The development team within the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has been given permission by Treasury to recruit an extra 200 staff – but must use aid money to do so.
There will be no new cash for the staffing increase, which will have to be funded from the Official Development Assistance budget.
Nick Dyer, the second permanent secretary responsible for international development, revealed the planned boost to workforce numbers during an appearance at the International Development Committee yesterday.
Dyer said the department has received approval from the Treasury to increase the headcount by 200.
Philip Barton, the FCDO’s outgoing permanent secretary – who is set to leave in the next few weeks, once his successor is picked – added that approval was granted as an exemption to workforce controls that have been put in place across the civil service, with the requirement that it is funded through ODA.
The 200 figure is similar to the number of ex-Department for International Development staff who left the FCDO in the year following the merger: 213.
IDC chair Sarah Champion asked if those roles have now been backfilled.
Dyer said: “There was a certain amount of internal filling and a certain amount of internal restructuring that went on alongside the merger, and also we have now got agreement from Treasury that we can increase uplift by an additional 200 to bring new people into the organisation on the development side.”
Champion asked if this means the FCDO’s development team will now get back to its pre-merger capacity.
Dyer said: “It’s complicated. It partly depends on the theme, what areas you’re looking at. Our bigger problem is we lost a lot of seniority. So many of the posts that we lost at point of merger were senior.”
Champion commented: “So because of the merger, because of the experience, they didn't want to be involved in what was going on and left?
Dyer responded: “There was a certain amount of that going on.”
Champion said: “What a dreadful waste of incredibly talented people. And my apologies to them, because they were our absolute international flagship and did phenomenal work. So that pains me to hear that.”
Capability is Dyer’s remaining merger concern
Dyer revealed the department’s plans to increase the development workforce as part of his assessment of the FCO-DfID merger.
The second perm sec said he had had three worries about the merger: “One was the visibility of our development voice within the merged FCDO. The second was 'How will you manage accountabilities?', because that was not very clear. And the third was reduction of capability, because, frankly, quite a lot of people left at point of merger and we undermined our development capability.”
Dyer said his own appointment as second perm sec with responsibility for development “went a long way” to address the first two concerns, “because I've put in place additional accountability mechanisms to ensure that I can see what's going on in terms of overspend and accountability, in terms of internal governance… And people now know who to go to talk about development if they want to, in terms of official level, which is myself and the teams that I work with”.
But he said capability is a “longer-term challenge”.
“We did lose about 20% of our professional capability just after the merger," he said. "If you look at our recruitments now, about 60% of all the development advisory roles in 2024 this year haven't been filled because we haven't got enough people in the business to be able to fill them. So we are going through a process of: how do we recreate and rebuild our capability?”
IDC chair Sarah Champion asked Dyer why there were so many vacancies and if it was due to reputational damage from the merger.
Duer said: “What we’ve focused on principally in terms of rebuilding our professional capability is bringing people across the organisation into professional jobs. There’s been about 200 of our new professional staff we have built internally – so we’ve brought people into the roles from our existing complement. We are now starting to recruit externally.”
Dyer also said that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the moment where he “recognised what the benefits of the merger could be, because I think at that time, bringing the traditional, modern team together, I generally think we made better decisions quicker and had better outcomes because of it, so I could see the benefits. “
Both Dyer and Barton said it was the cuts to aid spend in 2021 under Boris Johnson that damaged the UK’s development reputation rather than the merger.