Keir Starmer is poised to slash £150m in aid to the international fight against Aids, 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 for the Global Fund’s work for the next three years – a 15 per cent reduction compared to Britain’s last pledge of £1 billion in 2022, which itself was down from a pledge of £1.4bn in 2019.
The government has indicated it will use Britain’s aid budget to prioritise humanitarian responses in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine, as well as global health. It has named the Global Fund, along with the global vaccine alliance Gavi, as organisations in line to get bigger shares of its aid spending.
Nevertheless, the UK is making cuts to the fund which could threaten its plans to raise $18bn to save 23 million lives between 2027 and 2029. The worldwide NGO the ONE campaign calculates a £1 billion commitment by the UK would account for 1.7 million lives, so a £150m drop would see an estimated 255,000 lives lost.
The former secretary of state for international development, Andrew Mitchell, said the UK cut was “a bitter pill to swallow”.
“Not just for the many thousands of people who will lose their lives, the Conservative MP added, “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, and which is now being curtailed by the first Labour government ever to cut development spending”.
Co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on HIV/Aids, David Mundell, said the decision was, “seriously disappointing”.
“Obviously there are constraints on funding,” he said, “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.”
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) said the UK continued to work with the Global Fund to “play a significant role in the global response to fight disease globally” and that the pledge would be announced in due course.
“We remain firmly committed to tackling global health challenges, not only because it is the right, but to help deliver the 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 from the US, took effect earlier this year. Now potentially millions of extra deaths are predicted in the coming years.
“Unplanned cuts like the US cuts, they always have adverse consequences for the people who are being supported,” Mundell added, referring to reports by The Independent of deaths linked to Donald Trump’s cuts to HIV services in lower-income countries.
The Global Fund pays for a quarter of all international HIV treatment and prevention programmes, more than half of malaria programmes and three-quarters of TB support. It is estimated to have saved 70 million lives in the past 20 years.
It is mostly funded by contributions from more than 80 governments, as well as by private industry and philanthropy. Currently, the UK is its third-largest donor and is co-hosting its fundraising event in South Africa on 21 November.
The US already withheld already-promised money for 2025 from the Global Fund when Trump took office, with disastrous consequences. Countries supported by the fund had to immediately 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 struggles to keep distributing preventative HIV medication.
A US State Department spokesperson said: “Over the last year, the United States has provided more than $60 million of health assistance programming for Senegal to support to the most urgent health needs, including HIV prevention and treatment.”
Dr Katherine Horton at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s tuberculosis modelling group found cuts in the UK’s contribution to the Global Fund would drive 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 heavily 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.
TB programmes have been successful at bringing down deaths and reducing the threat of the disease spreading across borders, Dr Horton said.
“Any further cuts are are just going to cause greater damage and 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