Foreign and Commonwealth Office: Funding

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 9th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I strongly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Luce, about the loss of analytical and linguistic capability in the Foreign Office over the past 20 years or more.

I spent a little time as a very junior member of the ministerial team in the Foreign Office saying that we should be spending more time looking at the eastern neighbourhood and being told that it was not a high priority. When the Ukraine crisis broke out, we were desperately short of people who understood Ukraine and Russia, and others who had retired had to be brought back in. That is a good example of how if you do not follow things through—if you do not understand the language or have sufficient understanding of where a country’s elite is coming from to be able to empathise, even if you disagree with its point of view—you get things wrong.

I also strongly agree with the dangers of reducing the number of overseas posts to a point when you have one or two that are home-based. We are asking the locally employed in a number of posts to do things which are, frankly, dangerous for them and, incidentally, do not provide good enough political reporting for us.

I disagree strongly with the noble Lord about whether or not we have a foreign policy. I have read the 1961 report to Harold Macmillan which said that unless we have a coherent European policy, we will not have an overall strategic foreign policy. That is as true now as it was in 1961. I will take that no further but say simply that in terms of where the Foreign Office goes from here, we also need to recognise that the Foreign Office can no longer make foreign policy. It is a great source of expertise and advice but we make foreign policy across Whitehall. In this Government—too much, I think—the Treasury makes foreign policy, No 10 makes foreign policy, the Cabinet Office makes foreign policy, and the Foreign Office has been to some extent pushed out. But if we want to deal with climate change, management of the internet, cybersecurity, global pandemics or migration, we have to have people across Whitehall with skills, understanding of foreign countries and negotiating capabilities, and we are not good at doing that.

Those noble Lords old enough to remember the Berrill report, which said that we needed to have a proper overseas cadre across Whitehall, will remember that that was unfortunately resisted by the Foreign Office. I tried when in government to look at language skills across Whitehall. There was very little evidence that departments even kept proper account of who spoke what languages. That is simply not good enough. We need the cross-posting of people from other departments when they are young and unmarried or without children to go abroad, partly because that is when it is much easier to get them to do that, so that we build those sorts of external understandings and languages in other departments.

My final comment is that the biggest threat to the FCO’s future overseas budget is the Government’s announcement that they are going to impose economic rent on government departments across Whitehall. The FCO would make a wonderful hotel. I am not sure the FCO budget could stand the comparable rent.