Spending Round 2019

Lord Ricketts Excerpts

Wednesday 25th September 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ricketts (CB)]

My Lords, apart from my delight at being back in this House doing our constitutional duty of holding the Government to account, I rise to participate in the debate with a slightly different intention, primarily to say thank you. I will give the noble Lord a clue what I will thank him about when I say that I am chairman of the Normandy Memorial Trust. I thank the Government for the generosity of finding a way of granting the trust the £7 million that we needed to complete the memorial we are building in Normandy.

This is very welcome news, not least to the veterans for whom this is so important. They were determined to have a British memorial to commemorate all those under British command who fell in 1944—as far as possible while they could still visit it. They wanted to see all their comrades who lived, fought and died together brought into one place.

It is not a straightforward task to construct a British memorial on foreign soil—I think it is unprecedented in modern times. We were greatly helped by a contribution from the LIBOR fund to get us started. We have made great progress since then: we have a roll of honour of 22,442 names from many different nations, a fantastic site overlooking Gold Beach where many of the veterans landed and a moving design by a British architect. We also unveiled our sculpture, which will be the centrepiece of the memorial, on 6 June this year. We are now under way with construction.

We have had generous support from members of the public and one private donor. However, we were still well short of the funds needed to complete this to a standard that people would expect of a national memorial. In this 75th anniversary year of D-Day, we were therefore enormously grateful that the Chancellor was able to make this grant. I know that it is small in the overall scheme of things, but it makes a huge impact to be able to complete this project, which is about ensuring that the memory of that great generation is transmitted into the future. It will also include a memorial to French civilians who were killed in their thousands during the battle. In that sense, it stands as a very powerful memory and celebration of the ties that bind this country to our nearest neighbours on the continent. That is not without its force and relevance at this particular moment.

So that this speech is not entirely thanking the Government, I wanted to extend the point about funding Britain’s international commitment given the uncertainties in the years ahead. I welcome the uplift to the MoD’s budget—in this dangerous world, that makes great sense. The single intelligence vote has had a real-terms increase, as has the DfID budget, in line with the Government’s commitment to 0.7% of GDP.

My question is about the funding of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Here again, I suppose I should declare an interest as a former Permanent Secretary—a diplomat for 40 years. The details on the Government’s website suggest that the FCO settlement is what they call in the trade a flat real settlement—that is what the figures show here—apart from a contribution from the DfID budget which is subject to the OECD rules on aid spending and so is quite tightly constrained to being spent in lower-income economies.

I do not see how that is consistent with the Government’s ambition—implied in the term “global Britain”—for Britain to be an active, engaged partner in the world after Brexit. Can the Minister say anything about the Government’s intentions to have a real step change in FCO funding, perhaps in a comprehensive spending round to come, to make sure that we have the strong and confident Foreign Office we need for the years ahead?