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Foreign and Commonwealth Office

My Lords, I rise briefly to thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for the elegance of his introduction to the debate and to pay particular tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, who has made most of the points that I would have wished to make. I strongly support what the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, said about the consular work of the Foreign Office and its posts abroad. We tend to forget how the exponential take-off in travel has meant that more and more people need the help of posts abroad, and therefore that it is desirable to retain posts. I want to concentrate on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay of Chiswick, about networks. There may be a systemic problem concerning the allocation of the slices of the FCO resource cake. Most people who have taken part in this debate would like a bigger cake. That is hardly going to be settled by what we say, but how the cake is sliced is an important issue. I strongly support the clearer prioritisation that has been introduced. The drafting of clear, short objectives for foreign policy is a good idea. The clear, short lists that have been produced, particularly by this Foreign Secretary, are very good; I strongly support that. However, there is a risk that they result in the favouring of programme expenditure as against network expenditure. For example, the FCO’s work on climate change is of a very high calibre and is done by very good people. However, if you are the priority holder—if you hold the climate change objective—you will tend to have a bias in favour of initiatives, conferences and publications rather than conversation and contact-building in posts. You will not see an immediate interest for you in maintaining an embassy in Ruritania. Yet if we do not have embassies in the Ruritanias, the overall objective of trying to get the world to move the right way on climate change will be harder to achieve. If, as I believe, we are approaching a Bretton Woods moment, when we need to devise the new institutions to deal with climate change, there is no point in having just a British prescription; there needs to be an EU prescription, and a prescription that is pre-sold to a willing world that has heard about it previously, discussed it and seen its angles on it reflected in the final product. That is the risk if you go down the route of priorities: no one is directly responsible for maintaining the embassy in Ruritania, for the network: at least, I would like to hear from the Minister if someone is—I cannot see, in the charts in Foreign Office publications these days, who is. That worries me. A number of points made in this debate were very relevant, such as that made by the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, about language training. You have to have people on the ground; you have to have people talking to the Government in office in the country in question; you have to have people knowing the opposition—the people who might be the next Government—and correctly predicting who they will be. The Gorbachev prediction was very important at the time. It is no good saying that all of this can be done directly on the telephone from London. Yes, a lot of it can be done with the Government in office, if the approach is properly targeted and people have been briefed by the post on the ground—if you have the right people on the line. But the Government in London cannot ring up the opposition—the next Government—out there because, first, they do not know who they are and, secondly, it is politically dangerous for a Government to talk to another country’s opposition. You need someone on the ground; you need to have a network of people who speak the right languages in the right quarters. Inside the European Union, we have not yet reflected in our deployments—in our network—the fact that the new member states have votes and vote on what become our laws. We still have posts of a size that were quite good for keeping in touch with the countries of Eastern Europe before they joined the European Union. We do not have posts, in my judgment, that are fully equipped for the lobbying that should go on before there is a great debate in council, a great decision and a great vote. So I strongly support the point about Bucharest and Bratislava, which was elegantly made at the start of this debate by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire.