Sudan

Lord Oates Excerpts

Thursday 27th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as CEO of United Against Malnutrition & Hunger. I join others in thanking the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds for initiating this debate and for his strong advocacy for Sudan during his years in this House.

Previous speakers have set out the scale of the crisis that has engulfed ordinary people in Sudan. I will not repeat all the devastating statistics but, like the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, I want to highlight the figure of over 770,000 children facing severe acute malnutrition this year. The sheer scale of that tragedy can obscure the horrific suffering that it entails for every child impacted. When you have witnessed a child suffering from severe acute malnutrition, it never leaves you. Nor does the sense of guilt and despair that, despite the availability of proven and cost-effective treatments, a lack of funding or impeded humanitarian access means that tens of thousands of children who could recover will not.

Yesterday, a number of us had the chance to meet the Minister and representatives of the Emergency Response Rooms, whose 26,000 courageous volunteers across Sudan are providing a localised humanitarian response to the crisis, often able to gain access where international organisations cannot. They had two main requests: to be afforded protection and recognition as humanitarian workers—over the past two years, they told us, 146 of their volunteers have been killed and many more detained or disappeared—and for funding to meet the scale of the need that they encounter.

We have heard the argument in the past that the challenge in Sudan is access rather than funding. However, while access is a challenge in many areas, the lack of funding is a challenge in all areas. We know that more funding is needed for emergency responses, such as the provision of therapeutic foods to treat acute malnutrition, and it is required to provide agricultural support to smallholders to help to restore food production, yet the Food and Agricultural Organization’s appeal is just 10% funded. We know that it is needed to provide support to the millions of refugees displaced to refugee camps in neighbouring countries and within Sudan, which are massively underfunded.

We should work with our partners to provide that support for reasons of basic humanity, but we should also note the costs of not doing so. We have already seen a 60% increase in the numbers of Sudanese nationals arriving on small boats, and Sudanese nationals represent the most common nationality detected irregularly in the UK.

Sudan represents not only the world’s worst humanitarian crisis but the starkest example of its inability to work collectively to end a war that is fuelling such devastating suffering. We cannot resolve these issues on our own, but we must do more in concert with our European partners in particular to address this humanitarian crisis and to impose real consequences on those countries that are fuelling the war.