Preet Gill's to-do list upon taking office

Picture this: The year is 2023. The United Kingdom’s Conservative Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has just lost a snap election after a bitter campaign. Preet Kaur Gill, a Labour member of Parliament for Birmingham Edgbaston, is now international development secretary. She steps into the job after many years of aid budget cuts and what she calls “catastrophic” damage to U.K. development expertise and institutions, as well as to the country’s international reputation. The above scenario is fictional, but Gill’s criticisms are real. As shadow international development secretary, Gill has followed the government’s aid and development work since 2018. Gill told Devex the first three things she would do upon taking office: 1. Find out “what damage has been done internally to our civil service and [development] expertise,” Gill said. She added that “it feels like so many people have left” the Department for International Development after it was folded into the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office in 2020. “We need to be clear that we have the right expertise in a department to be able to deliver on development opportunities,” said Gill. She claimed she has been told by officials that FCDO “morale was really low” and some staff are leaving for other organizations. 2. Her next step would be to “get an understanding of what our ambassadors will have been doing, especially in terms of priorities,” said Gill. Since 2020 bilateral aid programs have increasingly come under the remit of ambassadors, who often lack development expertise. 3. Finally, making sure “we absolutely have our commitment to 0.7% [aid-spending target] to provide longer term funding for development, which Gill said required collaboration with universities, businesses, and civil society. She also said Labour would “absolutely” create a separate government department focused on aid and development but “it might be called something else” than DFID.