Aid spending accounts for 0.7% of national income

The BBC's Daily Politics this afternoon featured a discussion on UK foreign aid spending, in the light of a Guardian article over the weekend claiming foreign aid was being spent on "luxury developments".

Lord McConnell claimed spending is not as high as people think:

"People think that the British aid budget is now about 10 or 20% of our national expenditure and it's not, it's 0.7% of our national income. It's a tiny proportion of what we make in this country and what we spend in this country".

The Department for International Development's provisional statistics on Official Development Assistance (the international classification of aid spending) show that ODA spending (£11.4 billion) represented 0.72% of Gross National Income in 2013 - up from 0.56% in 2012.

This is the first time that the UK's spending has reached the level first agreed by the UN General Assembly in 1970.

We looked at the breakdown of the spending back in February last year.

Polling suggests the British public does think we spend much more than this. An Ipsos Mori poll in June 2013 found 26% of respondents thought overseas aid was one of the top areas of government spending - a higher share than the 24% who picked out pensions, which accounts for more than 10 times as much public cash. A YouGov/Chatham House poll in 2013 also found that 55% of respondents thought the government spent £11 billion or more on international aid and development in 2010-11, while on average the public estimated that the UK's overseas aid bill totaled £79 billion.