UK Aid Policy: Global Funding Trends

Debate between Beccy Cooper and Gregory Campbell

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.

Obesity and Fatty Liver Disease

Debate between Beccy Cooper and Gregory Campbell

Tuesday 28th October 2025 Westminster Hall

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

I beg to move,

That this House has considered obesity and fatty liver disease.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Efford, alongside my parliamentary colleagues who have kindly come along this morning to debate and highlight the public health emergency that is obesity and fatty liver disease.

The vast majority of us do not often think about the health of our livers. If we do, our biggest concern is how many units of alcohol we drink every week and whether our livers can keep up. But we do talk about our weight a fair amount, either in terms of how we look and how our clothes fit, or, if we are linking it to disease, whether we are blocking up our arteries and risking a heart attack. Today I want to make the case for linking our concerns about being overweight and sedentary with the very real risk of developing fatty liver disease. Before I give the alarming statistics about the huge increase in liver disease in the UK, I want us all to hold on to the fact that a weight loss of 10% can halt and even reverse fatty liver disease progression, and the way to help us all to do that is not to point fingers and tell individuals to try harder. There are much more effective public health solutions than that.

Now for the alarming statistics that should give us all pause for thought: after heart disease, liver disease is the biggest cause of premature mortality and lost working years of life in the UK. In stark contrast with other killer diseases where the mortality rate has gone down, deaths from liver disease have increased by 400%—yes, 400%—over the past two decades. Every year we are seeing 18,000 deaths from liver disease. It is now the biggest killer of 35 to 49-year-olds in the UK. In two to three years it is set to surpass heart disease as the leading cause of premature death in the UK.

Today’s debate matters because fatty liver disease is becoming one of the defining public health challenges of our generation—a disease that already affects as many as one in five adults in the UK, equating to about 1 million people, but one that hardly anyone knows about. When I asked my parliamentary colleagues to speak in today’s debate, they said, “Fatty liver disease? What’s that?” So hopefully this debate will highlight this alarming disease.

Closely linked to our ongoing struggles with obesity, fatty liver disease—for the record, its clinical name is metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease; that is the last time I am going to say that today—is deeply rooted in our broken food systems and the stark health inequalities that our communities face.

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

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing the debate. She is outlining very clearly the importance of the issue. It is vital that people are aware of it. Does she agree that if we do not deal with the issue, the NHS waiting lists over the coming years will be compounded even further than they have been already?

[Dr Cooper]

I thank the hon. Member for making that excellent point. He is absolutely right. The issues of the NHS waiting lists are pertinent and stark. Reducing them will mean that we have to get the left shift right as well as invest in acute services.

Our policies have failed the population for decades. This debate is an opportunity to make the urgent case for a national liver strategy, joined-up public health work and profound reform of the conditions that stop us all living well. Because we have failed to build an environment where healthy food is affordable and accessible, two thirds of UK adults are now overweight or obese, and one in three children in England are above a healthy weight when they leave primary school.

Fatty liver disease is a silent killer, often asymptomatic until at a very advanced stage, meaning many patients are diagnosed too late for effective intervention. Left untreated, as too many are, fatty liver disease can progress to liver inflammation, fibrosis, cirrhosis, liver failure or liver cancer. Fatty liver disease also increases significantly the risk of heart attacks, stroke and heart failure. It is projected to overtake alcohol as the leading cause of liver transplants within a decade.

How do we treat fatty liver disease? Despite high and rising mortality rates, there are limited treatment options for patients with this disease. As I have said, weight loss and lifestyle change are essential.