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UK Worldwide Interests

My Lords, I entirely agree with that. The values of the past do not die although how we deliver them changes. I believe that the World Service’s review was thorough and authoritative, that the right decisions were taken and that they should be seen as part of an investment to meet the requirements of the new world. The Foreign Secretary gave his consent to that change. As noble Lords have said, there is an increasing demand for FCO consular and visa issuing services. The funding arrangements for these are different from those of the rest of the FCO. They are funded so that the visa fees recover the full cost of issuing visas. Similarly, consular services are funded through a levy on passports issued at home and overseas. The Treasury holds a reserve to meet catastrophes which hit consular costs in unforeseen ways, as the tsunami did. I am very determined that however unforeseen, monumental or unprecedented a disaster, UK citizens can feel confident of our consular service. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, has had to leave the Chamber but I say to him that the FCO sought a critical review of what happened with regard to the tsunami. The review has been generally positive. Some things were less than positive but we have learnt those lessons and are already applying them. On the thorny question of post closures, on 14 December 2004 my right honourable friend Jack Straw announced that we would be closing a number of posts in Africa, the Americas, Europe and the Pacific. I understand the reaction that this announcement caused in many quarters. We have understandable attachments to many of those posts. In many cases we could see potential for their continued existence. In many cases being in a particular country reflected historic friendship. A decision to close a post is never made lightly, as all noble Lords who have worked in the Foreign Office will know, not least because of the effect it has on staff, especially local staff who have served the UK loyally and well. But decisions to open and close sovereign and subordinate posts are made quite frequently. That must be part of the good management of FCO resources around the globe. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Garel-Jones, has appealed to any incoming government, if it were a Conservative one, to reverse that process. I emphasise that it would be a reversal of a process. From 1979 to 1997 the FCO closed 31 posts, largely in Western Europe and North America, and opened seven posts, mostly in Asia. I do not complain about those changes, for I believe they were judgments made in order to deliver the priorities of the time. Since 1997 we have made a series of changes in the overseas network, also in response to changing priorities. But staffing has grown by 9 per cent. We have opened 18 new sovereign and subordinate posts, along with 13 locally-staffed posts, while in that period 10 posts have been closed. It is interesting, for me at least, to note that Germany has 10 per cent fewer missions than Canada, and that India has 30 per cent fewer missions than Italy. I have never heard it said when people talk of the dynamism of the Indian economy that they can somehow not perform around the world because they have that relative difference in numbers. The decisions were taken after careful review and we were made to ensure, quite rightly, that FCO resources were best matched to the UK’s priorities and objectives. Most of the resources released will not be wholly available for reprioritisation until 2006–07, because of the need to meet the costs of redundancy and other transitional costs. I turn to the issue of DfID and FCO funding, a rather sharp element in this important debate. Comparisons have been made between the relative increase in resources for the FCO and for the Department for International Development. Many noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Park of Monmouth, and the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, raised the point. The comparison is not wholly helpful, as the nature of spend in the two departments is different and, as noble Lords have noted, this Government are committed to raising the level of overseas aid to 0.7 per cent of GDP by 2013. We urged this on our G8 and European partners and, despite some expressions of pain, they have mostly gone in the same direction. This is largely money which will be spent through DfID which, unlike the FCO, has a high proportion of programme spend in its budgets. In accordance with government policy on global commitments to eradicate poverty, these are increasing at 9 per cent a year. The prizes are considerable and inspiring; the eradication of hunger, the introduction of primary education and of good health as development for the poorest and hungriest on our planet. The noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville, was typically generous about that. The FCO’s programmes—the Global Opportunities Fund and the Global Conflict Prevention Pool—will increase by just over 7 per cent per year from £202 million to £313 million. That has been largely translated into valuable projects. The resources are more than money alone. The staff in both departments mainly deliver the United Kingdom’s international strategic priorities, in the UK and overseas, and will continue to do so. DfID will make its own case in next year’s White Paper. It will no doubt demonstrate the strides taken this year at Gleneagles, and elsewhere; strides which we will continue to take. It will no doubt also address the critics who focused on some elements of its expenditure such as consultancy. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, said, diplomacy is critical to DfiD missions. I hope that I have covered the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, who asked for a comparison of expenditure including those involved in MoD munitions. The noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, made an interesting point. I am committed to the argument that trade will do a vast amount more than aid will ever do. Most economists would argue the same. In order to eradicate poverty, we need a solid launching pad. Some of the aid expenditure will provide that and some debt forgiveness will help lift trade much further. As I have said, between now and next summer the Government will be undertaking a comprehensive spending review. I hope that noble Lords will accept that I will be deeply interested in budgets; FCO Ministers are not uninterested in those, if I may say so. We will be looking at the entirety of government spending in the context of five long-term challenges facing the UK. There is a strong international dimension to many if not all of these challenges, as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, said. It may well be that the FCO will want to develop proposals on how to do that. The FCO has to be persuasive; not just to Government and to Parliament, but to a wider public. It will need to show not only what it can achieve with more resources but how it has been a good steward of the resources that it has. I will try to deal in correspondence with many of the other issues raised, but this has been a debate about setting the path and the prism through which we should understand what is taking place. In concluding, I make this appeal. Addressing global challenges—whether narcotics, terrorism, trade, or the environment—and delivering consular and migration services lie at the heart of the strategy. The strategy has been widely discussed and has broad support in Parliament. The Foreign Office takes its decisions on resources best to achieve these strategic priorities. It is against the delivery of that strategy that the FCO should be judged. That is what I ask your Lordships’ House to do. The raw metrics where some claim cuts and I say that we can demonstrate growth are not really fulfilling the substance of that judgment. The judgment is on this: what are we trying to do and have we made the best available provision to do it? Let us judge what we do in this country by that set of equations. They are the only rational ones.