Global Fund: Supplementary Funding

Debate between Dan Carden and Patrick Grady

Wednesday 8th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Dan Carden]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend. I am glad she had the opportunity to get that on the record.

Let me turn to the UK’s most recent funding contribution. At the seventh replenishment in 2022, the UK Government pledged £1 billion to the Global Fund—a significant 30% cut to the UK’s 2019 pledge of £1.4 billion. The US, Japan, Canada, Germany, the European Commission and several other contributors met the Global Fund’s request for a 30% increase from 2019. France increased its contribution by 23% and Italy by 15%. However, the UK—alone—went in the opposite direction. The UK was the only G7 member to cut funding in 2022. Mike Podmore, the director of STOPAIDS, said that it was a “disastrous decision” that risks the lives of 1.5 million people and

“over 34.5 million new transmissions across the three diseases, setting back years of progress”.

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

I congratulate the hon. Member on securing the debate. Is not the point precisely that the kind of interventions that the Global Fund make are preventive spends? If those lives are not saved or if people continue to contract those diseases and there is not further research into them, in the longer term it will cost more to deal with the consequences of not reducing the infection rate. It is a false economy. The Government talk about making their diminishing aid budget work smarter and harder. Surely, that kind of preventive spend is a smart and hard way of working?

[Dan Carden]

Absolutely, I agree. We know what is needed. Analysis has calculated that $18 billion is required to get the world back on track towards ending HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, to build resilience and sustainable health systems and to strengthen pandemic preparedness. The Global Fund is more than $2 billion short of reaching that $18 billion target. At the sixth replenishment, the UK was the second biggest donor. Now, the UK’s reduction in funding is the biggest contribution to the shortfall.

Now is possibly the worst time to be cutting funding following the coronavirus pandemic, which had a drastic impact on the ability to test for infectious diseases. In 2020, for the first time in the Global Fund’s history, we witnessed declines in key outcomes across all three diseases. Decreases in testing led to increases in infections, undoing years of progress. That is exactly what the statistics tell us: HIV testing fell by 22% and prevention services by 11%. In 2020, TB deaths increased, fuelled by a surge in the number of undiagnosed and untreated cases. The number of people tested for drug-resistant TB dropped 19%, and the number of people treated for TB fell by more than 1 million. Malaria testing fell by 4%. Now is not the time to reduce our commitments to the developing world; it is the time to redouble our efforts.