The Foreign Office and Department for International Trade are hoping to receive £10m at Wednesday's Autumn Statement to fund an “initial wave of trade policy slots” in the wake of Britain's vote to leave the European Union, Foreign Office chief Sir Simon McDonald has said.
FCO perm sec McDonald told MPs on the Foreign Affairs Committee this week that the two departments have put a joint bid to the chancellor as part of preparations for the Treasury's latest fiscal statement.
“I am hopeful that the joint bid will give us some more money for extra trade policy officers in the network,” he said.
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The money would be used to build up trade policy capability in government in the near future, while negotiations with the European Union about Britain's departure are still ongoing. Whitehall currently has a shortage of trade policy expertise after four decades of handing responsibility for striking deals to the EU.
The FCO’s chief operating officer Karen Pierce told the committee that this money would be an “initial outlay to help shape and analyse places overseas with which we might want to develop a trading relationship”.
McDonald said the Foreign Office would focus on training, rather than outside recruitment, to meet the new need for trade policy and negotiation skills across government.
“One of our emphases is on training rather than recruiting for gaps, so one of our responses is to set up for the first time a trade policy and negotiation faculty in Diplomatic Academy,” he said.
“We are in the process of doing that with the Department for International Trade – we think the best response is to train up people we already have rather than recruit expensively from outside.”
Earlier this month, the FCO and DIT launched a recruitment process to hire a trade negotiation expert to run this faculty, which has been allocated a £6m budget.
The Diplomatic Academy was launched in 2015 – it now has 12 faculties, which offer qualifications at three levels: foundation, practitioner and expert.
The first foundation level modules are now available and are accredited by City & Guilds. Practitioner level courses are being rolled out, McDonald told MPs, and the FCO is looking for a “heavyweight academic” partner to validate practitioner and expert-level courses.
He said his ambition for the Academy was for it to become “a centre of excellence where others across government can train and acquire something which is validated, and therefore worth something outside the FCO”.
Pierce told MPs that the Diplomatic Academy was also taking part in work to develop new leadership courses which will be available to all officials.
“Within Whitehall some work is going on through the new learning and leadership board to take the best of MoD courses and Shrivenham [home of the defence academy], and the best of the Diplomatic Academy and make them available across Whitehall,” she said.
“That’s very much in its infancy – but we want to see what more can be done collectively.”