Right to reply: Aid is one of the government’s greatest endeavours

Peter Kellner recently explained that the BBC licence fee becomes less popular if you describe it as an annual cost rather than as a daily cost. When people are told it costs £145.50 a year 27 per cent more people disapprove than approve. When they are told that’s only the equivalent of 40p a day there’s a striking turnaround: 8 per cent more people approve than disapprove.

You see a similar thing with Britain’s development budget. When the aid budget is expressed in terms of billions of pounds, people object and they object strongly. When it’s presented in more human-sized ways it is much more popular. A recent ConservativeHome survey of Tory members, for example, found that 79 per cent of normally aid-sceptical respondents could agree that “£2.22 of taxpayers’ money to protect ten third world children from polio is money well spent.” 

I am a big supporter of the aid budget.