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Two former top Foreign Office mandarins have warned Rachel Reeves against slashing the UK diplomatic corps in the spending review, as concerns mount among civil servants that the department is in line for further budget cuts.
Lord Peter Ricketts and Sir Simon Fraser said rising geopolitical instability and the international aspect of the government’s economic growth “mission” meant the chancellor should protect spending on Britain’s overseas headcount.
“Cuts will inevitably mean fewer people. In fact we need more diplomats, especially abroad,” said Ricketts, Foreign Office permanent secretary between 2006 and 2010 and an ex-national security adviser.
The interventions come after Sir Keir Starmer this week set out a reduction in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s aid funding from 0.5 per cent of gross national income to 0.3 per cent by 2027, in order to fund an increase in defence expenditure from 2.3 per cent to 2.5 per cent of GDP.
Initial departmental submissions to the cross-Whitehall spending round are due in by Friday, which will kick off negotiations with the Treasury led by chief secretary Darren Jones.
Final bids are due in April, with the spending review set to report in June. Departments have been asked to model for different scenarios, identifying cuts ranging from 2-11 per cent.
Senior figures across the UK’s foreign policy establishment fear that, as an unprotected department, the FCDO faces a further squeeze that will hit its staff numbers abroad.
Any cut would be a mistake, they argue, against the backdrop of an increasingly precarious world order following Donald Trump’s return to the White House, and given UK foreign secretary David Lammy has widened the department’s remit to include growth and migration.
Fraser, permanent secretary at the Foreign Office between 2010 and 2015, said the darkening geopolitical landscape and the UK’s status as a “standalone power” made it more important for Britain to retain “effective international representation”.
“If you keep on paring away at your diplomatic presence, then it’s very difficult to do that, so it is a matter of concern,” he added.
Ricketts said understanding a changing world “means being on the ground, speaking the local language, getting far beyond the capital”.
“Britain, seeking growth, needs to be connecting better with the non-aligned states who are being actively courted by China. We can’t afford to reduce our front-line diplomatic clout,” he added.
Foreign Office insiders predict that an existing voluntary exit scheme, which aims to cut 500 jobs, may be extended.
One official said there was “the sense that Lammy isn’t willing to go into bat for the FCDO with the Treasury in the way that he is with the intelligence agencies. So we’ll probably be asked to find 11 per cent”.
Other diplomats view protecting the budget from further cuts as a major test for Sir Olly Robbins, the former UK Brexit negotiator who became FCDO permanent secretary last month.
However, some mandarins at the department think job cuts should have come sooner.
“It’s overdue. They should have done that when the departments merged,” said one, referring to the juncture in 2020 when the Department for International Development was rolled into the Foreign Office.
The department’s case against cuts to its operational budget may also be weakened after recent scrutiny of some of its spending.
Diplomats chalked up almost £1,000 on food and drinks during a visit to a beach resort in Cambodia in September, while the FCDO spent more than £520,000 on “restaurants and bars” between July and October last year, expenditure first reported by The Times.
The expenditure in the early months of the current Labour government was in line with previous administrations, and officials said diplomatic entertainment was a tool of the job, used to build and maintain a network of local contacts in pursuit of operational objectives.
Some officials fear the Treasury could push for the disposal of UK diplomatic assets overseas, such as ambassadorial residences, to achieve savings in the FCDO’s capital budget.
Fraser urged caution, warning: “It is often a false economy — once you lose those things, they’re gone forever. So I always argued you should be careful about taking easy hits on capital budgets because it’s actually a loss of national assets.”
The FCDO said: “The foreign secretary has been clear about the importance of Britain’s diplomatic footprint in a dangerous world, alongside the need for reform to ensure the FCDO is fit for the future and delivers maximum security and growth for the British people.”
