What could a Liz Truss premiership mean for development?

Liz Truss is widely expected to become the next prime minister of the United Kingdom on Tuesday after a vote Monday. Her anticipated appointment has triggered concern and apprehension among officials in the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, which she has led since September 2021, and across the wider development sector in the U.K.

Truss has said she believes the aid budget should be used to challenge “geopolitical efforts by malign actors.” During her tenure as foreign secretary, she has paid relatively little attention to development, climate or lower-income countries, beyond overseeing the launch of British International Investment, and later, the international development strategy. It took nearly a week for Truss to make a statement responding to recent flooding in Pakistan, which has submerged a third of the country.

“Under her watch there was a dramatic shift from development to economic development and it really calls into question going forward whether or not we do have a focus on poverty reduction or whether it’s more about trade deals, partnerships, and what’s in the U.K.’s interests, and that does concern me,” said Sarah Champion, a member of Parliament who chairs the international development committee, which scrutinizes government development policy.

Champion also raised concerns about the gender equality record of Truss, who is also the minister for women and equalities, saying she showed a “lack of understanding of the broader context that is creating violence against women and girls” — particularly in the context of the U.K. aid cuts.

The political environment surrounding the aid budget is likely to become more tense as the U.K. enters a domestic economic crisis, with inflation and gas prices forecast to soar this winter. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Department for International Development was folded into the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, and the aid budget was cut from 0.7% to 0.5% of gross national income, which then Chancellor Rishi Sunak blamed on the “domestic fiscal emergency.” Though in an Aug. 11 campaign event, Truss said she would keep the aid budget “as it is.”

Despite Truss’s role in government officially making her responsible for global development and aid, “from our perspective it felt like anything to do with development was delegated to junior ministers,” said a former FCDO official.

Truss has instead embraced realist-style geopolitics, reorganizing FCDO to reflect this approach, and emphasizing a tough U.K. stance, particularly against Russia and China — sometimes contradicting the position of BII. Truss has reportedly even shown an antagonistic approach towards the United States, usually seen as the U.K.’s most important ally. She has constantly spoken in favor of “freedom” and free markets, but her flagship policy of building a “network of liberty” has made little progress. Beyond that, little is known about her view of the world and her ideas for shaping it.

“The general thinking is that she will do things guided by those around her because she doesn’t seem to have her own clear ideas,” said an official. “But I’m not sure what this’ll mean.”

Truss has a reputation for simplistic policies and being a divisive manager, and is sometimes viewed to have used the foreign secretary role as a platform for becoming prime minister. Since Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced his resignation on July 7, Truss has been focused on running in the Conservative Party’s leadership contest to replace him, gathering support from various factions of MPs and supporters. The campaign is widely viewed as having adopted a divisive, right-wing narrative, putting Truss on a collision course with the civil service.

Truss has not endeared herself to FCDO officials. After she joined last September, her first all-staff meeting with officials saw her asked what should be done differently now she was foreign secretary — traditionally one of the U.K. government’s great offices of state. “More parties,” came Truss’s reply, according to an official present. She then told an anecdote about partying at the U.K.’s embassy in Mexico City, and said she was fueled by “espresso and red wine, one for the mornings, one for the evenings,” according to the official. “It was totally bizarre, quite shocking and offensive to a group of exhausted civil servants and totally unprofessional. She’s very childish, seems to have no idea what’s going on,” the official added.

At the same meeting, Truss was “asked what she would do on D&I” and had a junior minister answer “because she clearly didn’t know it stood for diversity and inclusion,” according to the official.

The former official said people initially liked Truss “because she wasn’t [her predecessor] Dominic Raab,” and quickly scrapped his “obsessive approach” to key performance indicators. But Truss was also clear that development had been “brought in and under” the Foreign Office when DFID was closed, as opposed to a merger of equal departments and missions, the person said.

Since then, Truss has further alienated officials by attacking the civil service as “woke” and antisemitic during her campaign to become prime minister.  

“There is too much bureaucracy and stale groupthink in Whitehall,” Truss said in August. “If I make it into Downing Street, I will put an end to that and run a government that focuses relentlessly on delivering for the British public. ... I have shown in my time in government that I’m prepared to take on the Whitehall orthodoxy and get things done.”

These claims were dismissed as a “lie” by the former FCDO official. “She’s willing to take credit for [things] when it works but behind the scenes, on the merger, there was no real effort to deliver,” said the former official.

There was “no sense” of FCDO “collectively being challenged to do things differently and better,” said the former official. The person said that if tackling “groupthink” was the “willingness to challenge the way things are being done, just because that’s the way things are being done … that just isn’t happening.”

FCDO’s aid transparency continued its “worrying downward trend” under Truss’ tenure, according to Abigael Baldoumas, policy and advocacy manager at Bond, the network for U.K. NGOs. While DFID was among the most transparent donors in the world, according to a 2020 evaluation by Bond, FCDO’s new transparency commitments “lack much-needed ambition” despite being “vital to ensure effectiveness, value for money and impact,” said Baldoumas.

With the U.K.’s development reputation worsened in recent years, and global crises showing no sign of abating, development advocates will be closely watching for any course change by the government.