In a significant adjustment to the United Kingdom’s international profile, Prime Minister, Boris Johnson has announced that the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development (DfID) are to be merged.
In a statement to Parliament, Mr Johnson said a new Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office would “unite our aid with our diplomacy and bring them together in our international effort”.
Mr Johnson said the Coronavirus crisis had shown “distinctions between diplomacy and overseas development are artificial and outdated”.
As an example, he said it made no sense to ask whether British support for the World Health Organisation and other bodies to help them deal with COVID-19 amounted to aid or foreign policy.
The move comes after months of speculation that the two Departments could be merged, and despite warnings’ by MPs, ex-Ministers and former Permanent Secretaries that a merger was unnecessary and could damage the UK’s standing as a driver of international development.
Mr Johnson said the Foreign Secretary would now decide which countries received UK aid, delivering a “single UK strategy for each country overseen by the National Security Strategy”.
“DfID outspends the Foreign Office more than four times over, and yet no single decision maker in either Department is able to unite our efforts or take a comprehensive overview,” Mr Johnson said.
“Faced with this crisis today, and the opportunities that lie ahead, we have a responsibility to ask whether our current arrangements, dating back to 1997, still maximise British influence,” he said.
Former Foreign Office Permanent Secretary Lord Ricketts said that to “crunch the two Departments back together again in Whitehall” would not be necessary or a good idea as they served different purposes.
Lord Patten, who was Minister for Overseas Development at the Foreign Office in the late 1980s, warned that a merger could cause “all kinds of conflicts” over money.
The move coincided with the announcement that Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Simon McDonald (pictured), will step down from his position in September and leave the Public Service next year.
Sir Simon’s nearly four-decade career began in the Foreign Office in 1982.
He served in Jeddah, Riyadh, Bonn, and Washington before becoming Permanent Private Secretary to Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, in 2001.
Sir Simon has since served as Ambassador to Israel and Germany, the Foreign Office’s director for Iraq, and Foreign Policy Adviser to Prime Minister, Gordon Brown before taking up his current post in 2015.
London, 21 June 2020
