Corporate report

UK government response to the 2025 UK Aid Transparency Review

Published 14 May 2026

Background

The FCDO commissioned Publish What You Fund (PWYF) to undertake a review of Official Development Assistance (ODA) spending departments in 2025. The departments came together through its cross-departmental Transparency Community of Practice to agree and produce this plan to address the review’s recommendations.

This plan forms part of HM Government’s wider commitment to aid transparency including through the Open Government Partnership (OGP), delivering on specific milestones.

Introduction

The 2025 UK Aid Transparency Review, led by Publish What You Fund and commissioned by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), evaluated the transparency of Official Development Assistance (ODA) spending by government departments beyond the FCDO.

The review built on previous assessments, including the 2020 review, and is aligned with commitments to the Open Government Partnership (OGP). This review aimed to support departments to improve their transparency by engaging through constructive feedback and practical guidance to encourage better quality and more timely data.

PWYF selected government departments for inclusion in the review based on their total ODA spend as recorded in the 2023 Statistics on International Development (SID). The cut-off for inclusion in the UK ATR was a minimum annual ODA spend of £50 million. Nine departments were selected for inclusion.

PWYF excluded departments which had recently been assessed. These included:

• FCDO – assessed in the 2024 Aid Transparency Index
• British International Investment (BII) – assessed in the 2025 DFI Transparency Index
• Scottish Government’s ODA portfolio – reviewed in a preliminary 2024 assessment

The review found that:

Departments performed well when compared to their baseline year. Seven departments achieved an overall status of ‘progressed’ meaning they maintained high levels of transparency or made significant gains publishing new or larger amounts of data. One department maintained their transparency and made minimal gains, and one department had a ‘decreased’ status overall which meant that it was less transparent compared to the baseline year.

The purpose of this document is to highlight the specific recommendations made and what actions have been taken or will be taken. It includes the original recommendations from the assessors, followed by the response from each department.

Publish What You Fund: General recommendations relevant across departments

As part of their 2025 Aid Transparency Review, PWYF provided general recommendations relevant across the assessed departments, as well as specific recommendations for each individual department. This section considers the general recommendations, providing both a summary of the recommendations first and followed by the response from the UK government.

• publication of results data and impact evaluations should be institutionalised in non-FCDO departments, particularly for departments spending ODA internationally
• the publication of evaluations and results and impact data, whilst improved compared with 2020, remains low so needs improvement
• the availability of domestic ODA budgets needs to be improved. Central government should find a way to ensure indicative figures, particularly for in-donor refugee costs (IDRC), can be made more reliable and public
• forward-looking budgets and procurement data amongst domestic spenders remained low because IDRC budgets are counted retrospectively. Most were able to publish some kind of aggregate figures, but more can be done to produce indicative budgets
• publish more recent and regular International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) data: across the assessed departments 37% of 2024 ODA is visible in the IATI data. The shortfall is largely explained by the Home Office’s lack of transparency but was prevalent across all departments when taking a longer timeframe
• long-term analysis of the departments’ transparency shows a dip in publishing between the 2020 and 2025 reviews suggesting that these departments still need to further institutionalise ODA transparency practices
• overall, the UK government needs to encourage institutionalisation of regular transparency practices beyond FCDO

UK government response or plan of action

The UK government is pleased with the recognition that, overall, the level of transparency over the period of the assessment had increased.

As part of the sixth National Action Plan (NAP), we committed to strengthening transparency, accountability, and public participation in government. HMG ODA-spending departments have agreed a plan on how to deliver on that commitment. This includes, through agreeing a set of minimum transparency standards, outlined below.

Minimum Transparency Standards Agreement:

• ensure data is published on a regular and timely basis to uphold transparency commitments
• publish core documents where available and appropriate, including Business Cases, Annual Reviews, and Programme Completion Reviews in open data format for publication
• ensure compliance with GDPR, Data Protection, and Freedom of Information legislation when meeting transparency commitments. Sensitive information (for example, personal data, email addresses, bank details) must be excluded in line with legal obligations
• publish forward-looking budgets in line with departmental Spending Review allocations, including domestic spend, broken down by country and recipient organisation where possible or via other appropriate thematic breakdowns, on all ODA- funded programmes. Departments that spend ODA are required to publish spend and results to IATI

PWYF: departmental recommendations

PWYF provided recommendations for individual departments on their document publication and quality, in addition to the general recommendations noted above.

The annex provides the specific recommendations for each government department given by the assessment, as well as the department’s response to the recommendations and any immediate or future actions that need to be taken to address these.

The development and agreement of this plan of action to respond to the recommendations reiterates the UK government’s commitment to improving transparency.

View the department‑specific recommendations and responses in the Annex.