Ebola

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Thursday 12th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

The hon. Lady asked, understandably, about the four other health care workers. They are now in the process of being flown home, purely on a precautionary basis, and will be dealt with at the Royal Free hospital and the Royal Victoria infirmary in Newcastle.

I had a chance to meet some of the orphans from this crisis when I was in Sierra Leone just before Christmas. They were of all ages, of course. Some of our work is to help UNICEF to provide the psycho-social support that they need and to keep the orphanages going. We are also helping to provide dedicated centres where children can be looked after safely if their parents go to community care centres to be tested because they are concerned that they have Ebola; if the parents end up being taken into care, they cannot look after their children.

There are huge child protection issues. I can reassure the hon. Lady that we are mindful of them, and mindful of the need to work not just with the Government of Sierra Leone but with civil society and the NGO sector to make sure that they are properly addressed.

The hon. Lady asks about the extent of our commitment. The £427 million that I have talked about is essentially the money that we are spending on providing ongoing support, including what we have already done, which has now cost more than £200 million. Over the coming months, we need to keep supporting the beds and the safe burials and all the very practical work that we are doing—social mobilisation, talking to communities—and also put in place a budget, which is about half the increase, for the initial planning on early recovery. We are steadily shifting our strategy to ensure that we have the capacity on the ground still to cope and deal with Ebola and get to zero. That is the principal objective that we have to meet, while transitioning to look at how we can safely open schools and hospitals and deal with some of the issues that the hon. Lady talks about in relation to communities.

The helicopter support has been absolutely vital. The road network is part of the development progress, but there is no doubt that fantastic work has been done by the Merlin helicopters. I had a chance during my trips to Sierra Leone to get to know some of the pilots—I was there regularly enough—and they have been working round the clock. I want personally to say a massive thank you to them. They were incredibly impressive and have really put in the flying hours over the past six months. The civilian helicopter provision will ensure that we can continue to get around Sierra Leone rapidly and that the district-level response is working effectively, which is why we have kept it in place.

On the important point about ensuring that, frankly, we get the international community to step up to the plate, particularly as recovery takes place, we are indeed investing a lot of time and effort in lobbying. The Brussels conference, which happened a couple of weeks ago, was absolutely key in really making sure that we got international focus on the need to get to zero, avoiding complacency and starting to present the forward look at what those recovery plans will need. The $400 million part is really the initial absolute priority investment that is required to start the recovery process and kick it off. There will be a follow-up conference at the UN, which will be more focused on pledging. We have worked directly with the Government of Sierra Leone to talk to them about how we can ensure that their recovery plan is of good quality and essentially investable and prioritised, and we will continue to do all that work.

The hon. Lady also asks about the Ebola vaccine trials. In fact, we had some vaccines ready to go for phase 2 trials because the UK and DFID had already worked with the Medical Research Council and Glaxo Wellcome to help to support Ebola vaccines in the phase 1 trials. One of the learnings from my perspective is being clearer as an international community about what kinds of vaccine we want to have in stock at phase 1 stage, in order to be able to put them rapidly into phase 2, which is more expensive, if crisis hits. Also, streamlining the regulatory procedures is important, so that we can get the vaccines tested more rapidly when there is a real public health crisis element to them. Obviously, we all appreciate that the regulatory environment is there for a reason, which is to protect patients, but in this case, it was vital that we looked at how we could fast-track the Ebola vaccines. The trials have started in Liberia already. They are about to be started in Sierra Leone and Guinea.

On the number of patients, if anything we have a challenge, because fewer people are suffering from Ebola, but as the hon. Lady will understand, that is the patient population on whom we are testing the vaccines.

On WHO reform, I have had a chance now on a number of occasions to see Margaret Chan, both in London and, most recently, in Brussels. The UK has been a leading player, most recently in the special session on WHO reform, playing a constructive a role in helping us all to learn about how not only the WHO but the international community can better respond to such a public health crisis in the future.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

I join the Secretary of State and the shadow Secretary of State in paying tribute to all those who have tackled this terrible disease, some losing their lives in doing so—Sierra Leoneans, Liberians, Guineans and all others, including the British workers. I pay tribute, too, to the Secretary of State for the leadership that she has shown in this crisis. In a video conference which I chaired last month with the president of the World Bank and parliamentarians from affected countries, all stressed the need, which the shadow Secretary of State mentioned, to strengthen health systems. We also talked about the possibility of doing stress tests of those health systems, in the way that has been modelled for the banking sector, to ensure that they are robust enough. Parliamentarians all agreed on this vital point. Can my right hon. Friend assure me that the United Kingdom will continue to work with Sierra Leone and the Governments of the other affected countries over the coming months and years, and ensure that we do not leave them at this time of need?

[Justine Greening]

Yes, I can. The Ebola crisis has shown why the work that we do in development is so important. We saw that countries in parts of west Africa that had better developed health care systems were able to withstand this unprecedented Ebola outbreak. However, in the case of Sierra Leone and Liberia particularly, which had experienced terrible civil wars and comparatively recently come out of them, although their health systems had dramatically improved, they were still at a nascent stage and were unable to withstand such an unprecedented outbreak. I can assure my hon. Friend that the UK will play a leading role, particularly in our relationship with Sierra Leone, which is unique.

I join my hon. Friend in paying tribute to the bravery of the Sierra Leonean community, who were the ones on the front line, many of them volunteers, who ran towards the crisis and were part of the effort to tackle it, at the very time when most people would have wanted to run in the opposite direction. They were overwhelmingly the ones who helped get the crisis under control, but I am proud of the UK effort in supporting that.