Charities caution that ‘UK aid risks becoming a vehicle for UK foreign policy’ if post-Brexit merger comes to fruition

A coalition of aid groups including the British Red Cross, Cafod and Oxfam GB has warned Boris Johnson that to abolish the Department for International Development would suggest Britain is “turning our backs on the world’s poorest people”.

One climate diplomacy expert said it would be “political suicide” to merge DfID with the Foreign Office in 2020, the same year the UK is hosting the UN climate summit, since the move would tie up senior civil servants when they were most needed to tackle the response to the climate crisis.

Sources inside DfID have told the Guardian that they fully expect the department to be merged with the FCO after Brexit.

Tim Cole, the Europe executive director of the One Campaign, who worked in the FCO for 17 years, described DfID as one of Britain’s “crown jewels” and said a merger would limit its effectiveness, create incoherence and be seen globally as a “step back”.

Several Tory figures, including Alistair Burt, a former Foreign Office and development minister, and Andrew Mitchell, a former development secretary, have urged caution over the expected abolition of DfID and the merging of its aid functions into the FCO, an ambition of the prime minister’s dating from his time as foreign secretary.

About 30% of the £14bn annual aid budget is now spent in departments outside DfID and in cross-government funds such as the conflict, stability and security fund.

The aid watchdog, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, warned earlier this year that this redistribution of the aid budget had resulted in a growing focus on larger, middle-income countries which risked the principle of “leaving no one behind”.

In a statement, more than 100 charities specialising in humanitarian relief, girls’ education, global health, clean water and sanitation said: “Merging DfID with the FCO would risk dismantling the UK’s leadership on international development and humanitarian aid. It suggests we are turning our backs on the world’s poorest people, as well as some of the greatest global challenges of our time: extreme poverty, climate change and conflict. UK aid risks becoming a vehicle for UK foreign policy, commercial and political objectives, when it first and foremost should be invested to alleviate poverty.”

Nick Mabey, the founder of E3G, a thinktank focusing on climate diplomacy and energy policy, said: “A lot of weight for a merger would fall on senior members of DfID and BEIS [the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy]. But we need these senior managers to be on planes with ministers, talking about coal phase-out and finance. It would be diplomatic suicide to do it in the next year, when Madrid has handed us a hospital pass on climate.”

Mabey, a former senior head of Tony Blair’s prime minister’s strategy unit between 2003 and 2006, said the COP26 summit in Glasgow in 2020 would be be “the largest thing the UK has been in charge of since G7. It has to be a political success. The UK has to get out there and deliver.”

Overhauling Whitehall would be “huge distraction”, he said.

Cole, a former ambassador to Cuba, also stressed that 2020 was a crunch year in terms of Britain’s global standing. He said: “There are lots of costs in restructuring Whitehall. If we start trying to do that at a time when we are looking at a climate emergency, we don’t want to waste too much time and resources moving the chairs around the table.”

Cole said as long as a mechanism such as the national security council, existed to bring together expertise of different government departments, a merger was not needed.

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“As long as you have a strong coordinating mechanism, like the national security council, that brings together the expertise for all organisations, you don’t need that merger.”

However, Pauline Latham, Conservative MP for Mid Derbyshire and a member of the international development committee, said she didn’t see the merger as a problem. Latham said: “I wouldn’t have gone for that [the merger], but Boris has wanted to do that for a long time. Providing the people at DfID continue to be employed in the department, there will still be expertise.”

She said the select committee would provide more scrutiny if the departments were merged, because it would also oversee the FCO aid budget.

The latest Tory manifesto said the party would “proudly maintain” the pledge to spend 0.7% of gross national income on development.

But Johnson has previously argued that the aid budget needs to be spent “more in line with Britain’s political, commercial and diplomatic interests”.

One former DfID staffer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there was “angst” inside the department over the move.

Citing the Pergau dam scandal of 1994, when hundreds of millions of pounds of aid was linked to an arms deal, the former staffer said: “That’s the thing we would need to protect against if DfID was folded into FCO.”

The source added: “DfID is packed full of technocrats, there are lots of doctors and lawyers and highly skilled people, who are the sort of people Dominic Cummings would want.”

Three years after the Pergau dam scandal, DfID was set up by Tony Blair’s Labour government, and its role was further defined by the 2002 International Development Act, which outlawed aid tied to trade.

Cummings, Johnson’s top adviser, has been critical of the civil service, calling for changes to its culture.