Foreign Affairs Committee

Oral evidence: Integrated Security Fund, HC 310

Tuesday 9 June 2026

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 9 June 2026.

Watch the meeting

Members present: Emily Thornberry (Chair); Fleur Anderson; Alex Ballinger; Aphra Brandreth; Richard Foord; Alan Gemmell; Uma Kumaran; Abtisam Mohamed; and Sir John Whittingdale.

Questions 1 to 36

Witnesses

I: Lord Evans of Weardale KCB DL, former Director General at Security Service (MI5) and Chair at the HALO Trust; the Rt Hon. Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale,  former Special Representative for Peace Building ; Dr Kate Ferguson, Co-executive Director and Head of Policy and Research at Protection Approaches; and Olivia O’Sullivan, Director UK in the World Programme at Chatham House.

Examination of witnesses

Witnesses: Lord Evans of Weardale, Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale, Dr Kate Ferguson and Olivia O’Sullivan.

[Sir John Whittingdale took the Chair]

Chair: Good morning. We are expecting the Chair of the Committee very shortly, so I will be handing back to her once she arrives, but I think we should start anyway. This is a one-off hearing of the Committee on the status of the Integrated Security Fund. Perhaps we can start with you introducing yourselves individually.

Dr Ferguson: Thank you so much for having me. I am Dr Kate Ferguson, and I am the co-executive director of Protection Approaches.

Lord Evans: I am Lord Evans of Weardale, and I am the chairman of the HALO Trust.

Olivia O'Sullivan: Thank you for having me. My name is Olivia O’Sullivan, and I direct the UK in the World research programme at the think-tank Chatham House.

Lord McConnell: Thank you very much. I am Jack McConnell. I am a Member of the House of Lords and a co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on conflict prevention, conflict resolution and peacebuilding.

Q1             Chair: Thank you. Perhaps we can start with a general observation of the current status, given that there has been a switch away from overseas conflicts and towards specifically UK national security threats. To what extent has that affected the operation? Has the fact that it is now focused very much on the five pre-defined threat areas affected its activities elsewhere? Is it still able to respond quickly to an unexpected crisis?

Lord Evans: Obviously, from the perspective of the HALO Trust, we take it as a very important insight that, where there has been conflict, that drives security problems and poverty—the Foreign Secretary is on record as having stated that conflict is now one of the biggest drivers of extreme poverty across the world. Therefore, it is in the interest both of those suffering in post-conflict environments and of national security that the UK has an ability to intervene and prevent conflicts from developing in ways that can be extremely damaging.

Our view is that the very narrow focus that the ISF has now had to adopt—I recognise that, to a significant extent, this is driven by funding issues—means that the UK has much less opportunity to work on conflict prevention. That is regrettable, both because it will have an impact on our security later on, downstream, and because there are considerable areas of the developing world where we are no longer able to operate in conflict prevention.

Of course, that does not leave a vacuum; it means that others will take the opportunity to engage. Those others include Russia in Africa, China and so on. In that sense, we are losing influence, as well as missing the opportunities for countering poverty and increasing our national security.

[Emily Thornberry took the Chair]

Olivia O'Sullivan: Let me build on what my colleague has said and give my take on this. This is from work that we and our research programme have done on the wider future and context of the UK’s development strategy. The panel will all be aware that the Integrated Security Fund grew out of what was the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund, set up in 2015.

Our understanding of that was always that its purpose was to be catalytic, to do things that were not necessarily mainstream to the rest of the Government, and to bring together the development, security, defence and diplomacy perspectives to deal with that consistent problem, which is that conflict and extreme poverty tend to be intertwined. Conflicts are complex and, increasingly, are going on longer. In understanding the principle that prevention is better than cure, how you do peacebulding, build resilience and prevent conflict is an important area of focus for Government.

Since 2015, however, there have been some important developments. One is that the UK’s national security, and the threats to it, have changed. I do not need to remind anyone in this room that Russia mounted a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. We face more direct, hostile state threats and different challenges to our security. On the one hand, if the focus of what became the ISF had not changed, I think we would be asking why, but on the other hand, the other big, important thing that has happened in that span of time is, in the past few years, the massive contraction in global aid spending more widely.

What aid spending remains? There is less public finance, so the trends tend to be that states and Governments look to the private sector to mobilise investment to help deal with poverty. A lot of the remaining aid tends to go to climate finance, because we have targets for that, which is all well and good, but both those trends mean that the remaining aid and private funds for development purposes tend to flow to more stable countries or lower middle-income countries. We have the risk that the body of countries and places that remain affected by conflict—increasingly, those are the places where extreme poverty is concentrated, too—are neglected. That is the risk.

From my own perspective, that does not necessarily have to sit in the Integrated Security Fund. Arguably—folks from Government will be better placed to tell the Committee about this—what has happened is that there is a stronger hub of people working on national security at the centre, in Cabinet Office, and that the Integrated Security Fund is becoming an underpinning budget for that. However, if the Integrated Security Fund is not the place where we address these issues of preventing conflict upstream, and the risk that conflict-affected states in particular will become neglected by wider global trends, where does that sit in Government?

In the context of broader aid cuts, it is true that the FCDO has sought to protect funding to fragile and conflict-affected states, but I think that the broader trajectory in global funding will be that they are likely to be neglected. A lot of the funding is likely to go to short-term humanitarian response, rather than the harder stuff, which is the mediation, the peacebulding and the prevention.

Q2                Chair: We have not heard from Kate.

Dr Ferguson: Thank you so much, and good to see you again. I am in complete agreement with what Olivia just said, but to build on it, as we are right at the start of the big-picture analysis that I think was used to justify some of the changes, I will maybe challenge some of the limits of that understanding.

I agree very much with the diagnosis of the state of the world: we are in a period of deep and volatile contestation, where a confluence of anti-democratic forces, be they malign states—now some of our traditional partners, to be honest—non-state, anti-democratic actors, which I guess is a posh way of talking about the tech bro industry, where quite extraordinary financial gains are now to be made in the anti-democratic space, or political extremists, whether we are talking about the galvanised far right in our own region or other forms. That contestation is, I think, quite rightly recognised by our national security assessment.

What I think is missed is absolutely central to the statecraft and tradecraft of those anti-democratic actors. They have realised something that I do not think that our Government have caught up with, which is that the most effective, scalable, cheapest and deniable way to come for democratic rule, standards and influence is actually no longer through conventional military contestation; it is about going for the relative cohesion between democracies, the relative cohesion between state and citizen, and the relative cohesion between societies and communities. That is cheap to do.

That has always been the case, but now, in the technological and communications revolution that we are just at the beginning of, it is now very cheap and easy to reach directly into the very local level to advance global strategic goals. That is as true here in the UK, where our own communities are now feeling that force and will continue to do so, as it is on the other side of the world.

Q3             Chair: We are very aware of that. We did a disinformation inquiry and looked internationally and nationally at what was happening. We all agree with what you are saying and that Governments are perhaps not yet taking it seriously enough. The question that I do not necessarily have an answer to is: if they are doing this instead of invading, to what end? What is the long-term objective of destroying democracies?

Dr Ferguson: There is an awful lot to be gained when the rules and standards that the UK and many of our partners have disproportionately benefited from break down. We are seeing climate breakdown, resource nationalism and resource war, as in the middle east and elsewhere, and that is going to intensify.

We are going to be in a more violent period over the next 10 years. That is the bit that I think that the ISF limits. I agree that we need to worry about Russia and invest much more in hybrid threats. I agree with a number of those priorities. However, if we recognise that the strategy of our adversaries—as defined by our national security services—is to come towards us domestically in the UK and Europe, and through our partners and communities around the world, and target the civilian and the social realm, then why on earth are we not meeting that with a commensurate response? That is the bit that I do not understand.

Last year, the ISF paid my organisation to run an assessment of the changing nature of these kinds of threats, particularly as they exist within Europe, but also globally. Not a single person that I met—whether the head of civilian defence in Norway, the people I met in Nuuk and Sarajevo, senior hybrid threat advisers in NATO, people in our own Ministry of Defence or policing chiefs here in the UK—disagrees with this analysis.

Yet there is no strategic objective in our national security strategy, foreign policy or in the money. That is the bit that I do not have an answer to in the sense that I do not know where it sits in either the restructure, the future of the ISF or our grand strategy in the world. However, someone needs to take responsibility and accountability for it, or our own interests, as well as the lives of millions, are going to be in peril.

Lord McConnell: It may also be helpful to look beyond the past decade. Around 2006, the previous Labour Government agreed to establish a conflict pool and a conflict fund inside Government to bring together the work of the Defence Department, the Development Department and the Foreign Office. That was an initial baby step towards creating a proper integrated fund.

While it was in existence when I was special representative for peacebuilding in 2008, it was not really operating as an integrated fund. It was still working very much as a fund that served the different Departments, brought the money together, and then put it back again. However, it was right to try and integrate those three elements and the work of those three Departments in conflict prevention.

The Conflict, Stability and Security Fund established by William Hague and Andrew Mitchell was a quite dramatic step towards a better level of integration. The commitment at that time for 50% of ODA to go to conflict prevention and fragility made a real difference. It gave the Departments a strategic priority. It also sent a very strong signal to our ambassadors out in the field.

In the past decade, we have seen, first, the creation of this Integrated Security Fund, which could have been a big bonus but has ultimately resulted in more of a shift to these so-called domestic threats rather than our international interventions. It completely misses the point that the international work on conflict prevention, conflict resolution and peacebuilding contributes directly to our national security and to preventing these national threats.

The disappointment of the more recent years is that these significant cuts, in addition to a lack of strategy, have resulted in three problems. The first is that there is no clear strategy or prioritisation of this work that allows our ambassadors and officials in countries around the world, or in international organisations, to consistently take up relationships with others and support local peacebuilding and conflict prevention.

The second problem is that we are no longer a long-term, reliable partner, and that really matters in this field. The work by hostile actors that Kate has referred to is long term—over decades. They are thinking long term; we are thinking about which programmes we can cut in next year’s Budget, rather than having a three, five or 10-year strategy for seriously intervening.

For this Committee, the third issue is transparency. It is almost impossible to hold this fund to account because of the lack of information that is published in advance or afterwards in any given spending year. I do not want to speak for the Committee, but if there are going to be recommendations, that is an issue—

Chair: We are open to suggestions—don’t worry.

Lord McConnell: In parliamentary terms, there are issues about strategy and prioritisation, reliability and long-term approaches, and accountability and transparency. Addressing them could only lead to an improved use of the funding and a better approach.

Chair: Thank you. Alex, do you have follow-up questions?

Q4             Alex Ballinger: Yes, thank you, Chair. I should declare that, with Lord McConnell, I am co-chair of the APPG on conflict prevention, conflict resolution and peacebuilding.

Today is the launch of the “Global Peace Index”—the annual publication that talks about the number of conflicts happening around the world. I looked at it this morning, and there were more interstate conflicts happening last year than the year before. It is a record number since the end of the cold war: 103 countries are involved in conflict at the moment.

I just want the panel’s reflections on that. We have seen ODA decreasing in the UK. In the States and other European countries, the work on peacebuilding and conflict resolution, which is a part of that, has shrunk as a proportion through the ISF and other things. How much of the increase in conflict can be linked to that reduction, and how much is it due to bigger strategic factors that we are seeing in Ukraine and Iran?

Lord Evans: There are probably bigger drivers of this than individual funding shortfalls in the UK. But particularly where a country is vulnerable to conflict, there are things that can be done for a relatively modest amount of spending, such as—I say this with my HALO hat on—weapons and ammunition management.

There is very good evidence that, where a conflict has taken place, there is very often a lot of weaponry that is not under proper control. If that is not properly managed, that leads in turn to opportunities for the next conflict, crime and potentially terrorism. For a relatively modest budget, you can provide skills, advice and infrastructure to enable countries that are recovering from conflict to take control of those weapons, rather than them falling into the wrong hands.

The UK has a good track record of modest investment in post-conflict areas to stop that feeding in. Quite a lot of what is happening in the Sahel is being created or fuelled by weapons coming in from Libya, where there is a massive amount of weaponry. So, we can do things about this, particularly in areas relevant to our security, but it is conflict prevention. At the moment, UK funding has gone away from those areas, so we are leaving an opportunity for people who would bring further conflict to access the wherewithal to do so. That is not in our interests, and it is not in the interests of countries with very significant financial and humanitarian needs.

I don’t think one can say that the reason that the world is going backwards on this is that we have stopped this particular bit of funding, but there are opportunities to intervene where we wish. We have had the capability to do that as a country, but the funding has fallen away due to the very narrow focus that the ISF has adopted. I think in the longer term, that is not conducive to our national security interests or to the humanitarian interests in those areas.

Dr Ferguson: I would like to add two points on the question of the ODA reduction. One is around taking us back to the timing of when that took place. I remember it vividly, because I was in Addis doing some work with our embassy there when the announcement of what was essentially USAID’s gutting came through. Everyone in this room will have had networks that were on the ground. It was a devastating moment; over a number of days, whole teams were being cut. The realisation of the impacts was absolutely devastating.

At the same time—I am sure it is the same for people on the panel and in this room who have worked in international relations, foreign policy or development—our phones were going off the hook, because as DC was in crisis and the USAID dollar collapsed overnight, the power of our aid pound and the power of London, without doing anything differently, soared.

Humble as my work is, I was receiving phone calls trying to find access to the Foreign Secretary on M23 invasion or incursions into DRC, the intensification of the Rapid Support Forces in Darfur and intensification of Russian action within Ukraine. I also believe that China intensified some of its behaviour during that period in the crisis.

I find the timing of the decision to communicate publicly that massive reduction of ODA baffling, because if you had made exactly the same cut but six months later, strategically and politically for the power of the UK Government, you would have been able to make significant impacts not only on those crises, to which I am committed, but on a whole range of global issues.

The current ODA budget, reduced as it is, is still not safe—we all know that. I think it is worthy of scrutiny to know who was actually in that room—what is the sufficient level of political and expert advisory input within the Treasury regarding international relations, the UK’s role in the world and everything that we are talking about? I find it baffling, because for anyone who has worked in foreign policy and development, their phone would have demonstrated that that timing was an error.

The second thing I want to say is that if we as a country have less money—we should think about budget lines; that is part of the focus of this session—and the UK faces this tight fiscal reality, then the significance of strategy, expertise and politics is even more important. That is the bit that worries me more.

The current restructure going on, despite the best efforts of Committees like this and many others to scrutinise it, will have such a disproportionate impact on the UK’s ability to operate on these issues and others—perhaps even more than the ODA cuts, because it is the political and the strategic that seems to be absent. Whatever money you have should then fall in behind your strategy. Those are my two major concerns. I hope we can come later to some of the recommendations that are a bit more positive, but I just wanted to add those two points.

Olivia O’Sullivan: I will briefly add a couple of points. I agree that the drivers of conflict are bigger than the aid cuts we make, but given that we are seeing a real proliferation of conflict and a real transformation in the drivers—including more actors and more powerful proxies prolonging conflicts, which goes to Kate’s point about how much more complex the environment is—we need a space in Government where we bolster our ability to understand those drivers. Where that exists intellectually is important, on a level with where it exists in the funding.

I agree on the wider question: where is the space where we are thinking beyond budget lines to our overarching strategy and response to the proliferation of conflict? If it is not in the ISF, it can be somewhere else. Looking forward, this Committee will want to scrutinise where it is. From the statements we have heard about the FCDO cuts, I know that they are reducing and rationalising some of their centrally managed programmes—these big programmes at headquarters—and calling them “communities of expertise”. They are looking to rationalise. It would be good to ask, will there be one of those on prevention of conflict, drivers of conflict and how you bring those things together? That is the question at the forefront of my mind about where this sits now.

Lord McConnell: The issues of capacity are here in London, in the Departments and the Government. Once you lose expertise and capacity or relationships with people who have expertise and capacity, it is very hard to build them back up again. The way in which that has begun to happen and is happening should be of concern to the Committee.

Relationships on the ground also matter. Those can be affected by cuts or the closure of programmes or by the year-by-year late announcements of budgets, which has been a problem over recent years. Budgets for individual programmes and conflict prevention programmes in countries have been agreed in June of the financial year rather than before the beginning of the financial year. That really does not help with the long-term relationships that need to be built up to counter the variety of forces that others have spoken about.

Capacity building should be seen in two ways: first, in the Department and here in London and the UK, and also on the ground, because part of that capacity is the relationships that you have with people who are involved in peacebuilding or conflict prevention in country.

Chair: We have such expertise in front of us, but we have a large number of questions, so we might struggle with time. I wonder whether it is possible to have one person perhaps take the lead in answering, and then if there are additional points that other people want to make, we can add those on instead.

Q5             Aphra Brandreth: Broadly, this has been covered. Lord Evans, you touched on what Russia and China might be doing in Africa, for example. I wondered whether you or somebody else on the panel—but not all four of you, because we have to keep it quick—might like to expand on the risk of these regional blind spots, particularly in the fragile regions of Africa and the western Balkans, which are not covered by the portfolios.

Lord McConnell: I would be happy to talk about the Asian example, rather than the western Balkans or Africa. I have been involved for 12 years in the peace process in Mindanao in the Philippines. The Philippine Government made a decision about 15 years ago under the previous President plus one that, in order to deal with the threat that they faced from China in the South China sea and other external threats, they had to bring to a conclusion their internal civil wars and internal threats.

The Philippine Government focused on and prioritised that with support from the UK and a number of other countries, including Australia, Switzerland, Malaysia, Japan and others, and they have successfully achieved that, despite the tumult in their national politics. It has meant that the Philippine navy and army are able to concentrate on that, particularly in relation to cyber, which is a big problem in the Philippines, as well as the naval problems.

The peace process is at the stage of reaching elections of a new legislature, which is a key part of the peace agreement. The ISF funding for our intervention and support there, which is a small amount of money, has gone, and we risk the possibility that we might no longer be assisting them at a key moment in that peace process.

If the peace process goes wrong, the diversion of resources inside the Philippines from external threat, which helps us globally, to internal threat will have an impact way into the future. That is what I mean about being strategic and thinking about the overall context: how it affects us, but also, at a regional level, how the actions of certain Governments to try to promote peace deserve our support.

Q6             Aphra Brandreth: Earlier, you touched on the lack of notice periods for these changes. What was the notice period that you had, or what would have been helpful for groups to have known more in advance about that was coming? How long in advance would it have been helpful to have heard, or influenced, that information?

Lord McConnell: Kate and David probably have more experience of this dramatically than I do.

Dr Ferguson: The notice periods can be very brutal and the impacts have transformed the landscape of UK civil society capabilities. That is said with deep vested interest. My own organisation has felt, very bluntly, some of that mishandling sometimes, and our sister organisations even more so. What is more important, though, is the impact that that leaves on the ground.

To be doing this amid a departmental restructure also goes to the point that Lord McConnell makes about relationships. You have these two transformations taking place where you have a huge contraction at London HQ and uncertainty at post. There are going to be fewer people, of our global network and here at centre, who have the time and job description to engage with people, whether those are communities, organisations or senior partnerships.

You also have a massive contraction of our own sector—of so many exceptional colleagues. They will be familiar to you and they hold that role of engaging relationships, not only with the UK, but with other states. It is the political advocacy work, the bridging and the infrastructure. The connective tissue between community and our Government is gone. That leaves an enormous hole, and then those regional gaps, such as the western Balkans, will be intensified. It is even more significant than that.

There are genuinely some things that this restructure could take forward that perhaps the Committee can help to advance and encourage, such as thinking about that culture of engagement—of listening to people, hearing them and allowing the system to then receive it. That is much cheaper than spending millions and millions of pounds on open-source intelligence. Open-source intelligence is important, but just listening to people who are worried and are moving their families out of Khartoum in the days before violence breaks out is cheaper.

There are some cultural things that really need to be addressed anyway, but that the contraction of resource demands. Otherwise, our capabilities and approach as a country, both in the civil society arena and our Foreign Office, will simply not be able to function at a time, as we have heard, where the world is more volatile.

The multilateral systems of partnership and collective problem solving are under deep strain, and we are entering an era of poly-shock. Logically, it does not make sense when it is some of the cheapest, most cost-effective ways of working that you can do. That is not even about programming; it is about holding relationships and how you hold intelligence and the value of certain kinds of evidence over others.

Q7             Fleur Anderson: Lord McConnell, on the balance between hard security, peacebuilding, conflict prevention and civil society funding, does the increased investment in hard security that is currently happening produce better national security outcomes over the medium to long term in your experience? How can we quantify that to judge whether the FCDO is getting that balance right?

Lord McConnell: It is important to be honest about these things. Maybe not so much on conflict resolution and negotiation, but one of the problems with investing in conflict prevention and peacebuilding is that it is very hard to quantify and is long term. I give the example I used a second ago about the Philippines. If the international community had walked away after the peace agreement was not legislated for within the first three years of the programme, we would not, 12 years later, have 12 years of peace and the fastest growing region in the Philippines.

It is very hard to quantify these things, but it is undoubtedly the case that hard power alone is not going to resolve the tensions, violence and conflict that we have in the world today. Political solutions, mediation, negotiation, support for peacebuilding and support for democracy and civil society has to run alongside that investment in hard power.

Our opponents—the hostile actors that were referred to earlier—know that. They do not just invest in hard power; they invest in disruptive measures of a different sort to what we would invest in. Our credibility as a country has, at least until recently, been very strong in supporting and engaging mediations, negotiations and the sort of peacebuilding work that has been discussed. But we have to be honest about this publicly that sometimes you cannot even talk about it.

I mentioned transparency earlier. I can think of at least one negotiation that I have been involved in recently that I would not want to talk openly in the Committee about, but a small bit of seed funding from the UK was and is making a real difference in that region. If that stops, we will probably go back five or 10 years and have to start again.

Q8             Fleur Anderson: If we do not have the data about that with current conflicts, we must have the data about it from previous conflicts where we can see an amount of funding. In hindsight, we have the luxury of being able to say—

Lord McConnell: Colombia and the Philippines are good examples. It was a very small amount of money in the Philippines and a slightly larger amount in Colombia where we made a difference. Colombia was one of the main sources of the international drug trade. Resolving the conflict there had a very direct impact in this country and across developed democracies everywhere.

Our work in the western Balkans was mentioned earlier. In the past, this country has invested in the western Balkans, maintaining a level of peace there. That region is not only internally volatile, but is constantly prodded by the Russians to try and destabilise it. All of us who want to see stability in Europe should be aware of the need to continually work in the western Balkans for peace and to produce stability, deal with tensions and improve their democracy, which is ultimately the safeguard. A strong civil society, strong democracy, strong levels of governance and the rule of law are the key safeguards. I would agree you can quantify some of those things.

Chair: Do you know Fleur’s background? You are speaking directly—I just want to know what is going on here. That’s all.

Q9             Uma Kumaran: Lord Evans, I was with the HALO Trust team from Sri Lanka last week, and they told me they had done some incredible work. They have cleared 302,000 landmines and there are just 700,000 to go.

They were very grateful for the UK’s funding, but they explicitly said some of what you have all set out to us today, which is that the money not just helps conflict prevention, but helps build bridges and helps reconciliation efforts. And all of this goes by the wayside, so I heartily agree with what you are saying. The majority of the Integrated Security Fund portfolios are front-loaded, reducing funds over time. Does this approach allow for realistic capabilities to be developed and maintained?

Lord Evans: As it happens, HALO does not have any funding from the ISF. We used to, but with the narrowing of the focus and because we tend to be upstream, we are not receiving that. In principle, in any programme you will have upfront costs and you need therefore to build, if that is the area that you are talking about. But the funding would need to be based on the actual programme that you are trying to deliver.

I want to come briefly to the earlier point about the extent to which you can demonstrate the value of these investments, and I think it is really difficult. I remember 20 years ago seeing a piece of work that was done by the Foreign Office trying to put figures around the interventions and the influence that the UK had on Indo-Pakistan relations.

The trouble is that it kind of puts figures around it, but it is not something that you can demonstrate, because it has not happened. If you stop a war, you don’t get that immediate visibility. That is why programme design is very important. Certainly, you will need to invest at the beginning to get a programme up and running.

Q10        Uma Kumaran: Do you think the approach we are taking has any effect on the influence and trust with partners in any given region?

Lord Evans: I apologise—can you say the second part of the question again?

Uma Kumaran: Does this approach have an impact on the trust and relationships with partners in any region that we are discussing?

Lord Evans: In terms of the way the funding is structured?

Uma Kumaran: Yes.

Lord Evans: If you set up expectations and then do not deliver them, that is undoubtedly a way of destroying trust, quite reasonably. I am not familiar with the detail of the way it is structured in Sri Lanka, although I am obviously aware of the programme because there has been long-standing engagement from HALO. I would need to offer to follow up with the Committee afterwards.

Q11        Uma Kumaran: The same question to anyone else on the panel.

Lord McConnell: Yes—absolutely. I cannot stress this point strongly enough. The annualisation of funding in this area over the last decade has been detrimental to UK engagement and reliability, and the trust that people can have in us in so many places.

When this happens on a large scale in a country that has a huge programme, where many millions of pounds are being spent, obviously that is really serious. But that is true even on a small scale, in countries where the embassy employs one or two members of staff to work with a local peace process, with a small programme budget that helps fund different organisations doing interesting things on the ground.

It is not only the programme elements of that and the relationships with the external organisations. If you get to the middle of February and the members of staff do not know whether they have a job on 1 April, that affects everything—their morale, their motivation, the time that they spend on the job, rather than thinking about the next job. Then if the embassy has to use some funds to plug the gap for six to eight weeks before the contracts can be continued in June, that is not a sensible way to function. That is particularly a problem in this sort of work, where trust, continuity and people matter so much.

It is an issue. Even three-year programmes were a problem in this world, but moving away from three-year programmes to this annualisation of budget decisions, and late budget decisions by Ministers, in particular, over recent years, is just not acceptable. It is damaging our work and our reputation.

Olivia O’Sullivan: Can I add two sentences on that? I don’t have a perspective on front-loading, but on the point about annualisation and very short-term budgets, in this world it is potentially an area of strength for the UK that we do not need to do things this way.

When you deal with the US Government, particularly on aid spending, there is an awful lot of money that is tied up in a system for which you need annual congressional approvals, which is a nightmare for partners. We do not have to do that. It has been about our internal tumult and decision making. We could reinvest in the idea that it is an area of strength for the UK that we are a long-term partner and that we think long term, but we have to actively make that choice.

Looking forward, the ISF could be a place for that, because it is explicitly supposed to take an integrated, long-term perspective and think about bringing together development, security, defence and domestic perspectives to ensure we have identified the strategic national security self-interest of the UK. That should be a long-term project.

Q12        Fleur Anderson: Lord Evans, I want to look at HALO Trust’s experience of programmes to reduce land mines. I have seen that for myself with MAG in Lebanon. We got close to reducing them, but then the funding was reduced. You will have seen it in Syria with HALO. Could you say a bit more about the risk when local networks and all that trust is built up and then not funded? What happens to those projects? How costly is it to rebuild them?

Lord Evans: When funding stops—certainly from the HALO perspective, and I think MAG would be in the same situation—there is no endowment from which we can take the money to keep it going. On some of the programmes where US funding was withdrawn, total numbers of staff in HALO went down last year from about 12,000 to about 7,000. We made 5,000 people redundant.

Now that has an impact, not just in terms of the work that is delivered, but a wider impact on areas of humanitarian need, because those are good jobs and skills being created and so on, and families depending on them, and they go. Of course, if you then have to restart, you have an up-front investment again in terms of equipment and so on, and in training and retraining—sometimes you can take back the same people. But this is extremely disruptive.

If you are looking for longer-term partnerships, as you are, and a contribution to the stability of these areas, if you keep turning the tap on and off, that has a very detrimental effect. Instead of being seen as somebody who is alongside the communities in difficulty, you are seen as an unreliable partner. It is very difficult to maintain those relationships.

In a lot of these areas, you are dependent on relationships that go back a long way. The HALO Trust has been present in Afghanistan for over 30 years and we are still there. That enables you to do things that an organisation coming in from outside would not be able to do, because you have not got those relationships. In a lot of these countries and regions, relationships really matter. It is not a spreadsheet activity—it is a relationship activity.

If we keep turning on and turning off, it reduces our ability to operate. From the UK perspective, it reduces our reputation and our credibility.

Dr Ferguson: There are also some interesting lessons on some of the things that the ISF actually has done quite well on relationships.

At its best, the ISF is catalytic and it is cross-Government. It encourages a higher risk threshold of its partners to undertake work that under more traditional ODA programming was more difficult, by the nature of what many of you will be familiar with—that structural problem of DFID treating problems and not engaging in the politics or being brought into that harder policy, and the FCO thinking, “Well, the programming doesn’t speak to us.”

Since the merger, that has continued. Fantastic work that the UK was funding in this realm in Darfur was not feeding demonstrably into the policy analysis of the mounting risks ahead of what is now the most devastating catastrophe that the world is experiencing.

There are some very important lessons of what the ISF has cultivated well, in terms of that relationship between ground and policy. It is also about thinking about, whatever comes next and whoever funds it, how you strengthen a feedback loop from ground to UK Government in a manner that is cost-effective and sustainable. 

Some of that is about funding, and some is about expectations in how you manage projects. Some of it is actually around the implications of the restructure and how you hold relationships.

There are some very important things that we take of what worked from the ISF and some of the things that we need to be honest about that the UK has never quite got right, in failing to listen to programmes, whoever funds them, whether that is pure ODA or ISF.

Q13        Fleur Anderson: On Sudan, do you know how much we fund programmes there? Has that stayed the same, gone up or gone down?

Dr Ferguson: I would have to come back to you. I am terrible for remembering, with my dyslexic brain—I will give you numbers the wrong way round—but I can write them down and send them to the Committee.

Q14        Alan Gemmell: Your collective comments about the lack of strategy and politics are stark, as is the thought that we are missing the opportunity to play to our strengths.

Lord Evans, I had the privilege of being in Angola with the HALO Trust. It is in my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

It was clear that your organisation was going to receive a reduction in its funding. I wondered whether your assessment was that we were now going to lose, as a country, our sort of pre-eminent position in landmine clearance because of our lack of funding. Or do you think you and MAG and others can make up for that?

Lord Evans: The UK is in an extraordinary position, because the HALO Trust and the Mines Advisory Group are the two biggest humanitarian mine-clearance organisations globally and are both major recipients of US Government support—despite the bumpiness of last year, we still are. It is an area of real UK strength and plays strongly to the UK’s international reputation, because we can do things—and do do them—that other countries cannot do. A decreasing amount of that comes from UK Government funding, which is regrettable.

Will we be displaced? It is not likely that we will be displaced in that sense, but our impact will be reduced if funding goes down. Of course, the more we look for funding from other Governments or from the private sector or private philanthropy, the less influence will be directed towards areas of particular UK interest, because we have to go where we get the funding. There is a double hit: to the UK’s overall ability to direct what could be seen as a foreign policy asset, and to the total quantum of activity.

Q15        Richard Foord: I had the good fortune of seeing the work of the Global Conflict Prevention Pool in 2005 in the western Balkans. Dr Ferguson, you mentioned the conversations you have been having in Sarajevo. Last year, the ISF for countering Russian aggression in the western Balkans fell by 40%, from £40 million to £24 million. What is the practical effect of that reduction on the ground in the western Balkans?

Dr Ferguson: We are going to see. We can project what some of that will be. There is the immediate effect of good work now not being done—the relationship breakdown and the challenge of trust, which we have already spoken to—but let us zoom out and think about the UK’s own analysis of what we are worried about, which is Russian aggression in Europe. That is felt extremely keenly in the fault lines of the western Balkans. We should listen to and believe Putin when he says that when he is done with Ukraine, he will come for Kosovo again. The withdrawal from that investment and relationship is, to me, deeply concerning.

Depending on how the UK Government choose to interpret the Russian file of the ISF, which is significant, there is potentially enough flex there. Recognising their own strategic objectives could mean reinvesting in good work in the western Balkans. Perhaps there is some flex within that budget, but I do not know the answers; it would be for officials to explore that. The western Balkans is one of the rare areas where the UK’s ability to do good work, and strength and trust, actually grew after the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.

I have been familiar with the western Balkans for my whole professional life and have seen the strength of leadership that the UK has built up over successive Governments, so it is a real shame to see that decision of withdrawal. I do not think it has to be only a bad story if what is backed are clear strategic objectives that the geographic, supported by the centre, can advance through political and strategic means and through a different way of holding relationships, to advance the same objectives: to prevent conflict and, in this region particularly, protect civilians from future harms, human rights violations and—if we are thinking five to 10 years—the potential for future atrocity crimes in that region.

There are different ways that the objectives of preventing very real cost to human life and mitigating mutual interests around regional security can be advanced outside funding and programming, but I have yet to see—although I hope it is in development—the strategic objectives, and how or whether the conflict and atrocity prevention capabilities that now sit within the humanitarian directorate will be able to provide expert support. I hope that the Committee will be able to maintain its scrutiny of that.

Q16        Richard Foord: On the question of the practical effect on the ground of that 40% reduction, would any of the other panel members like to comment on the western Balkans, and whether we should move on?

Olivia O'Sullivan: I would offer one thing. In general, when we are looking at the ISF and the very good questions that the Committee has posed, in some ways we are touching on a symptom of a wider issue. At a time of significant volatility, when we have identified Russia as our primary security threat, our Foreign Office is undergoing a long and drawn-out restructure that has led to a lot of uncertainty about the wider strategy, and we have cut our aid budget. That is a symptom of the tendency to shift very quickly in Government from one fiscal target to another.

I am one of the people who thinks that we should spend more on the defence spending targets, and there are tough trade-offs here, but if we do this in an unintelligent way, we will shift a lot of money under an umbrella to demonstrate to allies or other leaders that we are spending a certain amount, without having what the ISF was intended to do, and should be doing: an integrated view of what we are spending our money for.

The western Balkans is a great case study. If our primary concern is Russian aggression, we need to think about all the tools in the toolkit and how they fit together. I hope that Russia is the top priority in the new ISF strategy, and as Kate said, I hope there is capacity to do that. That would be a great thing for the Committee to scrutinise and look into over time.

Lord McConnell: Let me add one sentence to that. Very important points have been made about the importance of the western Balkans in relation to Russia’s relationship with the rest of Europe, but there is an additional point. Even within the constraints that we now have in this ISF international security strategy, if we are concerned about migration and organised crime, reducing our investment in positive programmes in the western Balkans would seem to me right now to be bonkers.

Q17        Alex Ballinger: We have heard a lot about the reductions in support and funding from us and others. I was in Doha to see some of the Qatari work, and I think I might have met you there, Lord McConnell. Are we seeing other actors getting into this space and doing more work in conflict resolution? If there are other actors, what is the impact for us of them taking more of the convening role that the UK might have done in the past?

Lord McConnell: That is a very good question. I think we should rejoice about there being other actors. I think we should see that not as an excuse to reduce our own involvement but as a fantastic opportunity to make even more of an impact.

By and large, the countries that are increasing their level of activity in this space are countries that are very friendly with the UK. Qatar is an obvious example, and we have a partnership with it that I think could have gone much further from when it was agreed. I was recently in Armenia to attend the Yerevan dialogues, and Armenia has a very strong affinity with the UK. It is very keen to become a location in its part of the world that is used for peacebuilding initiatives and conflict prevention and resolution. The Philippines would be another example, as it has made peacebuilding its No. 1 priority for its year as the chair of ASEAN. There are obviously also regional examples right across Africa.

We should rejoice at the potential for these other locations to step up, but in the short term, they will not have the level of expertise that we have in the UK, and certainly not the previous level of funding and engagement that we had. They provide an opportunity to expand the scale and impact of this work, partly for cultural reasons, because it is always better if the neighbours are taking the lead. However, I do not think that is a substitute for the UK having a historic level of expertise and, until recently, a level of expenditure that really made an impact.

Q18        Alex Ballinger: I suppose that several of you have had criticisms of how the ISF is set up, but in a context where we have less money than we used to and other international players are playing a big role—maybe you could answer this, Olivia, because you seem to be all over it—how should we set up the ISF now so that it is most effective in this space? What should we be doing differently?

Olivia O'Sullivan: I hope that this does not sound like I am slightly dodging your question, but I would come back to the point I made at the beginning. Government officials will be able to speak to this more clearly than I can, because they are on the inside of it, but I think that, from the time the National Security Council was set up in the Cabinet Office, we have seen the evolution of more of a hub in the centre of Government that pulls together perspectives from different Departments and tries to identify if the UK is accurately identifying and pursuing its strategic national security interest in the totality of everything it is doing in international and domestic policy. My sense is that the ISF is becoming a budget for that and is responding, in some cases, to new questions and risks that we face.

I do not think that it is a bad thing that economic security is a priority in the new strategy, or that they are seeking to build sovereign capability—although that is a bit of a vague term—but it is responding in a way to a new environment. But if you are then shifting the areas of focus for the ISF, I think that some of the prior areas of focus—conflict resolution, mediation and peace building—are still relevant to many of these areas, and I would not want us to have an artificial distinction between things that have traditionally seemed to be development and things that have traditionally seemed to be harder.

That does not respond to the integrated way we should be thinking about our security and the types of threats that everyone on the panel has so clearly described. If you are not going to have some of those things in the ISF, they should be somewhere else in Government because of the proliferation of conflict and new actors, and, although it is not new, the intensification of the ways in which proxies are prolonging conflicts, for example. All of that should sit somewhere in our wider foreign policy and international relations structure. I am sorry if that is not the most direct answer.

Looking forward, we do have a good opportunity here for a fund that sits in the centre to respond to the way security is changing, make long-term plans and investments, and be a brain in the middle of Government that thinks a bit more about the types of questions and things that folks on the panel have brought up—the way security is changing and how we need to think differently. There is an opportunity here for that. But we would not want to lose some of the areas of focus it has had in the past. I would ask Government, in the wider FCDO restructure, shift and cuts, that it does not get lost in the shuffle.

Q19        Chair: One thing that also strikes me about this is that we do not mention women and their lives, and how they may be impacted by all these changes. I hear you saying that this is an opportunity to think about things in a new way, but I worry that we might take our eye off the lives of women and how they can be impacted by this.

Dr Ferguson: I previously mentioned some work that was ISF-funded and was a great example, I thought, of a working relationship where we were able to be brave and catalytic, and were given all sorts of cross-government access. We were asked to map the changing frontiers of insecurity—the threats that Europe faces. One area we found was the deliberate targeting and weaponisation of gender, the family and reproductive rights. This is a deliberate site of anti-democratic contestation.

There is a sense that advancing gender parity or protecting women and girls—whatever the language is that has often become depoliticised—is wrong, because the adversaries I have been talking about throughout this session recognise that to advance their interests, destabilise democratic coherence and make military gain, they can exploit and create division of the family unit, even in our own realm in Europe.

To deliberately seed questions over the nature of gender and gender roles, to intensify the very toxic amplification of what it means to be a man and a woman, create extremely strong binary positions on that and roll back reproductive rights is a very delivery deliberate tool that we are feeling here in the UK. I am happy to follow up in written evidence to the Committee on that.

It is also being amplified elsewhere. You see the weaponisation and intense strategy in parts of east Africa to really try to galvanise momentum of very often religious and extremist positions on anti-LGBT rights. It is part of a strategic approach that our adversaries have been advancing for decades, and we do not have a response either in strategy or now in parts of our strategic funding. I could not agree more that we really need to bring focus to it.

It is very welcome that the Foreign Secretary has spoken increasingly strongly on confronting violence against women and girls and preventing sexual violence in conflict, especially in Sudan. I am concerned that her priorities may not be matched by the budget lines that her senior civil servants are drawing up, and by the implications of the restructure. We do not know if the teams that specialise in conflict, atrocity prevention, the prevention of sexual violence and the mapping of funding flows are going to survive the summer and will work in the same way that they do now.

I plead the Committee to ask questions about what will be ringfenced regarding expertise on conflict, the prevention of atrocity crimes, the protection of civilians, and women, peace and security—these core issues. If we are going to lose the teams as well as the budget lines, the language of rationalisation becomes quite euphemistic.

Q20        Chair: We have talked about the changes to the Foreign Office and whether they reflect the Foreign Secretary’s priorities—indeed, those of the previous Foreign Secretary and the new Foreign Secretary—and how much those align, given the way in which they are doing the reductions. You talked about sending us some further written evidence on that. I would be very interested in that. Jack?

Lord McConnell: I absolutely endorse everything that Kate said. To be very specific about this, the ISF had a fund that supported its work on gender and national security of, I think, about £4.95 million in last year’s Budget. That whole programme has been eliminated from the ISF projections for this coming year, 2026-27. It comes back to this issue of coherence in strategy. The Foreign Secretary is announcing in December that women and girls will be the No. 1 priority of the Foreign Office, at the same time that the Government are reducing to zero, as I understand it, the funding for that in the Integrated Security Fund.

There are some really strong questions that the Committee should be asking about this. It is partly about the money and the programme, and it is partly about the expertise that I believe may already even have been lost, with people leaving the organisation who were funded from within that particular programme.

Chair: It seems to be the way in which it is being done. You start at the top and cut down the number of directorates, and then they have responsibility for cutting their staff to certain numbers, and so it goes on. As a structural thing, you can understand it, but it does not reflect the politics as expressed by the Foreign Secretary. For us, that has been an issue.

Q21        Abtisam Mohamed: On gender and women and girls, you mentioned that the funding has come to an end. The gender and national security portfolio came to an end in March this year. Are we left now with a gaping hole in the work being done in relation to women and girls and prevention of national security issues? Is this an issue because the ISF has moved Departments? Could it be that one arm is not talking to the other in relation to priorities?

Lord McConnell: It could just be an issue of coherence. It could be that the money has been transferred and it is about to be announced by the Foreign Office, but we are now 10 weeks into the new financial year, and there has been no confirmation of that all—to my understanding, anyway.

Q22        Abtisam Mohamed: The FCDO made the cuts, but the Cabinet Office has not confirmed them?

Lord McConnell: The ISF made the cut, so the Cabinet Office made the cut, at roughly the same time that the Foreign Secretary was outlining her priority in this area.

Q23        Abtisam Mohamed: Which Department made the cuts in relation to the gender and national security portfolio?

Lord McConnell: It was the Cabinet Office and the Integrated Security Fund. There was a suggestion that that money might reappear in the Foreign Office in this financial year, but we are 10 weeks into the financial year and there is no suggestion yet that that is the case.

Q24        Abtisam Mohamed: So is any work taking place in relation to women and girls in this particular field?

Lord McConnell: There are probably people paddling underneath the surface.

Dr Ferguson: There is still a team that will do it and that will have a budget line. They would be best placed to answer about the stresses that they may be under and what their strategic objectives are. This speaks to the wider flux of this stage of the restructure of the Foreign Office. Departments are applying for their own jobs, and there is this departmental matching going on at a time of such uncertainty, and they are building out their business plans.

I know that the Committee has done work on this, and I welcome it. We need to look at where democratic overstep begins, because we are a democracy, and this is up to our elected representatives and our elected Foreign Secretary. That is what we are—we are a democracy. You are elected on a policy platform to make certain decisions. It is their accountability. They are the ones who are answerable to the public and to you in questions of how we address the UK’s role in the world, uphold our legal obligations and protect populations in the gravest situations of atrocity, crimes and conflict. I question that scrutiny of stated policy commitments of our current Ministers vis-à-vis what is being communicated as a moving of the deck chairs, a rationalisation process and a bureaucracy issue that is not a matter for ministerial scrutiny.

I am much more a person of politics than programming, so this is my bias, but I genuinely think that we are in danger of having such a contraction of the UK’s capability to operate appropriately in a period of deep global volatility and uncertainty by reducing our extraordinary diplomatic corps. We have such an amazing system around the world and in London, which risks being in contradiction with the stated objectives of our Foreign Secretary. That deserves scrutiny.

If I may, my observation is that one of the problems—there are many—is the churn of Ministers. That is not limited to this Government. How many have we had? Eleven, I think, in as many years—something like that; I lose count. Often their advisers go with them, and our Ministers have very limited political advisory support. They rightly need their teams, who they know, to help them navigate. That is needed now more than ever.

You also need to have expertise to support the implementation of your policy objectives. That is a structural gap that our Foreign Office has really suffered from and No. 10 has suffered from, as has—going back to my point about the timing of the ODA cuts—the Treasury. If our Prime Minister is preparing us for war readiness, and if our national security assessment is that, as you have said, the global conflict index says that there are more conflicts now around the world than ever, and this is going to continue to rise, that reality will continue.

The binary between domestic and international and between military and civilian is blurred, yet the wiring of our Government does not represent that. The level of appropriate independent, expert political advice to our Prime Minister and our Ministers is not sufficiently reflective of that reality. That is slightly different from the ISF, but what the ISF at its best does is provide something of a bridge and wiring. Sometimes, when done well, it enables a kind of advisory political contribution of expertise. That should be championed.

Q25        Sir John Whittingdale: Can I come back to the activity of other actors in the regions that we have been discussing? Lord Evans, I think you talked at the beginning about the creation of gaps, which hostile powers like China and Russia will step in to fill. I wonder if you could give us any examples of that.

Lord Evans: I can give you an example in the other direction. HALO has been funded to undertake battlefield clearance in the Pacific, which is not an area that we have traditionally had heavy involvement in, but in places like the Solomon Islands, there is a great deal of uncleared explosives and battle debris that has been there a very long time.

I would say that one of the reasons why the US is now funding that is a recognition that China is very active in the Pacific—it is seeking to build its influence—and therefore there is a need to be able to demonstrate that alignment with the US and alignment with the west actually brings real benefits.

One of those benefits is all this work that we are now being funded to do. We welcome that because of the humanitarian impact, but there is also a diplomatic and security impact. We do see active engagement, particularly by the US, in areas where it feels it needs to be able to demonstrate that the benefit to the community comes from engagement with the west, not by engagement with, for instance, China.

We have seen similar things in Africa. Angola, I suppose, is a swing state at the moment. It has had traditionally very strong links with Russia and China, but increasingly the west see this as important from an economic perspective. Therefore, one of the things that we in the west can do is help to improve the quality of life for people in Angola and provide things such as de-mining in areas of potential development—humanitarian input, but with a wider geopolitical impact.

In a number of areas, you see the pendulum going back, as it were, in the direction that I think we as a country would wish it to go in. Part of that is humanitarian work specifically targeted at post-conflict rebuilding. The less we are present, the less we have the opportunity to do that. The capabilities themselves, particularly in the UK, are currently not being funded by the ISF, and that leaves the door open to our enemies and rivals.

Q26        Sir John Whittingdale: The Chair mentioned the inquiry that we held into disinformation, where we looked specifically at the activities of Russia and China in a number of these contested countries. I wonder to what extent the reduction of UK activity there has created opportunities for a narrative that Russia and China are only too keen to fill about how, actually, they are the reliable allies who will support the Governments against the capitalist, evil, wicked west.

Lord Evans: I will take off my HALO hat here, because that is not really a HALO Trust issue. Putting on my national security hat, it seems to me very evident that facts on the ground are a very useful way of countering false narratives. If the UK and our allies are seen to be doing things that are of real direct value to the country, that is very useful. Of course, you then need to publicise that, make it visible and demonstrate that it is happening, but it is undeniable if you see the reality of it.

This is an area also where we should be looking for co-ordination with other organisations. The EU has money for rebuilding after conflict. NATO is putting money into a variety of these areas in the near abroad from NATO. Obviously, you get better effect if you are co-ordinating with others who are going in the same direction.

From a HALO Trust point of view, our intent and our aim is to provide humanitarian benefit, but obviously, there are other issues that some of the funders are seeking to deliver. Doing it on a co-ordinated basis internationally seems to me to be the most sensible way of using the finite resources that we have available to us.

Q27        Chair: Without being jingoistic about it, isn’t that the sort of thing we are supposed to be good at?

Lord Evans: We have traditionally been good at it, but if you do not have any money, it starts to get a bit tricky, because you are making bricks without straw, aren’t you?

Q28        Sir John Whittingdale: I am just thinking about the international effort. Kate Ferguson, you referred to the impact of the dissolution of the US Bureau of Conflict and Stabilisation Operations. Obviously America is the major player. Would the panel like to say anything about how America’s stepping back from activity has affected the areas where we too are now apparently going to be doing less?

Dr Ferguson: I think it forces a question that perhaps always needed to be answered but now must be, with urgency: how can work towards the objectives that were assumed and that progressive, democratic internationalism sought to advance—there are a lot of caveats there about definitional boundaries and so on—be funded? The reality for the UK is prompted by not only the massive financial contraction of the US, but the political positioning and implications of the US’s stated national security strategy, as well as everything else that it is doing.

If, as our Ministers regularly advance publicly, the UK does still seek to prevent conflict and atrocity crimes, and to support and strengthen inclusive, democratic, sustainable ways of life—precious but imperfect though they may be—with less money, then we must move away not just from annual budgeting, but from the growing trend of clumping. Fleur, you mentioned Sudan, and I can get back to you with the actual numbers there, but you see in Sudan—as was seen in Afghanistan and elsewhere—an increasing trend: as FCDO staffing capacity shrinks, it says, “Okay, we’ve got X million pounds, so we will put out a single tender for someone else to manage.”

That goes in complete opposition to the stated objectives of the global partnerships conference, which I was at, as I am sure many of you were, and which was, I believe, the initiative of David Lammy when he was Foreign Secretary—Jenny Chapman has taken it forward. At that conference there was a rhetorical commitment to the need to have a reset in how you engage with your partners, not as an outdated form of ODA in its worst kind, but as partners. The trend also goes against the objectives of the Prime Minister’s civil society covenant, which was introduced to build trust between this Government and civil society for all Departments.

The Foreign Office has to find a way to spend smaller amounts of money more effectively. Otherwise, the reality is that, as the authoritarian threat comes over the hill, as conflict continues, as our own supply chains begin to break down and as our own social cohesion erodes, you are going to have partners filling out their logframes when the Russians are just giving out cash. I put it crudely, but that is the reality.

The risk thresholds of our posts and of London must be commensurate to the risk that we face. There is a discomfort that comes from a lot of places. It is a kind of bureaucratic inertia, a lowering of the ceilings of ambition for what can be done, and a removal of politics from what are deeply political issues.

We cannot engage in preventing conflict or confronting atrocity crimes without engaging in politics; the sense, in the last several years, that you can de-politicise it has to be undone. Spending money more politically at lower levels and with higher risk thresholds will allow the UK to maintain and strengthen new forms of relationships. That is what it should do in the western Balkans.

If the Foreign Office has less money, give it smarter, and have a feedback loop that can connect back to the political and the strategy. That would be a good rationalisation of our Foreign Office, rather than having programme managers here who engage with good local providers or good peacebuilders who are doing fantastic work and hold deep knowledge but who are never allowed to speak to the political advisers or policyholders within our Foreign Office.

One specific question is whether this restructure will end in a manner that means our Ministers receive stronger, more informed and more ambitious policy options on conflict prevention, atrocity prevention, peace building and the grand strategic piece, or whether our Ministers will be left—as appears from the restructure so far—even more disconnected from their officials than they should be.

Lord McConnell: On the USAID cuts and the issue of information, one of the most dramatic impacts on the ground—there have been many dramatic impacts, not least in vaccination programmes and so on, but one of the most immediate and dramatic—was the defunding of local reporters, news agencies and news websites, which were contesting that space with our adversaries in places like south-east Asia and elsewhere.

Chair: Moldova, and Bosnia—

Lord McConnell: That is right—in the eastern European and former Soviet states as well. The way individual reporters, activists and information activists were left stranded and very exposed when the USAID cuts came through was pretty deplorable, but also very impactful. It opened up a space for others, without support from us to contest.

I wonder whether that might be an area where—a bit like defence spending in Europe, and the whole argument between the US and NATO over the level of defence spending—perhaps the international democratic states left too much to the United States. That left those organisations relying on the United States for their funding, whereas when we talk about coalitions of the willing, alliances for democracy and so on internationally, that should not just be about trade, defence and the general promotion of democracy, but be about making sure that organisations that are very exposed at a local level are not left to the whim of one Western Government, whether that is the United States or maybe one of the big European Governments, which could suddenly turn off the taps if an election outcome were to deliver that.

Olivia O'Sullivan: I am conscious of the panel’s time. In November, we wrote a paper looking at the security and geopolitical consequences of the aid cuts, where we talked quite a lot about USAID, so I will share that with the Committee and will seek not to repeat anything others have said. Very quickly, the other thing I think that the UK Government should have their eye on is where the US is going now, because it is still spending some money on aid but is becoming much more transactional in that regard. We have had reports of it talking to African Governments about exchanging global health funding for health data, or access to critical mineral supply chains, for example.

I think we are at risk of being in a world where we have one pole in this space that is deeply transactional, and China, which has always been a complex actor in this space. One of the things we found in our paper is this shorthand idea that China or Russia will step in, but they will not step in and fill the gap we have left—that will remain a gap.

China has different interests. It has a capital surplus and is interested in doing vast amounts of infrastructure investment. This is a hole—we could have a whole panel on this—but both China and Russia, in different ways, benefit without really having to take any action by looking like the more long-term and consistent partners in the different regions where they have their interests and in the very different ways in which they act.

Even before the closure of USAID, I think that we in the UK did not have a clear idea about what we wanted to do about China and Russia’s growing influence in different parts of the global south. I would just underscore this: our actions can be very significant, and the individual programmes that we do—even cheaper, smaller ones—can build relationships with states and Governments.

Being realistic about the scale, however, we probably need to act with allies and partners if we want to have any kind of strategic response to all three of those poles shifting in the way that they seek influence in the global south. That is a massive topic, but I will stop there.

Chair: Fleur has a question, and I have two others after that.

Q29        Fleur Anderson: I was chair of an all-party parliamentary group for conflict prevention, the APPG on prevention of genocide and crimes against humanity, and I worked very closely with you, Dr Ferguson, on that. I have a couple of more quick-fire questions about the internal workings of the FCDO and where we are left now. In that all-party parliamentary group, we are arguing very strongly, based on the evidence, for a unit that would bring together atrocity prevention to stop countries going up the ladder towards genocide. Where in the new structure does that unit fit? To the best of your understanding, what is it called within the reorganisation? Where are we left?

Dr Ferguson: Two things. First, I gave evidence yesterday to the standing committee on atrocity prevention, and I will make available to this Committee my written statement there, because that sets it out in more detail. There is uncertainty at the moment. It went from the atrocity prevention hub to the conflict and atrocity prevention department, and now it sits in the humanitarian directorate. I do not know the shape of it and its capacity and capabilities.

My understanding is that they are also, like many others in the Department, applying for their own jobs or jobs that look similar—they are going through that matching process. I do not have clarity on their budgets, although I am aware of really excellent work that was being supported by them that now no longer will be.

It is appropriate that questions are asked about not just where UK Government contributions on atrocity prevention, monitoring violations of international humanitarian law and the protection of civilians sit, but whether they have seen a reduction in capacity. What are the staffing levels? What is the analysis being done? There is some rationalisation of that happening, and sometimes it sounds like a very logical argument, but it deserves scrutiny.

The UK must come out of this process in a position where it is making a stronger contribution to the promotion of IHL and ensuring that it is being upheld and is not weaker. That again goes to the point of whether we are seeing in the restructure of the Foreign Office a response to the stated objectives of our Foreign Secretary. She has made Sudan a deep priority, which is very welcome, but with the policy objectives that sit underneath it, I am not sure whether those teams are safe.

I really encourage and plead with the Committee to ask those questions of the officials who are responsible. My understanding is that there is a period between now and the autumn where the rationalisation of the directorates will take place, and I think something like seven departments, of which the conflict and atrocity prevention team is one, will become four. That worries me greatly.

Lord Evans: To add to that, the UK has also had a very strong record on freedom of religion and belief, which is also highly relevant to international humanitarian issues. We need to make sure that that strength is not lost in the reorganisation.

Q30        Fleur Anderson: To be clear, Dr Ferguson, you are saying that you do not think that there is enough ministerial oversight into the restructuring?

Dr Ferguson: I do not. I am worried that the rationalisation is not reflective of the trajectory of the world. You do not need to be an atrocity prevention or a conflict expert to think that, recognising climate collapse and the technological revolution—not even thinking about the statecraft of our adversaries—we are going to see more conflict and more violations of IHL. The efforts to destroy and displace populations as a tactic is now a defining feature of the primary crises that concern our Foreign Office—Ukraine, Sudan and Palestine—yet we are reducing our ability to assess and respond. That flies in the face of the evidence.

Lord McConnell: If there is going to be a restructure, the structure of the Foreign Office should follow the Government’s priorities and purpose. This has been the case for many more than just the past two years, but the relatively inconsistent explanation of what the main purpose of the UK is globally has possibly contributed to the restructuring being more of an administrative exercise than a purpose-driven exercise. There is a need to bring the two together, but you have to start with purpose and follow with a restructure, rather than the other way around.

Q31        Alan Gemmell: This is for you, Lord McConnell, but it is really driven by what Olivia and Dr Ferguson have said about the need for a space in Government, which we may not have, to understand the drivers of conflict, as well as Dr Ferguson’s points about the risk of an ever-increasing gap between advisers and Ministers on this. Is it clear which Minister has overall accountability for the thinking on this policy? If not, do we need something like a special envoy to try to bring some strategic oversight? We will start with Lord McConnell, and others might want to come in.

Lord McConnell: I think that Minister is the Foreign Secretary, but I am not absolutely certain about that. The Minister of State for development obviously has a responsibility for the budget in the FCDO, but that is not necessarily directly linked into the ministerial responsibility in the Cabinet Office for the ISF.

It is not at all clear—this touches a little bit on Kate’s point about the expertise at the centre—whether the Ministers in the Cabinet Office engage enough with the Ministers in the Foreign Office. Or maybe it is the Ministers in the Foreign Office who are not engaged enough in the work of the Cabinet Office.

It is hard to know what the reality is behind the scenes or what the reason is, but there does seem to be a disconnect between the ministerial responsibilities in the Cabinet Office and the ministerial responsibilities in the Foreign Office, and we lack a lead Minister who is driving this across either of those two Departments. I think that is something that would be helpful.

Dr Ferguson: My recommendations, perhaps, fall slightly underneath the level of envoy—some envoys are brilliant, but that is because they are brilliant, and sometimes the functions are less so. I think it is more structural than that. You do not want to create a position that makes it seem distinct from, or a lower priority than, the Foreign Secretary, the National Security Adviser, or indeed our Prime Minister. It really speaks to a culture across the Department of there not being enough people whose job is to develop policy options.

That is what I hear from Ministers, over years. Sometimes in situations of such deep, grave concern—where we on the outside as experts of civilian protection or crisis mitigation know that there are things that the UK can do—Ministers are being given the impression that their options are far more limited than those on the ground and we on the outside know them to be.

There is the question of the restructure in terms of how this can make our Department be more political and have a higher risk threshold, and I return to the earlier recommendation that, in my view, the Government that come in need to have their own political advisory expertise that holds deep understanding of the Department. That is a different skill from understanding your party and understanding the political dimensions. They are both important, but you need both.

It is appropriate that our Foreign Secretary and, I think, all Ministers have a much more strengthened base of political expertise on which to draw. When those Ministers move on—because we are in an era of reshuffle and instability that has characterised not just the Foreign Office, but Whitehall, for a decade—that allows continuity for the officials and the party in power. That would be a good democratic action, but it would also empower our Foreign Office, which has been marginalised over a decade in a manner that does not reflect the realities of what the UK needs to navigate this turbulent international period.

Q32        Chair: Would that not empower the advisers, though? There they are—they are the ministerial advisers, they are the ones with the with the time in the Department and they are the political brain. Would that not make it quite difficult for a new Minister coming in?

Dr Ferguson: It is often on personality, isn’t it? All of us will have worked with varied advisers, and some of that will have gone very well and some will have been quite difficult. But I have noticed over the last number of years that advisers who have experience of navigating international crises have that confidence in the face of the things we are talking about—war, genocide, enormous population movements and weapons flows.

These are deeply grave situations, and there are many people who have spent their professional careers navigating them, either inside or outside the Foreign Office. It is appropriate that our Foreign Secretary and their Ministers are supported at that political level with that degree of expertise.

The issue may well also be—I have made this recommendation repeatedly to the Foreign Office—about emboldening an appropriate level of officials to develop policy options. I have spoken on record many times about the ICAI report published last year on aid in Sudan in 2025; it was found that a series of recommendations on civilian protections were made but the least ambitious option was taken. That choice was taken within weeks of our Foreign Secretary sitting in New York and saying, “The UK will not let Sudan be forgotten. To do so would be unforgivable.”

I use that because it is an example on the public record. I do not think it is limited to the case of Sudan, but it is an illustration of the structural problem. Who holds responsibility to develop policy options? How can we empower our Foreign Office to stop being frightened of writing things down on paper? It really is; I get told off sometimes for putting things on paper.

Who holds accountability for taking decisions regarding conflict, the prevention of conflict and the prevention of harms to civilians? Does that lie at centre? Does it lie at post? And does it lie with Ministers? There must be transparent clarity at the end of this restructuring process, because the Committee and people in jobs like mine simply cannot uphold our own obligations if we do not know that.

Chair: Alex has a massive question, which I am not sure we have time for a full answer to.

Q33        Alex Ballinger: It is actually a very simple question: funding. All the damaging decisions that we have talked about have been driven by a lack of funding in the ODA budget and reductions by successive Governments.

Thinking about the closeness of this programming to security—NATO is investing in it, and a lot of the work directly contributes to our security objectives in the UK—is there an argument that this stuff should not be competing with health programmes and humanitarian programmes and that it should be part of the increasing Defence budget because those objectives are so closely intertwined? We will go to you first, Lord Evans, because this is more in your wheelhouse.

Lord Evans: It is a very big question as to where you start, isn’t it? Should it be part of the Defence budget? I do not think the budgetary question is enormously illuminating, because whether you put it in one or the other, the question is whether it is available. Then it becomes a question of how you manage that so that you actually get the outputs that you need from it.

The problem, and this is true of all Government expenditure, is that any boundary is unhelpful because you end up with an institutional need to push the money in the place that is institutionally beneficial to any one Department. If by your question you mean, “Should we have less hard security and more on this area?”, my answer would be, “No, I think we need plenty of hard security because we are lamentably weak on hard security at present.”

Q34        Alex Ballinger: In a world where we are going up to 3.5% of GDP, we could be spending half a quarter of 1% on this.

Lord Evans: Well, let’s see if we get there. At the moment, we seem to be struggling to even start on that route, in my view. I think it is too early to be saying, “Let’s divert some of our hard security spending and put it into this.” There are plenty of other areas of Government spending where I would start looking rather than in the Defence budget, which has become sadly depleted.

To take the question as, “Should we take less on hard defence and more on conflict prevention?” is to be much too far down the line. The question is much more, “Should we be investing in both these areas and looking in other parts of overall Government expenditure in order to fund them, rather than playing those two off against each other?” But that is my personal judgment.

Q35        Chair: What excited us was the idea that we would increase defence expenditure, but we would redefine what defence expenditure was, so we were trying to be creative in how you could spend that money. That is really what the question is about.

Lord Evans: I completely understand that, and it would be exciting. The trouble is that that means less overall hard security, and I think we need more hard security. Even the ambition that has been stated, in my view, does not seem to be necessarily going as far as we will need to in order to establish deterrence, and therefore to immediately start redefining what you mean by defence and implicitly move the money from defence into other adjacent areas seems to me to be the wrong place to start.

I would start further upstream and say, “Is the overall balance of our expenditure right?” but then I am going way beyond my pay grade and even the pay grade of this Committee.

Olivia O’Sullivan: I share the view that this is a hard trade-off, and we should invest more in our defence. I say this with caution, but the outer NATO target is 5% of GDP, and 1.5% of GDP on this category of security and resilience—there is immediately a huge risk that that becomes a Christmas tree, and everybody wants to say that their thing is security and resilience. This happens a lot in Government; those are the incentives, and it is important that we keep focused on the threat to our security.

None the less, if we do hit that target, which I agree is a long way out—even on the 3.5% of GDP target we are undergoing horse trading now; it is very difficult to hit, and this Government are in a difficult fiscal position with difficult security risks—it is worth considering what could reasonably be badged as being in the interests of our wider security and resilience in some of this work.

The other thing that is critical—and this Committee and your colleagues on other Committees play a role in this—is really consistent scrutiny of defence spending, development spending and all of this spending. I support investing further in defence.

I do not need to tell anyone here that the track record has not been great in terms of the outcomes we are seeking—for example, the western Balkans, where we might be making significant investments in hard defence but are not looking at our wider strategy in the region. That is a topic for scrutiny of that uplift in defence spending.

The final thing I will say is that quite a lot of the things we have talked about on this panel are not money; they are expertise, consistency, confidence, institutional memory, thinking politically and being able to navigate difficult diplomatic situations in a shifting world. That is critical too, particularly in this area.

Dr Ferguson: I would like to go even further than Olivia. Forgive me; I did not think I would disagree with anything that the panellists said, but I might do so now. I think we have to recognise that the statecraft of how conflict and contestation is being implemented by those that our national security experts have deemed a threat has changed.

If that is the case, we must include in defence the defence of the civilian and the social realm. The Ministry of Defence, NATO and law enforcement recognise that these harms are there, and they also quite rightly recognise that it is not their job to be investing in that kind of sustainable prevention and cohesion.

We cannot have it both ways. All expertise in our hard security world recognises that statecraft has changed, and yet our budgeting remains singularly or disproportionately focused on hard security—rightly, increasingly hybrid—and deterrence. I am not advocating for a diminished hard security budget; that is very clear. But deterrence does not work in the same way, because you can now build a drone for £40 in your garage. We have to recognise that reality.

The last thing I will say is about a historical analogy. In the 1930s, the United Kingdom and much of Europe failed to recognise the social political projects of fascists as being part of the same threat posed militarily. They were seen as distinct challenges. They were seen as a war effort of collective security, and then there were the social political projects of fascism.

That defined UK strategy towards its adversaries in the 1930s and into the second world war, to the climax in 1944 when European Jews petitioned our Foreign Office and the State Department to bomb the train tracks to Auschwitz and Birkenau. At that point, up to 10,000 people were being killed a day. Our Foreign Office and the State Department took this seriously—you can read the consultation—but ultimately, they came to the conclusion that to do so would divert resources from a war effort for a different objective.

That, to me, is the ultimate outcome that we must never get to. What is it we are defending if it is not people’s lives and the democratic assets and social cultural fabric that make us distinct? I think that democratic defence must change, and we have to undo some groupthink about what has defined budget lines for the last 10 years and very recently.

Q36            Alex Ballinger: Last word for you, Jack.

Lord McConnell: I hesitate to make my two practical points, following on from Kate being so eloquent, as ever, in this area. I agree strongly with what the other panellists have said. I will just add two things.

First, the ODA budget in this country that was allocated towards conflict prevention, peacebuilding and conflict resolution in 2016 was about 4%— surprisingly low. By 2023, it was 1%. There is an issue here about the allocations within the budgets, whether the budgets are being cut or increased, and the level of prioritisation is still an issue.

I want to add something that we have not had a chance to mention, and it backs up the final point that Olivia made about this not just being about the money; it is about the capacity, the people and the convening power of the UK or our contribution to others’ convening power. We have one additional strength that is recognised elsewhere on two fronts, and that is our constitutional change in the last 30 years, creating the devolved Parliaments in Scotland and Wales, resolving the conflict in Northern Ireland and finally creating a working devolved Assembly in Northern Ireland.

Until fairly recently, with the Russian invasions and associated issues, almost every conflict in the world in the last 15 to 20 years was a majority-minority conflict inside a country. The political solutions to those conflicts are almost always going to involve some kind of political autonomy for the minority to run their own affairs or have their own position, voice or whatever.

We have a practical example in this country of a part of the country that was riven by conflict—some would say for 30 years, others would say for 300 years—but resolved that conflict and has built a democratic institution that is now functioning in a way that we would never have expected, with a Sinn Féin leader and a DUP deputy working together. We have also made peaceful constitutional change in Scotland and Wales that, despite all the political issues, has been relatively stable administratively and has functioned from the point of view of governance.

Those are examples from this country that we can help other countries with. In addition to all the other more obvious examples of work on conflict prevention and peacebuilding, the sort of thing that I have been able to do in the Philippines—with, hopefully, by the end of the year autonomous government and an elected Parliament in the Bangsamoro—is a way in which we can contribute for very little funding. We should be very flexible and creative in the way that we use our own experience and not be shy about it.

Chair: Thank you all very much indeed for a very interesting session and for giving us your time. That is the end of the session.