UK Aid Policy: Global Funding Trends

Beccy Cooper Excerpts

Tuesday 7th July 2026 Westminster Hall

[Dr Beccy Cooper (Worthing West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. We meet at a moment when the global aid system is under extraordinary pressure. I thank the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) for securing this incredibly important debate.

Current projections suggest that cuts to international aid could contribute to as many as 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children under the age of five. That is the human cost of dismantling the world aid architecture at speed.

The United Kingdom is not alone in reducing aid spending—the United States, France, Germany and Canada are all scaling back their commitments—but that does not make our choices less significant; it makes them more significant. When every major donor retreats at the same time, there is no one left to step into the gap, and yet the challenges we face today do not stop at national borders. Conflict, climate change, forced displacement, pandemics and antimicrobial resistance affect us all. Investment overseas is increasingly an investment in our own security and prosperity here at home.

Global health provides perhaps the clearest example of why this matters. Viruses do not stop at passport control. The first line of defence against the next pandemic is not at Heathrow or Dover, it is in strong public health systems thousands of miles away. Our national health service and the health security of people across Britain depend on a global health system that works effectively for everyone.

That is why I welcome aspects of the Government’s approach. I welcome the decision to provide protection for key multilateral health organisations, and I am proud that the UK has made ambitious commitments to the Global Fund and to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance—institutions with a proven ability to deliver vaccines at scale and to reach communities that fragmented programmes often cannot.

The Government are also right to recognise that countries want autonomy, not dependency, and that our role should be to help to build resilient health systems that countries themselves can sustain and own. That is the right long-term objective.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

Does the hon. Member agree that one of the most cost-effective ways of helping, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, is to allow local people to avail themselves of clean drinking water, which can transform lives?

[Dr Cooper]

I agree 100%. My hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme (Lee Pitcher) has already talked about his role in the water, sanitation and hygiene all-party parliamentary group. Access to water is an absolutely essential health determinant.

Partnership and resilience building are incredibly important, but they cannot be the whole answer. A strategy designed to strengthen systems over many years does little for a clinic that is closing next month. Communities facing the loss of essential services are not reassured by a long-term theory of change, much as we love that in the development arena. They are worried about whether medicines will be available, whether healthcare workers will be paid and whether the lights will stay on. Withdrawal is fast, capacity building is slow, and people are falling through that gap.

That is why, to be honest, the decision to withdraw support from the Global Polio Eradication Initiative and the Pandemic Fund is really quite disappointing. The Government’s own impact assessment warns that these choices increase the risk of disease outbreaks. We are closer than ever to eradicating polio, a disease that has blighted generations of children, and yet, potentially because of cuts to official development assistance, we are stepping back from that goal. I urge us not to.

I am equally concerned about the dismantling of the Fleming Fund. Antimicrobial resistance may sound a little abstract, but it is not a distant or theoretical threat. Just ask anybody what they think will happen if their antibiotics do not work when they need them. It is one of the most pressing public health challenges that we face. The effectiveness of antibiotics underpins modern medicine and protects countless lives every day. Our NHS depends on those medicines continuing to work. Recent outbreaks of serious infectious diseases remind us just how much rests upon them.

As we have just been reminded, health does not exist in isolation. Clean water, good nutrition and quality education are health interventions by another name. For example, children whose mothers have received a secondary education are far more likely to be fully vaccinated. Although I welcome the prioritisation of healthcare spending, we cannot ignore the reality that in practice many of the programmes being cut are health programmes, too.

Nowhere is that more evident than in Africa. The continent bears about a quarter of the world’s disease burden while possessing only 3% of the global health workforce, yet bilateral aid to Africa is facing a 56% reduction—the steepest regional cut across the entire ODA budget. Multilateral institutions will of course continue to play an essential role, but we should not be so naive as to believe that they can absorb cuts of that scale without consequences.

The consequences are already becoming clear. In Malawi, an estimated 250,000 adolescents could lose access to family planning services each year. In Somalia, fewer women, girls and boys will be able to access lifesaving healthcare because of these decisions. Behind every statistic is a human being whose opportunities, health and future are being diminished.

There is also a broader question of fairness. The NHS benefits enormously from healthcare workers who trained overseas before coming here to serve patients across the United Kingdom, which we sometimes forget in our conversations about immigration. It has been estimated that the UK has saved about £14 billion by relying on health professionals educated and trained elsewhere, and many of the countries from which those workers come are themselves grappling with fragile and understaffed health systems. That is not a windfall; it creates a responsibility. We have a duty to invest back into the health systems from which we have drawn so much expertise, not to withdraw support at the very moment that those systems are under increasing strain.

The lessons of Ebola, covid-19 and antimicrobial resistance are ultimately the same: we cannot isolate ourselves from global threats, and the cheapest crisis is the one that we prevent. Ministers have described these decisions as exceptional measures taken in difficult fiscal circumstances. I recognise those pressures, but we have a responsibility to keep people safe, including people here in the United Kingdom. We are weakening the protection of some of the world’s most vulnerable communities, and in doing so we are undermining our own health security here in Britain. For those reasons, I urge my Government to look again. We need a credible, serious and urgent plan to restore aid spending, not only because it is the right thing to do but because it is in our national interest.