CHRISTIAN AID has responded to a recent report that calls for reform of the Foreign Office and types it “somewhat elitist and rooted previously”.
The charity’s head of UK advocacy and campaigns, Jennifer Larbie, said on Monday that reform should include “restoring the Department for International Development, and shifting resources and decision-making into the hands of communities most in need.
“We reside through a time when global poverty and hunger is on the rise. Yet all of the evidence shows the choice to abolish the federal government department tasked with tackling these challenges has been a whole and utter disaster.”
The report, compiled by three former ambassadors, makes little explicit reference to assist, apart from to recommend that expenditure on international development be set at one per cent of gross national income. It says, nonetheless, that there needs to be more flexibility about how aid is apportioned as a substitute of mandating a certain percentage be spent specifically on humanitarian aid.
The former Ambassador to Lebanon and current Principal of Hertford College, Oxford, Tom Fletcher, together with the previous Ambassador to Indonesia and honorary professor of the UCL Policy Lab, Moazzam Malik, and Lord Sedwill, a member of the House of Lords who was formerly Ambassador and NATO representative in Afghanistan, compiled the report after discussions with a wider group of former politicians, advisers, and diplomats.
The vision that emerges is of an approach to international affairs wherein the assorted agencies that currently operate semi-autonomously, including GCHQ and the British Council, could be co-ordinated to create a “more joined up approach to strategy, governance and financial delegation”.
In an article for the Financial Times on Monday, Mr Fletcher, who’s a former British Ambassador to Lebanon, wrote that the UK needed a “significantly better focused and co-ordinated set of mechanisms across government — including engagement with the devolved administrations — to deliver a coherent international policy”.
On the UK’s standing on the planet, he said: “We have heft, but we want to make use of it higher. That means doing things well, not shouting about how well we do things. It means engaging with humility and respect, and sharing power with countries beyond people who ran the world in 1945.”
A Downing Street spokesperson said that the Prime Minister had full confidence within the capabilities of the department, and that “the Foreign Office is doing vital work to guard and promote UK interests abroad.”
