DfID’s rise and fall provides lessons for government departments

With Keir Starmer attending a Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Samoa, and a pre-budget briefing in the Financial Times hinting at planned reductions in overseas aid, British international development policy has been in the news. So, our IfG event last week discussing the rise and fall of the (now abolished) Department for International Development was timely.

The panel – former permanent secretary Mark Lowcock, shadow foreign secretary Andrew Mitchell and International Development committee chair Sarah Champion – highlighted DfID’s successes, particularly in driving poverty reduction. Mitchell argued that “since Suez in 1956, it is the best example of genuine British leadership making an impact around the world.”

For all the praise for DfID’s successes, the discussion did less to address the reasons why DfID eventually lost political backing. And the trade-offs involved in finding money for aid budgets were obscured by the panel’s enthusiasm for the good that development spending can do.

Watch our event on the lessons from the rise and fall of the Department for International Development

When fighting poverty was the priority, a separate DfID made sense

One of Lowcock’s key contentions was that a separate development department, in charge of its own budget, was crucial to successful development policy. This was, he said, for two interconnected reasons. First, only a separate department, with its own mission, was capable of attracting the expertise and building the systems necessary to deliver aid effectively. Lowcock argued that “the tragedy of the destruction of the department is that it’s now almost impossible – because of the haemorrhaging of the expertise and the destruction of systems – to do a good, even a decent job, at turning the money into real world outcomes.”

His second argument was that development cannot be part of a suite of “mixed objectives” – it only works if it is pursued standalone. As Lowcock put it, “the current government seems to be leaning into the idea you can use your development budget to leverage some of your other objectives. And that way… lies ruin.”

From this perspective having a separate department, single-mindedly focused on driving positive outcomes, is sensible. And DfID, including under Lowcock’s own leadership, was remarkably successful at achieving its goals. A range of objectives – from the mortality rate of under five year olds to GNI per capita – trended in the right direction in DfID focus countries, and the UK had a well-deserved reputation as a global leader. 

DfID’s advocates need to reckon with why it was abolished

However, despite success in achieving its goals, international aid often struggled for widespread popularity with the public and DfID lost political backing post-Brexit. ¹⁰ https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/trackers/what-sector-is-the-uk-government-spending-too-much-on   ¹¹ https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/7806-British-amongst-least-generous-overseas-aid ¹² https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/voters-want-nhs-spending-more-than-any-other-department DfID’s difficulty making a positive case for its work, both with the public and stakeholders in Whitehall, is something that development advocates should reflect on.

There is a case that, as Lowcock set out, “reducing poverty is in the national interest… if the UK wants to be safe in the wider world, we have to care about what’s going on in very, very poor countries because they are the places where problems originate and from where they spread.” But there are also legitimate reasons why development might be superseded by other goals, and why merging DfID and the Foreign Office into a single organisation makes sense. Other commentators argue for closer alignment of diplomatic and development objectives, with development aims sometimes subordinate to geopolitical ones.

DfID’s unbending belief that poverty reduction should be insulated from trade-offs was in its founding DNA and partly what made it so effective. But it also made it one of the most single-minded Whitehall departments – and therefore one of the most vulnerable, when the consensus around poverty reduction as a primary goal, and more generally the centrality of aid spending to Britain’s national purpose, broke down.

Sarah Champion described how, after the FCDO merger, “We haemorrhaged our expertise. Because the one thing I know about development people is they do it not for the job, status or career progression, they do it because they really, really care.” Andrew Mitchell talked about how “meeting old DfID people in the Foreign Office was like meeting people who had emerged from the rubble of a nuclear explosion.” The FCDO merger clearly could have been managed better. But in the end, civil servants need to be able to adapt to changed political priorities. A department that had developed such a strong institutional outlook found it hard to adapt once political priorities changed.

The important discussion is what should happen next to development policy

Back in 2022 Keir Starmer suggested he would bring back DfID once in government. But he has subsequently distanced himself from that remark and a machinery of government change seems unlikely. 

While the FCDO has retained a degree of internal separation between diplomacy and development, the UK’s development policy will be institutionally tethered to diplomatic efforts for the foreseeable future. The real challenge is not to look for a return to the past, but to determine how aid spending can be as effective as possible within the institutional architecture and framework of “mixed objectives” that ministers – so far – seem to have chosen to maintain.