Jacob Rees Mogg MP NHS

    

MONEY should be diverted from the foreign aid budget to help tackle the crisis in the NHS.

That was the demand from MPs last night as the Daily Express revealed Britain is committed to spending £225million a year on family planning in the Third World.

The Government is signed up to support hundreds of clinics offering contraception advice, the majority of which are in Africa, with foreign aid cash until at least 2022.

At the same time hospitals here have had to cancel operations, forcing Theresa May to apologise yesterday for the chaos.

Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg said: “I think the NHS should be a priority rather than non-emergency health care in foreign countries.

“This is a huge amount of money and would help us meet the £350million extra for health care which many Brexiteers would like to see.”

In 2012 the Government vowed to spend £180million a year on family planning overseas until 2020.

But last year former development secretary Priti Patel upped this by £45million a year, meaning Britain’s commitments will now average £225million in each of the next five years.

That money would pay for 9,724 extra NHS nurses on a staff nurse’s starting salary of £23,137.

The Department for International Development confirmed Britain had pumped £27million into family planning projects in Malawi, south-east Africa, since 2011.

It said taxpayers’ money would help save the lives of more than 6,000 women by preventing maternal deaths, help nearly 20 million receive contraceptives and stop six million unintended pregnancies.

A department spokesman said: “We do not face a stark choice between spending on international development or British health care – this Government is able to do both.

DfID is supporting the world’s poorest women to take control of their lives, so they can finish their education, get better jobs and in turn provide for their smaller planned families rather than being trapped in a cycle of grinding poverty.”

But critics pointed out that the NHS is in the grip of a winter crisis. LBC presenter Nick Ferrari said: “My listeners realise Britain is a very generous country, and of course we should help out in emergencies, but the foreign aid madness that leads to contraception clinics in Malawi has to stop.”

Britain’s legally binding foreign aid target – to spend 0.7 per cent of our national income overseas each year – now costs £13.4billion a year, equivalent to almost £37million a day.

NHS nurses pin

    

If less than a tenth of the total were diverted to the NHS, it could pay for three million stays in a hospital bed, costing £400 a night, or 11 million visits to A&E, which average £114 each.

James Price, campaign manager at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “With all routine surgeries cancelled for the whole of January it will strike taxpayers as comical we still have a legally defined spending target on aid.”

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