Who is the UK's inaugural minister for development, Vicky Ford?

The U.K. government has appointed Vicky Ford as minister for development, creating a new position that will have a place in the cabinet of Prime Minister Liz Truss. Ford is the first dedicated minister for development since the creation of the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. Previously, the now-defunct Department for International Development was led by a secretary of state for international development. Ford previously served as minister for Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean in FCDO, beginning in 2021. As a minister of state, she is junior to the new foreign secretary, James Cleverly. Before entering politics — she was elected a member of Parliament for Chelmsford in 2017 — Ford was a banker and spent much of her career financing international infrastructure investment. “I like seeing things being built and made,” Ford told The Actuary magazine in 2017. “I've always seen, if you can help unlock finance into investment, what that can do for economic growth." The creation of a cabinet-level position focused on development was broadly welcomed by the United Kingdom’s beleaguered aid sector, but was also viewed as a further admission from the government that the merger of the Department for International Development and Foreign Office was not working. The announcement recognized how “enormous” the foreign secretary’s brief had become and showed the merger hadn’t “gone as it could,” said Mark Miller, director of Overseas Development Institute’s development and public finance program. He added: “For people who want to see more focus on the aid budget being spent well, it's a positive development.” “Development is now someone’s main job, and not a side gig prone to being shuffled down the list of priorities; and it also means that there is a voice solely representing development policy in most important political discussions, which has been lacking,” said Ranil Dissanayake, policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, in an email to Devex. Dissanayake said the move could “fix some of the problems that have beset U.K. development policy over the last couple of years, but it leaves the biggest ones unaddressed.” If FCDO also gained a dedicated development permanent secretary, it would go “a long way to creating the institutional clarity that development work in FCDO has lacked to date,” he added. Permanent secretaries are the civil servants who lead government departments, but unlike ministers, they do not change with government cycles. But Dissanayake warned that to make “inroads” to restoring the U.K.’s development reputation, Ford “needs to prove herself to be a real champion for development, and to fight its corner against a sometimes hostile Cabinet. Whether she’ll do so remains to be seen.” It was not known on Wednesday how the responsibilities of Ford and Cleverly would be divided, or who would have ultimate responsibility for the aid budget, authority on key decisions, and oversight of organizations in which the government is a shareholder, such as the British International Investment, formerly CDC Group. The change was described as a “reset” by Tim Boyes-Watson, global director of influence and initiatives at Humentum. “It will be interesting to see if [the government is] more collaborative with other colleagues. The feeling among my U.S. colleagues is the U.K. has been missing in action recently,” he added. Boyes-Watson and others remarked that Ford seemed to have a good grip on her brief as minister for Africa and had visited lots of countries on the continent during her ministerial tenure. She also seemed to have a good understanding of the “underwiring” of global development, unlike former Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, said Boyes-Watson. “She’s not just rhetoric and good intentions, it seems she gets that it’s complicated to do good development well. That’s important [for] locally led development to make it accountable and resilient,” he added. Before entering politics, Ford worked at JP Morgan and Bear Stearns. "In my time in banking, a lot of what I did was infrastructure finance,” she told Actuary. Ford said her work included raising money for the first post-Cold War investments in eastern Europe, an electricity company supplying townships in post-apartheid South Africa, helping “rural companies to start their own businesses,” and for early mobile phone networks in Turkey, Italy, France, and the Netherlands. Her experience appears to align with the investment-friendly approach of the FCDO’s international development strategy, signed off by Truss in May after a long delay. But a key challenge Ford will have to grapple with is the smaller aid budget — which has been reduced from 0.7% to 0.5% of national income last year — and funding remains a difficult issue. While he welcomed development being “taken seriously in cabinet,” David Lawrence, a research fellow at Chatham House’s U.K. in the world initiative, said the aid cuts “hit Britain’s soft power hard.” “Lots of developing countries were hoping for more support from the West including the UK on climate transition and post-Covid recovery. If we want them to ally with us on Russia's invasion of Ukraine, or in response to China's rise, then we need to demonstrate that we are reliable partners,” said Lawrence in an email. He added that internationally, the U.K. should be supporting more “practical projects,” like some of those hit by the aid cuts, because Truss’s “network of liberty” policy “can be alienating” for some countries. Ford has defended the U.K. government’s development policy, along with its climate stance, amid worries that Truss is less enthusiastic on those issues. On Tuesday, she passionately told Parliament government ministers “always” discuss climate change during diplomatic visits, and that the issue is a “priority” on which the U.K. will “continue to lead." Update Sept. 8, 2022: This article has been updated to clarify Tim Boyes-Watson’s statement on locally led development.