“When Boris Johnson became the prime minister – that’s what changed everything.”
Sir Mark Lowcock, the longest-serving permanent secretary of the Department for International Development, is reflecting on the moment when the department’s 23-year ascent was sharply halted and reversed.
Less than a year after coming to power, Johnson chose to “dismantle and parcel” out the capabilities which made DfID an international “superpower”, Lowcock writes in his new book The Rise and Fall of the Department for International Development.
The book, based on more than 100 interviews with former DfID ministers and civil servants, charts the creation of the department in 1997 and the historical context preceding it; the following 23 years of “unusual effectiveness”; and its demise in 2020 along with the UK’s reputation as an international development “superpower”.
Lowcock is unequivocal about the influence of Johnson – who was elected as prime minister in December 2019 – on the latter. “The Conservative Party at that point was captured by its right wing and reverted to the mode it had been in the 1980s and 1990s,” he says. “Boris Johnson was at the forefront of that, and that’s what changed everything.”
Back in 2016, Lowcock – then still the department’s perm sec – was serene about progress on international development. In an interview with CSW, he said he believed there was “a settled view” on the need for the UK to play its part and that he was worrying “much less than I used to about having to make the case for development”.
Comparatively, its descent was rapid. Just over a year after Johnson got the keys to No.10, DfID had been merged into the Foreign Office and the UK’s aid budget would go on to be cut from 0.7% to 0.5% of gross national income.
The Rise and Fall describes the path chosen by Johnson as one where the functions of DfID were being “dismantled and parcelled out” across various parts of the Foreign Office. “The result was as intended,” the book says.
Soon enough, Lowcock writes, a comprehensive and intentional destruction had taken place: of structures, skills, and processes that had been built up over 23 years, and which had enabled DfID to spend a large budget well and achieve the development outcomes that ministers had chosen to prioritise.
What made the department such a success?
Within six months of its creation in 1997, DfID – led by development secretary Clare Short and permanent secretary John Vereker – had published a white paper which The Rise and Fall describes as “the most consequential statement of British government policy on international development of the last 60 years”.
What made the white paper, which was based on Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development goals agreed the previous year, such a success?
“It was very prescient,” Lowcock says. “The goals set out in that white paper were adopted in the year 2000 by every country which was a member of the UN and became the agenda for international development for the following 15 years.” It took some time, however, Lowcock says, “for the new direction really to be believed and internalised, and [officials] to think, ‘Oh, we’re really going to do something now’”.
“For the first two years of the Blair government, there was no more money, and in fact the budget was very tight. So it wasn’t at all clear that the new government was really committed to development,” he says. “It took a long time for that to be bedded in.”
A key moment was the categorical support given in 2006 by then-development shadow secretary Andrew Mitchell in response to that year’s development white paper. By this point, the department had earned a striking international reputation – with the head of the Canadian International Development Agency, for example, writing in a 2005 government report that DfID “is generally considered to be the best in the world” – but it was the domestic support which secured its future.
“It became clear that the Conservative Party were now fully on board with what the Labour government had been doing by then for eight or nine years, and that actually is what gave the priority to this issue another 10 years, from 2010-2020,” Lowcock says. This, he adds, is a good example of the power of consensus in enabling governments to “sustain an approach for long enough to be able to make a real difference” when tackling “big, difficult” policy issues.
Reversing the decline
With the right approach, Lowcock is confident that development is an arena where Britain can “quickly” restore its international reputation.
After leaving DfID, he became the United Nations’ under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator. In this role, he “heard what people were saying about this country when we weren’t in the room”. Britain became “a laughing stock in the years after Brexit”, he says.
To reverse the decline, Lowcock says the new Labour government must do three things: be clear what policy objectives it wants to pursue; stabilise the budget so there is a predictable amount of money that is only used in pursuit of those objectives; and “sort out the organisational mess”.
The latter will require “rebuilding the expertise and rebuilding the systems and processes” to enable money to be spent well to achieve the desired outcomes, he says. “We do not advocate more money,” Lowcock adds. “We advocate spending the existing budget much better.”
He warns, however, that Labour will have to face up to the fact that the skills and capability needed to run a diplomatic service are “completely different” to those needed for good development policy.
“Unless you recognise that and work out what you need to do for both a fantastic diplomatic service – which this country desperately needs and we’ve under-invested in – but also putting back in place capabilities to do development well, you’re going to fail in whatever objectives you have,” he says.
Lowcock says there has been a “haemorrhaging” of expertise, with hundreds of officials leaving – “often the best people”. He says the government will have to work out how to attract them back. This is not about recruiting more people, he says, but improving the average calibre.
Improving systems, meanwhile, will require putting in place the right culture and incentives, he says.
These issues are “exactly the same as the things the government needs to get to grips with across all public services”, Lowcock notes.
Ultimately, Lowcock and co-author Ranil Dissanayake conclude that the “quickest, easiest and cheapest” way to get development back on track would be to bring back a dedicated development department but have it share a platform (buildings, IT and corporate support services) with the Foreign Office.
Labour's plan
Lowcock’s book includes behind-the-scenes insight into the development reform options Labour was considering before coming to power in July. A few months on, however, there still isn’t much clarity on the party’s plan.
Labour’s election manifesto said it would “turn the page to rebuild Britain’s reputation on international development” and that the mission statement would be “to create a world free from poverty on a liveable planet”.
“That’s a statement that provides essentially no information on what they actually plan to do,” Lowcock says, “because it’s hard to imagine what you could do with your aid budget that doesn’t fit within that vision”.
There’s also a line in Labour’s manifesto that has Lowcock actively worried: “Development work must be aligned closely with our foreign policy aims.”
“That’s a mindset which is a bit redolent of Boris Johnson’s government, and also governments in the Margaret Thatcher and John Major era, where they thought the aid programme was not that important, and to the extent that it was valuable, it was because it could help with other objectives,” he says.
“If your mindset is ‘really this aid budget is to help with other objectives, not to promote development or reduce poverty’, that’s a recipe for scandal.”
Lowcock points to Pergau Dam, Britain’s most infamous aid scandal, where £234m of aid money was used to fund a hydroelectric dam on a river in Malaysia while the UK negotiated £1bn in arms sales to the south-east Asian country’s government.
“I think Labour need to think really carefully about that and be clear that the purpose of the aid budget is to promote development, and that’s in Britain’s long-term interests,” Lowcock adds. “If you have mixed motives, you’ll find you don’t do much that’s good on development. And, actually, trying to use the aid programme as a sort of bribe for other things doesn’t work either.”
He also warns that Labour won’t restore Britain’s reputation “just by using different words”. “It will be actions that matter,” he says. “And, in particular, it’s not a good idea for them to go banging on about restoring British leadership. Saying that doesn’t achieve anything, it just irritates people, actually. What they need to do is take specific actions which people admire and think are the right things to do.”
David Lammy’s first move upon becoming foreign secretary was to launch a series of reviews, including commissioning former DfID perm sec Minouche Shafik – Lowcock’s predecessor in the role – to assess the government’s approach to international development.
CSW asks if this, at least, is an encouraging sign.
“It’s hard to imagine someone better to help them with this question on how to fix the terrible mess that they’ve inherited,” Lowcock says – noting that Shafik is a friend he has known for a long time.
“I hope that she’s able to make really powerful recommendations and that [Labour] listen hard to them,” he adds.
The differing roles of ministers and civil servants
Importantly, The Rise and Fall doesn’t just focus on the vital role ministers have played in the UK’s development story. It also sets out the key role that senior officials played, be that John Vereker’s advice to Clare Short on her walk to No.10 after the 1997 general election – “don’t leave the room without agreement to a new department covering international development” – or the successive system reforms enabling the department to deliver on ministers’ priorities.
CSW asks Lowcock to reflect on the differing roles and relative importance of political and official leadership – and the key skills needed for both.
“Politicians were a very important part of the DfID story,” he says. “Development is discretionary. It’s not like the defence budget, or the welfare budget or the NHS, where politicians have to have a big focus on those things, just because there’s a huge public demand for it. Development is something that governments do because they decide it’s an important thing to do.”
Lowcock says it was, therefore, important that the successive governments of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Theresa May “decided this was something that it was morally right to do, but also it was in the country’s best interest”.
“These were governments that were for international development, and that was a political choice,” he says.
Lowcock says DfID was also “very lucky” to have had ministers “for most of its life” who thought “this is a great job and found it very personally fulfilling”. “And I’m not talking about Priti Patel here,” he adds.
Hilary Benn – a favourite of DfID staff and a politician who has had a catalogue of ministerial posts, including his latest role as Northern Ireland secretary – told Lowcock and Dissanayake that the development secretary role has been the most satisfying of his career to date.
As well as wanting the job, Lowcock says a good minister will have relevant expertise and be able to learn on the job. They should then stay on as long as possible to make a real impact, he adds. In 2020-21, DfID’s last year of existence, the department had four secretaries of state, and 20 people served as ministers. “That is a recipe for chaos and disaster and for achieving absolutely nothing,” Lowcock says.
He goes on to say that civil servants need a broader set of skills. These include: strategising; management; numeracy; understanding how public policy works; getting on well with your ministers; having an awareness of the wider political context; understanding where the media is coming from; and knowing how parliament works.
It also helps if officials “know the subject matter of the relevant department very well”.
“For most of its life, DfID had very senior officials and permanent secretaries who had deep expertise and experience in development. It doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea to have done some other things at some point. But to have a deep experience of the work of the department really helps a lot.”
Ultimately, civil servants need to know how to get the organisation working in a way that turns spending into real-world progress on the policy objectives set by ministers. This, Lowcock says, was something DfID’s officials excelled at.
“One of the things that was very striking about DfID – and everybody says this, the Cabinet Office, the NAO, the press, international comparators – was that it was an unusually effective organisation,” he says.
Life after DfID
Lowcock spent 32 years at DfID and its predecessor organisations, rising through the ranks to become the department’s top official in 2011 and leaving in 2017 to work at the UN, where he stayed until 2021.
He now juggles writing books – The Rise and Fall is his third – with various board and university positions. This includes being a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, and a visiting professor of practice at London School of Economics’ Department of International Development, which was established in 1990 and continues to outlive its ill-fated government namesake.
Could he be tempted to return as perm sec if Labour brought DfID back?
“I do lots of other things now,” Lowcock says. He adds that he has “a lot of admiration” for the FCDO’s permanent secretary for development, Nick Dyer, who is described in the book as “one of the architects of the DFID model”.
“If they allow him to do the things that we all know need to be done, he’ll do a fantastic job for them,” Lowcock says.
However, he says he would “think very carefully” if asked by the government to help with anything specific.
Does he miss working in government?
“In some ways, I do,” Lowcock says. “I must admit I now enjoy doing other things.
“I feel very, very lucky. You only get one life, and if you’re exceptionally lucky, you get to do a diverse range of things in it.”
Before our time with Lowcock comes to an end, CSW gets one more question in: How has your perspective on the UK civil service changed over the last seven years observing it from outside?
“The civil service has taken an absolute battering over the last 10 years,” he says, citing comments from newly-elected Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch who, less than 24 hours before our interview, said that 10% of civil servants should be in jail.
“The approach that too many politicians have taken to attacking the civil service, particularly, I have to say, on the right of the political spectrum, is very destructive. Every country needs a really good civil service, and the civil service needs to be respected, invested in and valued.”
The Rise and Fall of the Department for International Development by Mark Lowcock and Ranil Dissanayake is published by the Center for Global Development. For more information visit www.cgdev.org