Government aid ‘worth £28bn’ handed to terrorists, criminals and hostile states
Billions of pounds of UK taxpayers’ money has been misspent as government aid and Covid relief funds ended up in the hands of terrorists, hostile states and criminal gangs, according to reports.
A Cabinet Office dossier, unearthed by the Telegraph, found that more than £28bn ended up in the hands of the Islamic State and criminals between 2015 and 2021.
It was also reported that the findings of an internal review were so damaging that officials chose not to disclose the document, fearing the political fallout from revealing the sheer scale of misdirected public funds.
The report — believed to be the first government assessment of its kind — found that Covid loans were sent to Islamic State fighters in Syria, grants were awarded to companies linked to the Russian state, and investment flowed into research benefiting firms tied to the Chinese military.
Counter-terrorism funding was also handed to extremists espousing anti-Western ideology. A significant portion of the funds went to criminal gangs, including human traffickers fraudulently claiming housing and disability benefits.
Sources cited an organised crime network with links to Eastern Europe and a hostile state that exploited British grant processes to actively encourage illegal immigration into the UK.
The dossier was commissioned in 2023 following fraud identified in the government’s pandemic spending.
A separate parliamentary report in December found that taxpayers had already lost £10.9bn to fraud and error during the Covid response alone.
The reported misspending came under the previous Conservative government and successive Tory prime ministers.
A Cabinet Office spokesperson told the newspaper the Labour government had saved over £7.5bn in taxpayer money in the past year through “aggressive fraud prevention and recovery.”
“By using better data and hiring more expert investigators, we are now finding and stopping this fraud faster than ever before.”
Government spending on Covid rises higher
Morning Wire recently reported that the total cost of Covid has been estimated by the government to be £385bn, which includes spending for loans and grants to support businesses.
The budget for aid was around £15.2bn in 2019.
Sir Keir Starmer’s government has also opted to slash international aid spending to ramp up defence spending to 2.6 per cent as a share of GDP from next year.