Lord Luce
Main Page: Lord Luce (Crossbench - Life peer)Foreign and Commonwealth Office: Funding
Lord Luce Excerpts
Lord Luce (CB)
My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to clarify how the Government are matching the funding of our diplomacy in relation to our foreign policy priorities. I am grateful to all noble Lords who are participating, with all their experience, and to the Minister for responding.
I support the Government’s commitment in the Queen’s Speech to continue to play a leading role in global affairs, and I welcome the autumn spending review decision to preserve the FCO budget in real terms. However, I suggest that there is still a serious mismatch between our foreign policy priorities and available diplomatic resources. The result is that we cannot properly fulfil our ambitions.
We need to look at this issue in a broader context to see why this is the case. Between 1997 and 2010 there were considerable reductions in the service. These included the closure of more than 30 UK overseas posts across Africa, Latin America and Asia. The coalition Government then embarked on tough new economic policies. During their five years in office, this led to a 16% core spending cut in real terms and a consequent reduction in UK-based staff from just under 5,000 to just under 4,500, although this was buttressed by a larger locally engaged staff.
I should acknowledge that in 2011, the then Foreign Secretary, now Lord Hague, did everything he could to retain our embassies. As a result, the total number of overall posts overseas has increased from 258 to 268, and the numbers are maintained in 168 countries and nine multilateral bodies. However, the danger now is that our very high-quality UK-based staff are too few, trying to do too many things. They are too thinly spread.
I was struck by the Foreign Secretary’s own admission of this when he said to the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, just before the Autumn Statement:
“The ability to maintain the network at its current level and to sustain that in the future, and the ability to have a sufficient density of policy-making capacity here in London so that we can lead the foreign-policy-making process across Government and beyond are the key to the Foreign Office’s raison d’etre”.
He went on to say that,
“we are pretty close to the irreducible minimum of UK-based staff on the network”.
By comparison, we spend less per capita on diplomacy than the United States, Germany, France, Australia and Canada.
Another way of looking at this is in the context of HMG’s spending on international policy. Of every £1,000 the Government spend, £2 goes to the Foreign Office, £50 goes to defence and £10 goes to DfID for development aid. I note that the MoD and DfID shares are now formally linked to international targets; the FCO’s is not, and so is vulnerable to squeeze.
It is increasingly clear that the capability of the FCO to undertake its vital work has been declining. There have been noticeable weaknesses in managing the outcome of crises in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the operational handling of the Russia/Ukraine region, Syria and Libya. Also, for example, only 23% of the jobs in eastern Europe and Central Asia and only 27% in the Middle East and north Africa have the required number of local language speakers. In this context, I welcome the new Language Centre and the Diplomatic Academy. Further problems arise from underinvestment in modern equipment and ageing IT systems.
It seems to me that we now face a choice: either we continue to play a global role, punching above our weight, as the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, once suggested, or we recognise that we are no longer willing to afford what it takes, sharpen our priorities and reduce or eliminate some of our roles. I, like the Government, am in favour of the first choice. There are many reasons for this.
In my student days at Cambridge, I had the privilege of meeting Dean Acheson, who had famously proclaimed that Britain had lost an empire but not yet found a role. I believe that this is no longer true. We have seen a successful transformation of an empire into a Commonwealth of 53 equal nations whose potential we have yet to fulfil. We are anxious to play a full role globally, but no longer as an imperial superpower.
It is worth reminding ourselves of our position in the world. We are the fifth-largest economy. We are a nuclear weapon state within the non-proliferation treaty. We are members of more multilateral international bodies than any other nation, ranging from the UN—with our permanent membership of the Security Council—to the EU, NATO, IMF and so on. We can add to all this our “accumulated estate of soft power”, so well summarised by the 2014 Lords Select Committee on Soft Power, ably chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Howell. It showed that we have the strongest cultural assets in the world. We are a leading digitally connected society. We are ethnically diverse and therefore outward looking. The BBC World Service and the British Council are outstanding in communicating our values to the world.
At the same time, Britain’s security and prosperity are under threat and likely to remain so. If anything, the world is more troubled than it was in 2010. Moreover, it is changing fast. We have seen the rapid rise of China, an aggressive Russia, disintegration in the Middle East spurred on by Daesh, a weakening of the EU and of transatlantic cohesion, an international humanitarian system at breaking point, with 60 million displaced people and mass migration towards Europe, and a sketchy global economy and financial system, in addition to the fact that the end of the Cold War has seen the return of local conflicts, many failed states and the increase of terrorism. In the face of all this, it must be in our British interests to continue using our diplomatic assets around the world, and within alliances and international organisations, to work actively for peace, stability and the promotion of free trade. But we can only do that if our diplomacy is adequately funded and supported.
In my five years as a Minister in the FCO, I grew to admire the immense skills and intellectual judgment of many independent-minded diplomats. But I recognise that the role of the diplomat is changing with the digital age. The range of tasks facing a diplomat today demand a multiskilled approach. Our embassies provide a platform for 26 government departments, promote trade, deliver consular services and contribute to global issues such as tackling climate change and cybersecurity. This must mean attracting and retaining sufficient highly qualified people, who these days have many other career choices open to them. If we spread them too thinly around the world and give them inadequate training, we will both overstrain them and fail to provide the quality needed for an effective foreign policy.
I suggest we need more of these highly qualified people as well as better resources to support them. I am not convinced that the settlement the FCO has now reached with the Treasury for the next five years provides for this. The cost would be peanuts compared to the DfID budget of over £13 billion. I want to see us using all our strengths as a country—strengths that we tend to understate and underplay—to try to contribute to a better and more stable world.
We need to take every opportunity within the Commonwealth to use our soft power to our mutual benefit. We need to be active in Europe, whatever form it takes. We need to remain a robust partner in NATO through strengthened Armed Forces and as a nuclear power. We need to be actively working with our friends in the Gulf countries to reduce tension and to end conflict. We need to work hard to understand the importance of new relationships in Asia while keeping close to our neighbours in Europe and our old friends in the States. In all this, effective diplomacy will be at a premium. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response to this debate and, in particular, to the urgent need for the Government to provide adequate diplomatic support to enable us to continue to play an effective global role.