UK to merge aid and diplomacy departments

The Department for International Development (DfID), which manages the UK’s overseas aid, and the Foreign Office (FCO) are to merge this autumn.
The move was reported by the BBC, and confirmed by prime minister Boris Johnson in a speech titled ‘Global Britain’ on Tuesday afternoon. The move follows a review by crossbench peer Lord Bew into the UK’s £14bn (US$17.7bn) aid spend, which dwarfs the FCO’s budget.
The departments have shared a team of ministers since the February reshuffle, and a merger has long been mooted in Conservative Party circles. Supporters of the move argue it will enable the FCO to build aid spending around the UK’s national interests, supporting the ‘Fusion Doctrine’ set out by Cabinet secretary Mark Sedwill – who is also the national security adviser, and whose background lies in security and intelligence work. Championed in 2018’s National Security and Capability Review, Fusion Doctrine is – in the words of defence think tank RUSI – Sedwill’s “initiative to fuse capabilities, across ‘economic, security, social and the rest’, to deliver strategy-led design of policy and planning.”
However, the reform’s opponents argue that it will waste time and resources, while diluting the impact of UK aid spending on reducing poverty.
Two former international development secretaries promptly denounced the decision. Tory MP Andrew Mitchell, who ran the department between 2010 and 2012, said DfID is “one of the most effective and respected engines of international development anywhere in the world,” and that merging it with the FCO would be a “quite extraordinary mistake”.
Meanwhile Douglas Alexander, who served as international development secretary under Labour’s Gordon Brown, said absorbing DfID into the FCO would be “an act of national self-harm that would hurt both the UK’s global standing and our efforts to assist the world’s poorest people amidst a global pandemic”.
The FCO and the department now known as the DfID have a long history of being merged and separated. They were first merged in 1970, before being separated in 1974 and merged again in 1979. They were again separated after Tony Blair’s election in 1997.