Britain will keep sending aid to China despite pledging to stop the handouts TEN YEARS ago 

Britain will keep sending aid to China even as the communist regime prepares to land a spacecraft on the Moon, the Foreign Secretary said yesterday.

Dominic Raab will conduct a review before Christmas to decide on the £4billion worth of cuts needed to bring the budget down to £10billion next year.

But in the Commons yesterday, he revealed the world’s second largest economy will continue to receive handouts from British taxpayers.

His extraordinary admission comes as China makes the first attempt to retrieve rocks from the Moon since the 1970s. 

The Chang’e-5 unmanned probe, which was launched on Tuesday, will attempt to collect 2kg of samples. 

If it is successful, China will become only the third country to have retrieved lunar rock, after the US and the Soviet Union.

Despite a promise a decade ago to stop giving cash to China, UK aid spending there rose £12.3million to £67.9million last year.

Tory MP Henry Smith asked Mr Raab to pledge that ‘no more aid will go to China, a country that is in effect developed and one that has a poor human rights record’.

The Foreign Secretary replied: ‘There is still a case for some collaboration… and the example I tend to give is climate change.’

He said China was ‘the biggest investor in renewables’ and this was ‘an area where we do want to engage positively’.

Matt Kilcoyne, of the Adam Smith Institute, said: ‘While the Communist Party continues to persecute minorities, break international law, and arrest British nationals in Hong Kong, China’s ruling elites deserve not a single pound from our pockets.