Under Tony Blair’s Labour government, British foreign aid was made the domain of the newly established Department for International Development. This was a change from foreign aid being administered by the Foreign Office.

This created a degree of separation between providing aid and alleviating poverty on the one hand and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s general purpose of promoting British interests overseas on the other. Such a distinction addressed criticisms that the British state’s policy of ‘colonial development’ and later ‘international development’ was merely a means of furthering its own foreign interests and therefore not driven by humanitarian concerns.