Foreign and Commonwealth Office staff have been sent a memorandum by the Head of the Diplomatic Service Sir Simon McDonald. It reveals that staff will be moved from current roles to work on No Deal from the middle of February. Talented and experienced individuals are being poached to be deployed in EU impact areas. Non EU-Exit work is being ‘delayed, dropped or done differently’…
A co-conspirator has told Guido that Remainer FCO staff are “very down, across the grades” and that morale is low. Apparently the threats to be moved to Brexit duties not going down well with staff…
Stepping up our No Deal planning
Yesterday the FCC’s Executive Committee (ExCo) agreed to intensify our contingency planning to manage a No Deal scenario. This includes working with Directorates to release staff from the ‘20%’ Directorate Crisis Lists for a potential No Deal response from mid-February (the 18th is pencilled in), as well as identifying experienced individuals to be deployed to EU Exit impacted areas outside of the Crisis Centre and to new short-term roles in the Europe network. The latter could require up to 5% of staff.This will have a significant impact on Directorates so we will need to be rigorous in our prioritisation of non-EU Exit work. Prioritisation guidance for Directors will follow shortly to help them make decisions about what non-EU Exit work to delay, drop or do differently. We will also need to adapt the way we work, including relying more on Posts, devolving decision-making to more junior levels and streamlining central processes.
As part of this work, colleagues in HR Directorate have been looking carefully at what changes they can make to HR policies and processes More detail on this will follow next week.
It looks like the Foreign Office is finally accepting we are leaving. Not only that, they realise it might be on ‘no deal’ terms…
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