Development of the Mandarins - Impact of the FCO/DfID Merger on National Security

The Prime Minister has announced that the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the Department for International Development (DfID) are to merge to form one super department charged with overall co-ordination of the UK’s overseas policy.

To some this will be welcome news, many commentators on this blog and more widely are inherently distrustful of foreign aid spending and Humphrey has lost count of the angry comments or twitter responses he gets about it. But others will be concerned that this may represent the loss of development aid at the heart of UK planning and spending and may have longer term implications for how the UK is seen around the world.

From the outset it is important to be very clear. Public spending on international development by the UK is not wasted money. It is a vital part of a long term strategy intended to improve life, increase prosperity and decrease the likelihood that British troops will need to deploy into a conflict zone, or that our security at home is threatened.

RAF supporting OP RUMAN in the West Indies Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

 

Those who call for more defence spending, taken from the defence budget, fundamentally miss the point that this is money which can easily be seen as spending on our long term national and global security. It may sometimes be hard to say why spending on ‘X’ is important, but the same can easily be said of the MOD and defence spending.

For example, there are plenty of people who questioned the issue of the funding for an Ethiopian girl band (Yegna), who had funding pulled in 2017. This was seen by some  as the UK supporting wasteful vanity projects in some quarters, and the £5m of funding was pulled after intense tabloid pressure.

But there is an equally compelling argument that the band enabled powerful messaging to reach a young population, offering core messages on social equality, women’s rights, empowerment and other key messages of change and reform in a traditional society. The band had significant impact and messaging reach in the country, and huge domestic audiences who listened to the lyrics and messaging they had to offer.

Over many years this would have resulted in potentially significant attitudinal shifts, changes to approaches in society and hopefully the creation of a more fair and equal society where women enjoyed the same opportunities as men. In turn this would decrease birth rates, reduce the vulnerability of the population to famine or natural disaster and help accelerate the growth of regional stability and democratic values.

This isn’t something that springs up overnight, but instead takes many years to help nudge changes in behaviour that will make a difference. It may sound more immediate to focus on vaccines and life saving aid, but if this doesn’t help change the underlying root challenges facing the region, you haven’t fundamentally solved its problems – merely exacerbated them by increasing lives, but not quality of life.

There is a very strong argument that projects like Yegna may upset the tabloids but serve a critical function in the very long term strategic goal of building a safer Britain. The UK has huge strategic interests in the horn of Africa region, an area prone to drought, famine, climate change and where a poor seasons crops can directly lead to people migrating to shanty towns, causing an explosion of socio-economic problems, in turn leading people to end up working in pirate skiffs attacking passing merchant ships in order to take them hostage for ransom.

This directly impacts on the Southern Red Sea and the security of Suez and when it has previously flared up, required an extremely expensive and time consuming operation involving multiple nations warships, maritime patrol aircraft and people deployed away from home to stop piracy. Op ATALANTA had at one stage 4-7 escorts and nearly 1200 people employed on it – at an estimate budget of £8-10m per in 2014.

We have to ask how many of these aid projects, which often spend a tiny amount of money overall are having significant downstream consequences that prevent untold numbers of future OP ATALANTAs occurring?

This is important in the context of understanding the potential reasons for merging DfID into the FCO. The challenge in Whitehall for many years has been the growth of essentially a ‘holy trinity’ of powerbases between MOD, FCO and DfID over international security engagement, with Trade playing an increasingly important role as well.

In theory the emergence of fusion doctrine should have led to the Cabinet Office helping co-ordinate an effective pan Whitehall approach where departments came together and worked collaboratively to help build a strategy and policy approach for different areas, and ensuring the levers of power were applied effectively to help meet overall strategic goals.

The challenge can be though at times that the departments do not always see eye to eye in how to resolve often complex issues, and have very different ways through which they both fund output and resolve problems. Humphrey is minded of an issue he was involved in a few years ago where DfID, FCO and MOD all wanted to achieve the same outcome, but all wanted another to pay for it – FCO couldn’t as the money equated to a significant percentage of their annual budget, MOD couldn’t as it had no money or capability to solve the problem and DfID had plenty of money to fund it but was constrained by international rules as to what it could spend its money on, and it was not possible for them to fund it due to said rules.

In the end the Chancellor had to make a special grant via the Spending Review to resolve the issue as not one of the three departments could work out how to fund it effectively using extant means. This perhaps highlights where the system didn’t work as people wanted it to – there were excellent working relationships, but a lack of progress because the system wasn’t joined up enough to deliver.

Although details are thin on the ground, it is likely that there will be a more joined up approach to developing country strategies with both aid and wider issues being considered by the national policy teams, in order to offer advice into wider cross Whitehall planning and strategy development.

The hope has to be that by fusing the aid and foreign policy teams into one organisation, there will be a significantly more strategic approach to both the development of how to handle issues and the ways in which they are resolved.

Culturally though it may prove an interesting challenge to handle. Although at birth DfID drew on FCO staff, in the intervening period it has become very much its own organisation and relies on a group of both UK based policy experts and global project delivery experts. They are a culturally distinct group and have worked for many years together, and fusing this back into FCO in order to create a single team may prove to be extremely difficult.

It will also be interesting to see the impact that this change has on FCO and its overseas tours approach and how the diplomatic role evolves. For many years since the split there has been a significant reduction in the overseas postings opportunities for UK diplomats, with many junior roles being handed out to local staff and not UK ones. While this makes sense from a savings perspective, it does rather mean that the day of the career diplomat is dying off.

There are far fewer ‘cradle to grave’ FCO civil servants out there now who go from Post to Post with the odd stop in London. Instead the rise in sideways entry from other departments, and the open competition for all Ambassador, High Commissioner and Governor posts means that the career diplomat is arguably a dying breed in Whitehall.

Given the numbers of DfID staff based abroad, often for very long tours, it will be fascinating to see what impact this has on the FCO career plot, how people deploy and where they go to. Will there continue to be a split in the system, creating a ‘policy stream’ and ‘development stream’ of posts, that essentially continue to maintain an FCO/Development split, or will there be upheaval in how diplomats careers are run.

With the move to being primarily a foreign policy hub, there are very few programme management experts in the FCO at the moment – particularly on aid. Keeping them, bringing them in from DfID and integrating them into a new departmental structure will be a particularly complex machinery of government transfer-  to work it has to do more than just relocate one organisational structure and rebrand it – it has to show how putting development experts at the heart of foreign policy planning works.

If anything, perhaps this move helps herald a re-examination of the diplomatic career system in totality. Has the time come to end the notion of a Diplomatic Service, separate to the Home Civil Service, and instead put all overseas posts into open competition across the Civil Service? There are already hundreds, if not thousands, of wider HMG roles carried out abroad by non-FCO departments and it is possible to do much of a career abroad in non FCO HMG work  – perhaps the time has come to use this as an opportunity to rethink how diplomats work and instead create a new approach?

There are potentially huge opportunities here if this is done well, and the opportunity for FCO to become a hub for both foreign policy and also programme delivery is potentially significant.

Proper alignment of aid spending to foreign policy priorities is useful, but it must be done in a manner that prevents short termism – much of what DfID does well it does because it had the operational independence to deliver projects with a years, if not decades long view. If this long-term approach is surrendered in favour of more short-term outputs, there are possible risks to what it means for long term UK security interests if not carefully managed.

For the MOD there is an interesting question about what this means for how security policy is developed moving forward. If aid and foreign policy are now being explored in a single location, has the time come to remove all security policy formulation and strategy development out of the MOD and instead create a single empowered national security policy hub in the FCO? 

Moves to this effect in some areas began back in 2015, with the establishment of various ‘Joint Units’ that brought together experts from around Whitehall in single teams. But if FCO is to lead on development of a proper international strategy, having ownership of the security strategy, and the means to direct MOD and other national security departments on funding will be key to success. 

Whether organisations like the Conflict, Stabilisation and Security Fund (CSSF) will continue as they do currently is unclear. There is definitely scope for the work they do to continue - as this link shows, the value of the multi-departmental approach is often very powerful, but will it survive?

While the existence of the National Security Council drives much central security policy 

development, the existence of mixed power hubs across Whitehall means its effect can be reduced if departments squabble about what they want to achieve. One way to break the logjam is instead to place policy making in the hands of one department (an enhanced FCO) and leave it to tell the MOD what its defence and security policies are to be, and how it is to deliver this – and in doing so let the various international policy units and other hubs in MOD fall by the wayside.

At an operational level though little is likely to change. The MOD has over the years built strong working relationships with both FCO and DfID, and this will almost certainly continue in the new department as well – providing these ways of working on the ground are not significantly disrupted, then there is likely to be little tangible change, at least in the short term.

There is a wider question too around how the new model effectively manages the split between policy and delivery. DfID has a significant hub of experts in development on its books who work across the world offering advice and support. They are often world leaders in their field, so ensuring they remain willing to work as part of HMG will be a key challenge. It will also be important to understand how their career model evolves over time, to ensure that as a department, the new organisation can both effectively conduct foreign policy and support aid and development programmes.

This news comes on the day that there has been coverage of the fact that one of the RAF A330 aircraft has been sent for repainting into a more visible paint scheme. This has led to a chorus of disapproval about how it isn’t necessarily the best use of the fleet, and why do we need a vanity project like having a plane painted in our national flag colours?

Frankly this is all a little bit silly. Most countries with a VIP air transport fleet tend to paint their aircraft in smart colours to transport their most senior dignitaries around in. A quick glance of Wikipedia shows dozens of different national designs used by air forces around the world.

The UK has always had a bit of an issue with the idea that any form of elegance or smartness can be attached to VIP travel, as if travelling austerely, and ideally via a C130 jump seat is the only possible way a Minister should travel. But is there really anything so badly wrong with the idea of a British Minister or leader arriving abroad in a recognisably British aircraft?

One of the great strengths of the Royal Yacht Britannia (the decommissioning of which without replacement was arguably the single greatest self-inflicted strategic soft power disaster in the 20^th Century for the British Government) was that she was recognisably British. In an era when image is everything, investing a smart design that shows what the official UK air transport looks like isn’t really a waste of money, it’s a good use of a tiny amount of money.

This won’t stop people moaning about it – but ironically the same people who moan about this sort of thing are the same who bemoan the lack of defence spending and bemoan defence cuts and how the UK isn’t a world player anymore and yet seem to feel outraged at the merest hint that the UK is actually a global power with global reach and global aspirations. We should never be ashamed of flying a Royal Air Force aircraft in the colours of our national flag.

The next few months will see interesting challenges ahead for FCO and DfID as they look to begin the change into becoming one government department. Much will be judged on how this move happens and whether it is the forerunner to creating a single genuinely integrated department, or if it is a Frankenstein’s monster MOG transfer, which puts two departments unhappily under the same banner, but with very different ways of working and employment conditions (as anyone who has worked in the often reshuffled / restructured / reorganised departments like DTI, BIS, BEIS, DECC, DFE can attest).

There is much to be gained here, but credibility is hard won and easily lost. DfID is listened to because of the good it does and the quality and experience of its staff, who are taken seriously across the globe. Ensuring they are retained, feel relevant and remain in the system will be crucial to the success of this project – but doing so may create challenges too.

For those who feel this is all a waste of money, and that what is actually needed is some kind of increase to the defence budget, it is worth remembering that firstly, money spent on development now saves much more money and lives being spent later – it can and does save a great deal in the long run.

Secondly, be wary of assuming that the MOD and defence spending is an instinctively sensible place to park this money instead. The MOD does not always have a great reputation for spending money, and can and does make mistakes – for example in the last few years it has spent millions in ‘fruitless payments’ for contractually obliged rent payments for properties that had been demolished…

There are interesting times ahead for Whitehall watchers, and it will be fascinating to see how this new department works with wider Whitehall. Will it set the stage for a renewed foreign, development and security policy hub at the heart of government that sets out a clear strategy for how the UK engages with the world? Or will it continue to rut heads with other departments, requiring the Cabinet Office to referee arguments in the manner of a referee on Gladiators?