International Vaccine Programmes: Funding

Lord Purvis of Tweed Excerpts

Tuesday 17th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness for the question and acknowledge her work in international development over many years. She has remained a stalwart advocate for the benefits of development ever since, and I thank her for that. We will be publishing the more detailed decisions that we are currently taking shortly. We will be consulting over the summer with partners, stakeholders and countries, to make sure that we are getting this as right as we can in, as she says, the constrained financial circumstances that we are in.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

Further to the question of the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, we know that any reduction in vaccine availability has a massively disproportionate impact on girls and young women. In the light of the recent government announcements of cuts and the deprioritisation of gender, as the Minister stated to the IDC in the Commons, the Government were challenged by the charity community to demonstrate how they were meeting their obligations under statutory equalities tests. The Government replied last week, and I can inform the House that they said that the tests do not apply because those impacted are not UK citizens. Can the Minister please assure me and the rest of this House that, when it comes to vaccine availability for children, a child in need of a vaccine in Malawi is just as needy as a child in Manchester, and that equalities are universal for this Government and do not end at the channel?

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

I think the noble Lord is somewhat overinterpreting what has been said. We have been very clear that we are going to prioritise humanitarian, health and climate initiatives. Because of his work in this field, he will understand that, when you are talking about health, principally, the beneficiaries are, quite rightly, often women and children. We will be making sure that a child, wherever they live, can access what they need. Gavi is a very good way of delivering this. We will be making our decisions, doing the impact assessments and, unlike the previous Government, publishing the conclusions of the impact assessments, because we want to be as transparent as possible.