Water, Sanitation and Hygiene: Sustainable Development

Maggie Throup Excerpts

Tuesday 17th October 2023 Westminster Hall

[Maggie Throup (Erewash) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Latham. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Dr Offord) for securing this extremely important and timely debate. Access to safe, clean sources of water, alongside basic levels of sanitation and personal hygiene, is essential within the realms of public health, for both prevention of, and protection from, infectious diseases.

Although hon. Members may be somewhat reluctant to do so, if we cast our minds back to the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, before the vaccine, masks, lockdown and social distancing, the first thing we asked the public to do was to wash their hands regularly for the amount of time it took to sing “Happy Birthday” twice. I am sure that we will never forget that, and we probably still sing “Happy Birthday” when we wash our hands even today. That may seem simplistic, yet in a country where clean water is in abundance and a bar of soap costs merely pence, it is the public health measure that is often the most overlooked. It is largely taken for granted, even by those of us who are washers not walkers after using the loo.

Although handwashing was commonplace in most medical settings involving doctors and surgeons by the mid-19th century, it was Florence Nightingale with her strong Derbyshire roots who truly brought it to the masses. While the true potential of regular handwashing was still to be fully understood, it was her intuitive approach towards promoting the importance of cleanliness and personal hygiene that led to a rapid improvement in public health in the years that followed the Crimean war.

In a similar vein, our understanding of how infectious diseases spread and the vital importance of providing good sanitation facilities have their roots in the Broad Street cholera outbreak of 1854, less than a few miles from this Chamber. It claimed the lives of 616 people and was eventually tracked back to a single contaminated water pump. Here in the UK we may have come a long way since that time, but shockingly even now, in 2023, the UN estimates that 2.2 billion people across the world do not have access to safe, clean drinking water or basic handwashing facilities, while 3.5 billion people lack safely managed sanitation facilities.

Earlier this year, I was privileged to take part in a parliamentary delegation to Kenya hosted by World Vision, during which I saw first hand how climate change is increasingly affecting people’s access to water. I had a discussion with a group of schoolchildren, who shared their experience of how extended periods of drought are causing crops to fail and boreholes to dry up. I hope in responding to the debate that my hon. Friend the Minister will look closely at not only how we can further prioritise water, sanitation and hygiene through the remit of international development, but how the Government can build on the UK’s track record of action to help to tackle climate change on the global stage.

The burden continues to fall disproportionately on females—WaterAid estimates that around 60% of all household water is collected by women and girls. At the same time, over 266 million are thought to be without access to proper WASH or sanitary materials to manage their periods, which can lead to deadly infection and disease. Similarly, waterborne diseases caused by poor WASH and leading to complications including diarrhoea and malnutrition are responsible for around 13% of all deaths among children under five, the majority of which are preventable.

While WASH facilities at home are thankfully of a good, modern standard, the lack of WASH in low and middle-income countries still presents a significant threat to the UK, with most resistant infections treated by the NHS originating from elsewhere in the world, at a cost of some £2 billion per year. The lack of hygiene in low and middle-income countries leads to the overuse of antibiotics, which in turn leads to the threat of antimicrobial resistance becoming even more real. When she was chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies stated that, after terrorism, AMR poses the greatest threat to the world.

I would like to pay tribute to a young scientist, Kirsty Smitten, who, at the age of 29, lost her life to a rare cancer just a few days ago. Kirsty, while still a student at Sheffield University, and working in a spin-off company, worked on developing a new class of antibiotics, which I am sure will make a huge difference. Kirsty had a great future ahead, but I know that she has left a great legacy and that her work will help to tackle antimicrobial resistance for many generations to come.

With the global cost of AMR set to grow exponentially over the next decade, the Government must prioritise aid spending for WASH to allow more time for new antibiotics to come online, and in the meantime help to defend the NHS from being overwhelmed. We cannot just sit back and let this situation continue to play out. As we all know, having lived through the pandemic, access to WASH is the very foundation on which good public health is built. We must do everything we can, through the vehicle of the UK international development strategy, to ensure that it is properly prioritised and funded accordingly.