Sir Keir Starmer is poised to slash £150m from Britain’s contribution to the international fight against Aids, tuberculosis (TB) and malaria, putting 255,000 lives at risk, The Independent understands.
The government is preparing to announce its contribution to the Global Fund as soon as next week, in one of the first major decisions since announcing it would dramatically reduce foreign aid to pay for defence spending.
The prime minister is expected to pledge £850m towards the Global Fund’s work over the next three years – a 15 per cent reduction compared with the previous pledge of £1bn in 2022, which itself was down from a pledge of £1.4bn in 2019.
The government has indicated that it will use Britain’s aid budget to contribute to the humanitarian response in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine, as well as in support of global health. It has named the Global Fund, along with the global vaccine alliance Gavi, as organisations that are in line to receive a bigger share of its aid spending.
Nevertheless, the cut in aid could threaten the Global Fund’s plan to raise $18bn (around £14bn) to save 23 million lives between 2027 and 2029. Worldwide NGO the ONE campaign calculates that a £1bn commitment by the UK would save 1.7 million lives, so a £150m drop would see an estimated 255,000 lives lost.
Former secretary of state for international development Sir Andrew Mitchell said the cut in aid was “a bitter pill to swallow”, adding: “Not just for the many thousands of people who will lose their lives, but also for the many people in Britain who are proud of the work Britain has led in preventing death from malaria, HIV/Aids and tuberculosis, which is now being curtailed by the first Labour government ever to cut development spending.”
Conservative MP David Mundell, a co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on HIV/Aids, said the decision was “seriously disappointing”.
“Obviously, there are constraints on funding, but the track record of the Global Fund is well established in terms of delivery, and therefore is one of the most effective ways of providing funding,” he said.
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said that the UK would continue to “play a significant role in the global response to fight disease globally” by providing funding to the Global Fund, and that its pledge would be announced in due course. “The UK remains firmly committed to tackling global health challenges, not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because it will help us deliver on our Plan for Change in the UK by supporting global stability and growth.”
The world was on track to end the Aids pandemic by 2030 until funding cuts, especially those implemented by the US, took effect earlier this year. Now, potentially millions of additional deaths are predicted to occur in the coming years.
“Unplanned cuts, like the US cuts, always have adverse consequences for the people who are being supported,” said Mr Mundell, referring to the deaths linked to Donald Trump’s decision to withhold funding that was used to provide HIV services in lower-income countries, as reported by The Independent.
The Global Fund pays for a quarter of all international HIV treatment and prevention programmes, more than half of the world’s malaria programmes, and three-quarters of those aimed at the prevention and treatment of TB. It is estimated to have saved 70 million lives in the past 20 years.
This work is mostly funded by contributions from more than 80 governments, as well as support from private industry and philanthropy. Currently, the UK is the Global Fund’s third-largest donor, and will co-host its fundraising event in South Africa on 21 November.
After Mr Trump entered office, the US withheld money that had already been pledged to the fund, with disastrous consequences. Countries supported by the fund were immediately forced to cut at least 10 per cent of their work.
When The Independent recently visited programmes in Senegal, we found disabled people dying for lack of transport to reach lifesaving drugs; hospitals no longer able to give out food kits to malnourished patients; and challenges in the distribution of preventative HIV medication.
A spokesperson for the US Department of State said: “Over the last year, the United States has provided more than $60m of health assistance programming for Senegal to support the most urgent health needs, including HIV prevention and treatment.”
Dr Katherine Horton, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s tuberculosis modelling group, said that a reduction in the UK’s contribution to the Global Fund would result in thousands of extra deaths. TB kills more people each year around the world than any other infectious disease.
“Global health broadly is really strained at the moment, [largely] because of the US cuts that have already happened. And so I think, in the wake of the US cuts, there’s a real need for other countries to contribute as much as they can to try to fill some of that gap,” she said.
TB programmes have been successful in bringing down the number of deaths and reducing the threat of the disease spreading across borders, Dr Horton added. “Any further cuts are just going to cause greater damage and greater harm to these global health systems and individual lives.”
This article has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project
