The Pandemic Fund was set up in the wake of the Covid-19 emergency as the world recognised we are dangerously unprepared for the next big global health threat – and it boasted enthusiastic support from the UK. No longer.
Similarly, our country proudly funded the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, which is winning the war to stamp out a devastating disease that paralyses children. Now that money will stop, even as record-low vaccination rates here put our own youngsters at risk.
I never thought I would see the day when a Labour government pulled out of projects to prevent pandemics and polio, but that is now revealed as the shocking fallout from the decision to slash 40 per cent from the UK’s international development budget.
Ministers have done their best to bury the full truth, in an equality impact assessment scandalously lacking in detail, but we have been given a glimpse of the horrors that will follow. The document admits that axing development programmes in Sierra Leone and Malawi – two of the world’s poorest countries – will result in around 250,000 young people losing access to family planning and up to 20,000 children dropping out of school.
In Ethiopia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania and Zambia, families in poverty and people unable to work because they are disabled or too old will be hit hard, the assessment acknowledges.
In just four years, by this decade’s end, bilateral aid to African countries will have plunged by 56 per cent – a repeat, under a Labour government, of the pain inflicted by the Conservatives a few years ago that my party attacked so strongly at the time.
Even where there appears to be a hopeful story to tell, it turns out to be smoke and mirrors. Ministers say they are focusing support on the most fragile countries, often those gripped by conflict – but even there the cut in funding is around 25 per cent.
It is no longer possible to disguise that the decision to strip £6.5 billion a year from our aid budget will have catastrophic consequences, not only for the poorest parts of the world but for our country’s international standing and influence.
And it is just as clear that it is based on a false premise: that there is a choice between spending money on defence or on international development – when any military expert will tell you the best line of defence is to spend wisely to help people stay safe and secure in their own homes, able to hold their governments to account.
Instead, the effects of depriving girls in South Sudan of the opportunity to go to school, and of ending scores of other projects that are yet to be revealed, will be felt here at home as well as in those countries losing a helping hand.
The inevitable consequence will be more refugees arriving across the Channel in small boats, full of people fleeing conflict and famine, chasing the chance to feed their families and the hope of a decent life.
That is what happens when, as the respected Center for Global Development has calculated, our aid cuts are on course to be even larger than those being made by Donald Trump in the United States, and the largest of any G7 nation.
By next year, spending on overseas programmes will be the joint lowest since records began in 1970 – at just 0.24 per cent of national income – once the billions diverted to funding the accommodation costs of asylum-seekers here in the UK are subtracted
And it is not even correct that slashing aid allows the government to boost defence, because – as the respected Paul Johnson, the former head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies has pointed out – most defence funding is investment, not the day-to-day spending being cut from aid. There is no direct link.
The time has come for ministers to have the courage to put this controversy to a vote in parliament – to comply with the law and to allow MPs to put forward better alternatives that avoid such short-sighted wreckage.
Otherwise, we are stuck on the dismal path of slashing the very aid that our prime minister once acknowledged “helps build a more stable world and keeps us safer in the UK”. It is time to change course.
Sarah Champion is chair of the House of Commons’ International Development Committee and Labour MP for Rotherham
This article has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project
