“The concept of reintegrating the Department for International Development back into another department is a policy from yesterday’s men,” says Mike Foster. “Why would anybody listen to them? Their credibility on international development doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, given where we were in 1997 when the Labour government came in.”

Foster’s broadside is aimed squarely at two key figures in the last Conservative government: prime minister John Major and foreign secretary Douglas Hurd. Both have argued recently that the Department for International Development (DfID) should be subsumed within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) – the latter using an interview with this newspaper to set out his case (p3 and p13, 30 June). Although Hurd supports the retention of a cabinet seat for the international development secretary, he believes that DfID’s grip on the purse strings controlling overseas spending has weakened the FCO. “In many African countries, they know that the money is with the DfID representative,” he told Civil Service World. “The ambassador or high commissioner may theoretically be in charge, but the person really in charge is the DfID person.”

Because DfID staff “may have a different set of ideas” from FCO representatives, Hurd argues, the FCO/DfID division weakens the coherence of UK overseas policy and undermines the FCO’s effectiveness. But Foster is having none of it: “DfID staff and high commissioners or ambassadors may bring different skill sets, but they work hand in hand,” he says. “One is not the boss dog. They work as a partnership – and that’s what makes DfID’s programmes so successful. Every country has different needs, and that’s why we have an active partnership, as opposed to one dominant department – be it FCO or DfID.”

Equally robustly, Foster rejects the charge that the FCO’s influence has been weakened. “When I visit countries as a development minister, I’ll often stay with the ambassador or high commissioner, and it’s quite clear that they have a strong relationship with the head of the DfID office,” he says. Officials may “come at the solution to problems from different directions, but they complement each other rather than working against each other. I’ve visited countries around the world, and on each and every occasion I’ve seen supportive, coordinated efforts.”

When Labour came to power, Foster continues, “we had seen the aid budget cut to 0.26 per cent of GDP” – spending in 2007-8 was 0.36 per cent, with a target of 0.7 per cent by 2013 – while “development didn’t have its own seat at the cabinet table, and aid was conditional upon British commercial interests.” It was under Hurd, of course, that the government was caught linking aid for a Malaysian dam with a £1bn arms deal. “That wasn’t good development,” says Foster. “We didn’t do it for the good of the people we were [supposed to be] trying to help.”

Labour’s response was to create DfID as an independent department – echoing the 1964-70 Labour administration’s establishment of the Ministry of Overseas Development, subsequently abolished by Margaret Thatcher. The results, says Foster, speak for themselves. “The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development ranks us as the best development agency in the world. Within Whitehall, the capability review said that DfID is the number-one Whitehall department. And [pressure group] One Campaign rates us as the top development body.” The idea of “saying: ‘We know you’re the best, but now we want to bring you back under the FCO umbrella’” is, says Foster, “madness”.

Why so? “Immediately you’d be downplaying the importance of development, and that sends a very clear signal to the rest of the world,” he replies. “That would then play out in-country, to the detriment of our overall policy aims – which are, primarily, to fight poverty, and then to tackle the challenges ahead of us: climate change, food security, conflict in fragile states. We’d lose some of the impetus behind all the good work we’ve done over the last 12 years.”

Of course, the current Conservative leadership has pledged to retain DfID as a distinct department (see p17, p23), and committed itself to the 0.7 per cent target. But Foster argues that this is an “unbelievably shallow conversion”. When in July website conservativehome.com conducted a poll of the Conservative prospective parliamentary candidates most likely to win seats at the next election, Foster says, “Only four per cent of them wanted to protect the aid budget.” Indeed, he argues that “Ninety-six per cent of Conservative candidates want to see aid cut. That’s the figure that will be a millstone around David Cameron’s neck. He can’t be taken seriously when 96 per cent of his new flock don’t agree.”

In fact, Foster is playing rather loose with his statistics. Rather than asking candidates whether they want to see the aid budget cut, the conservativehome survey asked “which of the following policy areas should be most immune from spending cuts?” (our italics). Aid was put up against health, defence and schools, and respondents could only pick one answer; defence won the day, with 39 per cent of the votes, followed by health on 34 and schools on 23 per cent. In this context, the aid budget’s six per cent score looks unsurprising. Notwithstanding the statistics, though, Foster’s position is clear: “David Cameron was an active Conservative before 1997, when aid budgets were halved,” he says. “This is something he’s trying to do as a political gesture, but behind him is the real Conservative Party.”

Enough party politics. When asked about the criticisms of DfID’s approach contained within Shared Responsibilities, the June report published by think-tank the Institute for Public Policy Research’s Commission on National Security in the 21st Century (see p1, CSW 30 June), Foster’s response is far more measured.

The commission argued for a more coordinated, cross-departmental approach to overseas operations, supported by pooled funding streams – and Foster says the government is already moving in this direction. “Some DfID, FCO and defence funding has gone into a single conflict-prevention pool, which is already working,” he argues. The commission’s call for better coordination of civilian staff, he adds, has also been pre-empted: “The prime minister has already committed us to having a cadre of civilians who can work in these environments. It’s almost ‘job done’ already.”

On the commission’s suggestion that DfID’s statutory objectives be broadened from tackling poverty to allow it to foster security and stability in areas of conflict, Foster argues that the department can do this already. “We can work towards poverty reduction in the short term or it can be a longer-term outcome – and we know that delivering a stable environment will deliver poverty reduction in the years ahead,” he says. “Where there are areas outside our remit, that’s where the pool funding comes in. So there’s no need to change the law.”

What’s more, says Foster, DfID’s new white paper focuses the department on areas of conflict. “We’ve said that 50 per cent of the additional funding that’s going to be committed to development aid will go to countries in conflict or fragile states, because we sense – as the commission did – that you can’t get development unless you have stability”, he says. “We’re looking to step up to the mark to help prevent conflict, because if you prevent conflict you’ll get a better deal for the people we’re trying to give development outcomes to.”

Mike Foster says his department is determined to reduce conflict in the developing world, but back in London he clearly relishes a scrap with the Conservative Party. In him, DfID has a doughty defender; and the Tories a pugnacious opponent. Perhaps – in the language of international development – he doesn’t feel that the opposition is in such a ‘fragile state’.


CV: Mike Foster

1963     Born in Birmingham
1984     Graduates from Wolverhampton Polytechnic with a BA in economics; joins Jaguar Cars as a financial analyst
1987     Promoted to become management accountant
1991     Qualifies as an associate member of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, and becomes a lecturer in accountancy and finance at Worcester College of Technology
1994     Completes Post Graduate Certificate in Education
1997     Elected as Worcester’s first Labour MP
2001     Becomes Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to education minister Margaret Hodge
2005     Made PPS to Northern Ireland secretary Peter Hain
2006     Enters government as an assistant whip
2008     Promoted to become Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at DfID, under Douglas Alexander