Official Development Assistance

Lord Londesborough Excerpts

Tuesday 13th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[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.