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International Health Partnership

After the sometimes stormy weather in Parliament this week, it is a real pleasure to be in the relative oasis of calm consensus. It has been instructive to listen while the Minister and the Conservative spokesman have introduced the debate. The problem with consensus is that by the time the third person speaks, many of the best statistics and points have been mentioned. I do not wish to try your patience, Lady Winterton, or that of my colleagues by being overly repetitive, but I apologise in advance if some of my points cover ground that has already been discussed. The Minister and the hon. Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown) were both right to focus on the millennium development goals and on the particular ways in which they draw our attention to horrific problems. Half way through the period covered by the programme we are still tragically off the pace and struggling to reach the noble goals that were set a few years ago. We must never lose sight of how shocking the statistics are on child mortality, which has already been mentioned. Only 32 of 147 countries are on track to cut child mortality for those under five by two thirds in the period before 2015. In Asia, a number of countries are off track to a greater or lesser degree, but in Africa almost every country will miss the target, which is a wake-up call for us all. The Conservative spokesman has mentioned the issue of maternal health. Like him, I was impressed by the ““Sisters of the Planet”” exhibition in Parliament this week. I was unable to attend the official opening, but I spent some time at it yesterday. The stories from different parts of the world were a reminder that we should not be complacent about the challenges and the difficulties facing people as they go about their everyday lives in different parts of the world. The exhibition and the messages from the Oxfam people who assisted us to understand and take on board all the information brought home to us that complacency is not an option. On HIV/AIDS and malaria, as has been mentioned, the figures are staggering. It is mind-boggling to think that nearly 40 million people in the world live with HIV/AIDS. Sadly, contrary to what the millennium development goals seek to achieve, the numbers are going up, rather than down. As the Minister pointed out, there are a number of different priorities for our country, which have been explicitly set out by the Government over time. Funding is a big part of that and there has certainly been a great increase in funding by the Government over recent years. We pay tribute to that; it is a very welcome development. In this country we also have a particular role in relation to health professionals and the expertise that they have and can share with others around the world. Again, a key theme of the international health partnership is the need for better co-ordination in all the various programmes that exist—not just from non-governmental organisations, the Government and charitable foundations in this country, but across Europe and the world. A year ago, in his report ““Global Health Partnerships”” commissioned by the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, Lord Crisp set out the need for partnerships to be established along the lines of those that the Government have now set up. Importantly, he stressed that developments must be based on the needs of the countries themselves and the needs that they have identified for themselves. Proposals put forward must improve the practical value of what is happening and should not simply layer on more bureaucracy. Lord Crisp has established some important principles—for example, that developing countries themselves need to take the lead, and that when we are scaling-up resources they should be in relation to the training, education and employment of health workers. More importantly, he also said that we need to be more rigorous in our research and evaluation of what actually works and that we should not simply keep reinventing the wheel—we are guilty of doing that too often. The Minister demonstrated how those principles have been boiled down into factors that are particularly emphasised in the international health partnership, such as the need to develop and support a country's own health plans, to provide better co-ordination among the donors and to focus on health systems as a whole, not just on single diseases. Indeed, the Overseas Development Institute highlighted several very positive things that can flow from such an approach. We can refocus health aid away from treating individual diseases exclusively and towards developing health systems in the round. We can tackle the tendency to focus on some diseases at the expense of others, which are sometimes called orphan diseases. That is something that we understand from our constituencies and from the way in which health is debated in this country, and action in that respect would certainly be a major breakthrough. Finally, we need greater harmonisation and alignment, and that is a theme that occurs in every aspect of the development work that we consider. Instruments such as IHPs offer us the opportunity to pursue such things, and my party would certainly welcome that. As the Minister said, we have just had the six-month anniversary of the creation of IHPs, and their implementation is now critical. The hon. Member for Cotswold asked several questions, and, like him, I am keen to hear the answers to them this afternoon or at some other appropriate moment. If I may, however, I would like to add to the list of queries for the Minister to consider. On the individual country compacts, how far have we got with the individual countries that are listed as the starting points? Like the hon. Gentleman, I would be interested to know how many more countries are being brought on board, by which I mean both developing countries, which we hope will benefit, and developed, donor countries. On the simplification and harmonisation of the multilateral delivery of health and other assistance, to what extent have the Minister and her colleagues taken up such issues in the EU? A number of the countries that are listed as part of the IHPs are members of the EU, but many other EU members are not listed as part of them. What work is being done to broaden involvement in IHPs across the EU? Japan and the United States are key players in the delivery of development assistance in its many forms. They can offer a huge degree of funding and expertise, and it is important that they are brought in.