2. A new start in 1997 – the Department for International Development

Key points:

• The UK Department for International Development was a game changer for UK policy in 1997. It put eliminating extreme poverty as the clear, legal and primary objective of UK global policy and legislation. That has gradually been eroded over the years and should be restored. ?Hopefully the new (and former) Development Minister Andrew Mitchell will do so.
• Boris Johnson’s decision to abolish DFID in 2020 was wrong and has – as predicted - been a disaster.?It should be reversed. ?Mitchell and Labour have some early ideas on this.
• UK government strategy for most of the last 25 years has recognised that eliminating world poverty is not mainly about aid, but about a wide range of policies , and that required a Secretary of State to argue for them in Cabinet.?This should also be restored. ?

Twenty-five years ago, I joined a brand-new Department for International Development (DFID).?It was my first job in the British civil service, and I was one year out of university.?My older brother already worked for the Overseas Development Administration (confusingly sharing its acronym with official development assistance) which became DFID in 1997.??That’s how I found out it existed.?I had grown up watching Live Aid on TV and singing “Free Nelson Mandela” at demos. ?I was excited about contributing to changing the injustice that almost half of the people in the world lived in extreme poverty, while I was lucky to be born in one of the richest countries in the world. ?1997 was the start for me, and a fresh start for UK government policy on international development.?

Clare Short was the new Minister putting fresh energy and purpose into the Department. Myles Wickstead was writing the DFID White Paper Eliminating World Poverty , which began by stating ‘we shall refocus our international development efforts on the elimination of poverty and encouragement of economic growth which benefits the poor’.?

This was important for several reasons.?It clearly distanced the UK from the 1994 Pergau Dam scandal which revealed UK official development assistance had been used to bribe Malaysian government officials to buy British arms – ships, planes and missiles.?From now on, the purpose of UK official development assistance would be eliminating poverty – not bribing other governments - and in 2002 this would be enacted in legislation by the UK Parliament.?

It led to the UK’s decision to “untie” all UK official development assistance so that it would not be ringfenced for British companies or charities, but it would be used in the best way possible to achieve its goal of eliminating poverty. The UK began to lobby other OECD countries to untie their assistance too. It was estimated this open competitive process would increase the value of global assistance by 25%.

The white paper signalled a new level of ambition. ?It did not say reduce poverty. It was not good enough to alleviate the symptoms of poverty and make life a bit better. The goal is to eliminate poverty. There was – and is - no excuse for people living on under ￡1.50 a day in the 21st Century.

Perhaps most importantly, it represented a new way of thinking about extreme global poverty. Elimination means recognising that global poverty can be eliminated. ?Poverty has root causes which could be addressed.?Elimination means poverty is not inevitable or normal. It is man-made, unjust and can be ended. And the white paper recognised that other UK government policies might be contributing to the causes of global poverty and inequality and that eliminating world poverty needed to be a whole of government objective. It recognised that there needed to be more development assistance for other countries. But it’s not just about aid. Governments and companies in all countries, and what they do, matter even more.?At the same time as making DFID a separate Cabinet level Ministry, development policy was going to be more joined up than ever before.

This shows why Boris Johnson’s argument in 2020 that UK global Covid policy could only be joined up if he merged DFID into the Foreign Office was never true.?Its failure was predictable and predicted. Throughout my DFID career I always worked closely with other parts of Government including the Foreign Office, the military, trade, health and environment, to achieve government wide objectives, including eliminating world poverty.

In January 1998, the UK assumed the Presidency of the G8 and my first job in DFID was working with Richard Manning on the international development workstream for the Summit. It was held in May in Birmingham, Clare Short’s hometown. ?I was still young and junior. Richard Manning and the Foreign Office and HM Treasury “sous Sherpas” did the real negotiating with other G8 countries. I did a lot of the faxing Tokyo at midnight over an insecure line making sure it was safely received at 8am their time. But I also did quite a bit of the drafting, honing that civil service and political skill of finding a form of words that eight different governments could agree to. It can sometimes lead to brilliant breakthroughs, as it did in Gleneagles in 2005. Sometimes it is used to paper over fundamental contradictions, as in the Northern Ireland Brexit protocol.?

The Birmingham G8 Summit became most famous for the circle of 70,000 Jubilee Debt Campaigners holding hands in a ring around the venue. Clare Short famously joined hands with the protesters, agreeing that the G8 needed to do much more to cancel debts of countries that could not afford to pay them. ?This was a totally different relationship between the UK Government and anti-poverty campaigners. At No 10, we had a similarly close relationship with the Make Poverty History campaign in 2005.

The Birmingham G8 Summit response to the Jubilee Debt campaign was not good enough.?This was my first lesson that change and international negotiations take time and patience as well as passion and action. It took another G8 Summit in Cologne in 1999 to do much better.

But the Birmingham G8 Communique still kicked off many of the achievements of global international development policy in the subsequent years: increasing official development assistance, untying aid, and reducing trade barriers for developing countries. The Communique committed the G8 to work with other countries to achieve several international development targets , including provide universal primary education, and to reduce drastically child and maternal mortality, deaths from AIDS , and the proportion of the world's population living in extreme poverty . ?Over the next 25 years we saw progress on all these fronts. And I will look at each of these in more detail in this series of articles.??

The former Secretary of State and new Conservative UK Minister of State for Development, Andrew Mitchell, argued at the time that closing DFID was “at a stroke destroying a key aspect of global Britain .”?Mitchell now attends Cabinet as Development Minister, which is a small step in the right direction.?Given Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt have now ruled out restoring the 0.7% aid budget under their government, the next best thing they could do, if they really want to prioritise the most vulnerable people in the world, is to recognise abolishing DFID was a mistake. Not their mistake, so they could reverse it without making a ‘U-turn’. ?

During an interesting session of the International Development Committee in the House of Commons this week [6 Dec 2022] Andrew Mitchell said he regarded the closure of DFID as “settled UK policy.” ?He said, “let’s not beat around the bush, we are not a development super power at the moment and that is something that is bemoaned around the world by our many friends.”?Mitchell said he’s looking to see what he can do to improve the structures, short of re-opening DFID. ?He said he looked back to when there was a separate Overseas Development Administration within the Foreign Office, led by a Permanent Secretary, and asks If we can do something even better than that, fit for the 2030s, that is a focal point for global public goods like climate change, pandemics or migration. “An entity that will be seen around the world as the part of the Foreign Office that deals with international development”.

That might be the best we can hope for if closing DFID really is settled UK policy in Sunak’s government, although a Prime Minister always has the power to change the machinery of government whenever s/he wants to.?But last time I looked, the building remains boarded up on Whitehall (see photo above), ready for a comeback.? And maybe this issue isn't settled for long, if the Labour Party win the next general election, which is what opinion polls suggest.?

The Labour Party has pledged to reverse Boris Johnson’s decision to close DFID.?Keir Starmer announced in July 2022 that he would bring back the Department for International Development if Labour wins the next election, saying that its merger with the Foreign Office was “totally misguided”.?Preet Gill, the Labour Party international development spokesperson is currently considering options for a new version of DFID which, she says, “will have a new forward-looking focus .”?She is consulting experts and the sector. ?In a speech at an event in Parliament today [7 Dec 2022], she said a new DFID would refocus aid on poverty, and prioritise support for civil society and other organisations in developing countries and on making sure the UK has the international policies which address the causes of humanitarian disasters and conflicts. This is a good combination of restoring the best (and most relevant for today) of the old DFID and updating it for the present and future.

Next article - How we measure progress – UN goals

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