The foreign and international development departments should be merged, a former foreign secretary has said in an interview with Civil Service World.

Conservative peer Lord Hurd, who was a Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) diplomat before he became a politician, said that the Department for International Development (DfID) should become part of the FCO. Emphasising that this is his own, personal point of view, the peer called for the aid minister to be based in the foreign office – but with a Cabinet seat.

“In my time [as foreign secretary], the Overseas Development Administration came under me,” he explained. “You can argue that aid has a bigger budget [now], and I agree that there should be a cabinet minister dealing with aid.” Nonetheless, he said: “There should not be a separate department with separate rules, a separate bureaucracy and a separate way of looking at things.

“I would favour having two ministers based in the foreign office, as has happened before – both in cabinet, one dealing with aid and one with foreign policy, but living under the same roof and sharing civil servants.”

The current system has allowed DfID to run its own foreign policy independent of the FCO, Hurd warned. “The division between DfID with the money and the foreign office without the money has gone too far,” he claimed. “In many African countries, they know that the money is with the DfID representative. The ambassador or high commissioner may theoretically be in charge, but the person really in charge is the DfID person. That is no criticism of him; he just may have a different set of ideas. That needs to be looked at.”

Meanwhile, the independent Commission on National Security in the 21st Century’s report Shared Responsibilities, published today (see p1), also argues for closer coordination between DfID and FCO. Asked why the commission recommended retaining DfID as a separate entity, commission member Sir David Omand replied: “It would be fairer to say that we haven’t recommended that it should simply be reabsorbed [into the FCO]. It should have its own cabinet-level minister, given the importance of international development – but we wanted to emphasise that its work is not entirely separate, because relieving poverty is best done when there’s stability and security, and [fostering] that should be part of its primary mission.