0.7% Official Development Assistance Target

Philippa Whitford Excerpts

Tuesday 8th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP) [V]]

The Prime Minister has declared his aim to secure an agreement of the G7 to vaccinate the world against covid by the end of next year, but it is hard to see how he will have the brass neck to push such a proposal when the UK will be the only one in the room cutting overseas aid. The overall budget is being cut by a third, but covid funding masks the drastic cuts to core projects, including on the health and education of women and girls, which the Government claimed was a key policy, as well as those delivering humanitarian aid and addressing HIV/AIDS, conflict zones, famine relief, refugees and child education. It is hard to believe that the Government think it is remotely reasonable to slash funding for water and sanitation in the middle of a pandemic.

Even if funding is restored in a couple of years, the staff, researchers, experience, knowledge, networks and infrastructure of many of those projects will have been lost. The Chancellor has justified the cuts by highlighting the cost of the pandemic, but what does he think it has been like for low-income countries that were struggling even before they were hit by covid?

The UK is also hosting COP26, but any promises by the Minister responsible, the COP26 President, the right hon. Member for Reading West (Alok Sharma), will have little credibility, because when he was International Development Minister he made commitments that the UK has now abandoned. In 2019, he promised more than £100 million a year for the global polio eradication initiative, only for the funding now to be cut by an eye-watering 95%. The World Health Organisation has estimated that 80 million children are at risk from infectious diseases such as diphtheria, polio and measles owing to the disruption of immunisation caused by the covid pandemic, so vaccination projects should not face cuts. They need extra support to fund the necessary catch-up programmes. We must not allow the re-emergence of polio and other infectious diseases to take a toll on the children of low-income countries.

Covid is a global crisis and it calls for a global response. So far, the international community has struggled to live up to its warm words of last spring, but the UK is alone in cutting aid at such a critical time. Low-income countries have received less than 0.5% of all covid vaccines delivered so far, and the UK is one of those blocking the sharing of intellectual property and technology. This will prolong the pandemic for all of us and delay the economic recovery of low-income countries, and the UK Government must not compound the problem by removing support from some of the most vulnerable in the world. I support the call to restore overseas funding, and I do not believe that it can wait until next year. The covid crisis is now.