Official Development Assistance

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 13th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bates, for securing this debate. My brief remarks will draw on two reports. The first is from the Public Accounts Committee in June, highlighting the links between trade deals, aid cuts and superbugs, and the second is a Chatham House report from November titled Rethinking UK Aid Policy in an Era of Global Funding Cuts.

But first, a note of perspective: this year, global aid is expected to have declined by almost a third versus the level of 2023—this while the level of subsidy from the global South to the wealthy continues to grow, with huge repayments on high-interest loans to wealthy banks, institutions and Governments. Physical extractivism also continues apace, with natural resources ripped from global South lands, and pollution and destruction left as payment. The poor, particularly, pay with their health, and the globe sees fast-rising threats from infectious diseases; as we learned from Covid, no one is safe until everyone is safe.

Health provision is in a state of crisis. The FCDO figures already referred to show a 45% fall in health funding in 2024-25, and another 46% fall is coming this year. A WHO analysis last year found country offices reporting massive disruption. In the 20th century there was a hubristic complacency that humans had essentially defeated infectious diseases; that is clearly not the case now, but there are still cuts.

We are allowing, even encouraging, the disease organisms to marshal and develop their forces against us by developing and spreading resistance to the drugs that we have so expensively developed and put out to try to treat people through antimicrobial resistance, as both the reports I draw on indicate.

The closure of the Fleming Fund was announced in July. The Government say that they plan to mitigate this with a new partnership model. As the Chatham House report says, there are still no details of this. Can the Minister tell me, or write to me about, what the plans are for that partnership model?