Labour will reverse “misguided” Foreign Office and DfID merger, Starmer says

Keir Starmer has pledged that a future Labour government would reverse the “misguided” merger carried out by the government that saw the Department for International Development subsumed into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Speaking on The Rest is Politics podcast on Wednesday, the Labour leader said “not to see the importance of a department that is focused on fixing some of the global problems that actually unlock a lot of the promise is, I just think, totally misguided”.

“The wrongheadedness of not seeing that as a massive asset is huge,” he added. “We are [going to bring back the Department for International Development] – for so many reasons.”

Boris Johnson announced in June 2020 that the Department for International Development, which he had called a “giant cashpoint in the sky”, would be merged under the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to create a new department: the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

The government described the move as “uniting development and diplomacy in one new department that brings together Britain’s international effort” with the UK’s aid budget “given new prominence within our ambitious international policy”.

As reported by LabourList at the time, Labour’s Preet Kaur Gill MP said in response that her party would “oppose retreat from the global stage” and argued that “getting rid of an independent DfID in the middle of a global pandemic is irresponsible, counter-productive and wrong”.

Former Tory Prime Minister David Cameron also criticised the decision, saying it would result in “less respect for the UK overseas” and senior Conservative backbencher and former international development secretary Andrew Mitchell called it an “utterly self-inflicted act of vandalism”.

Rishi Sunak announced a cut to the aid budget from 0.7% of gross national income – which had been a level of spending enshrined in the International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act – to 0.5% later that year.

187 charities and aid organisations wrote to the Prime Minister urging against the cut, including Save the Children, Greenpeace UK, Christian Aid, VSO International and others. Keir Starmer highlighted the cut in reference to defence spending, for which Johnson announced in 2020 the biggest investment since the Cold War.

Commenting on the commitment from Starmer today, Daniel Willis at Global Justice Now said: “It’s welcome that Labour is committed to bringing DfID back, but this is really the bare minimum that a progressive party should offer and won’t undo the decade of damage that Conservative governments have done to UK aid.

“If Labour are serious about fixing aid, they must go further and unpick the Tories’ attempts to put British International Investment and the City of London at the forefront of development.

“We can’t just undo the past couple of years and hope things will get better, Labour must think more radically about how to fix these problems in the long term.”

Save the Children executive director of policy Kirsty McNeill described Starmer’s promise as an “important announcement from Labour that shows serious thinking about how the UK government can make the biggest difference in tackling global challenges and supporting the poorest and most vulnerable families”.

Oxfam GB chief executive officer Danny Sriskandarajah said it was “very good news” that there would be a department with “dedicated resources and expertise to help the UK play a positive role in addressing rising hunger, inequality, climate breakdown and other global challenges”.