Overseas Aid: Child Health and Education

Debate between Steven Bonnar and Matt Rodda

Wednesday 22nd February 2023 Westminster Hall

[Steven Bonnar (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (SNP)]

It is nice to see you in the Chair, Mr Bone. I thank the hon. Member for Reading East (Matt Rodda) for securing this important debate.

The cumulative impact of covid-19, conflict, the climate crisis and poverty means that more children around the world need humanitarian assistance than at any time since the second world war. UNICEF recently provided an overview of the situation:

“Across the globe, children are facing a historic confluence of crises—from conflict and displacement to infectious disease outbreaks and soaring rates of malnutrition…Meanwhile, climate change is compounding the severity of these crises and unleashing new ones.”

In 2022 alone, children across the world have been affected by war and conflict in Ukraine, in Palestine, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, in Tigray, in Afghanistan, in Myanmar and in Yemen. Then there are the climate-induced natural disasters: the floods in Pakistan, the drought in east Africa and the Sahel, the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, and the extreme tropical storms in the Philippines and in Latin and North America. It is children who are bearing the brunt of a planet in crisis, with millions struggling to survive.

Rather than rising to meet the challenges head on, the UK Government continue to oversee devastating cuts to the UK’s overseas aid budgets. This Conservative Government like to portray themselves as a compassionate force helping the world’s most vulnerable communities, but the reality is that they are falling far short of the image that they like to project. As we have heard, the Conservative party vowed in its 2019 manifesto to maintain official development assistance spending at 0.7% of gross national income, but in 2021 the Government cut their international aid budget from 0.7% to 0.5%—an overall cut of between £4 billion and £5 billion.

The effects on children’s health and education of those cuts are extremely stark: 7.1 million children, including 3.7 million girls, are losing out on education, 5.3 million women and girls are losing access to modern family planning methods, and more than 11 million children, girls and women are losing out on nutritional support. Those examples are just a snapshot of the damage that these aid cuts have caused to children across the globe.

The FCDO’s international development Minister, the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), wants the UK to become a “development superpower”. His Department could achieve that very easily just by standing by the very Tory manifesto funding pledge on which the Government were elected. To spare even more children from being left behind in education and healthcare, the UK Government must urgently restore their aid budget to a 0.7% level. The SNP believes that that is a bare minimum requirement.

SNP Members wholeheartedly support increased funding for refugees and asylum seekers here in the UK, but it is completely unacceptable to divert money from ODA budgets for that purpose. Our unwavering support in Scotland and across the UK for those who are fleeing war and persecution in Ukraine, Afghanistan and elsewhere should not come at the expense of international development efforts. Instead, the ODA budget should be ringfenced for spending abroad, and the Home Office should be given increased funding to drastically improve its asylum processes.

We know that the system is broken. It needs to be fixed, and it needs the finance to fix it. The UK Government have already cut international health and medical funding during a global pandemic, cut food programmes during a global food security crisis, slashed environmental projects in the midst of a climate crisis, and reduced conflict resolution projects at a time of renewed war.

[Matt Rodda]

I commend the hon. Gentleman for his point about the current food crisis. One of the background points that are so important to today’s debate is the dramatic increase in the cost of food, which is having a huge effect in many countries that have been mentioned today, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa and the middle east. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the Government should be more mindful of the huge crisis that is facing so many people living in poverty around the world?

[Steven Bonnar]

I thank the hon. Member for his excellent intervention.

I agree wholeheartedly. The cost of food crisis is impacting on people in this country, let alone those in less developed countries across the world. He makes an excellent point.

The cuts to conflict resolution projects come at a time when the world has renewed war, as in the invasion of Ukraine. Those cuts have cost lives. The Government should not wait any longer before they reverse that devastating policy direction.