International Health Regulations: Amendments

Lord Allan of Hallam Excerpts

Tuesday 7th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Markham (Con)]

The key thing that we are looking at here, which I would hope that all of us could agree on, is that we will not agree to anything in this process which impacts our sovereignty as a country and our ability to react to a pandemic in a way that is appropriate for this country and this Government. I hope that we can all rely on that, and that is very much our approach to these negotiations.

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, objective 2 of the UK’s Global Health Framework says that the Government will:

“Reform global health architecture, including through a strengthened World Health Organization, driving more coherent governance and collaboration across the international system”.


Aside from producing a winning sentence for policy buzzword bingo, can the Minister point to any specific global health architecture wins that the Government have had in the year since that policy was published?

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I am not sure in what year that policy was published. However, I can talk about how, when we were president of the G7 in 2021, we led the calls to donate vaccines on a worldwide basis, which led to 1.2 billion doses being donated to countries all around the world, led by Britain’s initiative with AstraZeneca. That was great global co-operation and we can feel very proud of it.