Jamaica: Hurricane Melissa

Lord Purvis of Tweed Excerpts

Wednesday 29th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

The noble Earl is right that this is a problem. We encourage British nationals to register their presence; we have 24/7 telephone access available, and we have our team in Kingston. The situation is incredibly difficult; there is local advice issued by authorities in Jamaica, which we encourage British nationals to adhere to. We updated our travel advice on Thursday about the likely strength of Hurricane Melissa. This is hurricane season in the Caribbean; these events are not unprecedented, sadly, but the severity and impact of this hurricane are greater than we have seen before.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, I add to the condolences for the devastating impact on the communities there, and share with the noble Lord regards from all Benches in this House.

The Minister stated, correctly, that this event is even worse than the 2017 hurricanes that affected the Caribbean. I supported the previous Government’s work to change the OECD rules on overseas development assistance for Caribbean and middle-income nations to receive short-term ODA assistance when hit by a catastrophic humanitarian crisis. The question now is about not our intent or our support for communities in Jamaica but the scale on which the UK does it.

In 2018 the previous Government, before the development assistance cuts of that Administration, allocated £57 million plus £3 million match funding— so £60 million. With the current Government’s ODA cuts, can the Minister assure me that the £2.5 million is only the start? What is the current size of the UK’s humanitarian crisis reserve pool?

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

I do not want this to sound at all patronising, but the assistance that we can give now is very different from that which we could give 10 or so years ago. Yes, there is the immediate response, which will take the form of ODA, and we have a crisis reserve, which is where it needs to be for this stage in the year, but we have also been able to work on insurance and construction. I was very recently at a hospital in Jamaica whose construction we had been able to support, making it much more able to withstand the impact of a hurricane. It has generators and its own energy supplies, and some of that is renewable, and it is able to carry on functioning even in the most difficult circumstances. So the infra- structure is becoming more robust. We have invested alongside others in parametric insurance so that the payouts are very fast to enable the Government of Jamaica and those of other islands to be able to respond much more quickly than they could previously.

On the noble Lord’s points about OECD and ODA graduation, for small island developing states that is really important. There is a problem with graduation, as we see with Montserrat at the moment; it is something that we are very keenly looking at to make sure that countries are treated fairly, because at the moment the way these things work often disadvantages countries with very small populations.