day trip to East Africa. The commitment included:

• GBP15 million (US$18 million) for a five-year initiative to improve Tanzania’s primary health systems, with a focus on saving the lives of mothers and babies;
• GBP12 million (US$14 million) to extend the UK’s Scaling up Family Planning Programme for an additional two years, enabling an additional 900,000 people to receive services; and
• An additional GBP6 million (US$7 million) for a new program to provide vulnerable communities with greater access to clean energy and improved urban resilience.

During his trip, Mitchell also announced a Mutual Prosperity Partnership with Tanzania, which aims to unlock GBP1 billion (US$1. 2 billion) of UK government-backed investment in Tanzania between 2024 and 2030 and increase UK-Tanzania trade.

On March 28, 2024, UK Minister for Development and Africa Andrew Mitchell committed to increasing humanitarian ODA to Sudan to GBP89 million (US$106 million) in 2024/25 in the face of growing humanitarian need in the region.

The commitment was made by Mitchell while on a trip to Chad, where he acknowledged the growing number of refugees from Sudan arriving in the country.

Some of the funding is slated to go to UNICEF for emergency and life-saving food assistance and nutrition, water and hygiene services for 500,000 children and to support survivors of gender-based violence. The funding will also support the WFP to provide assorted food commodities, including cereals, pulses, oils, and salt for thousands of people.

On March 24, 2024, BOND published a new manifesto setting out the steps the next UK government should take to help deliver on the SDGs and work in solidarity with its partners.

The manifesto is based around seven key asks:

• Act as a responsible and ambitious development partner. This includes returning ODA to 0.7% of GNI and providing new and additional resources for meeting global climate finance and ensuring the ODA program is headed by a cabinet-level minister with dedicated and well-resourced staff;
• Create an equitable and sustainable international financial system that works for people, nature, and the climate. This includes supporting a UN sovereign debt workout mechanism to deal with unsustainable debt in lower-income countries, pursuing an ambitious MDB reform agenda that increases their provision of resources and makes their governance more representative, and supporting a universal UN Framework Convention on tax;
• Recommit to the SDGs and ‘leaving no one behind. This includes ensuring UK development programs focus on those most in need, promoting gender transformative approaches to sustainable development, acknowledging care as an economic issue and a right and build the care economy in line with the 5Rs framework{title"recognition, reduction, redistribution, representation and reward"} for care work, and scaling up efforts to deliver universal access to basic services;
• Do our fair share to tackle the global climate and biodiversity crises. This includes ensuring all ODA is aligned with the Paris Agreement, providing genuinely new and additional grant finance for the Loss and Damage Fund;
• Develop a new approach to UK trade and private sector investment. This includes introducing new legislation that mandates companies, the financial sector, and the public sector operating in the UK to carry out human rights and environmental due diligence. It also holds them to account for failures, reduce the volume of UK funding being used to capitalize BII until it reforms to ensure it does more to contribute to poverty reduction;
• Promoting stability, security and effective crisis responses. This includes providing the UK’s fair share to support humanitarian crises, championing locally led approaches to anticipatory crisis prevention, action and resilience, establishing a prevention-focused national security outlook which focuses on preventing crises as well as responding to them; and
• Protect and promote rights, freedoms and civic space. This includes prioritizing meaningful partnerships with human rights defenders, including indigenous communities, women, LGBTQI+ advocates, migrant rights advocates and environmental defenders, removing restrictions on civil society campaigning domestically, and working with other governments to reverse restrictions on civic space in public debate and policymaking.

On February 6, 2024, the UK government announced GBP100 million (US$119 million) to a new fund to end preventable deaths in Ethiopia, targeted at children, pregnant women, and post-natal women.

The fund aims to help more than 3 million people and will focus on supporting people in the Tigray region.

The fund was announced after UK Minister for Development and Africa Andrew Mitchell returned from a 2-day visit to Ethiopia to witness the ongoing regional humanitarian crisis. Mitchell called for other development cooperation providers to step up and financially support the crisis.

On January 27, 2024, it was announced that the UK has joined the US and other nations in freezing its funding for the UNRWA for Palestinians in the Near East in light of allegations that 12 UNRWA staff took part in the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel.

The UK government noted that while it remains committed to getting vital humanitarian aid to people in Gaza, it was temporarily pausing future funding while the allegations are reviewed. The UK was the third-largest donor to UNRWA in 2020, but its funding fell sharply in 2021 and 2022. No recorded funding was delivered in 2023.

Assistance workers and Palestinian advocates have stated that freezing funding could have dire impact on humanitarian relief to Gaza.

On January 25, 2024, the UK’s International Development Committee released its first report on the FCDO’s approach to SRHR, which outlined the severe impact of cuts to SRHR as a result of reductions in the overall UK ODA budget beginning in 2020.

The report noted that between 2019 and 2022, FCDO reduced its spending on SRHR by a third, halved its spending on family planning and cut spending on reproductive and MNCH by 37%.

The report highlighted the impact of these cuts on key programs, noting that the UK’s flagship WISH programs saw its partners reduced from 27 to 17 countries, and its program results for women and girls reduced by approximately 60%.

At the multilateral level, UNFPA saw its funding cut from GBP20 million (US$25 million) in 2020 to GBP8 million (US$10 million) in 2021. UNAIDs saw its funding cut by 80% in 2021. The Global Fund also received a 30% cut in the pledge committed to for its replenishment in 2022.

The committee recommended the UK government:

• Set targets for its bilateral spending on SRHR with no less than 4%, which it was set at before 2019, to be allocated at the bilateral level moving forward;
• Adhere to its prior commitments to multilateral funds and maintain future;
• Ensure a more integrated and complementary approach to SRHR, e.g., integrating services to treat and prevent HIV and AIDS into SRHR programming; and
• Include marginalized and hard-to-reach people in the planning, development, and delivery of SRHR programming.

On December 13, 2023, departing Chief Executive of Oxfam Great Britain Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah called on the UK Labour Party to ensure it puts global solidarity at the center of their international development policy.

Sriskandarajah noted the need to target ODA where it is needed and supporting strong public health systems. He advocated against UK ODA being used as a foreign and trade policy instrument and also advocated against the practice of counting in-donor refugee costs as ODA.

Sriskandarajah also called on the Labour Party to stop addressing development, climate, and migration as separate policy areas rather than interlocking issues. He recommended that Labour should work to dismantle vested interests blocking efforts to cut emissions, invest in helping refugees, and find innovative ways of raising funding to tackle big climate issues, including through fair-share pollution taxes and increased wealth taxes.

Sriskandarajah also called on the Labour Party to show leadership on debt relief for poor countries by enforcing private creditor responsibility through changes to UK law, supporting a new convention on tax to reduce tax avoidance, and responding constructively to growing calls for reparations by forging partnerships based on the pursuit of equitable development and racial justice.

On November 1, 2023, the UK government announced that it will provide GBP38 million (US$46 million) to a new GBP80 million (US$96 million) global initiative to speed up the use of AI to support international development.

The announcement was made at the inaugural AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, UK. The initiative, which is also being supported by Canada, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the US, and partners in Africa, aims to utilize AI to combat inequality and boost prosperity, primarily in Africa. It will focus on building the capacity of and supporting African AI expertise to address long-standing development challenges.

The UK’s funding will come from a new phase of the UK AI for Development Programme. The following goals were listed as priorities until 2028:

• Funding post-graduate training and fellowships in AI in African universities;
• Investing in innovators building models with data that accurately represent the African continent;
• Fostering responsible AI governance to help African countries mitigate the risks of AI; and
• Enhancing the Sub-Saharan African voice on how to use AI to further the UN SDGs.