Looming headcount cuts at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office are likely to have the largest proportional impact on staff who are based – and work in – the UK, permanent secretary Sir Olly Robbins has told MPs.
Back in July, Robbins told members of parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee that the department was looking to make staff reductions in the region of 15% to 25% by 2029.
At a session this week, the perm sec faced repeated questioning over the development of the plans – and their impact. Robbins rejected a figure of 1,885 jobs being “at risk” which was floated by PCS, the civil service’s biggest union, in October.
He said the 25% figure, which is the basis for PCS’s calculation, represented the “outer edge” of the overall FCDO plan.
“That is not the number of planned redundancies, or anything like it,” he said. “We still do not know what the overall numbers to leave the UK-based organisation will be over the next year or two.”
Robbins told MPs the department had just completed an exercise of rationalising the number of SCS Pay Band 2 directors at its London headquarters, and is reducing the overall number of directorates at King Charles Street from 43 to 34.
He said those directorates were now looking at the arrangement of headquarters teams as a whole. “We will then work with HR to guide a restructuring process for the headquarters function early in the new year,” Robbins said.
The perm sec said directors had been asked to model various scenarios for the resources ascribed to their new directorates and had been given a “blanket scenario” for reductions in workforce to “argue from”.
Robbins said it would be a “bad outcome” if FCDO’s senior leadership ended up recommending to ministers that every directorate should shrink by the same amount.
“We are listening carefully to what ministers say their priorities are for the next years,” he said.
Robbins declined to put a number on the blanket scenario that directorates had been presented with. He said the goal of the exercise was to identify where there is a need for future capability, based on ministers’ priorities, and areas where FCDO could reduce efforts. That work, he said, could involve digitising some work that is currently “manual heavy”.
Plans for large-scale headcount reductions at FCDO have prompted widespread concerns for the ongoing quality of the department’s work. Two weeks ago, parliament’s International Development Committee called on FCDO to halt its plans to avoid an exodus of talented staff that would jeopardise ministers’ ambitions.
On Tuesday, Robbins told MPs that while he expected all parts of the FCDO’s operations to be affected by the planned headcount reductions, the ambition was to weight cuts towards UK-based staff who actually work in the UK.
FCDO has around 17,000 staff in total, 8,000 of whom are “UK-based” and 9,000 of whom are so-called “country-based”. Of the UK-based figure, around 2,000 do not work in the UK.
“Over the next three to four years, all of those numbers will go down," he said. "What I want is for the 2,000 remaining – between that 8,000 and 6,000 – to go down by a lot less than the 6,000 at home.”
Robbins said he expected the end result of the staff cuts would probably be “a slight reduction overseas, rather than a deeper reduction”.
He said an “overseas network review” had begun that would involve talking to partners and stakeholders to get a sense of what is required from the department and what future trends are envisioned for particular countries.
“That exercise will take us a little bit of time,” he said. “But we thought it important to get it started before we finish the work on headquarters, so that we at least have a sense of how achievable concentrating our resources in intelligent ways overseas is, before we settle the final numbers on workforce restructuring at home.”
FCDO staff are not the only UK officials based in British embassies and consulates , with the Department for Business and Trade also maintaining a presence in many locations. It too is facing cuts as part of the 2025 Spending Review.
Robbins told MPs that FCDO staff could be required to provide more commercial and investment support for British business in places where DBT has reduced its presence. He said the department was making sure its staff were properly trained and supported to do that.
Back in the summer, Robbins said a voluntary exit scheme had been launched with the aim of identifying around 500 colleagues interested in leaving the department.
On Tuesday, he told MPs that, so far, 350 people had taken up the offer and left. He said that further staff may exit before the end of the current financial year.
Robbins added that FCDO had been given a budget of £35m for the exit scheme, but did not know what the final outturn would be.