Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office

The department's spending is now being reduced faster than any other in Whitehall. FCDO planned spending falls by an average of 8.3 percent a year in real terms between 2025/26 and 2028/29, the largest sustained reduction of any department. The programme aid budget is being cut by a third, from £9.3 billion in 2024 to £6.2 billion by 2027. The overall aid target is dropping from 0.5 percent of gross national income to 0.3 percent by 2027/28, a reduction of £6.5 billion, almost exactly equal to the planned increase in the defence budget. The international development minister, Baroness Chapman, described 0.3 percent as the new normal and confirmed that the department is not treating the cuts as temporary. The 0.7 percent target remains in legislation, to be restored when fiscal circumstances allow. Nobody in Whitehall expects that to happen soon.

Cutting aid to fund defence is the most significant rebalancing of Britain's international spending since the end of the Cold War. It amounts to a decision that the world has become dangerous enough to require more military spending, and that aid is the budget that should pay for it. Whether that makes Britain safer, or simply less visible in the parts of the world where instability breeds, is a debate the government has chosen not to have in public.

Ten Foreign Secretaries have served since 2010: William Hague, Philip Hammond, Boris Johnson, who resigned over Brexit, Jeremy Hunt, Dominic Raab, Liz Truss, James Cleverly, David Cameron, David Lammy and Yvette Cooper, who moved from the Home Office in the September 2025 reshuffle. Cameron's return was the most extraordinary appointment of the decade: a former Prime Minister, elevated to the Lords to take the job, and the first former Prime Minister to serve as Foreign Secretary since Alec Douglas-Home, who held the post from 1970 to 1974 after his own premiership. Raab was criticised for holidaying in Crete during the fall of Kabul and the emergency evacuation of British nationals and Afghan allies in August 2021. Johnson resigned in protest at the Chequers Brexit plan. That is ten holders in sixteen years for one of the great offices of state.

The 2020 merger of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office with the Department for International Development remains one of the most contested structural decisions in recent Whitehall history. DFID was created in 1997 with its own Secretary of State and a focused mandate of poverty reduction and humanitarian assistance. In 2013, the year the 0.7 percent target was first met, DFID spent 87.8 percent of UK aid. By 2020, just before the merger, that share had fallen to 69.4 percent. The merger was presented as a way to align diplomacy and development. Critics argued it subordinated poverty reduction to foreign policy objectives and removed the institutional champion for aid within government. The subsequent collapse in the aid target from 0.7 percent to 0.3 percent suggests the critics had a point. Without a separate department fighting for the aid budget, the aid budget lost.

The overseas network remains one of the largest in the world. The 280 posts and 6,500 properties span nearly every country, providing access, intelligence and influence, and requiring constant maintenance. The National Audit Office is conducting an inquiry into the financial sustainability of the British Council, the cultural diplomacy body that operates alongside the FCDO network. The department plans efficiency savings of £76 million a year by 2028/29 through workforce reform, digital upgrades and changes to its arm's length bodies.

The FCDO can point to genuine strengths. British diplomats remain internationally respected. The UK plays a central role in NATO, the G7, the United Nations Security Council, the Commonwealth and the OECD. The diplomatic network provides consular support to millions of British travellers and workers abroad. Britain's contribution to the international response in Ukraine has been substantial and widely acknowledged. These are real achievements.

The department's deeper problem is that its successes are largely invisible while its failures and cuts are highly visible. Quiet diplomacy that prevents a crisis rarely makes the news. A £6.5 billion aid cut to fund defence does. An evacuation from Kabul that left Afghan allies behind does. A former Prime Minister appointed Foreign Secretary from the House of Lords does. The public's relationship with the FCDO is shaped by the dramatic rather than the routine, and the dramatic episodes of recent years have not built confidence.

Britain now faces a strategic choice it has been deferring for decades. It maintains one of the world's largest diplomatic networks, a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, nuclear weapons, substantial military commitments and global ambitions. It has simultaneously cut the aid budget that underpinned its influence in the developing world, struggled to define a post Brexit trade identity, and watched its European relationships deteriorate before the recent reset. The FCDO sits at the centre of all these tensions. Its budget is falling fastest. Its responsibilities are not shrinking. Ten Foreign Secretaries in sixteen years have each arrived with a vision for Britain's place in the world, and none has lasted long enough to see that vision through. The world has not become simpler while they were rotating.