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Secondly, there is the question of visas. Again, when I first went to the FCO this was another backwater of activity, a sidelined, difficult area of work that most of the FCO considered dull, routine and not what clever chaps did. However, it became an issue of huge priority for the tens of thousands of British Pakistanis and British Indians whose families wanted greater access, and for the increasing number of people who want to come to this country on business or for tourism. It became, in effect, a domestic issue and resources had to be put into it—rightly so. Of course those services are paid for by those who benefit directly, but they absorb staff time and human resources. I came back from Saudi Arabia this morning—I declare an interest as chair of the Saudi-British Business
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The third area in which I see a marked change is trade, as the noble Viscount, Lord Montgomery, mentioned a moment ago. In 1977, ambassadors regarded involvement in trade issues as somewhat below their sightline, except perhaps when the serious business of defence equipment was involved. However, trade has become another area that requires our ambassadors to be fully engaged and to which they are required to commit time, intellectual application and staff resources. The FCO is our delivery mechanism for trade, not BERR or the UKTI exclusively—as I remember it at the time of the DTI—or indeed the Treasury. It is Foreign Office diplomats who do that on the ground throughout the world. I was the first Minister between the two departments, the DTI and FCO, and co-operation at working level was not always as wholehearted as it might have been in terms of Whitehall activity. Let us see what happens when those activities are added to by the addition of the Defence Export Services Organisation. I am interested to know what the Minister has to say on that when he responds.
The fourth area, which has assumed increasing importance, is human rights. That is characterised in different ways; our friends over the Atlantic think of it as democracy and for others of us, with perhaps less simplistic views, it is about establishing the rule of law, human rights and the growth of civil society, without which a vote for a Government becomes the licensed tyranny of the majority over the minority. The Foreign Office’s commitment to capacity building in civil society overseas is real and important, and it costs time, money and human resources. It is emphatically not a DfID issue; it is a Foreign Office issue and area of expertise. It needs real knowledge of the individual countries concerned. It is not a one-size-fits-all exercise.
I have characterised those four areas, not because they are exclusively important but because they are the day-to-day bread-and-butter issues, which so often get shoved to one side. They are not headline issues about the huge and enormous importance of our diplomatic presence in countries such as Iraq or our recently strengthened presence in Afghanistan. They do not deal with the burgeoning economic influence of China or India, the flexing of Russian energy muscles or the Gulf’s sovereign wealth funds. However, they are of huge importance to the security and the prosperity of this country.
Those areas are matched by increasing commitment in other areas, such as in the United Nations, where we field a superb team of highly motivated and intellectually able individuals; in NATO, where our strategic positioning with the US, Europe and Turkey is arguably more crucial than ever; and in the EU, where the United Kingdom’s down-to-earth attitude—which is without the doctrinaire fervour of some of our close neighbours—or the instinctive opposition to the winds of change of others usually put us in the right position.
The truth is that we all know that foreign policy now has to comprehend overseas development, defence and trade, and that it increasingly involves transport,
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3.48 pm
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard: My Lords, I rise briefly to thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for the elegance of his introduction to the debate and to pay particular tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, who has made most of the points that I would have wished to make. I strongly support what the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, said about the consular work of the Foreign Office and its posts abroad. We tend to forget how the exponential take-off in travel has meant that more and more people need the help of posts abroad, and therefore that it is desirable to retain posts.
I want to concentrate on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay of Chiswick, about networks. There may be a systemic problem concerning the allocation of the slices of the FCO resource cake. Most people who have taken part in this debate would like a bigger cake. That is hardly going to be settled by what we say, but how the cake is sliced is an important issue. I strongly support the clearer prioritisation that has been introduced. The drafting of clear, short objectives for foreign policy is a good idea. The clear, short lists that have been produced, particularly by this Foreign Secretary, are very good; I strongly support that. However, there is a risk that they result in the favouring of programme expenditure as against network expenditure.
For example, the FCO’s work on climate change is of a very high calibre and is done by very good people. However, if you are the priority holder—if you hold the climate change objective—you will tend to have a bias in favour of initiatives, conferences and publications rather than conversation and contact-building in posts. You will not see an immediate interest for you in maintaining an embassy in Ruritania. Yet if we do not have embassies in the Ruritanias, the overall objective of trying to get the world to move the right way on climate change will be harder to achieve. If, as I believe, we are approaching a Bretton Woods moment, when we need to devise the new institutions to deal with climate change, there is no point in having just a British prescription; there needs to be an EU prescription, and a prescription that is pre-sold to a willing world that has heard about it previously, discussed it and seen its angles on it reflected in the final product. That is the risk if you go down the route of priorities: no one is directly responsible for maintaining the embassy in Ruritania, for the network: at least, I would like to hear from the Minister if someone is—I cannot see, in the charts in Foreign Office publications these days, who is. That worries me.
A number of points made in this debate were very relevant, such as that made by the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, about language training. You have to have
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Inside the European Union, we have not yet reflected in our deployments—in our network—the fact that the new member states have votes and vote on what become our laws. We still have posts of a size that were quite good for keeping in touch with the countries of Eastern Europe before they joined the European Union. We do not have posts, in my judgment, that are fully equipped for the lobbying that should go on before there is a great debate in council, a great decision and a great vote. So I strongly support the point about Bucharest and Bratislava, which was elegantly made at the start of this debate by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire.
3.53 pm
Lord Dykes: My Lords, the House would have been pleased to learn that the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, was going to make some remarks—inevitably brief but also illuminating—in the gap. If I may misuse the famous London slogan, I could say, “Mind the gap and stand clear of the floors”, using the verb “mind” in the old Anglo-Saxon sense of “pay attention to” and the phrase “stand clear of the floors” to refer to the Government’s policy, which involves far too tight a budget for the Foreign Office, with all its future duties. That has been a consensus outcome of this debate from all parts of the House, although it was couched in very polite language. I hope that the Minister will not misunderstand the politeness, which is a traditional House of Lords phenomenon for concealing, as it were, the anxiety that many noble Lords have expressed today about the new budget plans.
I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire for his initiative in launching this debate. It has been a very great occasion. He spoke with his traditional authority and knowledge, blending the best elements of Chatham House and the international relations department of the London School of Economics, as well as his knowledge of these matters as a politician in the House of Lords. How right he was to refer to the Cabinet Office role having been built up in recent times by slightly jealous Prime Ministers, so that it becomes a miniature Foreign Office of a kind on its own. Its difficulties at present partly reflect that, and partly the need to recast some of its roles.
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I also agree with my noble friend Lord Wallace when he said that the now Prime Minister—and then Chancellor—did not appear at all keen on the Foreign Office and probably wanted it to be a small and more modest department in future; modest for the wrong reasons. I also agree very much with the suggestion of my noble friend that we call our embassies in the EU countries British Government Offices, British Government Representation Offices, or some such more modern title. That would convey that we are not too nervous about being reasonably integrated with our colleagues in the European Union.
It was also a great pleasure to hear the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, refer to DfID. I think that he used a phrase along the lines of “it has much more cash than it actually uses”. It is manifestly unfair on the Foreign Office, as both departments ultimately need more resources. DfID, as has been said in this debate, is getting going in a really striking way now, and no one would want to detract from that. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, also referred to that unfair disparity between the two departments, which I hope will be dealt with in future years.
I am so glad that my noble friend Lady Williams of Crosby showed the strong support for the EU that we have come to expect from her. How right she was to say that that also means, by implication, an even more active role for our own embassies or missions in other EU countries, particularly the east European ones, where their modern nation-building needs help and advice from outside—but not of an overweening kind, I hasten to add. I rather agree with the analysis of the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, when he said that it sounded as if the Treasury wanted a reduction and the Foreign Office Ministers then decided to build the modern strategy in that reality.
While one would like to have time to refer to other speeches, time is inevitably short on these occasions, but it was also a pleasure to listen to the wise advice of the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, who spoke from her knowledge of the modern problems of the Foreign Office. To declare an interest, the noble Baroness recently became the appointed chairman of the European Atlantic Group, of which I am president. She will contribute much knowledge and authority to that group in future. The diplomats in that group, whether as guests, visitors or members—for many foreign diplomats come to each of our occasions, whether we have dinners or other gatherings—frequently pay tribute to the quality of the British Foreign Office and its work.
The modernisation of the Foreign Office in recent years has been very considerable, with agreeable developments such as more women diplomats and more couples being located in missions, which are important for the modern development of the sociology of the Foreign Office. They are not just from Oxbridge, by the way; although that process is pretty slow, it is getting better—and the sooner it gets rapidly better, the greater that achievement will be. Links to trade and economics also reinforce the modern role of the Foreign Office, rather than reducing it. A number of your Lordships referred to more effort within the European Union.
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The conclusions of the report from the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, however, were pretty radical, although couched in polite language. Conclusion 2 states:
“We conclude that the Comprehensive Spending Review ... settlement for the FCO, one of the tightest in Whitehall, risks jeopardising the FCO’s important work”.
That is a strong conclusion, and the Government must now answer some of the points made in this debate about those anxieties. However, I will quickly pay tribute to David Miliband’s leadership as Secretary of State, which has been quite remarkable—not least in the recent European reform treaty proceedings—as has that of Jim Murphy, his Europe Minister in the House of Commons. In future, under that treaty, the external action service of the EU will also be extremely important for British diplomats and their careers. I hope that that new mechanism will be successful in future.
However, £1.7 billion is really not enough to deal with the priorities that the Foreign Office will now face in this much larger and more demanding world, where there are more and more countries in total in the UN. The presence in African missions is totally inadequate, as has been said, and that applies to other parts of the world as well. My noble friend Lord Roper mentioned the helpful and beautifully laid out report from the House of Lords Library. The relevant figure in real terms is 5 per cent per annum. The £1.7 billion for 2010-11 will be inadequate for the Foreign Office’s tasks.
The new targets come after five to seven years of demoralising cuts in services and activities here, there and everywhere in the Foreign Office, as you rapidly find out if you talk to younger diplomatic members of the Foreign Office when they are entitled to be indiscreet in the corner of a pub or restaurant. The reduction of posts in EU countries at a time when enlargement and the Lisbon treaty increase the need for Foreign Office activities is difficult for the Government to justify. The military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan was mentioned several times. It needs to be finite so that we do not get into the morass of an inexorable rise in hugely extravagant and expensive defence spending without achieving our necessary targets. Although some people in the Middle East may be incorrect in their analysis, a lot of people in that area do not share our support for NATO’s role and regard it as a pretend assignment for an organisation that should have been disbanded shortly after the signing of the Warsaw Pact. Many Arabs and Afghans say that this is a pretend mechanism to keep NATO going and that it is not really an appropriate role. I do not agree with that but none the less one cannot go on saying that NATO’s role in Afghanistan will last for years and years with all the huge expenditure that that will involve for Britain and other countries.
The important matter of the arms trade treaty was referred to in the report. I very much endorse the need for that in the modern world. My noble friend Lady Williams also accepts that that is an important priority, and has campaigned for it recently. I do not have time to refer to the FCO services and executive agencies’ work mentioned at page 53 of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee’s report. Therefore, I conclude by asking the Minister to respond seriously—as I am
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4.02 pm
Baroness Rawlings: My Lords, this has been a fascinating but distressing debate. I am, however, most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for introducing it this afternoon. It is always a great privilege to respond on behalf of my colleagues on these Benches.
As my noble and learned friend Lord Howe and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, clearly stated, this debate is about the importance of democracy. The noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, in her forceful speech referred to the importance of security and prosperity. Yet the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s budget is due to rise by just £0.1 billion over the next three years. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s budget is supposed to,
- “effectively rise through efficiency savings by restructuring, cutting administrative costs and changing the emphasis of resources, by streamlining towards the Middle East”.
Many of your Lordships mentioned that since May 1997 the Government have closed eight British embassies, eight British high commissions and 18 British consulates, making a total of 34 closures in 10 years. The “diplomatic surge” announced in January this year is supposed to account for the reassignment of these roles, with the number of staff in posts in the Middle East and south Asia to be increased by 30 per cent. However, over the past 10 years the closing of diplomatic posts has resulted in rock-bottom morale and a stampede for the exit door by disenchanted embassy staff. By 2005, diplomats on gardening leave were costing the taxpayer more than £500,000 per month. An issue noted not only in this debate by the noble Viscount, Lord Montgomery, but also in other debates, is that of the diplomatic black hole in central America, where just three out of the seven countries have any diplomatic—or even any DfID—staff posted there. This reflects a wider change in the geographical utilisation of FCO resources—part of the so-entitled “diplomatic surge”.
President Bush’s global war on terror—GWOT—has further strained the limited resources of the FCO by increasing security costs for diplomatic property and staff and by channelling money to the front line. Yet in 2004, the Kuwaiti embassy, undeniably a location of colossal strategic importance in the Middle East, was driven nearly to the brink of bankruptcy and was forced to close until urgent financial aid could be found. The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, rightly bemoaned the Foreign Secretary’s Written Statement today, cutting the FCO scholarship and fellowship funding, and also the lack of languages being taught.
I turn to the European part of the debate, touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, where I have direct personal experience of the FCO budget cuts. I declare an interest—I have been a member of the British
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I return to where I started and quote again. The FCO’s budget is supposed to,
- “effectively rise through efficiency savings by restructuring, cutting administrative costs and changing the emphasis of resources, by streamlining towards the Middle East”.
This is exactly what happened this Tuesday with the BBC World Service. Ten language services were closed so that it was able to launch the new Arabic television service. The three-year grant in aid of 3 per cent was only released provided the BBC World Service met its efficiency targets. It had to find savings to meet the rising costs of wages and pensions.
On a personal point, it is ironic that the issue of cuts to the BBC World Service was the subject of my first forays in politics. I lobbied furiously against the then proposed cuts in 1979 of £4 million on a £40 million budget. We were at that time due to attend the World Administrative Radio Conference—WARC—in Geneva, where all radio frequencies were being renewed, reallocated and would be binding into the next century. For this reason, it was vital then not to make these cuts. It was a unique opportunity too, at the height of the Cold War, for the Russians to obtain at our cost what they felt was their fair share of the frequency pie. Luckily, the then Mrs Thatcher and her team listened and recognised the problem. They abandoned the cuts and allocated more money, thus saving the BBC World Service. Will the Minister consider augmenting rather than cutting funds both for the BBC World Service and for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office?
4.11 pm
Lord Bach: My Lords, warm congratulations are due to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, on having picked this subject for debate this afternoon.
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