Charities and MPs have criticised the UK for reducing the amount of money it gives to a major global health fund by almost a third, lambasting it as a “disastrous decision” that will cause preventable deaths and mean “a more dangerous world for us all”.
Britain will provide £1bn over the next three years to the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development office said today, a cut of £400m on its previous pledge in 2019.
The pledge is understood to have been made as a result of lobbying by the development minister, Andrew Mitchell, who has praised the fund as “brilliantly effective” and is a longstanding advocate for overseas aid. In a private letter to MPs and peers, he defended the cut, saying: “I hope, given the circumstances, you will feel this is an exceptional pledge.”
But NGOs said the reduced spend was a disappointing sign of the UK’s wavering commitment to global health, at a time when other countries such as the US, Japan, Canada and Germany were significantly increasing funding.
The Global Fund had asked all donor countries to raise their pledges by 30% this year in response to the damage done by the Covid pandemic. That would have meant the UK pledging £1.8bn.
“For decades the UK has been a leader in the global response to these infectious diseases, but no more. When other allies met the Global Fund’s call for a 30% increase, the UK went in the opposite direction, with a 30% cut from their 2019 pledge,” said Mike Podmore, the director of StopAids.
“This is a disastrous decision that will result in the preventable deaths of up to 1.5 million people, and risk over 34.5m new transmissions across the three diseases, setting back years of progress … [It] will harm our credibility as a reliable international actor and leave us unable to respond effectively to other global crises.”
Gareth Jenkins, the interim chief executive officer at Malaria No More UK, thanked Mitchell for having used “principled leadership” to avoid a larger cut that had been feared.
However, he added: “While we acknowledge that the domestic and international challenges that require our government’s support are considerable, the fight against three of humanity’s deadliest diseases should not be de-prioritised.”
Campaigners said an additional consequence of the UK’s cut was that it would reduce the amount the fund would receive overall, as the US, which hosted the pledging conference in September, had offered to match a proportion of contributions. The UK’s reduction of £400m, therefore, will mean a real-terms cut of £600m, they calculate.
The budget for official development assistance (ODA), which was slashed under Boris Johnson from 0.7% to 0.5% of gross national income (GNI), has been mired in controversy once again in recent weeks over how much of it is being used to fund the domestic cost of housing refugees from Ukraine and elsewhere.
Charities today urged the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, to use the autumn statement on Thursday to make that spending additional to the aid budget, as well as plan “a speedy return” to 0.7%.
While neither of those things is likely to be announced, the BBC reported that the government is preparing to breach the 0.5% cap, with Hunt expected to admit there will be an overspend and that the aid budget will be pushed to about 0.55% of GNI.
Sarah Champion, a Labour MP and chair of the international development select committee, said the Global Fund pledge was “welcomed but considerably less than requested”. She added: “I am deeply concerned that it represents the last flexible funding in the ODA pot. We saw a freeze on all but essential aid in the summer, plus it seems at least £4bn of unbudgeted expenditure has been used on UK-based refugees.
“The government brought in a cap on ODA spend for ideological reasons; by my maths, that ceiling has been reached. This week’s budget represents the last hope for the UK to maintain its commitment to the world’s poorest as, without an uplift, I don’t know how ministers can fund their plans.”
In the letter to MPs, Mitchell said a performance agreement would be developed covering the UK’s key priorities, but it would no longer be tied to performance-based funding. “This reflects that, as a high-performing organisation, the Global Fund has routinely met our targets and this change will help them to use our funding more flexibly and impactfully,” he wrote.
While MPs – including some Conservatives – had resisted any kind of cut, they privately said the move was disappointing but to be expected given the country’s economic outlook.
Peter Sands, the executive director of the Global Fund, said the pledge would be “instrumental” in helping the world get back on track after Covid.
