It is well understood that the same amount of aid makes a bigger difference to peoples’ lives when their incomes are lower. And Development Minister Andrew Mitchell has rightly emphasised a “focus on the poorest and most vulnerable” in the UK’s development activities. With significant cuts to the UK’s aid budget since 2020, we might have expected remaining resources to become more focussed on the poorest. However, the latest official data for 2021 shows that the trend of moving resources away from the poorest countries—with average recipient incomes having risen over the last decade—has actually accelerated. In this note, we show that this trend is not being only driven by the predisposition of recent governments to allow other departments to spend huge portions of the aid budget, but by the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and its predecessor themselves becoming significantly less pro-poor in aid allocation.