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Foreign and Commonwealth Office

rose to call attention to changes in the budget of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the levels of staffing in embassies and their effect on British foreign policy and on European co-operation on foreign policy; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, policy changes often emerge from financial decisions. The immediate context for this debate, then, is to draw attention to the continuing squeeze on the FCO budget, which will fall in real terms over the next three years under the Comprehensive Spending Review—while that of the Department for International Development, in contrast, is set to double between now and 2013. UK subscriptions to international organisations, which fall on the FCO budget and which are beyond the control of the British Government alone, operate to squeeze this already small budget—one of the smallest in Whitehall—further. There comes a point at which a succession of cutbacks becomes a step-change: in the character of an organisation, in its ability to deliver the tasks demanded of it, and in the objectives it is able to serve. I want to pose the question of whether we are now facing such a step-change in the position and capabilities of the FCO, both at home and abroad, and to ask how we should adjust aspirations and objectives to match the more modest resources that the Government have provided. I raise this not from a sharply partisan perspective, but as someone who has worked with British diplomats over nearly 40 years, and observed their struggle to deliver the objectives that their political leaders have set—very often without anything like the resources needed to achieve them. Sir Hilary Synnott, in his just-published book on post-invasion Iraq, remarks that, "““there seemed to be a great mismatch between what Tony Blair was saying and how Whitehall was operating””." That was not for the first time, and probably not for the last. The history of Britain’s long retreat from empire, since Suez, has been of Governments struggling to maintain their aspirations to be a global power without being willing or able to pay for the means to do so, with the press insisting that we absolutely must maintain our pretensions and not admit our limitations. Harold Macmillan thus famously stressed our role in global summitry; Harold Wilson attempted to maintain our bases east of Suez. There was an outcry from the Daily Mail when in 1968 the Duncan report on the future of the Diplomatic Service suggested that the UK was then a "““major power of the second rank””." There was a further outcry, again led by the Daily Mail, when under Jim Callaghan’s Labour Government the Berrill report proposed the closer integration of the Diplomatic Service with the rest of Whitehall. There has, of course, been a revolution in communications among Governments in the 30 years since then. Secure e-mail is now being introduced, enabling people in posts abroad to comment on and contribute to policy discussions within Whitehall. The number of member states of the UN has continued to rise inexorably: there are now more than 190, with resident British missions in some 145 of those—leaving large numbers of African states, and several in Latin America, without a British presence. That includes one state, Burkina Faso, which is currently a member of the UN Security Council. International travel has become both easier and cheaper, making it often far more cost-effective to send officials out to foreign capitals for successive short visits than to post them and their families abroad. The British Diplomatic Service now has 40 per cent fewer home-based staff serving abroad than it had 30 years ago—a substantial reduction as the number of posts and countries has sharply increased. The work of government as a whole has become more international, and much more multilateral. One official recently offered me the estimate that 60 to 70 per cent of the work of DEFRA and of BERR—the Department of Business, Enterprise and something on regulation, I forget its exact title—is internationally driven, either by the European Union or by other multilateral conferences and organisations. Expert officials deal with expert officials from other Governments within these multilateral organisations, and often also deal there with the transnational lobbies that work to shape policies both here and abroad. It is, therefore, much less clear where bilateral missions fit into this world, or where the FCO stands in the making of overall policy in London. I have been told that different ministries now find it useful to second their own staff, not to UK missions abroad, but directly to the ministries of other important Governments—in Paris, Copenhagen, Tokyo and Brasilia—as well as to the European Commission and to the secretariats of UN agencies. The Foreign Office, under its new Secretary of State, has done its best to try to fit resources to objectives; ““Strategy Refresh”” has agreed a reduction of some 25 per cent in home-based staff in European embassies to enable posts in Afghanistan, Pakistan and across the Middle East and Asia to be reinforced. The number of staff working within the FCO in London is also being cut back, as direct communications enable posts abroad to deal directly with other departments across Whitehall. There is a delicate question as to whether these cutbacks have undermined the future of the Diplomatic Service as such, since the FCO may now no longer be able to provide sufficient home-based posts at different levels for people serving abroad to spend sufficient time during their careers at home. I therefore want to raise several questions about the future of the FCO and the management of British foreign policy. The first is about the co-ordination of British foreign policy and the relationship between the FCO and the other departments involved in international diplomacy, which now means most departments in Whitehall. The FCO, rightly, now defines itself as one of ““the three international departments”” with DfID and the Ministry of Defence. Since our new Foreign Secretary has defined tackling climate change as one of the FCO’s four strategic priorities, and combating transnational terrorist movements and political and religious extremisms is also a major theme of his, the need for closer and closer co-operation with other ministries—the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, DEFRA, BERR and so forth—is evident. I am no longer confident that the slimmer and slimmer FCO, with its tiny budget, can manage to provide the political overview that our Foreign Secretary rightly sees as its special role, to give us the ““joined-up government”” that is needed across particular negotiations. The Cabinet Office already holds the ring on European policy and is shouldering an expanding role in national security policy—not always in easy partnership with the FCO. However, people tell me that the Cabinet Office is currently in chaos, with far too high a turnover of staff and poor co-ordination between its different units; last year’s Civil Service capabilities review was sharply critical of its capabilities and performance. I am very glad that our new Foreign Secretary has reinstituted the FCO planning staff to try to give a strategic role in foreign policy, but I am no longer sure that the Foreign Office can plan the strategy of foreign policy on its own. Furthermore, I suggest that the task has been made more difficult by our new Prime Minister. Gordon Brown was famously unenthusiastic about the Foreign Office and its posts abroad which, as Chancellor, he did his best to avoid when travelling to foreign capitals. Successive reductions in the FCO budget may partly reflect his lack of enthusiasm. He seems impatient with the complexities of multilateral diplomacy, particularly with the interventions of smaller countries, and is in danger of underestimating the importance of political relations with difficult Governments beyond the UN Security Council’s permanent members and the G8. That raises difficult questions for some of us about the cutback in bilateral missions across the EU, and about the future of those missions. It is evident that we no longer need extensive staffs writing reports on technical subjects. That material is easily available on the internet and officials can come out from London when needed. However, we still need to cultivate good relations with the other 26 EU member states, smaller as well as larger, which means that we need politically skilled representatives well briefed in British domestic political constraints as well as in the politics of the countries to which they are accredited, to build and maintain relations of mutual confidence. As a succession of officials have told me over the years, departments across Whitehall still need good briefing on the domestic political context within which other EU Governments operate, not only in Berlin and Paris but also in Bucharest and Bratislava. I suggest that we need further reflection, perhaps even on a cross-party basis, about what sort of missions we now need across Europe after the present cutbacks, and what their priorities should be. It is unfortunate that so many bilateral British ambassadors in other EU countries are appointed to these posts as their second or even third successive posting abroad. We need representatives who are seen to represent London, and are up-to-date and closely in touch with thinking in London and across the UK. I am not sure that it is sensible to cut back military attaches in our European embassies when the UK is pressing other Governments so hard to increase their contributions to NATO, European and UN missions outside Europe. I note that many of these posts now house liaison officers from our police and law enforcement services, and wonder whether departments across Whitehall have dispassionately considered the trade-offs between resident liaison and the stream of visitors that air travel allows. Might I suggest that we should consider renaming our embassies across the EU—or even across the OECD world—as ““British Government Representations””, to reflect the job that they now do and to underline how closely they relate, or should relate, to the whole of Whitehall? That would suggest less pomp and more encouragement of professional Government-to-Government interaction, parliament-to-parliament interaction, and wider than that. Further, I suggest that the heads of these representations should be drawn from a wider group within Whitehall than the FCO alone. I note, with approval, that our new ambassador in Ankara had previously served as head of the immigration and nationality service in the Home Office. That was, after all, what the Berrill committee recommended 30 years ago—a closer integration of the home and diplomatic services, to fit the changing career patterns and expectations of the women and men in our Civil Service and to reduce the proportion of years served that are spent abroad. That, of course, necessarily implies that more attention needs to be paid in the domestic departments to the acquisition of language skills, including ““hard”” language skills, and to ensuring that service abroad is seen as a path to promotion; but these are, of course, desirable objectives in themselves. Outside the OECD world, British missions have more sensitive political roles to fulfil but also a growing mixture of officials to fulfil them. I note, for example, that now some 150 liaison officers from our law enforcement services are attached to overseas missions. Redefinition of Britain's national security and its management therefore also needs to address what sort of teams of officials, civilian and military, are needed to promote our interests in states of concern. There is a particular issue about the partnership between DfID and the FCO in the non-OECD world, which others in this debate may well wish to address. DfID has become a major department in foreign policy, with both our previous Prime Minister and our new one giving its goals their blessing. But, as we have seen in Kenya in the past two to three years, development goals and good governance can easily cut across each other, and relations between the understaffed but more generously paid—so I am told—DfID missions and British diplomats are not always easy. I note that last year's capabilities review of DfID in effect raised doubts as to whether that department will be able successfully to manage the continuing increases in funding it is due to receive over the next two to five years. There is room for much more careful integration of strategic planning and policy-making between these two departments to make sure that political and development objectives are successfully reconciled. The width of the gap between aspirations and resources should encourage the Government to take a much more open and positive attitude to the proposed EU external action service than they have so far displayed. Since we cannot afford resident representation in some 50 UN member states, we have an interest in making the best of shared representation and common reporting where we can. I know that Her Majesty’s Government have gone some way in sharing resources with friendly Governments in some foreign capitals—with the Germans in Reykjavik and Dar es Salaam, for example, even with the European Commission in one case. We should embrace the chance now offered to do more and face down the predictable cries of horror from the Daily Mail. Above all, we need to be comfortable with our role within the European Union. I was extremely happy to read in David Miliband’s speech of 4 March to the FCO forum for leadership his careful distinction between our most important bilateral relationship with the United States and our work within the multilateral framework of the European Union—an institution, he said, of which we are a party. That is a very important distinction as regards the way in which we should now operate in different countries. We recognise that the Government are reluctant to state this obvious transformation of the context of British foreign policy too openly before the Lisbon amending treaty has been ratified. I am not even sure that the Prime Minister, as opposed to the Foreign Secretary, yet fully understands how much our 35-year membership of the European Union has transformed the management of British international policy alongside all the implications of globalisation which we have witnessed. These Benches hope that in the wake of the ratification of the amending treaty Britain will at last become a settled and positive actor within the developing frameworks of EU internal and external policies and will wish to make sure that we play a major role in the formation, development and staffing of the EU external action service. Perhaps even the Conservatives will come to recognise the evident advantages of embedding British diplomacy further within that framework. I hope that is not too partisan a note on which to introduce the debate. I beg to move for Papers.