Foreign and Commonwealth Office: Funding

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

Tuesday 9th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Luce was indeed an excellent Minister and governor and deserves to be congratulated on having made every single one of the points that I had intended to make. Undeterred, I will add a couple.

First, the funding situation is a little worse that my noble friend describes. In my five years, the FCO secured real-terms increases in its vote every year, but in the 15 years since I left, there has been a real-terms cut of 20%. It is actually bigger than 20% if you think of its effect on the front line, because when you strip out the programme spending on UN contributions, international subscriptions and the conferences, exhibitions and stunts which are so popular with Ministers of every political complexion, what you are left with for funding the service is much more steeply reduced.

The paradigm case is language skills, and I entirely agree with the points already made. When I was Permanent Secretary, there were some 400 to 500 people —my noble friend Lord Green among them—who spoke Arabic in the service. There now are 131. When I learned Russian, I was one of about 300 in the service who spoke it; there now are 56. That is very worrying.

As my noble friend Lord Green said, what Whitehall, Ministers and businesses look for from the Diplomatic Service is considered advice from people who know what they are talking about because they have been in the country more than once. They have got about and know who is in and who is out, who is going to be the next President, and who is rising and who is falling. They know who, in each decision tree, is the real decision-maker or influencer. They have been round the bazaars and the restive provinces, and they know what is being said in the mosques. They have made friends and done favours. They have been to the funerals and to the weddings: they have become trusted, so they can go and listen. Most importantly, they have to be good listeners.

I worry that our staff, much more thinly spread than they used to be, are now required to spend far too much of their time preaching rather than listening. It seems to me that the key thing that the Foreign Office adds is local knowledge distilled from a long stay and lots of contacts. I wonder whether this is the reason we were blindsided by the Russians when they attacked Ukraine or why we unwisely derecognised President Assad on the grounds that we assumed he was about to fall. I wonder whether we sometimes have such a tin ear for the resonance in other countries of our EU rhetoric because we do not have enough people explaining the local impact and effect of our actions.

The noble Lord, Lord Luce, is quite right to talk about a mismatch. Our talk about a global role and global responsibilities will be more posturing than performance if it is not backed with adequate resources.