The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office is planning to reduce the size of its workforce by up to 25%, the department’s permanent secretary has said.
Appearing at the Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday, Sir Olly Robbins was asked by committee chair Emily Thornberry how much of the 17% reduction to the department’s administration budget outlined at last month’s Spending Review will be headcount cuts.
Responding, Robbins said the department would “get significantly smaller over the course of the next three to four years” and that this would mean reducing its staffing numbers by up to a quarter.
“We don't know exactly what level of staffing that's going to require yet chair, which is why I have to give you, I'm afraid, a frustratingly vague answer at the moment – we think it's between 15 and 25% cuts to our full head count… between now and 2029.”
The FCDO currently has a global headcount of around 17,000 people, with around 9,400 of these UK-based staff.
The Spending Review set out a flat cash settlement for the FCDO’s day-to-day spending over the next four years, meaning it faces significant real-terms cut which will depend on inflation in the coming years. To enable this settlement to be achieved, the department has also agreed to reduce its admin budget by 17% by 2029-30, the joint highest percentage-reduction commitment among departments along with HM Revenue and Customs.
Following up, Thornberry asked how the department is going to ensure it is not losing its best people through this reduction drive.
Robbins said the FCDO has started the process to get smaller, running a voluntary exit scheme in this financial year where the department is looking to lose around 500 colleagues. He said the department has run a process to vet applications for voluntary exit “to make sure that we are not losing people with the skills we need the future of the organisation”.
“So if you're too good, you're not going to be allowed to have voluntary exit?” Thornberry asked.
“Yes. I'm avoiding using the word good, because it's more about the skills we need for the future. We will lose some very good people, but they may not have the skills we need for the future.”
Robbins said the process to decide which applications to accept has been completed and the department is now waiting for those people to get their compensation package quotes and decide whether to go ahead with it.
On the wider restructure to streamline the department over the next four years, Thornberry asked if the FCDO has started thinking about people at the top, or those at the bottom.
Robbins said the department has “started from the top”, beginning by restructuring the director general level cadre in London. He said there were nine directors general in London when he arrived, and there will be seven by September.
Robbins said the department has now begun looking at changes to the director-level roles, and is planning for there to be “fewer jobs, but they will be bigger jobs, and they will be more empowered”.
Robbins said he hopes that by autumn, through the DG and director-level restructures, the FCDO will have a “stable” headquarters structure for the rest of the parliament.
He said the department will concurrently run an exercise to determine the right levels of grading and seniority in the FCDO’s overseas network, which has more than 20 directors general.
Asked what proportion of the cuts will be overseas versus in London, Robbins said he doesn’t know yet as the department will start looking at the overseas network structure at the beginning of 2026, but that “the way we're trying to run this is that we have, on the whole, a bias towards having a larger proportion of our workforce overseas by the end of the parliament than we have today”.
Thornberry also asked Robbins why the FCDO was being asked to make the joint highest admin savings "given the state of the world, given the chaos in the Middle East, given the war in Ukraine, given Donald Trump, given climate change, given everything, given that we are trying to be in the middle of all of this a stable force for good".
Robbins said: "I do think we can get to a position over the course of the next three or four years where the Foreign Office is at least as effective as it is today. I'm very conscious of the complexity of the world and the difficulties my colleagues face, and one of the things we talk and think a lot about is how to preserve that experience and knowledge, including at senior levels.
"Whilst we want to push as much responsibility and accountability down the organisation as it's sensible to do, we do need experience and judgment in some of our in some of our senior roles."
He added that the FCDO is "a lot bigger than it was at the time of the merger, and some of that increase is hard to explain".
And he said there is "an appetite for streamlining" among senior officials "and for making sure that responsibility is pushed down to people - very bright, very capable people - coming up through the organisation".
Robbins said the department is also "very, very alive to needing to do it without reducing the effectiveness of the department and without losing valuable experience".
He also pointed out that the FCDO was allocated a £290 million pound transformation fund at SR25, which he said will allow the the department "to invest in and reshape our workforce, as well as invest in our digital capabilities".
Responding to Robbins comments, Gideon Rabinowitz, director of policy and advocacy at Bond, said the network of international development organisations is "concerned that development staff within FCDO will face the brunt of these cuts".
"After the previous round of UK aid cuts and the rushed DFID-FCO merger, capacity and expertise have already been severely undermined," he said. "Further reductions will narrow development expertise within the FCDO and damage the UK’s credibility as a trusted global development partner at a time when global challenges demand urgent attention."