Johnson’s bizarre foreign aid merger must be explained
It has been a month since the government announced that the Department for International Development (DFID) is to be merged with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). The move is intended to bring the UK’s humanitarian and diplomatic arms together to create the flagship of the prime minister’s “Global Britain”.
A month on, and we are none the wiser about how the merger will work in practice, what is being
sacrificed, the costs or what will happen to the 3,600 DFID staff in the UK and its country offices around the world. All this needs to be resolved by the government’s self-imposed deadline of 1 September.
Parliament has yet to be given the evidence-based rationale for this bizarre decision and why it was taken so impulsively – particularly at a time when the government’s own integrated review of foreign policy was paused, and while we are in the midst of a global pandemic.
The prime minister announced in the House of Commons that the merger was in the UK’s national interest, but it is hard to see how this is the case. The move will undoubtedly harm the UK’s standing in the global community. In our report published today, the International Development Committee makes clear that the UK voice is strengthened because of DFID’s reputation as the gold standard in development, providing top quality interventions which transform people’s lives without strings attached. This approach builds confidence in the UK generally as a high-level international player, enabling us to extend influence in other areas of international policy.
This lack of transparency has led to my committee calling on the government to show its hand. It must explain why the decision was taken with no consultation: not with parliament, not with staff, and, as the secretary of state has recently admitted to the committee, not with NGOs or others that partner with DFID in projects on the ground.
If the government had done its due diligence and reviewed similar mergers around the world, the decision may not have been taken so easily.
It would be totally counterproductive to cast aside the overwhelming benefits that being a development superpower brings, in the rush to rebrand ourselves
My committee looked specifically at Australia and Canada. The former merged AusAID and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in 2013, and in the same year Canada merged its International Development Agency and Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. The case of Australia led to “2,000 years of expertise” being lost as specialist staff left in their droves, and Canada’s administrative costs increased immediately after the merger. Both mergers were disruptive, and both mergers significantly affected the countries’ global standing.
We must also consider how out of step the move is for the UK, as one of the biggest aid donors in the world, to lose a development minister. Other major donor countries, such as Canada, Germany, Denmark and Norway all have a minister solely responsible for development. We have already heard that there are no plans to retain a minister with a development portfolio in the UK. The committee urges the government to reconsider this, and to go a step further and have that minister attend cabinet and have a seat on the National Security Council, given the intersection between global poverty, instability and threats to national security.
This merger is particularly hard to swallow at a time when the aid budget is being significantly reduced due to the fall in domestic economic activity. We have heard numerous accounts of aid programmes grinding to a halt as Whitehall departments scuttle around looking for 30 per cent cost savings. The implications are potentially catastrophic for some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable who rely on UK aid.
While my committee supports the government’s commitment to 0.7 per cent of our gross national income on foreign aid, it must make further guarantees to offer reassurance that no one will be left behind and that the world’s poorest remain the focus. Despite the clawbacks, life-saving aid programmes must be protected,
and the new Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office must adopt DFID’s locally-led focus to ensure greater impact.
All of this work must be subject to thorough scrutiny. That is why we are calling for the formation of a new committee with a cross-departmental remit, particularly given the growing number of government departments spending Official Development Assistance, often with woefully inadequate transparency. Further, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact should continue, in collaboration with the new committee, to provide the independent and thorough analysis of whether UK aid programmes offer value for money.
While the merger is now inevitable, we must make sure it is executed in a way that keeps UK aid central to the new department’s work, with a clear focus on ending extreme poverty. It would be totally counterproductive for the government to cast aside the overwhelming benefits that being a development superpower brings, in the rush to rebrand ourselves as Global Britain.