£50.5 Million Abroad and a Scandal They Won’t Fix
THE RATIONALS
Imagine the irony, Your taxes, extracted from working and middle-class families who pay an average of £11,450 per household in income tax (10.8% of national income) and often have less than £25 spare cash at the end of the week after covering energy bills, food, rent and council tax, are funding £50.5 million to Pakistan to combat child exploitation, some £7.2 million a year, while men convicted of strikingly similar offences remain in Rochdale and beyond, courtesy of borders that successive governments have allowed to remain more enlightened in theory than in practice.
Consider the absurdity here, the same taxpayer forced to choose between heating and eating is involuntarily bankrolling a programme abroad that delivers meticulous tracking and verifiable reductions in gender-based violence, while at home the machinery of justice grinds slowly and incompletely against the very crimes it is meant to prevent.
This discreet scandal surfaced quietly in 2024 during a routine Lords debate on Pakistan’s development needs. A written answer from the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office confirmed the full commitment, originally £46.5 million for the Aawaz II programme from 2018 to 2025 (subsequently increased to £50.5 million with extensions for monitoring and sustainability), aimed at tackling child bonded labour, sexual exploitation, and gender-based violence.
Delivered via United Nations partners in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the programme reaches seven million people through community forums, psychosocial support, and disability certification for survivors. The reporting is meticulous, the objectives precise, qualities one might reasonably expect from a government that routinely asks its citizens to tighten their belts, yet somehow finds such precision harder to muster when the victims are British children.
Yet the scale of this overseas investment becomes particularly striking when set against the more modest domestic response, especially given evidence that such programmes can produce measurable reductions in gender-based violence, reductions that remain frustratingly elusive in the UK despite drawing from the same taxpayer source.
This annual outlay, exceeding the core £10 million allocated to the 2025 domestic action plan on grooming gangs, continues to flow steadily overseas while perpetrators of comparable crimes evade the swift justice here, that victims might reasonably expect.
Launched in 2018 and extended beyond its original endpoint, Aawaz II delivers verifiable outcomes, community forums reaching millions, psychosocial support for survivors, and over 4,000 disability certificates issued to those marginalised by violence, all tracked with the rigour one expects from parliamentary responses and development reports.
Recent activities include provincial pre-budget consultations for the fiscal year 2026–27 in Punjab, focused on inclusive allocations for marginalised groups such as transgender persons, religious minorities, and persons with disabilities, and sustained by British Council-led community engagement across districts in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
The programme operates through a network of approximately 900 Aagahi Centres and 29,946 volunteers, reaching over 26.9 million individuals through awareness campaigns, behaviour change initiatives, and service linkages. Monitoring and evaluation continue through partnerships such as the Oxford Policy Management, extending oversight to March 2027 to ensure accountability in implementation.
Discussions on sustaining community networks and volunteer structures beyond the programme’s final phase in March 2027 have involved provincial authorities, underscoring efforts to embed long-term social inclusion and resilience against harmful practices.
These sustained efforts have contributed to tangible results. Evaluations of Aawaz II and similar community-based interventions abroad consistently report positive outcomes in reducing acceptance of gender-based violence and strengthening survivor support.
For example, the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office’s annual review (October 2023) found increased awareness and behaviour change leading to reduced acceptance of GBV, with 280,812 individuals (52% women) accessing mental health and psychosocial support for violence risks.
A global systematic review of 178 studies (a 2024 update to the RESPECT framework) synthesised evidence from low and middle-income countries, concluding that empowerment interventions, including economic and skills training, effectively reduce violence against women and girls.
A primary study by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (March 2022) evaluated community-based programmes across six LMICs, including Pakistan, and found reductions in intimate partner violence of 38–52% at costs as low as £3.67 to £11.01 per person.
By contrast, UK domestic interventions have shown some success in perpetrator-focused programmes. For example, the DRIVE programme reduced abusive behaviours by 38% over 12 months compared to a control group, according to the University of Bristol three-year pilot evaluation (2019).
However, broader prevention efforts and implementation have faced persistent challenges. These include gaps highlighted in Home Office evidence reviews and syntheses of randomised controlled trials on violence against women and girls (VAWG) prevention (updated 2025–2026), as well as in the GREVIO baseline evaluation report on the United Kingdom (June 2025), which identified disparities in data collection and policy delivery across devolved administrations.
These domestic shortcomings are routinely downplayed in official statements that emphasise “robust frameworks” and “international leadership,” while the measurable success of programmes like Aawaz II, funded by the same taxpayers whose children face the same threats, exposes the gap between government rhetoric and reality.
The main reasons for this difference include narrower programme design (less multi-component integration), implementation fragmentation and lower fidelity at scale, weaker data infrastructure for monitoring and evaluation, and a more complex baseline social and institutional context in the UK.
Programmes like Aawaz II succeed through concentrated funding, local ownership, multi-component design, and rigorous monitoring, elements that UK domestic efforts have not consistently replicated at national scale.
These factors explain much of the disparity in demonstrated effectiveness without implying that UK interventions are inherently inferior, rather, they reflect different design choices, resource allocation, and evaluation capacity. A reminder, that when the stakes are high and the funding is generous the most reliable results are sometimes found furthest from home, perhaps because confronting uncomfortable domestic realities remains too politically inconvenient for those in power.
This asymmetry becomes all the more pronounced when viewed through the lens of repatriation challenges, where diplomatic commitments have not translated into decisive action.
The repatriation challenge traces back to August 2022, when Priti Patel and Pakistan’s Interior Secretary Yousaf Naseem Khokhar signed a memorandum renewing a lapsed European Union readmission arrangement and committing both parties to the swift issuance of emergency travel documents.
At the time, Pakistani nationals accounted for nearly 3 per cent of England and Wales’ foreign national prison population, the seventh largest group. The agreement was intended to streamline removals, yet progress has been limited. Home Office data for 2024–25 indicate fewer than 10 grooming-related deportations to Pakistan, even though individuals who qualify remain in the system, underscoring a gap between diplomatic intent and practical delivery that has persisted despite broader increases in foreign national offender removals.
Rochdale provides the starkest illustration. Qari Abdul Rauf (56) and Adil Khan (55), convicted in 2012 for their roles in a nine-man gang that abused 47 girls, some as young as 12, drugged and trafficked, were stripped of British citizenship in 2018. One anonymous survivor said in 2025 “My life has been destroyed from the abuse of these men.”
In September 2018, shortly after the deprivation orders, the men strategically renounced their Pakistani nationality to claim statelessness and frustrate deportation efforts, though tribunals later ruled these renunciations invalid as they were obtained under the false premise of assured British citizenship, which had already been revoked, and noted that reacquiring Pakistani nationality would be straightforward via a simple application process.
Despite this clear judicial finding, they have continued to rely on statelessness arguments to remain in the UK, with courts upholding the principle that deportation must not render an individual stateless, leaving them in Greater Manchester even as of December 2025.
That is when Pakistan proposed a controversial swap deal, accepting Rauf and Khan in exchange for the UK extraditing dissidents Shahzad Akbar and Adil Raja, a proposition that, if accepted, might finally deliver the outcome a bilateral agreement signed years earlier, was meant to achieve routinely. This remains unresolved though, with UK officials declining to comment amid opposition.
Adil Khan, however, absconded from the UK in late 2025 during ongoing deportation proceedings, fleeing the country after compliance checks failed to locate him in October. The Home Office subsequently confirmed a permanent exclusion order, barring his return for life and effectively resolving his presence here through evasion rather than formal removal.
Qari Abdul Rauf, by contrast, remains in legal limbo. Their continued, or formerly continued, presence is not merely a legal curiosity, it is a reminder that diplomatic agreements, however solemnly signed, require sustained leverage to produce results rather than prolonged deferral or self-initiated flight.
That leverage has been applied elsewhere with striking success. Britain’s 2022 agreement with Albania, combining enforcement measures with £5 million in reintegration funding, reduced small boat arrivals by 95 per cent by 2025 (from over 12,000 in 2022 to 616 in 2024) and delivered over 5,000 enforced returns in 2024.
Yet the results elsewhere only highlight the missed opportunity in Pakistan. The absurdity is unmistakable. A relatively modest reintegration package tied to aid secured dramatic results in migration control and returns, while £50.5 million committed to Aawaz II in Pakistan, far larger and focused on the very issue of child exploitation, has not been leveraged to resolve even the most high-profile grooming gang deportation cases, leaving convicted offenders in legal limbo at home
Similar aid-linked arrangements with Nigeria, Vietnam, and India have produced marked increases in removals. Yet in Pakistan, high-profile cases continue to stall despite general increases in enforced returns, a striking inconsistency in how diplomatic tools are deployed across bilateral relationships.
These precedents reflect a post-Brexit migration strategy in which development assistance serves as a diplomatic instrument for returns and border cooperation. The UK spent £2.8 billion on in-country refugee support in 2024, 20 per cent of the total Official Development Assistance budget of £14.1 billion, frequently underwriting such arrangements amid broader aid cuts.
Against this backdrop, the Aawaz II commitment, originally £46.5 million and subsequently increased to £50.5 million, was reaffirmed in November 2025 Hansard. It proceeds without any public linkage to deportation outcomes, with continuity into 2026 supported by diplomatic engagements such as the July 2025 lifting of the Pakistan International Airlines ban and David Lammy’s May talks in Islamabad.
While low-profile returns have increased, prominent cases remain unresolved. The 2022 International Development Committee review questioned Aawaz II’s alignment with migration enforcement priorities, even as it supported the programme’s advances in minority rights.
Yet the picture at home presents a starkly different reality. Baroness Casey’s June 2025 audit reveals an over-representation of Asian and Pakistani-heritage men in group-based child sexual exploitation (52–54 per cent of suspects in sampled forces against a 20.9 per cent population share), a finding undermined by missing ethnicity data in two-thirds of cases.
These gaps in recording obscure patterns and hinder effective policy. In 2023 alone, over 4,000 group offences were recorded. The legacy of Rotherham’s 1,400 victims and the ongoing Stovewood operations endures, a sobering reminder of how deeply entrenched the problem remains.
This is not malice, but profound misalignment sustained across administrations, and actively prolonged by human rights lawyers, left-leaning barristers, and a current left-leaning government that appear reluctant to enforce deportations with anything like the vigour they apply to other causes.
UK aid to Pakistan addresses genuine need with measurable effect yet the asymmetry endures, substantial resources confront the crime abroad while aspects of it linger inadequately addressed at home.
The answer to why your money stops grooming in Pakistan but not here lies in the very differences already laid bare, concentrated funding, local ownership, multi-component design, and rigorous monitoring succeed abroad, while narrower approaches, fragmented delivery, weaker data systems, and institutional caution, fortified by repeated legal challenges and political reluctance, limit progress at home.
Precedents demonstrate that firm expectations can secure cooperation, here, caution prevails. Your taxes, contributed by those who navigate a historic slowdown in living standards and often end the week with a minimal financial buffer, thus fund remedies overseas for a problem that, in part, persists domestically, even as the very people paying for the cure watch their own children remain vulnerable to the same horrors.
The flights remain grounded.
One awaits, with growing impatience, a more decisive alignment of priorities because surely this cannot be right when taxpayers, forced to choose between heating and eating, are funding solutions abroad for the very crimes that continue to threaten British children at home.
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This article (Why Does Your Money Stop Grooming in Pakistan – But Not Here?) was created and published by The Rationals and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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