Latest news with #SarahChampion
Sky News
3 days ago
- Business
- Sky News
Government struggles to slash foreign aid spent on asylum hotels
The government is struggling to cut the billions of pounds of foreign aid partly used to house asylum seekers in hotels, according to new figures. The £2.2bn Home Office estimate to spend £2.2bn of overseas development assistance (ODA) in this financial year is only slightly less than the £2.3bn spent in 2024/25. The vast majority is used for the accommodation for asylum seekers who have arrived in the UK, with recent figures showing more than 32,000 were being housed in hotels at the end of March. Labour has pledged "to end the use of asylum hotels" and the government says it has reduced the overall asylum support costs by half a billion pounds, including £200m in ODA savings, which had been passed back to the Treasury. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has said he will cut the overall ODA from its current level of 0.5% of gross national income (GNI) to 0.3% in 2027. Foreign aid is supposed to be spent on providing humanitarian and development assistance in other countries, but the UK is allowed to count refugee-hosting costs as ODA under internationally agreed rules. Labour MP Sarah Champion previously said a "scandalously large amount" of ODA has been diverted to the Home Office and has called for a cap on how much can be spent supporting asylum seekers and refugees in the UK. Asylum seekers and their families are housed in temporary accommodation if they are waiting for the outcome of a claim or an appeal and have been assessed as not being able to support themselves independently. They are housed in hotels if there is not enough space in accommodation provided by local authorities or other organisations. A Home Office spokesperson said: "We inherited an asylum system under exceptional pressure, and are urgently taking action to restore order, and reduce costs. "This will ultimately reduce the amount of Official Development Assistance spent to support asylum seekers and refugees in the UK. "We are immediately speeding up decisions and increasing returns so that we can end the use of hotels and save the taxpayer £4bn by 2026."
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Government struggles to slash foreign aid spent on asylum hotels
The government is struggling to cut the billions of pounds of foreign aid partly used to house asylum seekers in hotels, according to new figures. The £2.2bn Home Office estimate to spend £2.2bn of overseas development assistance (ODA) in this financial year is only slightly less than the £2.3bn spent in 2024/25. The vast majority is used for the accommodation for asylum seekers who have arrived in the UK, with recent figures showing more than 32,000 were being housed in hotels at the end of March. Labour has pledged "to end the use of asylum hotels" and the government says it has reduced the overall asylum support costs by half a billion pounds, including £200m in ODA savings, which had been passed back to the Treasury. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has said he will cut the overall ODA from its current level of 0.5% of gross national income (GNI) to 0.3% in 2027. Foreign aid is supposed to be spent on providing humanitarian and development assistance in other countries, but the UK is allowed to count refugee-hosting costs as ODA under internationally agreed rules. Labour MP Sarah Champion previously said a "scandalously large amount" of ODA has been diverted to the Home Office and has called for a cap on how much can be spent supporting asylum seekers and refugees in the UK. Asylum seekers and their families are housed in temporary accommodation if they are waiting for the outcome of a claim or an appeal and have been assessed as not being able to support themselves independently. They are housed in hotels if there is not enough space in accommodation provided by local authorities or other organisations. A Home Office spokesperson said: "We inherited an asylum system under exceptional pressure, and are urgently taking action to restore order, and reduce costs. "This will ultimately reduce the amount of Official Development Assistance spent to support asylum seekers and refugees in the UK. "We are immediately speeding up decisions and increasing returns so that we can end the use of hotels and save the taxpayer £4bn by 2026."
The Guardian
18-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on Britain's new aid vision: less cash, more spin. The cost will be counted in lives
Last week, the government justified cutting the UK's development budget from 0.5% to 0.3% of gross national income – the lowest level in more than 25 years – by claiming Britain's role is now to 'share expertise', not hand out cash. With a straight face, the minister responsible, Jenny Chapman, told MPs on the international development committee that the age of the UK as 'a global charity' was over. But this isn't reinvention – it's abdication, wrapped in spin. No wonder Sarah Champion, the Labour MP who is chair of the committee, called Lady Chapman's remarks 'naive' and 'disrespectful'. Behind the slogans lies a brutal truth: lives will be lost, and Britain no longer cares. Dressing that up as the 'new normal' doesn't make it less callous. Kevin Watkins of the London School of Economics analysed the cuts and found no soft-landing options. He suggests charting a sensible course through this wreckage, noting that harm from the cuts is inevitable but not beyond mitigation. Dr Watkins' proposals – prioritising multilateralism, funding the global vaccine alliance (Gavi) and replenishing international lending facilities – would prevent some needless deaths. Ministers should adopt such an approach. The decision to raid the aid budget to fund increased defence spending was a shameful attempt to cosy up to Washington. The cuts were announced just before Sir Keir Starmer's White House meeting with Donald Trump, with no long-term strategy behind them. It's a deplorable trend: globally, aid levels could fall by $40bn this year. The gutting of USAID, the world's biggest spender on international development, by Elon Musk, was less fiscal policy than culture-war theatre. Foreign beneficiaries don't vote, and liberal-leaning aid contractors lack clout, so dismantling USAID shrinks 'globalism' while 'owning the establishment'. But the real casualties lie elsewhere. Memorably, Bill Gates said the idea of Mr Musk, the world's richest man, 'killing the world's poorest children is not a pretty one'. Countries that built health systems around USAID now face a reckoning. It wasn't just cash – it sustained disease surveillance, logistics and delivery. Ironically, much of it never left American hands, absorbed by US private interests. In the UK, University of Portsmouth researchers say aid increasingly serves foreign policy, not development. It's not just ineffective – it's cynical. Aid should change lives, not wave flags. All this as poor nations' debt crisis deepens. Without global reform, the Institute for Economic Justice warns, African nations face a cycle of distress blocking investment in basic needs. The UK recasts withdrawal as progress – holding up Ethiopia and Zimbabwe as model partners. But Georgetown University's Ken Opalo makes a cutting point: in diplomacy, when the music stops, those who outsourced ambition get exposed. Aid dependency, he argues, has hollowed out local ownership. With little planning, many governments now face a choice: take over essential services or cling to a vanishing donor model. Politicians should choose their words carefully. The former Tory development secretary Andrew Mitchell rightly criticised Boris Johnson's 'giant cashpoint in the sky' remark for damaging public support for aid. Labour ministers are guilty, too. Britain has replaced moral leadership with metrics, and compassion with calculation. The policy's defenders call it realism. But without vision, it's just surrender – leaving the world's poor to fend for themselves, forced to try to survive without the means to do so.
Jordan Times
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Jordan Times
Israel Targets UNRWA schools in occupied East Jerusalem
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — "Israel must immediately reopen UNRWA-run schools and restore access for Palestinian refugees to UNRWA services in the West Bank", MP Sarah Champion, Chair of the International Development Committee in the British Parliament said. The Chair of the Committee, , has written to UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy on 9 May , about the continued Israeli harassment and undermining of UNRWA and that Israeli armed guards forced UNRWA into closing three schools that it operates across East Jerusalem and another three within the Shu'fat refugee camp. On 8 May, heavily armed Israeli Forces stormed three UNRWA schools in Shu'fat Camp in occupied East Jerusalem, enforcing the illegal closure orders issued on 8 April 2025, forcing over 550 children out of their schools. The Israeli Security Forces harassed UNRWA teachers and detained one UNRWA staff member, ordering them to dismiss the students. As a result, UNRWA was forced to evacuate all children across the six schools it runs in East Jerusalem. UNRWA, runs a range of critical services for Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Since the 1950s, UNRWA has run schools and medical clinics in East Jerusalem, which Israel seized during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. The agency is the second biggest provider of education in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) after the Palestinian Authority (PA), operating 96 schools in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and serving nearly 50,000 students from the first to the ninth grades. "These closures represent simply the latest in a long line of actions intended to undermine the work of UNRWA across the Occupied Palestinian Territory," she wrote. "UNRWA also operates health centres across East Jerusalem that meet the needs of 40,000 citizens. We have no guarantees that these will not be the next targets of the Government of Israel." Sarah said. "Access to education is a basic human right. Removing that right by force is not only traumatic for the children who will lose out on vital learning; it demonstrates that the Government of Israel appears prepared to commit serious breaches of international humanitarian law. ..." Sara commented . This latest provocation is just the latest in a string of actions to undermine the work of the agency. Will health centres be next?, "Sara said. The agency said the closures will affect around 800 children, with no alternatives yet announced for them to continue their education. "This is an assault on children. An assault on education," UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said in a statement. "Storming schools and forcing them shut is a blatant disregard of international law." "These schools are inviolable premises of the United Nations. UNRWA schools must continue to be open to safeguard an entire generation of children," Lazzarini added. The development follows two bills passed by the Israeli Knesset last year, prohibiting UNRWA from conducting activities within Israel's borders and making it illegal for Israeli officials to have any contact with UNRWA. Those measures have been in effect since late January. Israel has accused UNRWA employees of involvement in the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, a charge vehemently denied by the UN. On his part, Roland Friedrich, Director for UNRWA Affairs in the West Bank, warned that the Palestine refugee children are at an "immediate risk" of losing their access to education. "Israel's actions today are a grave violation of its obligations as a UN Member State under international law," he said in a social media post. "So here, Israel is acting in contravention of its own obligations and commitments as a party to the so-called general convention." In the short term, UNRWA's students will be left scrambling to finish their school year, which ends in June. In the longer term, Friedrich warned that the effects of the closures will be far reaching. "This is going to have a psychological impact, and an economic impact on the families. It will create a host of humanitarian issues," he said. He also warned that, more broadly, the closures have political implications, tightening Israeli control over areas that are internationally recognised as occupied. "We at UNRWA are bound by international law, we're also bound by the UN General Assembly Resolution last September on ending the occupation," he said. "It states very clearly that no UN agency or member state should undertake any steps that further reinforce the illegal occupation." On her part, Al Jazeera correspondent Nour Odeh said that the closure of the UNRWA schools is "extremely problematic" because children would likely end up at Israeli institutions run by the Jerusalem Municipality and Israeli schools do not teach the Palestinian curriculum. "It is an Israeli-run curriculum that Palestinians say ignores and erases Palestinian identity," Odeh said. That move, is likely to have a "crippling effect" on UNRWA's operations "in 19 other refugee camps" across the occupied West Bank, affecting "Palestinians who rely on the agency, not just for education but also for health services, for psychosocial support" Odeh added. UNRWA has long faced attempts by the Israeli authorities to curtail its activities in East Jerusalem and bring all services, including education, under Israeli oversight, a part of its comprehensive war against the Palestinian presence and identity. The Israeli campaign against the UNRWA has escalated in January as it ordered UNRWA to vacate all premises in the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem, where the Agency has had an established presence for more than 70 years and its headquarters is the centre of operations of the Agency's work in the occupied West Bank including East Jerusalem. An order which is in contradiction to international law obligations of UN member states including Israel, which is bound by the General Convention on Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations. Israel effectively annexed East Jerusalem in 1980 in a move not recognised by most of the international community, and sees the whole city as its capital. Palestinians see East Jerusalem as the capital of their hoped-for future state. Speaking to an advisory committee in Geneva, UNRWA Commissioner-General Lazzarini said the agency has been the target of a "global disinformation campaign" led by Israel that is "premised on the misguided belief that if UNRWA disappears, so will the issue of Palestine refugees."
The Independent
13-05-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Attenborough film shows seabed ‘devastation' says MP in bottom trawling ban call
A Labour MP has pressed ministers to say whether they will ban bottom trawling before climate leaders meet in France next month, after Sir David Attenborough warned the fishing practice was among the most 'wasteful'. Sir David's new film Ocean features detailed footage, thought to be the first of its kind, of bottom trawling along the seabed. The camera follows large nets which are dragged along the ocean floor using a metal beam, with sea creatures indiscriminately caught inside before they are brought to the surface. Rotherham MP Sarah Champion told MPs that 'David Attenborough's latest film Ocean revealed the shocking devastation caused by bottom trawling' and referred to calls from environmental campaigners to 'take action at the UN conference in just four weeks'. At Foreign Office questions, Ms Champion asked: 'Will the Government use the conference to announce a ban on all bottom trawling in marine protected areas? 'And why has the minister still not set out when we will ratify the ocean treaty which will keep our Sids (small island developing states) and overseas territories safe?' Minister Catherine West replied: 'The climate and ocean adaptation sustainable transition (Coast) programme is improving vulnerable coastal communities' resilience to climate change including protecting and restoring coastal habitats, supporting nature-based solutions and improving small-scale fisheries management, and including the issue which she raises – the use of bottom-towed gear over rock and reef habitats in 13 Marine Management Organisation areas.' Greenpeace UK's co-executive director Will McCallum, Oceana UK executive director Hugo Tagholm and Blue Marine Foundation chief executive Clare Brook have previously written to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer urging him to prioritise ratifying the Global Ocean Treaty – also known as the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement – to conserve the high seas and help protect 30% of the world's oceans. They have also called for a full ban on bottom trawling, which they said would help marine ecosystems in UK domestic waters 'recover' from the practice's 'devastating impact'. It comes ahead of the 2025 UN Ocean Conference in June, which is being held in Nice on the Mediterranean coast. Commons foreign affairs committee chairwoman Dame Emily Thornberry, the Labour MP for Islington South and Finsbury, later told the Commons: 'I know there's a lot going on, but the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Treaty is important. 'It's about our blue planet. It's about our oceans. 'It used to be that we had a leadership position in it. In fact, when we were leading it, 115 countries signed that treaty, but it needs to be ratified as well, and very few countries are ratifying it including Britain. 'And when we ask the Government about it, the Government says it's because they haven't got enough time. Have they dropped the ball? 'Is there a Bill? Are we going to ratify it, and will we ratify it before the UN Ocean Conference?' Ms West replied: 'We will redouble our efforts to get into the legislative queue and do all (that's) necessary to ensure and maintain our leadership on this important area.' In his documentary, Sir David said the bottom trawling net moves along the seabed 'destroying nearly everything in its path', even if it is not wanted on the surface. 'It's hard to imagine a more wasteful way to catch fish,' the 99-year-old said.
