UK pledges £85m as Bangladesh floods displace more than 2 million

Britain has pledged £85m in emergency aid to Bangladesh after floods in the north-east of the country displaced more than 2 million people and left an estimated 600 dead, the Foreign Office announced on Saturday, as the first of three RAF transport aircraft carrying relief supplies prepared to leave Oxfordshire.

Two weeks of exceptional late-monsoon rain over the Meghalaya hills in India sent the Surma and Kushiyara rivers over their banks and inundated most of Sylhet division, a region of about 11 million people with close family ties to Britain. Roughly half of the UK’s 650,000 people of Bangladeshi heritage trace their origins to the area. Water levels in the city of Sunamganj reached 2.3 metres above the danger mark on Tuesday, the highest since records began in 1961.

The UK package includes £40m channelled through the UN and the Red Cross for shelter, clean water and cash payments to displaced families, £25m for the Bangladeshi government’s own relief operation, and £20m for repairs to embankments and roads over the next year. The RAF flights will carry 12,000 family shelter kits, 40 water purification units and medical supplies donated by the NHS.

“This is a disaster with a British dimension in a way few overseas emergencies are,” said the minister for development, speaking at a briefing in Whitehall. “There are families in Tower Hamlets, Oldham and Birmingham who have not heard from relatives in a week. We are doing what any country would do for a friend, and we are doing it quickly.”

The announcement is the largest single humanitarian commitment the UK has made since it cut its aid budget to 0.3% of national income to fund higher defence spending, and officials acknowledged that it would be met in part by reallocating money from programmes elsewhere. Aid organisations welcomed the pledge but said it illustrated the strain on a budget that has fallen by about £6bn since 2020.

“The money is real and it is needed, but it is coming from somewhere,” said Kwame Osei-Bonsu, head of humanitarian policy at the charity Christian Aid. “The honest answer is that it is coming from Sudan, from Yemen and from long-term programmes that stop the next disaster being this bad. Nobody in government wants to say that out loud.”

In east London, community organisations have raised more than £1.8m in a week. At the East London Mosque on Friday, volunteers were packing boxes of torches, sanitary products and dried food for a container leaving Felixstowe on Monday. “My uncle’s house in Sunamganj has water to the first floor,” said Rukhsana Begum, 41, a school administrator from Whitechapel. “He is on the roof with 14 people. The phone works for ten minutes a day. We cannot wait for governments, so we are not.”

The Bangladeshi government has asked for international help in rebuilding 1,400km of embankments, many of which date from the 1960s. Scientists at the Met Office said the rainfall that caused the flooding was made roughly 30% heavier by climate change.