The Foreign Office Is Leaderless Amid A Restructuring – And What's The Strategy?

Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Whitehall (Adrian Chinery/Alamy)

When Sir Olly Robbins was sacked from his job in April over Peter Mandelson’s security vetting, there was little mourning in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). Insiders deplore the way he was removed, but he left behind an ill-thought-out restructuring plan and a proposed 25 to 30 per cent cut in the department’s wage bill.

The job of permanent under-secretary (PUS) was advertised last month but, for now, the FCDO is leaderless, and Britain waits for a new a prime minister. Meanwhile, the wars in the Middle East and Africa drag on and an unpredictable Donald Trump has years left in office.

The atmosphere is grim. Few staffers are safe from the cull. They describe colleagues in tears as they prepare to re-apply for their own jobs, and probably other people’s too. “It’s like a horrible game of musical chairs,” says one anonymous FCDO official. The PCS union is balloting again for strike action after a previous vote narrowly failed to meet a 50 per cent turnout.

The PCS wants no compulsory redundancies, but some staff have already taken advantage of the Discretionary Exit programme to take up jobs elsewhere. The cuts are part of an evaluation strategy known as ‘FCDO2030’. Its stated purpose is to work out which parts of the department’s activity are fulfilling its aims and which are not. A recurring complaint is that the FCDO has not been clear about which functions and abilities it wants to cut, leading to insecurity and endless speculation. Nor has there been a clear steer on what those aims will actually be over the next few years.

Part of the rationale is that the merger of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the Department for International Development (DfID) in 2020 did not go well, and that the subsequent deep cuts to the aid budget have made a lot of development work impossible.

“The FCO-DfID merger was not successful, and you need to look again at how you get the department functioning,” says Hannah Keenan, associate director of the Institute for Government. “We have much less ODA [Official Development Assistance] to spend. It needs to be much clearer how we intend to use our soft power in the world.” ODA has been cut from 0.7 per cent of gross national income to just 0.3 per cent.

FCDO2030 was spearheaded by Robbins and there is little love lost for the way he went about implementing it, with some privately suspecting that he relished the task of cutting the size of the department. His management style is remembered as secretive and at times divisive. The FCDO2030 policy paper did not even mention the need for redundancies.

Staff were especially dismayed when they were asked to write a 500-word essay answering the question: “Thinking about the work you do now and have done in your career so far, what skills and capabilities do you currently possess that contribute most effectively to FCDO’s work?” Sarah Champion, chair of the international development committee, asked Yvette Cooper whether this process concerned her: “Basically, if you can write a good essay and you can pitch it in the right terms, you will keep your job?” The Foreign Secretary tried to pass the question to Nick Dyer, the second PUS, but Champion insisted on asking her to summon

Robbins to answer it. He did not appear at the committee before his removal.
Whoever replaces him will take over a febrile department that feels No 10 has been downplaying the diplomatic challenges facing Britain – including the strained relationship with the United States, delicate negotiations with China, the ongoing war in Ukraine and the ambition of closer co-operation with the EU. Ex-diplomats privately expressed concerns that the Starmer government was more interested in spending money on defence. They noted that rearming is far more expensive than maintaining the UK’s reputation for diplomacy, and that the British, American and German aid cuts would not just hurt people in the Global South but create an opportunity for China to step in and build its influence.

Robbins told the committee in November that the impetus for FCDO2030 came from David Lammy, the previous foreign secretary, quoting him as saying: “This is a department that does not feel sufficiently strategic… We are trying, probably, to do a little bit too much of everything, everywhere in the world, all at once.”

The FCDO is also felt to have too many senior staff. “If you talk to our staff,” Dyer told the committee, “they will say that we are too top-heavy, too hierarchical – we are not giving people enough responsibility, we do not invest enough in new technology, and we… are quite dated.” One way the policy paper intends to save money is by using AI to evaluate projects.

“We are trying, probably, to do a little bit too much of everything, everywhere in the world, all at once”

“It’s a very nice place to work,” says the FCDO official. “There’s a significant leadership cohort that doesn’t necessarily match the roles available. The opportunity for more junior members of staff to progress is therefore limited. I think it’s perfectly legitimate for the organisation to seek to rectify that.” The problem is the way it is going about it.

The department-wide rethink means job cuts will come not just from former DfID functions that are no longer viable, because of the reduction in the aid budget, but right across the Foreign Office. “Every bit is under stress. The demand is that every directorate has to take a hit,” says the official. The number of directorates in Westminster will fall from 43 to 34. A year ago, it had 8,152 UK-based staff. Under what Robbins described as a “worst case scenario”, 1,885 of them will lose their jobs. The intention was for those working from the UK to take the brunt, but insiders predict that further job losses among staff based abroad will follow.

“It’s an incredibly sharp amount of cuts and there are all sorts of risks associated with that,” says Keenan. “What is the strategy for who they want to keep in the department and how are they communicating that? We were expecting a civil service strategic workforce plan – it was delayed and delayed again. How do you hold on to specific skills and high performers?”

Dyer has spoken of a new focus on “geoeconomics and economic security”, but where and how? “There’s been a lot of talk of, ‘we’ll be more agile with greater use of tech’,” says the official, who is open to using AI but not convinced it can always replace long-term expertise and judgement: “Precision and accuracy is fundamental.”

Emily Thornberry, the chair of the foreign affairs committee, warned the FCDO was “restructuring in order to restructure, while not looking first and foremost at what the Foreign Office is about, what we should be doing and how we can ensure that we retain the expertise, the knowledge, the connections, the best people, in order to deliver those priorities”. Others fear it risks losing institutional memory and expertise and that it will struggle to cope when the next international crisis hits. And the aid cut, for example, is supposed to be temporary.

In the meantime, faced with uncertainty about the FCDO’s future direction and their own jobs, more staff are jumping before they are pushed. “What do you want us to not do?” asks the official. “Which bits of the world do you want us to not have a future in? And are you going to be honest about it?” 

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