The FCO and the Spending Review 2015

Debate between Patrick Grady and Crispin Blunt

Tuesday 1st March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

I congratulate the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt), and all his colleagues, including my hon. Friend the Member for North East Fife (Stephen Gethins), on the important job they have done in producing the report and the quite considerable success that they have achieved in persuading the Chancellor at least to maintain the Foreign Office budget more or less at what it was in the face of very great pressure. I will come back to some of those points as we go on.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) pointed out, this is a debate on the estimates. Madam Deputy Speaker, you were only doing your job when you called my hon. Friend to order, because of the rules and conventions of this House by which you are bound. None the less, it does serve to demonstrate the complete inadequacy of the estimates process. The motion in front of us today authorises, in clauses 2 and 3, the expenditure of more than £50 million of public money, yet the Chamber is almost empty. There has not even been a single contribution from the Back Benches of the Official Opposition party. The broader estimates are contained in the mighty tome, House of Commons paper 747, which was no doubt named after a jumbo jet owing to its not inconsiderable size. Yet here we are, barely an hour and 20 minutes after starting this debate, moving to the wind-up speeches.

All kinds of important Government expenditure will have no kind of real in-depth scrutiny. Page 407 includes a payment from the resources reserves (programme) budget in respect of the battle of New Orleans commemoration—an increase of £142,000. Page 410 contains a transfer to the Cabinet Office (capital) budget in respect of the Foxhound Project—perhaps the Minister can tell us what that is. There is a decrease of £3 million to that Government budget. Also on page 410 is a cost-neutral transfer of the old Admiralty building, which is much appreciated by FCO officials, I am sure, to the Department for Education.

[Crispin Blunt]

I have some sympathy with the hon. Gentleman and with the arguments, which were almost in order, about the quality of the estimates. As he has raised this question, perhaps when the Minister replies to the debate he can explain why we have given that money to celebrate a British defeat that happened after the peace treaty was concluded on the war in which it took place. Perhaps we can also have an explanation of the biggest number of all in the Foreign Office estimates, which is the budget-neutral increase in programming expenditure fully offset by an increase in receipts in respect of revised intergovernmental charging, which appears to be a sum of £220 million. If the Minister could explain that, we might at least have had some focus on the estimates themselves.

[Patrick Grady]

The hon. Gentleman makes my point for me. It demonstrates the complete lack of scrutiny. Madam Deputy Speaker, you did, of course, say that there are other mechanisms—such as Select Committees, statements, Question Times and Westminster Hall—through which we can discuss different aspects of expenditure. The estimates process itself is clearly inadequate, particularly for those Members from Scotland who were told during the debates on English votes for English laws that this was the opportunity for us to discuss Barnett consequentials and the impact of legislation on which we cannot vote because of the EVEL procedures. It seems that that opportunity is being denied to us. As a member of the Procedure Committee, I look forward to our inquiry into the estimates procedure and to questioning Ministers, particularly Treasury Ministers, and Members from all parties about how we can make this procedure fair. As I am at risk of deviating too far from the motion and being ruled out of order myself, I will now turn to the more general themes of the debate in the Foreign Affairs Committee’s report, and the broader issue of the FCO’s role and function.

It seems from the tone of the debate that the FCO is in a somewhat precarious situation. It is a victim, like so many other Departments, people and communities across the country, of the Government’s ideological commitment to swingeing public service cuts, no matter what the cost. In the SNP manifesto, we showed that it was possible modestly to increase public services, while over the long term still balancing the books and paying down the public debt. This estimate is one of the more unforeseen and probably slightly less concerning aspects of that commitment, as it does not impinge on people’s day-to-day lives in the way that so many other cuts are. Nevertheless, it is the impact of an ideological drive from the Government.

At the same time, that approach is leading to an increasingly ideological and almost isolationist narrowing of focus and interest, with a divergence away from what should be priority areas—the protection of human rights and the promotion of peaceful and sustainable development. Some of that was alluded to in the discussion about the role of the FCO and its expenditure on overseas and official development assistance. The SNP has long welcomed the Government’s commitment to 0.7% of GNI to be spent on ODA, but meeting the target is not a blank cheque to spend that on whatever the Government can cram into the definition of ODA. I have several times raised on the Floor of the House the increasing overlap between expenditure for that target and that for the 2% NATO target, which might be allowed in principle but I do not think is what people expected in practice when the Government made those commitments.

The hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) mentioned ODA and the funding of the World Service, and I share a number of his concerns. My hon. Friend the Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (Ms Ahmed-Sheikh) talked about the importance of effective co-operation across Government, and it would be interesting to hear the Minister’s responses to her points.

The headline FCO budget is one of the smallest in government, but that does not mean that it is necessarily the most effective or efficient. The discussion, as I have said, is in the context of the pressure being felt across public spending, so if the FCO’s budget is to be protected it must be used efficiently. From the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) we heard some statistics about the number of people employed. Over my lifetime I have, for various reasons, visited three of Her Majesty’s embassies and high commissions around the world. I was in Malawi, where, despite 2 million people in that country not having access to clean water, the high commissioner has a swimming pool at his disposal in his residence. In Zambia, a tennis court is provided in a country in which most children probably play football without shoes. Just the week before last I was in Berlin, where I found that the embassy takes up an entire street block and practically stops the traffic through one of the main thoroughfares right next door to it.

There are undoubtedly efficiencies to be found. We were told during the independence referendum that Scotland could never afford a network of global embassies, outposts and so on—that this would be one of the crippling costs of independence. To be fair, if we were to try to replicate what the FCO has, that might well be true. However, I think that a country such as Scotland could probably manage much more modestly. Indeed, considering the role that we play in the world today, so could the United States—I mean the United Kingdom, although the United States probably could too, for that matter.

Other issues that the FCO needs to consider have been mentioned in other debates. There was a useful debate in Westminster Hall a while back about consular assistance, especially for bereaved families following the loss of loved ones overseas. I wrote to the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), about concerns that one of my constituents raised about support for people who are victims of terrorist attacks—or, more accurately in her case, who witness terrorist attacks, as she did in Tunisia. She feels very concerned about the lack of information and communication, which I have mentioned in parliamentary questions and in a letter to the Under-Secretary.

Finally, we have also heard about the downgrading of human rights in the FCO’s priority areas. The director of Amnesty International has said:

“The UK is setting a dangerous precedent to the world on human rights. There’s no doubt that the downgrading of human rights by this government is a gift to dictators the world over and fatally undermines our ability to call on other countries to uphold rights and laws.”

This is a serious concern about which I have heard from a number of civil society organisations, and it is important that it is addressed. Nowhere else is that more true than with the situation in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, where UK planes with pilots trained in the UK and bombs made in the UK, co-ordinated in the presence of UK military advisers, are being used in the war in Yemen. At some point, the Government must tell us when that adds up to complicity in that war.

In conclusion, these next two days ought to be taken up by a debate on the estimates process, but we have shown in this debate the inadequacy of the House’s processes and procedures for dealing with estimates and expenditure. We have also touched on the important role of the FCO, the pressures it faces as a result of the Government’s ideological budget cuts and the challenges that that presents for more effective use of taxpayers’ money and co-ordination across Departments.