The new aid super-ministry must avoid the terrible errors of the past
The merged department will need a coherent plan and effective leadership if it is to silence the critics
The history of Whitehall reorganisations in recent decades is not a happy one. The vast departments created by the Heath government – Environment, Health and Social Security and Trade and Industry – were subsequently dismantled. Harold Wilson’s Department of Economic Affairs was a disastrous distraction. The main motive for abolishing the Ministry of Agriculture and creating Defra in 2001 seemed to be to obscure the failure to contain foot and mouth disease. On these and many other occasions thousands of hours of civil service time have been consumed moving staff around, renting new buildings, appointing new managers and creating new hierarchies without any resulting improvement to the governing of the nation.
Some of these departments were too unwieldy for any individual to lead; others lacked any common purpose; still others were merged successfully but lost the specialist skills of their component parts. Many were born out of the search for an immediate political statement rather than a coherent plan for improving government.
Boris Johnson’s announcement last week of a merger of the Foreign Office with the Department for International Development will need such a plan. Otherwise it will join those other formerly grand ministries in the graveyard of history. The plan has been attacked by opposition parties and by David Cameron. Andrew Mitchell, probably the most outstanding Development Secretary we’ve ever had, denounced it as “a quite extraordinary mistake”, which would destroy a key aspect of “Global Britain” at a stroke.
There is indeed a great deal that could go wrong. Our hard-earned reputation for commitment to reducing global poverty could be damaged if the move is seen as too politicised. Or there might be the opposite problem: millions spent on reorganising but no practical change. Key issues might be neglected: a foreign secretary might be passionate about development or about diplomacy but not about both at the same time.
Nevertheless, as a former foreign secretary I can see the logic for the merger. I often spent time with African leaders who listened to me politely but really wanted to meet the development secretary, armed with a budget four times the size of mine. Whatever I was saying about upholding democracy, protecting human rights and working with the West would have been strengthened if I had held the purse strings as well. And the same is true for our foreign ambassadors in foreign capitals, who will gain considerable clout from a combined UK budget.
Such a budget could certainly be used to deliver more assistance to countries of strategic importance to Britain. Boris Johnson pointed out last week that we currently give more aid to Tanzania than to all six countries of the western Balkans. That, of course, is because there are many more poor people in Tanzania. But even a small increase in assistance to the Balkans, a region torn by division, friendly to Britain, courted by Russia, and facing great uncertainty would go a long way in helping human development and reinforcing British influence at the same time.
A decision of that kind could be made by a foreign secretary ranging across both departments. Yet there is no way they should try to command all this on their own. A strong deputy is needed, specialising in development, acknowledged to be reporting to the Foreign Secretary but sufficiently empowered to attend international meetings and speak with authority. That means attending Cabinet meetings and leading debates in Parliament. Without such support, the Secretary of State will be overwhelmed and the department will fail.
Intense efforts will be needed to make sure the new super-department is a place of excellence and education. I opened a new language school within the Foreign Office, after my Labour predecessors bizarrely closed the old one, and founded the Diplomatic Academy that now trains our diplomats. Using such strengths to create a world-class centre that understands both diplomacy and aid is vital to the success of this idea.
The most important test of all will be whether the vast amounts this country spends on overseas aid – which does a huge amount of good in the world – can be spent more effectively. The first step in this should be to change the rules on when aid money can be spent. At the moment, because the UK is committed to spend 0.7 per cent of our national income on aid, a lot of money is sometimes given at the last minute. In 2015, when our economy performed better than expected, Dfid suddenly had to spend another billion pounds to hit the target. That does not lead to wise spending.
Worse still, to avoid this problem, officials are required by the Treasury to spend 80 per cent of the money on any aid project by December each year. So they end up telling people running an excellent project to address deprivation in a foreign country that they can have a lot of money now and then nothing after that. Few sensible businesses would allocate money in that way. This merger is an opportunity to change the rules, so that 0.7 per cent is a more flexible target to be met over several years, with money always spent well.
Finally, and most crucial of all, the new department will succeed if it makes a global impact with the combined weight of British diplomacy and aid. The huge support for work on Covid vaccines announced last week is an example of that. I would add three global campaigns to show what the UK can do. One would be to entrench democracy and good governance in countries where the Chinese approach to aid will otherwise lead them to become more corrupt and trapped in debt. Another would be to strengthen work on an issue such as preventing sexual violence in conflict, allocating at least one per cent of aid to support the victims of such crimes and bring perpetrators to justice. And third, we should put more aid behind global conservation efforts, as this pandemic has shown how humanity depends on respect for the natural world.
If, at the next election, the new Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office can show it has accomplished such things, its critics will be silenced. If it can’t, its name will be yet another miserable footnote in the long textbook of reorganisations that didn’t work.