Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria

Nadine Dorries Excerpts

Tuesday 12th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Nadine Dorries (in the Chair)]

Order. If I put a four-minute time limit on speeches and there are no interventions, we will still not have enough time to get everyone in. I will start the list of speakers and go in the order in which Members submitted their request to speak. If those speaking keep their contributions short, we will be able to get everybody in. I will set a time limit of three and a half minutes, and if everyone is brief and no one intervenes, we might make it. Without wasting any time, I call Pauline Latham.

[Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Dorries, for the first time not just during this Parliament but since I have been here. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) and colleagues on securing the debate, because the issue is incredibly important at this time. He talked about the generalities of the funding, but I will focus on a specific case, because although the Global Fund is fantastic, its eyes and ears cannot be on every single problem in the world.

I recently returned from northern Uganda, where I visited Gulu and Pajule in Pader, which are experiencing a huge problem with a malaria epidemic. Even the in-country director of the Malaria Consortium, the organisation I travelled with, was shocked at the level and scale of it. Women and children are dying in huge numbers, including babies aborted and stillborn during pregnancy after their mothers contracted malaria. Hospitals there are completely overwhelmed. The best hospital that I visited—the Lacor hospital, a private, non-profit Ugandan hospital whose mission is to guarantee affordable medical services, particularly to the most needy—was admitting up to 500 children into a 100-bed area, meaning that children were sleeping three or four to a bed and under the bed. Their parents were there as well. It is causing huge problems.

That is a really good hospital: it has bedsheets, which are pretty rare in many hospitals there. I saw one child of about three who was fitting badly due to cerebral malaria. I suspect that that child is no longer alive. The mother and other mothers were all attending around the bed, plus the doctors and nurses. That institution is doing the best that it can in incredibly difficult circumstances. Another hospital I visited, a state hospital, had no bed nets or sheets, and the mattresses were so decrepit that no one over here would put a dog on one, never mind lie on it themselves. Most facilities that I saw had no water. How can anybody recover when basic hygiene is not available to the doctors and nurses?

There are also huge pressures on hospitals when families go there too, because they must feed the families as well as feeding and looking after the patients. There is no patient confidentiality, because the patients’ families are there, and when patients are three to a bed, other families listen in as well, but the doctors and nurses say that they desperately need the families to come, because they do not have sufficient staff. It seems to me that the system in Uganda is failing to provide adequate healthcare.

Wherever we went and whatever health facility we visited, the statistics were the same, because spraying had stopped. Residual indoor spraying stops the epidemic, which has now gone through the roof. In one place, the number of cases had decreased to 33 a month by last April, but by May, it had rocketed to 1,500. No health facility, however well prepared, could cope with such a jump. Stock-outs of drugs are not unusual. The director-general of health told us that there was no problem, but she was discussing statistics that were a year out of date.

Hospitals treat 100% of patients with fever in malaria-type facilities, despite the fact that probably only 85% of them actually have malaria, which is not helping the issue of drug resistance. The problem is that drugs are funded, but diagnostic tests are not.

[Nadine Dorries (in the Chair)]

Order. I am sorry, but I must call the next speaker.

Oral Answers to Questions

Nadine Dorries Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

This is an issue on which I have been repeatedly lobbied by people across the House and more broadly—[Interruption.] I do think that it is worth having a proper look at the issue to see what we can do. Yes, we want to ensure that bookmakers are not over-regulated, but we also want a fair and decent approach that prevents problem gambling.

[Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

In Mid Bedfordshire last year, 130 parents, teachers and staff were very disappointed when their free school application failed. That application was managed by the Barnfield Federation, which is now under investigation by the Department for Education and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Will the Prime Minister please use his good offices to ensure that the failed free school application in Mid Bedfordshire is incorporated into that inquiry?

[The Prime Minister]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her suggestion. Obviously, we need a proper policy of ensuring that proposals for free schools are ready to go ahead before they go ahead. It is worth making the point that two thirds of the free schools in our country have been judged to be good or outstanding, which is a higher proportion than for schools in the state sector. It is therefore worth not only continuing with this policy but putting rocket boosters on it so that we see many more free schools in our country.

Oral Answers to Questions

Nadine Dorries Excerpts

Wednesday 7th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr O’Brien]

I thank the hon. Lady for drawing attention to that key aspect, but in focusing totally on results and achieving the genuinely transformational climate change effects that we want, this Government have absolutely stood by our promise to meet the requirements to fulfil the international climate fund— the responsibility is split between the Department for International Development, the Department of Energy and Climate Change, and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. There has been a series of announcements. We are now two thirds of the way through the Fast Start commitment, so the answer is yes, our commitments are in place.

[Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

7. What estimate his Department has made of the number of people living in poverty in Equatorial Guinea.

[The Secretary of State for International Development (Mr Andrew Mitchell)]

Although Equatorial Guinea has one of the highest per capita incomes in Africa, nearly 70% of the population live in deep poverty. Most of that per capita income goes to the President and his family and cronies.

[Nadine Dorries]

I declare an interest. My visit to Equatorial Guinea in the summer was paid for by the Equatorial Guinea Government.

The Secretary of State is quite right to say that one family control the wealth of Equatorial Guinea and are amassing an unimaginably vast fortune from drilling rights and oil revenue. Will he use his good offices to press upon the Obiang family the fact that the wealth of a nation belongs to its people, and that they should be using that money to alleviate poverty, particularly among children in Equatorial Guinea?

[Mr Mitchell]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. She has been there and so is in a good position to speak out about what she has seen. I should say to her that we do not have any bilateral links with Equatorial Guinea, but she is right: it is a disgrace that its high level of oil wealth is stolen for the corrupt and personal use of an unaccountable and self-serving elite.

Oral Answers to Questions

Nadine Dorries Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

When you are making difficult spending decisions and have a difficult economic situation, and household budgets are under huge pressure from things like petrol prices, food prices and inflation, clearly, that impacts women. The Government want to do everything they can to help women and that is why we have lifted 1 million people out of tax, the majority of whom are women, and that is why we are putting much more money and time into free nursery education for two, three and four-year-olds. That is also why, for the first time, we have agreed that women working fewer than 16 hours a week will get child care. And we do not just care about this issue at home: because of what we are doing through international aid, we will be saving more than 50,000 women in childbirth around the world.

[Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

The Infrastructure Planning Commission has made one decision—to grant planning permission for the giant American waste company Covanta to build a 600,000 tonne incinerator in Mid Bedfordshire. Thousands of people in Bedfordshire responded to the consultation, saying that they do not want this. The small print of the decision says that the decision is subject to special parliamentary procedure. Will the Prime Minister please let the people of Bedfordshire know that this Government are not like the previous Government, that we listen to local concerns and that we will ensure that that monstrous rubbish-guzzling atmosphere-polluting incinerator will not be imposed upon the people of Bedfordshire?

Humanitarian Emergency Response Review

Nadine Dorries Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mitchell]

The hon. Gentleman will understand that we consider attendance at such meetings on the basis of need. We consider whether our attendance or our work in advance of a meeting will have the most effect. I and my ministerial colleagues travel ferociously in pursuit of this agenda. We have contributed in a large number of ways to the shape of the international community’s handling of humanitarian emergencies. The multilateral aid review played a significant part in that and the Ashdown review has played an enormous part in it. The Ashdown review is being read avidly by most of those who are engaged in this important work. For the future, we will consider, as we always do, what is the most effective way in which Britain can intervene to ensure the overall effectiveness of this vital work.

[Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

The UN has been notoriously slow and unco-ordinated in the past in responding to certain disasters, as a result of the poor leadership that has been identified. Notwithstanding the report on the agenda for change by Baroness Amos, will the Secretary of State assure us that his Department will relentlessly keep up the pressure on the UN? The next disaster, God forbid, may come tomorrow, and we need to know that the UN is fit for purpose today.

[Mr Mitchell]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to make that point. It is the quality of local leadership on the ground that determines how quickly we can respond. Inevitably, although the UN actors on the ground are extremely good at what they do in normal times, they are sometimes not the right people to respond to disasters. That is why it is essential to get people there who can provide the necessary quality of leadership. For example, it was very interesting that the presence of John Ging, the No. 2 to Valerie Amos, in Libya very shortly after the conflict started led to an immediate response of a much better quality than we had previously seen.