The government’s integrated review describes but does not resolve foreign policy tensions

We learnt from the integrated review published this week that the government – rightly – takes a very broad view of how to define Britain’s place in the world. Tackling climate change is a top priority, as is supporting an international Covid-19 response. Investing in science and technology, disrupting terrorist plots, reinforcing cyber-security and dealing with economic crime sit alongside tilting foreign policy towards the Indo-Pacific and, more controversially, building up the country’s nuclear deterrent.

There are also expressions of the government’s wider priorities. There were many references to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and a message that the union is “our greatest source of strength at home and abroad”. There was an emphasis on post-Brexit opportunities, with rapid and nimble action promoted as “the determining characteristic of the UK’s foreign policy following our departure from the EU”. Meanwhile, British institutions will have “the freedom to identify and fund transformational science and technology at speed”. Fine words, perhaps, and for the moment ministers have rapid vaccine development and distribution to trumpet, but it will take more than that to embed the union in foreign and defence policy decisions and may do little to help hold the UK together.

The review’s span was a reminder of just how many threats the country faces and to which the government must respond. But the review is just that – a review. It is in the specifics that difficulties will emerge. We now know the government’s overarching view of Britain’s place in the world, but not how it plans to resolve the tensions between promoting human rights, building trade links and selling military hardware overseas, those between freedom of expression and countering extreme views at home, or reaching global net zero and freezing out authoritarian regimes like China. Over time, the government will need to set out how it plans to make these trade-offs and how it will organise itself to do so.

An integrated review needs an integrated response

The response needs to be a whole-of-government effort. The review recognised this, noting that success depended on “departments that would not previously have been considered as part of the national security community”. No examples were given, but the focus on climate change means that more of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy will be engaged, and treating biodiversity as a national security priority means that the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is unusually close to the front line.

The review also argued for “deeper integration across government”, building on former national security adviser (NSA) and cabinet secretary Mark (now Lord) Sedwill’s “fusion doctrine” to bring together decisions that cut across departmental boundaries. But this is not a revelation, and at times “fusion” seemed to blur responsibilities rather than to clarify and resolve them. How to make integration actually happen, to properly co-ordinate and bring everything together, let alone at high speed, has been a problem for decades. The review shows that the government does not yet have a full and convincing answer.

An abundance of new bodies risks confusion

But it does make a start. There is much emphasis on creating centres of expertise and co-ordination, with a new Situation Centre for rapid data analysis and decision-making, a Counter Terrorism Operations Centre to bring together all the agencies and other actors involved in keeping citizens safe, and a new Conflict Centre – established in the Foreign Office – to co-ordinate work to reduce instability and conflict. These sit alongside the existing National Cyber Security Centre (its success quite possibly the model for some of the new units), the National Economic Crime Centre, the Joint Biosecurity Centre and many others.

This alphabet soup of centres and units will need careful co-ordination and a single controlling brain to ensure that remits complement rather than overlap, and the right work is commissioned to the right person at the right time. That will be the job of incoming NSA Sir Stephen Lovegrove. The review’s short final chapter purports to set out how the government will implement its conclusions, but its description of implementation is more aspirational than detailed. It says that departments will develop “Outcome Delivery Plans”. Lovegrove will need to keep those short and focused to avoid them becoming boilerplate descriptions of activity as single departmental plans became under previous governments.

It is ultimately the prime minister who must decide how to resolve tensions

Given the contradictions inherent in the review, Lovegrove needs a crystal clear governance structure for its implementation, that ultimately presents the prime minister with direct choices. Everybody in the system, in whichever department, centre or unit, must understand clearly how policy and operations are directed and controlled, and what their role is in the organisation. The National Security Council must be the place where disputes are decided, and the policy direction set by the prime minister.

The integrated review sets out how the government sees the UK’s place in the world. It identifies problems and is more honest than might be expected about some of the trade-offs. More money has been committed, new teams and units have been established and the prime minister has strengthened the government’s commitment to nuclear deterrence by raising the threshold for the nuclear weapon stockpile.

But it still says relatively little about precisely how the government will tackle the threats and opportunities it identifies. If the review is to successfully guide UK policy in years and decades to come, the hard work of turning words into reality begins now.