UK Foreign Aid Programme

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 1st July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, in thanking my noble friend Lord Fowler for initiating today’s debate, I draw attention to my non-financial interests in the register. Given that the cuts will have a disproportionate impact on fragile and conflict-affected states, what impact assessment was made of the consequences for places such as Syria, Yemen and Tigray, prior to cutting the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund by half a billion pounds—£492 million? Will the Minister confirm that, against these cuts and a 40% increase in humanitarian need, a staggering 80 million people, many of them victims of conflict of course, are now displaced—more than ever before?

How much money has been left in the crisis reserve fund, compared with previous years? Only this morning, reports from Tigray state that patients in Ayder hospital in Mekelle are dying because there is no electricity or medical supplies. The army looted everything, including the UN compounds, when it left the city. What resources from the crisis reserve fund are being used to help them and the 350 million people facing famine in Tigray, where, as the UN’s Mark Lowcock says, starvation is being used as a “weapon of war”. In 1985, Mrs Thatcher ordered Operation Bushel and told the RAF to drop aid into the remotest areas of Ethiopia. Will the cuts to the crisis reserve fund enable us to do the same?

I return to the issue of health, raised by my noble friend. What has happened to the 770 million medicines donated by pharmaceutical companies that we are told will not now be delivered because of the cuts? How can the Government say that

“it is not possible to assess the impact on the number of donated medicines distributed”,

when others have been able to do so? As the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, asked, what will happen to the malaria eradication programme? This country’s word should be its bond. We should reverse these decisions to prove that that is so.