International Women’s Day

Lord Bates Excerpts

Friday 6th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates (Con)]

My Lords, it is an honour to speak in this debate, in which we have had so many excellent and inspiring speeches, including four maiden speeches so far; there is one more to come immediately after me, so I will get on with it. The premise of my speech is simple and profound: women and girls benefit overwhelmingly from UK overseas development assistance. As that is the case, it then follows that women and girls will be the prime people who suffer as a result of cuts to overseas development assistance.

On 5 February, the Foreign Sectary made a courageous visit to the front-line refugee camps in Sudan and Chad to see for herself what was happening there. When she returned to the House of Commons, she gave a very powerful Statement, in which she said that 85% of the people in those camps were women and children and that they

“had fled the most horrendous violence and violations”.— [Official Report, Commons, 5/2/26; col. 437.]

The Foreign Secretary reminded us of the well-established fact that the prime beneficiaries of UK aid have always been women and children. This bias exists for a very good reason: women and girls are all too often on the front line when it comes to conflict but at the back of the line when it comes to education, healthcare, safe water and economic empowerment. Our aid was meant to address this imbalance, and it has succeeded. We gave and they received, but we also gain as a result.

It therefore follows that, when we cut UK aid, the hardest hit will be vulnerable women and children. Cuts already announced to the UK contributions to the Global Fund and to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance are estimated by the ONE Campaign to be likely to result in 620,000 preventable deaths, most of which will be of children under the age of five. An article by Niki Ignatiou in the British Medical Journal on 10 September 2025 gave one example of the effect of these cuts:

“The planned 46% reduction in Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office health spending in 2025/26, including cuts to the Women’s Integrated Sexual Health programme, is a cruel proposal at a time of acute public health crises for women and girls. These cuts are predicted to leave millions of women and girls without access to contraception, resulting in unintended pregnancies and thousands of maternal deaths”.


The Government’s own equality impact assessment, published last year, expressed concern about the impact on gender equality of cuts to bilateral spending on overseas aid—but what is the point of an impact assessment if it does not impact the policy it is assessing?

The full scale of the cuts now being implemented to UK aid is unprecedented. The UK aid budget has been cut faster than those of any other G7 country, including the United States. Yet this is from a Government who were elected on a manifesto pledge that promised not only to maintain aid at 0.5% but to return it to 0.7% as soon as possible. It is the single most regressive policy for women and girls I can recall, and yet it seems to have passed through the House almost on the nod.

I make these remarks not personally against Ministers and Members opposite, who I know care deeply and passionately about international social justice. I also make them in the deep humility of speaking from these Benches, where our policy on cutting aid is even more draconian and unworthy of the efforts of people such as Sir Andrew Mitchell and my noble friend Lord Cameron, who pledged and implemented a policy of 0.7% when in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, not because it was popular or fiscally prudent but because it was the right and responsible thing to do for the sixth richest nation on earth. However, we are not in government; the party opposite is—and it is our duty to hold them to account.

I have one question for the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Malvern—who I respect enormously—when she comes to respond to the debate from the Dispatch Box. Will she acknowledge that the most vulnerable women and girls in our world will suffer disproportionately because of the aid cuts being implemented? If so, will she ask the two women in charge of this policy—the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Foreign Secretary—to change this deeply damaging and unconscionable policy? Such a change will require courage, but as the noble Baroness, Lady Lloyd, reminded us at the beginning of the debate, courage calls for courage everywhere.