The Foreign Office is planning to reduce staff numbers by 20 per cent in a move that former ambassadors have said could severely damage Britain’s global reputation.
Civil servants working for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) have been told by managers that the headcount will be cut by a fifth by spring 2025. No official announcement on job cuts has been made.
There has been fierce criticism of the department’s handling of the evacuation of British and Afghan citizens after Kabul fell to the Taliban. Staff are also disgruntled that a merger with the Department for International Development (Dfid) remains incomplete.
Lord Ricketts, a former Foreign Office permanent secretary and former ambassador to France, said that a 20 per cent cut to staff was “massive” and would damage Britain’s global standing. “Further cuts in FCDO numbers now seems to be completely incompatible with rhetoric about Global Britain,” he said.
The former senior civil servant said the Foreign Office had already endured decades of chipping away at its budget and staff numbers and that as a result “a lot of Foreign Office posts are now hollowed out with very small numbers to actually go out and do diplomacy, to do development work, to be on the ground and understand what’s going on”.
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He said that reducing staff numbers would damage Britain’s reputation and “our foresight or capacity to see problems coming”.
After a long phase of engaging in military operations abroad “that lever is now basically over and therefore we’ve got to do more through non-coercive diplomacy for which you need a bigger, better resourced Foreign Office,” he said. “It seems to me completely wrong to be reducing FCDO staff numbers now in that climate.”
Sir Paul Lever, a former British ambassador to Germany, said the scale of the planned cuts could threaten Britain’s role on the world stage.
“You can’t absorb a cut of 20 per cent across the board in staff while continuing to do all the things you used to do . . . they won’t be able to maintain the same level of presence and performance,” he said.
“They will therefore need to be more ruthless in choosing what the priorities are.”
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Lever said that “if it’s just done as a straight cut across the board . . . I think it will have an impact on our ability to make our voice heard”. He said more funding was needed to reverse cuts in areas such as language training for staff in foreign postings.
Civil servants have been told that the 20 per cent cut to staffing numbers will be across the department with a voluntary redundancy scheme to be opened soon. It is not yet clear if compulsory redundancies will be required.
The Foreign Office is already battling low morale among staff with the unfinished merger with Dfid leading to complaints over unequal pay and a “culture clash” between different teams, The Times has discovered.
Work to integrate IT and email systems used by the two departments was said to have hindered the response to the crisis in Afghanistan in the summer.
In written evidence to a Commons select committee published this week, a junior civil servant said that former Dfid staff had volunteered to assist but “it was hard to integrate them effectively because we could not share live documents or give them access to the inbox because the Dfid and FCO IT systems are not yet integrated”.
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The department has already been subjected to several cash-saving initiatives. It currently employs 7,471 UK-based staff, of whom just under a third are posted abroad where they are supported by 9,261 local hires.
The annual aid budget has been cut by about £4 billion a year until at least 2024, with Britain deciding not to meet the UN-backed target of 0.7 per cent of gross national income during that period.
In recent years there has also been a move to replace British civil servants who would have been posted overseas with cheaper local hires. About half of overseas posts now have no more than two UK-based staff.
A spokesman for the Public and Commercial Services Union, the largest civil service union, said “the merger has been shambolic and ill thought-out”. He added: “There is no alignment on terms and conditions 15 months after the two departments became one [and] there has been little substantive negotiations with the union, particularly on pay.”
A spokeswoman for the Foreign Office said work was continuing on the department’s “strategic workforce plan” which would assess the staff numbers needed over the next three years.
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She said that “strategic workforce planning will ensure that we have the right capabilities to deliver on our international priorities as set out in the Integrated Review.
“As the foreign secretary has said, we must deploy our diplomacy and development expertise to advance freedom, democracy and enterprise around the world.”
Under the terms of the autumn spending review, the Foreign Office has committed to cutting its budget by 5 per cent by 2024-25 compared with this financial year.
The spokeswoman said this “will be delivered across a number of areas including our estate, non-aid programmes, arms-length bodies and our workforce.”