Ebola

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Thursday 23rd October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, a close relative of mine works for Save the Children, which I note will take over the administration of the hospital that the UK Government are currently building in Sierra Leone. We have to understand just how difficult it is to cope in-country with what is going on. Sierra Leone has fewer than 200 doctors. Communications are not easy; there are several languages. We are upping what we do and encouraging others to raise their level of effort. The Germans have just promised to help with medical evacuation, for example, and we very much hope that they, like the Norwegians, will do a great deal more. We are working with others as fast as we can.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I wonder whether the Minister recognises that this is not just a humanitarian crisis. These three countries in west Africa are all fragile states, and Sierra Leone, in particular, is emerging from conflict. It has now had several stable elections, but all of that will be under threat unless we get on top of the health crisis. We must recognise the support that will be needed financially for that country to re-establish the settlement between the population and the Government. Indeed, the last thing we would want is for Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea to go back into conflict, civil war, and so on. The Government need to recognise that it is a security as well as a health issue.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we do recognise that. The last strategic defence and security review in 2010 marked international epidemics as one of the biggest problems that this country faces from elsewhere. We all recognise that the investment that this Government make by providing a large development budget is part of a contribution to our own security as well as the security of those other countries. Perhaps I might say that the pitch that we are currently making to the Germans is that Germany, like Norway, is a country with a fiscal and a trade surplus, so it ought to be able to make a very generous contribution to the broader issue of European security, which is threatened by epidemics spreading from fragile states, particularly in Africa.