Boris Johnson expected to merge Foreign Office and International Development Department
Boris Johnson is expected to announce today that the Department for International Development (DFID) will be folded into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO).
The Prime Minister is slated to make an announcement today in the House of Commons on “global Britain”, with the BBC now reporting that he will announce the merger of the two departments.
The merger has been long-proposed in Conservative party circles, with speculation earlier this year the merger would happen in Johnson’s post-election cabinet reshuffle.
No merger happened, however some changes were made with a combined group of junior ministers now working across the two departments.
Johnson told the Financial Times in January 2019 that DFID should be rolled into the Foreign Office.
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“If Global Britain is going to achieve its full and massive potential then we must bring back DFID to the FCO,” he said.
“We can’t keep spending huge sums of British taxpayers’ money as though we were some independent Scandinavian NGO.”
Tory backbencher Neil O’Brien tweeted his support for the initiative.
“In the 1990s we broke DFID out of the FCO to symbolise the end of cold war style political aid and bad practice,” he said.
“But things have moved on – it’s a high price to pay in terms of making coordination harder. Aid also much more transparent now.”
There has been an ongoing review by crossbench peer Lord Paul Bew into the government’s global aid spending – set at 0.7 per of national income every year – however it is unclear if the merger is related to this.