Official Development Assistance

Lord Bates Excerpts

Tuesday 13th January 2026 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Bates]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of any humanitarian impacts of actual and planned reductions in Official Development Assistance.

[Lord Bates (Con)]

My Lords, I shall never forget it. It was late morning on 25 June 2017. I was then the Minister for International Development. We were visiting the Al-Sabbah Children’s Hospital on the outskirts of Juba in South Sudan. It is the only functional paediatric hospital in a country five times the size of England. People would travel long distances to access its life-saving care. The hospital was funded by British taxpayers and delivered in partnership with UNICEF and Gavi.

Just as we were leaving, a tall, elderly man ran in, carrying a small child, desperately seeking assistance. The child was a girl, around five; she was his granddaughter. He had walked three days to get her to the hospital. Later the nurses told us that she had died on the way from dehydration caused by diarrhoea, from a virus that still kills around 500,000 under-fives every year. The staff pointed out that a simple sachet of oral rehydration therapy, essentially sugar and salt mixed with clean water, a treatment costing around 50 pence, could have saved her life. I will never forget the look of grief and the vacant stare that the man gave as he sat on the steps of that hospital on hearing the news. He had done everything he could for his granddaughter, but I felt that the same could not be said for us. I told him this. We could have done more, but now we are proposing to do even less.

A dangerous myth has emerged in recent years that UK aid is wasted. Tell that to the parents sitting at the bedside of their sick children in the wards of the Al-Sabbah hospital. The second fallacy is that national security depends solely on defence, whereas in fact it is a careful blend of diplomacy, development and defence. The more effective we are in deploying the first two, the less we need to rely on the third. In a debate on 13 July 2021 on the decision to cut the aid budget from 0.7% to 0.5%, the then shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, said:

“If this cut goes through this evening and the House votes for it, it will diminish Britain. It will reduce our power and influence for good in the world, and it will undermine our security”.—[Official Report, Commons, 13/7/21; col. 220.]


She was right.

The final dangerous fallacy is that the British people do not support aid. I do not accept it. The British people, I believe, are the most generous and compassionate in the world. That is why many of the leading humanitarian charities were started here: Oxfam, Save the Children, Christian Aid, Islamic Relief, Water Aid and, of course, Live Aid. What angers the British people is seeing their generous aid not reaching the people for whom it was intended—a case in point with figures released by the Foreign Office, which have shown that over the past year the proportion of the budget allocated to health has been cut by 46% to £527 million, whereas the budget for energy, climate change and the environment has been increased by 59% to £658 million. That is a bewildering decision, which puts lives at risk. It is like the NHS being asked to make savings in its budget and choosing first to close accident and emergency units and intensive care wards in order to put more solar panels on the roof. Can the Minister confirm these numbers, and tell us how this decision was made?

Let me give just three examples of the real-world effect of these changes in priority. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance has saved an estimated 13 million lives. The UK Government have announced that their contribution will be cut by 24%. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has saved an estimated 65 million lives, but the UK has announced that its contribution is being cut by 15%. UK funding for the World Food Programme, providing emergency food assistance to 124 million people, has been cut by one-third. The chair of the International Development Committee, Sarah Champion, said:

“The savage aid cuts announced this year are already proving to be a tragic error that will cost lives and livelihoods, undermine our international standing and ultimately threaten our national security. They must be reversed”.


These decisions are already costing lives. The Government’s own equality impact assessment on the proposed ODA cuts has confirmed this. The Gates Foundation has estimated that the number of preventable childhood deaths last year increased for the first time this century, by 200,000, from 4.6 million to 4.8 million. The ONE Campaign suggested that the UK cuts to the Gavi budget alone will cost 600,000 lives, but the cumulative effect of UK aid cuts as planned is likely to be measured in millions of lives, mostly children’s. To put that in context, the UN estimates that the total civilian deaths in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza over the past four years tragically number some 85,000. Yet, by comparison, these millions of deaths pass us by largely unnoticed.

It does not need to be this way. The Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs at the UN, the distinguished former British diplomat Tom Fletcher, has launched an emergency appeal, the Global Humanitarian Overview, based on his humanitarian reset. The aim is to save the lives of 87 million people. It is laser focused on the most urgent, life-saving humanitarian needs—exactly what British taxpayers have always supported. He is looking to raise $23 billion from the international community by March this year. The plan is so convincing and the need so great that even the Trump Administration have pledged to back it with $2 billion. The UK has yet to respond. I am delighted to say that Tom Fletcher will be here tomorrow, giving a briefing on his plans in Committee Room 1 at 4.30 pm, and it is open to all parliamentarians to learn more about this compelling proposal.

The more I look into the details of this matter, the more I see it as less a crisis of cash and more a crisis of misplaced priorities. I firmly believe that by changing priorities and being laser focused on saving lives, we could find $1 billion from within the existing ODA budget to support this ambitious plan to save lives, restore our international reputation and enhance our national security in the process. I commend this plan to the Minister and, indeed, to the whole House.