The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
playing one
Government department off against another”. The Ad Hoc Ministerial
Group
could have
been controlled the budget.
662.
Mr Neil
Crompton, the Head of IPU, reflected on the availability of funding
in his
May 2005
valedictory minute to Mr John Sawers:
“HMG (and
the FCO) took a long time to wake up to the scale of the task we
had
taken on.
Demands from No.10 and Ministers for action have always
exceeded
the
resources available. The Treasury have played hard ball, exploiting
different
departments’
own internal reasons for not wanting to make claims on the Reserve
to
kill off
initiatives. No.10’s unwillingness to intervene with HMT [the
Treasury], except
once, has
compounded the problem, and undermined the morale of officials
tasked
with
running an ‘exemplary operation’ without the resources to do
so.
“It is
naive to expect the Treasury to behave differently. But Ministers
(and the
FCO) need
to recognise that in a conflict we cannot afford the luxury of
ensuring
expenditure
is subject ‘to the same rigorous criteria as anywhere else’, as we
have
occasionally
been told.”413
663.
Mr Crompton
recommended that, in future, the Ad Hoc Ministerial Group
or
equivalent
should be allocated a budget to fund immediate priorities not
covered by
departments’
core budgets or by funds such as the GCPP. That would avoid the
need for
“extended
negotiations” with the Treasury.
664.
In his
response to Mr Crompton, Mr Sawers, FCO Political
Director, agreed that the
FCO needed
to give a much higher priority to an issue when it “prevails over
all others”,
in terms of
both money and people.414
The FCO had
done that in the pre‑conflict phase,
but it had
been less apparent in the post‑conflict phase.
665.
A June 2005
FCO Conflict Issues Group paper drawing together
post‑conflict
lessons for
the FCO concluded:
“We need to
make it clear to other government departments the true cost of
what
they are
asking us to achieve. We can spend too much time trying to secure
extra
resources
and fail to secure them in a timely manner. Policy without
resources is
usually
futile. All OGDs [other government departments] need to be required
to
allocate
resources to tasks which the Cabinet rules to be
important.”415
666.
An FCO review
of lessons to be learned from the UK’s experience in
Basra,
produced in
late 2008, concluded:
“… The FCO
was constantly scrambling after resources. Risk
management
should
ensure that realistic estimates of resources are made at an early
stage,
413
Minute
Crompton to Sawers, 4 May 2005, ‘Iraq: Reflections’.
414
Minute
Sawers to Crompton, 9 May 2005, ‘Iraq: Reflections’.
415
Paper FCO
CIG, June 2005, ‘Post Conflict Lessons Learned
Exercise’.
554