The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office was too ambitious in the first year of the 2020 DfID-FCO merger, Philip Barton has said.
The FCDO permanent secretary said the department did not realise how much of an impact the Covid pandemic and cuts to aid spending would have on the merger, which brought together the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development.
Barton, who will step down next year, took up his appointment as FCDO perm sec on 2 September 2020, day one of the new merged department and right in the middle of the first and second waves of the Covid virus.
Asked by the Foreign Affairs Committee what he had learned from his four years as permanent secretary, Barton said: “I think the one lesson that I learned – and if I had my time again would think about differently – is we were over ambitious in what we tried to achieve in the first phase of the merger.”
Barton said the department “didn't understand quite how long [the pandemic] was going to continue and how deep the impact was going to be, including to our own finances, but also our ability to operate as a global organisation, which depends to a high degree on being able to have people overseas and to travel and to meet people”.
“I think after about a year, we realised that that ambition couldn't be met, and we therefore pared back the transformation to absolute making sure that the basic fundamental foundations of a single department were what we prioritised,” he added. The department focused on having a single set of accounts, a single system for finances in HR, and a single IT system, he said.
“We had hoped to be more ambitious in that first phase, but particularly Covid – but also the reduction in resources – had made it more challenging than I think any of us realised at the start. So that was my one big lesson.”
A report published by the National Audit Office in March said the merger had been brought back on track “by scaling back original plans which were unrealistic in scope and timing”. NAO chief Gareth Davies said the department “took sensible action to get the merger back on track when it was clear it could not be delivered to the original plan”.
The report also said the FCDO “did not do enough in the early stages to set out a clear vision and direction for the department”.
Asked about the criticism that the department lacked a clear vision in its early days, Barton said: “We had a vision for what we're going to do by bringing diplomacy and development together. I think the world turned out to be more challenging than people expected at the time.”
Alongside Covid and the cuts to aid spending in 2020, which led to the department needing to take £3.5bn out of its budget inside one financial year, Barton said the FCDO had to contend with a “dramatic increase” in domestic refugee costs and Russia's invasion in Ukraine.
“So there were set of things which made it harder to achieve everything we wanted achieve in terms of our vision for a merged department,” he said.
The FCO-DfID merger has come in for a lot of criticism but Barton said he believes the FCDO has "achieved a lot" and is "now settled as a single department".
"The task ahead is to build from where we are and build the capability in the department and the foreign secretary’s three reviews will help guide all of that," he added, referring to reviews commissioned by David Lammy in September into the UK's global impact; how to maximise the benefits of the FCDO's joint integrated development diplomacy model in its development work; and the UK's economic capability in diplomacy.
Agility and the Afghanistan evacuation
Barton also told the committee that the department had got better at being agile “in response to a more challenging world” and that this is one of the achievements he is most proud of.
“We've had a big programme of work over the last three years now to make the department more agile in a way in which we can deploy our people,” he said. “So when we need to find additional people, for example, to step in to do more work on the Middle East, we've got better mechanisms for doing that. When we suddenly had an acute crisis in Bangladesh, we were able to find additional people through the key period of that crisis.”
Barton was heavily criticised for his handling of the evacuation crisis in Afghanistan in August 2021 after he stayed on holiday 11 days into the fall of Kabul. He later apologised, saying: “If I had my time again I would have come back from my leave earlier than I did.”
Asked to reflect on this, Barton said this is still “the biggest regret” from his time as perm sec.
Barton said the department has since put in place better systems to respond to this kind of crisis and that this had helped recently in getting people out of Sudan and Lebanon.
The perm sec also said he was “humbled” by the support he had from staff following the blunder. “It was really, really clear to me that people wanted me to lead them,” he said.