Lord Bates
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of any humanitarian impacts of actual and planned reductions in Official Development Assistance.
Lord Bates (Con)
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?
Let me give just three examples of the real-world effect of these changes in priority. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance has saved an estimated 13 million lives. The UK Government have announced that their contribution will be cut by 24%. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has saved an estimated 65 million lives, but the UK has announced that its contribution is being cut by 15%. UK funding for the World Food Programme, providing emergency food assistance to 124 million people, has been cut by one-third. The chair of the International Development Committee, Sarah Champion, said:
“The savage aid cuts announced this year are already proving to be a tragic error that will cost lives and livelihoods, undermine our international standing and ultimately threaten our national security. They must be reversed”.
These decisions are already costing lives. The Government’s own equality impact assessment on the proposed ODA cuts has confirmed this. The Gates Foundation has estimated that the number of preventable childhood deaths last year increased for the first time this century, by 200,000, from 4.6 million to 4.8 million. The ONE Campaign suggested that the UK cuts to the Gavi budget alone will cost 600,000 lives, but the cumulative effect of UK aid cuts as planned is likely to be measured in millions of lives, mostly children’s. To put that in context, the UN estimates that the total civilian deaths in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza over the past four years tragically number some 85,000. Yet, by comparison, these millions of deaths pass us by largely unnoticed.
It does not need to be this way. The Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs at the UN, the distinguished former British diplomat Tom Fletcher, has launched an emergency appeal, the Global Humanitarian Overview, based on his humanitarian reset. The aim is to save the lives of 87 million people. It is laser focused on the most urgent, life-saving humanitarian needs—exactly what British taxpayers have always supported. He is looking to raise $23 billion from the international community by March this year. The plan is so convincing and the need so great that even the Trump Administration have pledged to back it with $2 billion. The UK has yet to respond. I am delighted to say that Tom Fletcher will be here tomorrow, giving a briefing on his plans in Committee Room 1 at 4.30 pm, and it is open to all parliamentarians to learn more about this compelling proposal.
The more I look into the details of this matter, the more I see it as less a crisis of cash and more a crisis of misplaced priorities. I firmly believe that by changing priorities and being laser focused on saving lives, we could find $1 billion from within the existing ODA budget to support this ambitious plan to save lives, restore our international reputation and enhance our national security in the process. I commend this plan to the Minister and, indeed, to the whole House.
Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab) [V]
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.
Lord Oates (LD)
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.
Baroness Gohir (CB)
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.
The Lord Bishop of Gloucester
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?
Lord Herbert of South Downs (Con)
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.
Lord Evans of Weardale (CB)
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.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
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?
Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale (Lab)
My Lords, I draw attention to my interests in the register. I noticed tonight on the news that there is a suggestion that the Government might be announcing another so-called U-turn—that would be the 13th, for those who appear to be counting in the media. I think 13 is a very unlucky number, if I can say that to the Minister and the Government. Perhaps they might want to consider a 14th before the 12 months are out since the announcement last year of the cut in ODA.
The Prime Minister and the Chancellor really should think again about becoming the first Labour Government in history to spend less than the Conservatives on overseas development assistance. I hope that, between now and the one-year anniversary of the announcement last year, they will rethink this; otherwise, from April this year, people will be thrown out of school, lose vaccinations, lose job opportunities and lose access to clean water. That would be a humanitarian disaster, as described very eloquently by my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Bates, who has a terrific voluntary record in this sphere as well as a fantastic record as a Minister.
However, I disagree with the noble Lord on one point. All, or a substantial proportion of, this budget should be directly allocated to the consequences of conflict and the displacement that we see around the world. I believe that in the new, reduced budget there is a desperate need for a specific allocation for conflict prevention and preventive work of the sort described by the noble Lord, Lord Evans.
I hope that the Government, in allocating this reduced budget—if it has not changed before the end of this financial year—allocate a specific resource to expertise and to interventionist projects that help prevent conflict, and directly to the stability that is required to ensure that people have a chance to experience education, health services, job opportunities and other services that are so vital in their lives.
Baroness Sugg (Con)
My Lords, I will speak in relation to family planning and sexual and reproductive health, which are core components of effective humanitarian aid, not add-ons. SRHR services are at high risk of being disrupted during conflict and displacement, with lack of access to essential sexual and reproductive health services a leading cause of death for displaced women and girls.
In 2024, the United Kingdom’s funding for family planning is estimated to have enabled 11 million women to access modern contraception. In a single year, it prevented an estimated 3.7 million unintended pregnancies, including 1.2 million unsafe abortions and 1.3 million unplanned births, and is estimated, crucially, to have averted almost 4,000 maternal deaths in low- and middle-income countries. These are not abstract statistics. They represent women who survived childbirth, girls who stayed in school and families able to plan their futures. Yet this progress is under serious threat as global funding cuts converge with multiple crises and conflicts.
While we await the final UK decisions on future spending, modelling from the Guttmacher Institute shows that a 30% reduction in UK family planning funding alone would mean 3.3 million fewer people reached, more than 1 million additional unintended pregnancies and an estimated 1,170 additional maternal deaths.
This is also a question of value for money. Every pound invested in family planning yields almost £27 in social and economic benefits. Voluntary, rights-based family planning underpins social stability, gender equality and economic growth, and contributes to long-term resilience.
I recognise the importance of sustainability, country ownership and, indeed, partnership. We can use modern financing tools and delivery models as well, through debt relief, private sector innovation and smarter, accountable financing that delivers lasting results.
UNFPA’s work through the Supplies Partnership has helped Governments increase domestic contraceptive spending fivefold since 2020. But transition must be predictable; sudden funding withdrawals risk reversing hard-won gains. I have heard the Minister talk about gender mainstreaming, but I think that there is a clear case for specific programming too.
I urge the Government to protect spending on sexual and reproductive health and rights within ODA. It is not only the right thing to do; it is one of the smartest investments we can make, and it is part of the solution to nearly every major global challenge that we face.
Baroness D’Souza (CB)
My Lords, worldwide cuts to international development programmes are a reality. We cannot escape the adverse effects this will have on poverty reduction, healthcare, education and, importantly, national security. Depressing as these statistics are, they enforce innovative, perhaps leaner, ways of delivering development assistance, and priorities must include a greater reliance on locally led development and local civil society organisations.
In its simplest form, development is a process of identifying viable local projects, establishing leadership which has the confidence of the community, and supplying money and expertise where requested. The final stage is to step away and begin again elsewhere. In short, this means supporting what people need and are committed to and helping the local community to get on with it. In nearly all societies, small-scale or otherwise, people make intelligent decisions about the welfare of their communities—of course, there are exceptions—and the job of the donor is to facilitate this.
I have spent much of my working life in remote and impoverished communities and observing the international development fraternity at work; money is often wasted, many projects fail in the short and medium terms and too little planning is based on evidence.
In 2001, in Afghanistan, I met a potential leader who had the intelligence, sensitivity and determination to achieve his dream of educating girls. All he lacked was funding; we began providing small amounts of a few hundred pounds, delivered here and there in brown paper envelopes. With this, he repaired buildings, created warm spaces in winter for people to congregate in, worked with parents to persuade them of the value of educating their daughters, and held classes on how to vote in the forthcoming election. A few more hundred pounds saw the construction of functional school buildings and increasing commitment from local families and businesses to support this programme, in which they had enormous pride. Teacher training and vocational courses were added, and female students began to attend universities in surrounding countries such as India and Bangladesh, and in Australia, Canada and the UK.
I see I have come to the end of my time so I will cut to the chase. The total contribution from donors here in the UK over a period of some 20 years was in the region of £140,000, including fees for consultant engineers and auditing help. In 2022 the Taliban returned. We continue to follow a pared-down development model in Afghanistan, albeit in different guises.
Development requires humility, evidence, trust and understanding of local cultural norms, as well as modest funds.
Baroness Goudie (Lab)
My Lords, overseas development assistance is often discussed in terms of percentages, ceilings and fiscal headroom. But on the ground, it looks very different: it looks like a clinic that is no longer open three days a week, a nutrition programme that quietly stops enrolling new children or a women’s safe space that closes because funding has ended.
Since the reduction of UK aid from 0.7% to 0.5% of GNI, the cumulative effect of cuts has been profound. The Independent Commission for Aid Impact has documented programmes being scaled back or closed altogether, often with little notice to implementing partners or affected communities. These decisions are not neutral; they have humanitarian consequences.
We are living through a moment of unprecedented global need. The United Nations estimates that more than 300 million people now require humanitarian assistance worldwide—the highest number ever recorded —driven by conflict, climate disasters and economic shocks. Over half of them are women and children. At the same time, humanitarian response plans are chronically underfunded, often receiving less than 40% of what is required.
As we have little time, I will just say that aid is not charity; it is an investment in stability, dignity and shared security. When we reduce it without care, we do not eliminate need; we deepen it. I hope that the Government will reflect carefully on the humanitarian impacts of both actual and planned reductions in ODA, and place the protection of the most vulnerable back at the centre of our approach.
In particular, as my noble friend Lord McConnell said, during this difficult period, we need to implement more money to tackle sexual violence in conflict. We should work to help communities build peace, and to do that we have to have women on the ground, with children. Women also have to be at the peace table. This should be very much part of our international aid and we should not be cutting aid at this difficult time.
Lord Londesborough (CB)
My Lords, Governments can be forced to make abrupt, top-down decisions without having the time to undertake scientific ground-up assessments on the impact of those decisions. That is very much the case with our ODA budget, which, at a stroke, will lose an annual £6.2 billion, taking it down to £9.2 billion. In the space of five years, we have dropped from 0.7% of GNI—which in today’s terms would in fact be £19.5 billion—to less than 0.3%, once you factor in the cost of funds devoted to asylum support in the UK.
There is no time to debate the rights and wrongs of these cuts, so I will focus on measuring the humanitarian impact. In that vein, I have some questions for the Minister. First, when will a full impact assessment on UK ODA cuts be completed and shared with Parliament and the public, and how transparent and granular will it be? Secondly, will it specifically cover the number of people impacted by age, gender and country in the following five areas: healthcare, education, nutrition, housing and sanitation, and poverty? Thirdly, what will be the projected mortality consequences of the current planned defunding—namely, the number of additional preventable deaths? These are hard, uncomfortable questions that deserve explicit answers.
I conclude by providing some context, courtesy of the Institute for Global Health. It estimates that the global decline in ODA funding could result in 22 million additional deaths by 2030, including 5 million children under the age of five.
Lord Bruce of Bennachie (LD)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bates, on the debate and on his powerful speech and say how much I enjoyed working with him as the Development Minister.
As co-chair of the APPG for Aid Match, I urge the Government to make more use of it. The Minister complained about the loss of public support for aid, but aid match can draw people in. It can and should be more than a gimmick. Experience has shown that, when people can see how their donations change lives, it encourages giving. It may also help people appreciate the difference between urgent emergency and long-term commitment to building health systems, educating young people—especially women and girls—and training for secure livelihoods. Will the Minister explain how the Government will balance multilateral spending versus bilateral commitments? She should also explain how the Government will divide the aid budget between humanitarian assistance and development assistance.
Long-term partnerships with Governments in developing countries can help build capacity and resilience. We should not underestimate the good will that flows from such programmes. Will the Government consider working with such Governments to help build their own capacity and delivery? This requires relatively small amounts of funds in technical assistance and diplomatic support—no substitute for the aid cuts, but at least positive progress. How does the Minister propose to work with the private sector, first, to expand UK trade and investment and, secondly, to encourage businesses to provide philanthropic support to build capacity and strengthen bilateral partnerships? The full impact of the aid cuts has yet to be felt, but the demise of USAID has already had consequences.
Finally, what are the UK Government doing to build partnerships to help aid and development funding maximise achievement by co-operation and efficiency savings through pooling teams and resources, nationally and internationally? The UK was a world leader in the field; I urge the Government to show how we can be again.
The Earl of Courtown (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Bates on securing this important debate. He has once again made a powerful and deeply personal case for the positive impact of UK overseas development assistance, and for the leadership role that this country can and should play internationally. His account of what he has witnessed was moving, and underlined the reality that behind every statistic are human lives.
In an increasingly unstable world, the case for effective, well-targeted development assistance is stronger than ever. Britain must continue to work with international partners to support the most vulnerable, prevent crises escalating further and promote stability where we can. The situation in Sudan, which this House has debated before, is a tragic example. The humanitarian catastrophe unfolding there demands urgent international action.
Can the Minister please update the House on what assessment His Majesty’s Government have made of the humanitarian impacts of recent and planned reductions in ODA, particularly in conflict-affected states? Can the Minister provide an update on what the UK Government are doing to ensure that aid is reaching those who need it most, including efforts to alleviate famine, prevent the spread of disease and protect displaced populations?
As my noble friend rightly said, Britain is a generous and outward-looking nation. The extraordinary support given by the public to international charities reflects a strong moral commitment to helping those in desperate circumstances. However, public confidence depends on knowing that aid is being used for its intended humanitarian purpose and is delivering real impact on the ground. In that context, can the Minister update the House on how much ODA is currently being used to fund costs associated with asylum accommodation? The Government’s manifesto committed to ending the use of asylum hotels and saving enormous sums of money.
In conclusion, the United Kingdom has a vital role to play internationally. At a time of growing global need, it is essential that development assistance is not only well spent but that its humanitarian impact is clearly understood and rigorously assessed.
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Baroness Chapman of Darlington) (Lab)
My Lords, I am genuinely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bates, for providing us with the opportunity to have this discussion. It is probably rather overdue, and there seems to be some pent-up frustration and anger in the Chamber about decisions that have been made, and I absolutely hear that. He gave us such a vivid account of why this matters, and I honestly could not agree more with the case that he made for the UK showing global leadership on development and humanitarian assistance. He is absolutely right to talk to us about how important this is.
The noble Lord spoke of fallacies around the UK public’s attitudes and the hopelessness of all this, and he is right to do that too. However, it is true—and it is important that we remind ourselves of this—that development, countries and the nature of humanitarian aid have changed as well. Even if we had not cut the budget, we would have had to fundamentally rethink how we go about the business of development in 2026, compared to the decisions that were taken in, say, 2005. I am incredibly proud of those decisions, and of the role that the then Labour Prime Minister and Chancellor played in that, but the world has changed.
The collective experience of this House has shone through this evening; it is an experience of many decades, from noble Lords who have worked on this as a Minister, in the sector or with Halo, and we benefit from hearing all about that. Like people across the country, this Chamber cares deeply about the role that the Government play. On behalf of the Government, I want to leave noble Lords in absolutely no doubt whatever that we share that care and commitment to supporting the world’s poorest.
I have to challenge the idea that less money in the ODA budget has to lead to less action, less impact and fewer development outcomes. I do not believe that any more. As we have already seen this year, the world has changed a lot and it is continuing to change. We cannot just keep doing things as we always have done in the face of that change. I am absolutely focused on the reform agenda that we need to see in the humanitarian and development system. We need that so we get the biggest impact for those people who we are working so hard to support.
The noble Lord, Lord Bates, and other noble Lords quoted figures around our global health spend. I do not think those numbers are quite right—they probably relate to our global health directorate. We spend more of our money on global health through the Global Fund and Gavi. Those who have been Ministers will remember that there is not an even spend across the years on those. We are now the largest contributor to Gavi and we hosted the Global Fund replenishment. We are at the leading edge of donors on global health, and that has not changed. The numbers have finally been published for the proportion of our money that goes on global health, and noble Lords will see that that has increased. I ask those noble Lords opposite with such a deep concern about this to perhaps challenge the leadership of the Conservative Party about its current position on further reducing spend to 0.1%. Even I cannot see how you run a development budget on that amount of money.
Tom Fletcher’s name came up a few times, as it should. He is a strong leader and we are very proud of him at OCHA. I am seeing him tomorrow and I encourage others who have been invited to go to the briefing that he has arranged. He is an incredibly strong advocate for this agenda and he is doing remarkable work at the United Nations.
I want to touch a little on the humanitarian context. Despite huge advances in the last 30 years, which have seen extreme poverty fall, today, humanitarian needs are rising, and a lot of this, as noble Lords have said, is about conflict. This year, more than 239 million people will require humanitarian support, and the UN is hyperprioritising 87 million people with the most life-threatening needs. Our hearts are absolutely in this agenda, but our heads need to be as well. We need to do that so that every penny goes where it is needed. We have to make prioritisation decisions with our ODA budget for the next three years, and we are going to be announcing the allocations very soon.
However, it is not true to say that the UK’s international reputation is diminished. That is incorrect, and saying that fails to appreciate the way in which the world has also changed. The clear message that we have from partners particularly in Africa—we announced our new Africa approach just before Christmas—is that our partner countries want to work with us just as that: as partners, and they do not see us as donors. They want to take responsibility for their own services, the education of their own children, setting up their own health systems, and we can do a lot better than we have done sometimes in the past in supporting countries to do that and to raise more of the money that they need domestically. This is working in Ghana and in Rwanda, and we have done some good work on this in Ethiopia and Kenya. That is how countries want to work with us. It is very different to a traditional programming approach.
On humanitarian spend, we estimate that, in 2025-26, this will be around £1.6 billion. I can answer the noble Earl, Lord Courtown, opposite: in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan we are going to protect our spending. I think Ukraine currently has the biggest ODA programme in history, at £240 million a year.
On Gaza, I was asked about access. We are pressing for humanitarian corridors. We are calling on Israel to lift restrictions to allow the UN and other NGOs to operate freely, and we will continue to do that.
Since April, our humanitarian crisis reserve has provided £72.5 million in life-saving support, which is in connection with earthquakes in Myanmar and Afghanistan, famine risks across east Africa and Yemen, and the hurricane in Jamaica.
I was quite impressed by the speech by the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, explaining the need for evidence-based work. I completely agree with that, and we are now having to be much more ruthless about ensuring that everything we do is based on a sound understanding of what works. We are backing multilateral organisations which have the biggest impact —I think the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, encouraged us to do that—including through the commitments that we have made to Gavi and the Global Fund, and we are championing reform, particularly at the UN.
I meet Tom Fletcher regularly, as I have said, and we completely support the reform agenda that he is proposing. We are clear about what we need to see; this is about rigorous prioritisation of those in the greatest need, more streamlining to approve efficiency and value for money, and a greater focus on upholding international humanitarian law and protecting the vulnerable. This will give us a more joined-up response across humanitarian and development agencies, removing false distinctions, which hold effective work back too often. We will also lead by example on this, reflecting these principles in the UK decisions that we are making. As the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, said we should, when we can, we will work principally with local organisations.
The noble Lord, Lord McConnell, and others encouraged us to increase the Government’s spend. I am very happy to take that message back to my right honourable friend the Chancellor. I do not think that that will happen any time soon, but we need to use the opportunity that we have now to carry out the changes that are needed, so that when the situation changes, we can get absolute best value out of every penny that we spend—I am trying to make sure that I do not run over time here.
I will mention a little about technology in the private sector, which I think the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, also mentioned. We need to bring all the talents of the United Kingdom to bear on this, because this will no longer be a situation where the Government are the only actor alongside some NGOs. Technology companies, philanthropic organisations, the private sector, our universities—I think that with all of them there is a desire, which is far more widespread than we have been able to capitalise on in the past, to be active and leading in development. The Government ought sometimes to be more of a convener than a provider, and we will be taking that approach forward. We hope to hold an event in the summer where we try to bring all these people with an interest together—I will finish very soon.
The noble Baronesses, Lady Sugg and Lady Goudie, asked us about violence against women and girls, and I am very glad that they did. They will have seen that my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary has called a national and international violence against women and girls emergency and is committed to putting these issues at the heart of our foreign policy. The impact assessments and the decisions that we have made will be published in full when we publish our allocations. We have already used those impact assessments to amend some of the decisions that we have made, and I hope that the noble Baroness will be able to see traces of what she believes in when we make those announcements.
The noble Lord, Lord Herbert, said, on TB, that we need to look at systems and multilateral work. He is absolutely right, and I am very happy to meet with him to discuss that further.
I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Evans, for his work on Halo and demining; I have had great conversations with his organisation, and I am very pleased to be able to continue to work with it.
Finally, I just want to say that we need to continue to back our brave humanitarians around the world. It is our mission and their mission to get life-saving assistance to those in greatest need. They are some of the most remarkable people that I have ever had the privilege to meet. They are engaged in the noblest of causes in the most difficult of situations. There is really no better place to end my remarks than on that note, because we all admire and respect what they do, often putting their lives at risk through a desire to support others. It is the very best of humanity that they embody, and the UK Government will continue to support them in all they do.