Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting

Lord Kakkar Excerpts

Thursday 17th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kakkar (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure and privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, and to congratulate her on a powerful, thoughtful and compassionate maiden speech. Her remarkable contribution to this Parliament in the other place and her service in two government departments, the Home Office and the Department for International Development, are highly regarded, and her further contributions on many important issues that are deeply held in your Lordships’ House will be greatly welcomed in the years to come.

I also thank my noble friend Lord Luce for introducing the debate, and in so doing I declare my own interest as chairman of the advisory board of the Commonwealth Health Hub within the Commonwealth Secretariat and as chairman of the Healthcare Business Group of the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council. I should also declare an interest as chairman of UCL Partners because some of our organisations are involved in the work of the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust.

The recent Heads of Government meeting reaffirmed the importance of a focus on healthcare in the Commonwealth. There is great disparity in what is currently achieved. Life expectancy in Lesotho is 48 years while in Australia it is 82 years. A woman is 300 times more likely to die of complications in childbirth in Sierra Leone than she is in Singapore, and in Malta there are 300 times as many doctors per 100,000 population than there are in Tanzania, so there are great opportunities. It is reassuring to see how the Commonwealth is now mobilising itself to address this vitally important issue, one that is of significance to every Commonwealth citizen.

Within the secretariat, the health hub has now created a platform that will provide the opportunity for communication and contact across the largest single grouping of healthcare professions in the world. Those professionals are serving a population of some 2 billion people. But it is thanks to the support of the noble Lord, Lord Marland, and the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council that a further group has been established to bring forward a broader base of partners to address important Commonwealth opportunities. This group of partners, which is drawn from Government, the independent commercial sector and the charities sector, will address four important issues as agreed at the recent Commonwealth Business Forum. These are to develop new methods for financing healthcare projects across the Commonwealth nations, to aggregate those opportunities for development into large enough pools that independent finance can be brought to bear and is attractive to those who are prepared to make long-term commitment, to ensure that appropriate methods of regulation of healthcare systems are achieved across the Commonwealth nations, and to ensure that opportunities for education and training are delivered to a similar standard in order to drive improvements in outcomes and thus improve the long-term prospects of all Commonwealth citizens.