The prime minister has been accused of jeopardising Britain’s standing in the world after he announced the Department for International Development (DfID) is to be folded back into the Foreign Office after more than 20 years of independent existence. Boris Johnson said he would create a new “super-department” called the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, provoking a storm of criticism from anti-poverty campaigners and three former prime ministers. Announcing the departmental move in the House of Commons, Johnson said the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, would in future make the final decision about which countries should receive help. “For too long, frankly, UK overseas aid has been treated like a giant cashpoint in the sky, that arrives without any reference to UK interests,” the prime minister said. David Cameron, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair all condemned the shake-up, with Cameron saying it would mean “less respect for the UK overseas”. The government is to maintain its statutory commitment to spending 0.7% of gross national income on overseas aid, but the blending of the two departments will inevitably require greater linkage between the UK’s aid, security and commercial interests. Johnson justified the decision, saying: “DfID outspends the Foreign Office more than four times over and yet no single decision-maker in either department is able to unite our efforts or take a comprehensive overview.” He added: “We give as much aid to Zambia as we do to Ukraine, though the latter is vital for European security. We give 10 times as much aid to Tanzania as we do to the six countries of the western Balkans, who are acutely vulnerable to Russian meddling.” Oxfam GB’s chief executive, Danny Sriskandarajah, called that comparison a “brazen challenge to the aid sector”. pointing out that more than half of Zambians live on less than $1.90 a day, while extreme poverty in Ukraine is near zero. “Effectively what he’s saying is, we’re going to use our aid budget to pursue security and diplomatic aims. Those are noble aims, but that’s not what aid is for,” he said. The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, responding to Johnson’s statement, described the move as “the tactics of pure distraction” from the country’s soaring unemployment and one of the highest Covid-19 death rates in the world. “Abolishing DfID diminishes Britain’s place in the world,” he said. “There is no rationale for making this statement today. The prime minister should stop these distractions, and get on with the job of tackling the health and economic crisis we currently face.” Gordon Brown, who championed debt relief and increased aid spending as prime minister, described the decision as sad, while Tony Blair said he was “utterly dismayed”. DfID’s £15.2bn budget dwarfs that of the Foreign Office, and diplomats have jealously eyed the scale of the guaranteed DfID spending ever since the two departments were split by the Labour government in 1997. The new department is expected to be formed in the autumn, before the government has completed its integrated foreign and defence security review, which is being carried out by the academic and Downing Street adviser John Bew. DfID was already braced for a sharp cut in its budget with the economy hit hard by the coronavirus crisis. Research carried out by the House of Commons library for the Liberal Democrat leadership contender Layla Moran shows that if the economy shrinks by 13%, as predicted by the Independent Office for Budget Responsibility, the government could cut the aid budget by £2.5bn and still fulfil its legal duty to spend 0.7% of GNP. It is unclear if Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the international development secretary, will retain a cabinet post after the autumn. Patrick Watt, Christian Aid’s director of policy, public affairs and campaigns, called the decision “an act of political vandalism”, saying it “threatens a double whammy to people in poverty, and to our standing in the world”. The timing of the merger, long favoured by Johnson and his key aide, Dominic Cummings, was justified by the government on the grounds that the UK needed to be “match fit” for major international events starting this autumn, including the 75th anniversary of the United Nations, and Britain’s hosting next year of the UN climate change conference. Officials said the new department would be more joined up, focused and coherent.But that rationale was questioned by development experts. Kevin Watkins, the chief executive of Save the Children UK, said: “A prime minister can require that government departments talk to each other. A prime minister can set up coordinating mechanisms to ensure that that happens. What this is about is a shift in priorities. “Merging DfID, the world’s leading aid agency, into the Foreign Office in the midst of a pandemic that threatens to reverse hard-won gains in child survival, nutrition and poverty is reckless, irresponsible and a dereliction of UK leadership.” In practice, the Foreign Office has been slowly taking control of the aid budget, either by directly spending more of its cash, or in-country diplomats being put in charge of the budget. In 2019, for example, the Foreign Office spent £680m of the overseas aid budget – more than double the £300m it spent in 2013 and equivalent to 40% of the FCO’s core departmental allocation of £1.7bn in 2018–19. As part of the last reshuffle, the Foreign Office and aid department ministers were required to work in both departments. The new department will have only one permanent secretary, and no redundancies are expected.