Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make it his policy in negotiations on a pandemic preparedness treaty that responsibility for the (a) planning and (b) implementation of future pandemic responses will rest with the UK Government and not the World Health Organisation.

The United Kingdom has been clear that we will not sign up to a pandemic instrument that would compromise the UK’s ability to make domestic decisions on national measures concerning public health policy. Protecting states’ sovereign rights to determine and manage their approaches to public health is a guiding principle for negotiators of the pandemic instrument.

The UK continues to negotiate the text of the pandemic instrument to ensure it delivers on our priorities. Once the instrument is agreed and adopted by World Health Organization Member States, the instrument would only become binding in the UK as a matter of international law, after satisfying the UK’s usual constitutional requirements. Parliament’s role in the UK remains undiminished in this process.