15.1 | Civilian
personnel
“I raised
this with the Permanent Under Secretary [Sir Michael Jay] when
I got back
and I was
told that … the Permanent Under Secretaries’ Committee … were
quite
adamant
about this: it was an important duty and civilians were different
from the
military …
I think there was some concern about liability of being sued in the
event
of injury
or death.
…
“A side
effect of this was that the interpretation varied within
ministries, and there
was one
occasion in early September 2003 when I discovered that I was short
of
17 DFID
personnel. They had gone away for a break and they had been stopped
by
their
managers from going beyond Kuwait on the grounds that conditions
were too
dangerous
in Basra.
“Now, we
were living and working [in] Basra … The general who is the expert
on
security
had not been consulted, but the managers of DFID had decided that
they
should not
come back. I kicked up a bit of a stink and after quite some time
they
216.
Efforts to
co‑ordinate departmental approaches to duty of care are addressed
later
in this
Section.
217.
Mr Buck
advised Sir Michael Jay that the FCO record was not perfect,
but the
department
had “learned several lessons and gained valuable experience for the
future”:
•
Staffing of
the FCO’s Iraq operation in London had been “hand to
mouth
from the
start, and only recently received adequate strength, depth
and
continuity”.
A properly staffed unit needed to be formed as soon as it
became
clear the
FCO would have to manage a major new overseas deployment,
and
the FCO
needed to accept far more quickly that the requirement would
remain
for the
medium term.
•
In London
and abroad, the FCO needed to be able to redirect staff “more
swiftly
and
flexibly” and to be able to target officers with suitable
qualifications “more
systematically
than HR records have allowed in the past”.
•
A
“genuinely flexible” budget allocation along the lines provided for
the military,
possibly
controlled by the AHMGIR, would have saved time and energy
and
prevented
the Treasury playing one department off against another. “The
only
area on
which the Treasury have been genuinely helpful has been
security.”
•
In the
early stages DFID had not been “fully on side”. When it agreed to
recruit
a large
tranche of contractors, it had been slow to implement that
commitment.
•
The FCO had
little previous experience of recruiting contractors, but now
had
a pool
of knowledge to draw from in future.
149
Public
hearing, 9 December 2009, pages 108‑110.
281