13.1 |
Resources
657.
Lord Boateng
highlighted the need for the UK Government to examine how
it
funded the
MOD, DFID and the FCO to work together in post‑conflict
situations:
“… at the
moment, we have a very, very dangerous imbalance, an imbalance
made
all the
more difficult by the requirements of law in relation to DFID, that
makes it
very, very
difficult to pool resources …”409
658.
Mr John
Dodds, Head of the Treasury Defence, Diplomacy and Intelligence
Team,
told the
Inquiry that, in his personal view, there was a “tension” between
the way that
military
and non‑military activities were funded, and that there was the
potential for some
“sub‑optimal”
decisions:
“… the cost
of a military solution to a conflict problem … was probably about
ten
times the
cost of a non‑military solution …
“I think
that … potentially the funding mechanisms that we had … tended to
create
incentives
for more military intervention and less non‑military intervention,
but
I don’t
think that’s an issue … which is really relevant to Iraq. I think
it is … a piece
of broader
reflection …”410
659.
In his
evidence to the Inquiry, Sir Mark Lyall‑Grant suggested that
there could be
different
approaches to allocating funding, such that:
“… you
wouldn’t take decisions on the basis of how much you could afford,
but
Ministers
would sit round the table, take the decisions that they think are
the right
decisions
to take in a strategic environment, and then the funding would
follow
from that.
“What
happens at the moment is that the Ministers take the decisions,
then the
departments
get together [to consider] ‘How are we going to fund it?’, and end
up
by saying
‘Well, actually, we can’t fund it’.”411
660.
During his
farewell call on Mr Straw in mid‑February 2004,
Sir Hilary Synnott, the
departing
Head of CPA(South), made a number of criticisms of the FCO’s
support for his
office (see
Section 10.1).
661.
Mr Buck
addressed those criticisms in a minute to Sir Michael Jay
of
16 February.412
He argued
that the FCO had learned several lessons, including on
funding
civilian post‑conflict operations. A “genuinely flexible” budget
allocation similar
to that
provided for military operations would have saved the “huge amounts
of time
and energy
required to wrangle over funding”, and helped to “prevent the
Treasury from
409
Public
hearing, 14 July 2010, page 62.
410
Public
hearing, 14 July 2010, pages 27-31.
411
Public
hearing, 22 January 2010, page 37.
412
Minute Buck
to FCO [junior official], 16 February 2004, ‘FCO Response to
Iraq’.
553