‘Two cheers’: Cautious welcome for development veteran in new UK post

The appointment of a top civil servant with deep experience in international development to a new senior post has been hailed as a significant but limited step in the U.K.’s attempts to rebuild its battered reputation on foreign aid delivery. The merged Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, or FCDO, has been given a second permanent under-secretary — a deputy to its senior civil servant — with a brief to focus on development work and “undo damage,” as one expert put it. The selection of Nick Dyer, a former acting head of the abolished Department for International Development, or DFID, is seen as a further victory for U.K. development minister Andrew Mitchell, who worked with Dyer at DFID more than a decade ago. Dyer, who was also the U.K.’s first special envoy for Famine Prevention and Humanitarian Affairs, tweeted Wednesday that his priority in the role would be “delivering our collective development ambitions.” However, experts cautioned the move is not a renewed separation of foreign policy and aid work — because the existing permanent under-secretary, Philip Barton, will remain the FCDO boss and its accounting officer responsible for all spending. Ranil Dissanayake, a senior research fellow at the Center for Global Development think tank, gave it “two cheers,” saying: “Nick comes with a huge amount of credibility on development issues — but there is so much work still to be done to undo damage and make the FCDO function better.” "My understanding is that it's not quite the case that this will separate out all development policy and development spending, which would then be run by Nick Dyer. It’s not the same as having a different development stream and foreign policy stream,” he continued. "However, this is unambiguously an improvement, even if it does not go as far as I and many others in the development sector would like.” Tim Durrant, program director at the Institute for Government, said FCDO was clearly “beefing up the focus on development,” when the aim of the 2020 merger had been to integrate aid and foreign policy fully. But of the new post he added: “It is second in line to the permanent secretary, who is responsible for running the department overall. This is not a carving out of a new internal organization.” Nevertheless, the appointment is seen as key to improving a structure that Mitchell found to be failing when he arrived last October, as well as to boosting “morale,” which suffered after the chaotic merger. Mark Miller, director of global strategy at the ODI, a think tank, said in an email: “A second perm sec leading on development helps ensure it stays front of mind and doesn't become an afterthought.” It follows Mitchell’s rebranding of aid work as UK International Development with a new Union flag logo — to make it “more identifiable at home and abroad,” he said. The intended abbreviation was UKID, but this was changed to UKDev after a consultation found the former to be too close to UKIP, the name of the party that campaigned for Brexit. Dyer, who is currently director general, humanitarian and development at FCDO, will take up his new post on July 3. He described it as “a real honour,” adding: “The FCDO is full of the most passionate, committed and brilliant people.”