Official Development Assistance

Question for Short Debate

Asked by

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of any humanitarian impacts of actual and planned reductions in Official Development Assistance.

My Lords, I shall never forget it. It was late morning on 25 June 2017. I was then the Minister for International Development. We were visiting the Al-Sabbah Children’s Hospital on the outskirts of Juba in South Sudan. It is the only functional paediatric hospital in a country five times the size of England. People would travel long distances to access its life-saving care. The hospital was funded by British taxpayers and delivered in partnership with UNICEF and Gavi.

Just as we were leaving, a tall, elderly man ran in, carrying a small child, desperately seeking assistance. The child was a girl, around five; she was his granddaughter. He had walked three days to get her to the hospital. Later the nurses told us that she had died on the way from dehydration caused by diarrhoea, from a virus that still kills around 500,000 under-fives every year. The staff pointed out that a simple sachet of oral rehydration therapy, essentially sugar and salt mixed with clean water, a treatment costing around 50 pence, could have saved her life. I will never forget the look of grief and the vacant stare that the man gave as he sat on the steps of that hospital on hearing the news. He had done everything he could for his granddaughter, but I felt that the same could not be said for us. I told him this. We could have done more, but now we are proposing to do even less.

A dangerous myth has emerged in recent years that UK aid is wasted. Tell that to the parents sitting at the bedside of their sick children in the wards of the Al-Sabbah hospital. The second fallacy is that national security depends solely on defence, whereas in fact it is a careful blend of diplomacy, development and defence. The more effective we are in deploying the first two, the less we need to rely on the third. In a debate on 13 July 2021 on the decision to cut the aid budget from 0.7% to 0.5%, the then shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, said:

“If this cut goes through this evening and the House votes for it, it will diminish Britain. It will reduce our power and influence for good in the world, and it will undermine our security”.—[Official Report, Commons, 13/7/21; col. 220.]

She was right.

The final dangerous fallacy is that the British people do not support aid. I do not accept it. The British people, I believe, are the most generous and compassionate in the world. That is why many of the leading humanitarian charities were started here: Oxfam, Save the Children, Christian Aid, Islamic Relief, Water Aid and, of course, Live Aid. What angers the British people is seeing their generous aid not reaching the people for whom it was intended—a case in point with figures released by the Foreign Office, which have shown that over the past year the proportion of the budget allocated to health has been cut by 46% to £527 million, whereas the budget for energy, climate change and the environment has been increased by 59% to £658 million. That is a bewildering decision, which puts lives at risk. It is like the NHS being asked to make savings in its budget and choosing first to close accident and emergency units and intensive care wards in order to put more solar panels on the roof. Can the Minister confirm these numbers, and tell us how this decision was made?

My Lords, the unpalatable truth is that the 25% cut in OECD support, together with the cut in European aid, is proving catastrophic for development and humanitarian assistance in the third world. The Labour Government, having inherited a legacy of economic problems, have had to take some very difficult and agonising decisions, and I am the first to recognise that. But the cuts in aid have been unsettling. The shifts from development budgets to defence and asylum support have been problematic.

Over a lifetime, I have travelled worldwide, and I have seen real poverty. I first saw it as a third-world hitchhiker in my early 20s, later in business and during my work in the Commons, in the development brief. Cuts in aid, in conjunction with the disastrous effects of climate change, are provoking unparalleled movements of population from the third world to first-world countries. This movement is in its infancy; it is creating social pressures and division, racial intolerance and problems of integration, and is breeding extremism throughout Europe.

Thankfully, enlightened policy in the United Kingdom, under all Governments, has to date helped to avoid the worst effects, but the rise of the far right across Europe is a direct consequence of population movements. Our mistake, across Europe, is to persist in the belief that cutting overseas assistance is unavoidable in conditions of financial restraint. I question this whole approach. The truth is that if we want to stem population flows, the developed world has to increase, not decrease its support for the third world.

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bates, for initiating this debate. I declare my interest as CEO of United Against Malnutrition & Hunger.

As we have heard, the world faces an unprecedented series of humanitarian crises driven by conflict and climate shocks, from the DRC to Myanmar, Palestine to Sudan, Somalia to Yemen and many places in-between. In the face of this staggering human suffering, rather than step up to the plate, the world has chosen to step away, allowing conflict to go unresolved and leading to huge shortfalls in the funding required to provide desperately needed food, medical supplies and access to clean water.

In Sudan, for example, the World Food Programme has a funding shortfall of $662 million. Hospitals are out of critical supplies of basic medicines and emergency therapeutic foods. Last year, speaking to the BBC, Dr Ibrahim Abdullah Khater, a paediatrician at al-Saudi Hospital in El Fasher told the BBC,

“We have many malnourished children admitted in hospital, but unfortunately there is no single sachet”

of therapeutic food. He continued:

“The situation, it is so miserable, it is so catastrophic”.

In the DRC, UNICEF’s level 3 emergency response continues to face severe funding shortfalls, with a 73% gap in health funding and a 42% gap in nutrition funding. Agencies are having to make decisions that, in effect, take from the hungry in order to provide for the starving. This story is repeated in Yemen, Afghanistan, South Sudan and many other places. The UK’s ability is constrained by our own ODA cuts, so I urge the Government to do all they can to maximise the use of the funds that we have, through innovative mechanisms such as the Child Nutrition Fund and other financing mechanisms.

My Lords, the UK Government have chosen to withdraw a vital safety net from the world’s most vulnerable people at a time of unprecedented global instability. There are currently around 59 active conflicts worldwide, the highest since the Second World War, yet the response has been to cut aid.

The Government’s own assessments show that women and girls are bearing the brunt. These cuts are costing lives and these deaths are preventable. Reducing funding for maternity care is leading to more women dying in childbirth and pregnancy. The closure of women’s refuges is leaving women exposed to gender-based violence. Fewer girls are attending school, increasing risks of child marriage, FGM and sexual exploitation. When girls and women lose access to education and livelihoods, whole societies become less stable. Is the Minister therefore able to share which countries have been most impacted by the aid cuts?

I understand that the Government needed more funding for defence, but why not take this money from elsewhere? Why take it from life-saving support for women and girls? Does the Minister accept that this has damaged the UK’s global reputation? How can the Government credibly champion women and girls abroad, particularly through the appointment of a women and girls envoy, at the very same time that they made the cuts of funding to women and girls? If the Government are worried about public opinion, they could provide more information on how the funds are spent and their impact.

The Government are capable of U-turns. I hope they do another one and restore aid before further preventable harm is done.

My Lords, we on this Bench continue to lament the reduction in ODA. I call on the Government, as others have, to publish a clear road map for returning to previous commitments on international development, which affects so many people, particularly, as has already been said, women and girls.

In the short time I have, I will focus on Gaza. It is welcome that forecast humanitarian spend in Gaza is currently protected from cuts in ODA, but I am sure that noble Lords are aware that international NGOs face ongoing restrictions on aid and considerable obstacles to working in Gaza. I simply want to add my voice to those, including His Majesty’s Government, who are concerned that many established international NGO partners are at risk of being deregistered because of the Government of Israel’s restrictive new requirements. Given that the majority of the population in Gaza face high levels of acute food insecurity, will the Minister say what more can be done to encourage the Government of Israel to give international NGOs the access to the region that they need?

My Lords, in the two minutes I have been allotted, another four people globally will die from tuberculosis. That is 1.25 million people a year. It is the world’s deadliest disease and still exacts this terrible toll, quite unnecessarily.

For 20 years, I have been campaigning to draw attention to the problem of TB and our continuing failure to beat the disease, the last 10 of which as chair of the Global TB Caucus. It would be easy to be despondent because of the fiscal headwinds, of which we have heard much already, and the reductions in overseas development spending, not just by this Government but by others, notably the United States. Yet I find myself being more optimistic than I have been for some time that we could finally beat this disease, because of the advent of innovative new treatments, new technology, and, at last, the prospect of a vaccine in sight, which does not exist for adults.

I simply implore the Government to recognise that they still have the power to help end this disease, in spite of the reductions in funding, which are simply a fact at the moment. They have the ability to convene, both at ministerial level and at the level of their missions. They could say something about this issue on World TB Day. They could say more about how the vaccine could be rolled out when it becomes available. They could continue to support cost-effective programmes, such as TB REACH, that find innovative new solutions to beat this disease. We cannot just fall prey to counsels of despair. There is much that the Government can still do, and I would be grateful for the opportunity to write to the Minister about that. Perhaps she might be willing to meet to discuss those ideas.

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bates, on securing this debate. I declare an interest as chairman of the Halo Trust, the global mine and explosives removal charity. I recognise that the pressing nature of the security threats we face may mean that other spending needs to be curtailed, but if this is to include ODA then the cuts need to be made strategically and in a way that retains a distinctive UK contribution.

Humanitarian mine action is just such a UK contribution. It is a strategic asset for this country—one that saves lives, helps stabilise fragile regions and contributes to the UK’s bilateral relations with a number of vital states. In 2023, 69% of civilian personnel mine clearance globally was carried out by either the Halo Trust or the Mines Advisory Group. Both are British charities. This is an area where we do not merely contribute; we lead, drawing on decades of experience and credibility that no other country can match, and operating in many of the most troubled parts of the world—places that matter to the United Kingdom, such as Ukraine, Afghanistan, Syria, Zimbabwe and Gaza.

I therefore ask the Minister whether the Government will maintain their commitment to the global mine action programme, which is a great British success story. Do the Government recognise that the integrated security fund should increase its focus on preventing conflict, which, in the longer term, is more effective than responding to crises as they arise? If the ISF is genuinely to be integrated then it must be used upstream to prevent conflict, not simply to respond once instability reaches our shores.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bates, for securing this debate. My brief remarks will draw on two reports. The first is from the Public Accounts Committee in June, highlighting the links between trade deals, aid cuts and superbugs, and the second is a Chatham House report from November titled Rethinking UK Aid Policy in an Era of Global Funding Cuts.

But first, a note of perspective: this year, global aid is expected to have declined by almost a third versus the level of 2023—this while the level of subsidy from the global South to the wealthy continues to grow, with huge repayments on high-interest loans to wealthy banks, institutions and Governments. Physical extractivism also continues apace, with natural resources ripped from global South lands, and pollution and destruction left as payment. The poor, particularly, pay with their health, and the globe sees fast-rising threats from infectious diseases; as we learned from Covid, no one is safe until everyone is safe.

Health provision is in a state of crisis. The FCDO figures already referred to show a 45% fall in health funding in 2024-25, and another 46% fall is coming this year. A WHO analysis last year found country offices reporting massive disruption. In the 20th century there was a hubristic complacency that humans had essentially defeated infectious diseases; that is clearly not the case now, but there are still cuts.

We are allowing, even encouraging, the disease organisms to marshal and develop their forces against us by developing and spreading resistance to the drugs that we have so expensively developed and put out to try to treat people through antimicrobial resistance, as both the reports I draw on indicate.

The closure of the Fleming Fund was announced in July. The Government say that they plan to mitigate this with a new partnership model. As the Chatham House report says, there are still no details of this. Can the Minister tell me, or write to me about, what the plans are for that partnership model?