For the first stop in our blog series on the future of British aid, we’re looking ‘big picture’ at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). This is the new department that will come into being in September, and we’ve been thinking about how it can avoid some of the risks we’ve warned about and take advantage of new opportunities. We’ve submitted a paper on the risks and opportunities of the new FCDO to the officials planning the merger. This blog looks at some of our ideas.
We know what the UK public’s the priorities for the new department are:
- transparency – so their taxes are well-spent
- a focus on the most vulnerable people – whose need for our support is greatest.
But how can the new department ensure it gives the public what they want?
The department will have to find the balance between the contrasting priorities of its predecessors – promoting British interests abroad, as the Foreign Office has done for centuries, and prioritising the world’s poorest people, as the Department for International Development (DFID) has for 20 years. This will be a challenge, but one for which there is a global framework. The Sustainable Development Goals, agreed in 2015 thanks to British leadership, changed the way the world thought about international development by making all the commitments universal. Development was no longer just for poor countries, but something that we must all do together, at different rates and stages, but committed to the same goals and putting those farthest behind first.
This universalist view should be at the heart of the new department, so that its founding principle is to deliver for the most vulnerable people and build a healthier, safer, more prosperous world because that is in our national interest, not instead of pursuing the national interest. It can set the new department up to use all the tools at its disposal to meet taxpayers’ expectation that it prioritises the most vulnerable people, while also advancing British interests.
There are more practical ways in which the new department can bring a new angle to focusing on the most vulnerable people, such as a “single UK strategy for each country”, which gives policy coherence and combines the expertise of both departments to plan a long-term vision for development on the basis of deep understanding, rather than quick wins transplanted from a Whitehall strategy. Getting this right will need the process to be led in-country,
There are also opportunities to combine the skills of the previous departments to maximise impact for the most vulnerable. The UK’s role as host of the G7 in 2021 will be the first proof of concept for the new approach, and if the FCDO effectively brings together the best of DFID and the best of the Foreign Office, it can use this platform to convene action to ensure the recovery from COVID-19 prioritises the poorest and most marginalised people. The UK can only achieve this by combining its diplomatic influence with its development expertise.
Parliament’s International Development Committee and the senior MPs on the Liaison Committee have weighed in on the transparency point, calling for a specialist select committee for aid spending, to scrutinise aid on behalf of the taxpayer, with the Independent Commission for Aid Impact reporting to it. These are vital measures to ensure taxpayers have confidence in the work the new department does on their behalf. There are other measures that should be adopted too, such as retaining and expanding devtracker, which gives public information on aid programmes, and setting and meeting ambitious targets for the department’s rating in the Aid Transparency Index, on which DFID has always scored much better than the Foreign Office.
We did not welcome the merger, and we still worry that it could downgrade the UK’s ability to improve the lives of the world’s poorest children. But these are some of the ways the new department can make the best of the hand it is dealt, in order to deliver on the British public’s hopes that it will provide for the most vulnerable people in a way that is transparent and well scrutinised.
