MPs Alarmed by Closure of Foreign Office International Law Unit

MPs have expressed alarm at the closure of the Foreign Office’s international humanitarian law unit, warning it “will impair the UK’s ability to anticipate, assess and respond to serious violations of international law across multiple contexts”.

News of the closure, revealed by the Guardian, was raised with Keir Starmer at prime minister’s questions this week by the independent MP for Dewsbury and Batley, Iqbal Mohamed. Starmer said the work would be undertaken by another team as part of a restructuring.

However, he made no reference to the ending of the Foreign Office contract with the Conflict and Security Monitoring Project, run by the Centre for Information Resilience, which monitors incidents of concern in Gaza, the West Bank and, more recently, Lebanon.

In a letter to the foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, the cross-party group of MPs asked how the closure aligned with the government’s stated commitment to upholding international law and ensuring rigorous compliance with the UK’s arms export licensing criteria.

They also questioned what steps the Foreign Office would take to retain access to the database of 26,000 incidents dating to 7 October 2023, when Hamas launched its attack on Israel, prompting Israel’s military response in Gaza.

According to Gaza’s health ministry, more than 70,000 people have been killed since then.

The MPs asked what other data sources the department intended to use to monitor breaches of international humanitarian law.

The cuts come as part of a restructuring programme, known as FCDO 2030, overseen by the now-dismissed permanent secretary, Olly Robbins.

The trade union representing Foreign Office staff, the PCS, also challenged Starmer’s claim that the work of the unit could be absorbed elsewhere, stating that senior leadership had predicted job cuts of 15-20%.

The union said it “has not been provided with detailed plans setting out what work will continue, what will cease or how the remaining staff could absorb highly specialised areas”. It added that it had seen no evidence that ministers fully understood the impact of the cuts or whether they aligned with the priorities of the public.

Polling published on Friday by Medical Aid for Palestinians and conducted by YouGov found that 54% of the public would like to see the UK end all arms exports to Israel, compared with 22% who supported weapons sales.

Robbins had been overseeing the restructuring of the Foreign Office, and in effect had required some diplomats to prove their suitability for their job after the decision in February 2025 to reduce Official Development Assistance spending.

Estimates published by the Foreign Office this week show projected spending of £6.28bn in 2026-27, a £2.39bn (27%) reduction on the previous year.

Robbins’ cuts included a requirement that Foreign Office staff write essays outlining the skills they possessed that made them useful to the department. One aim was to tilt the Foreign Office expertise towards economics.

The restructuring programme has been taken on by Nick Dyer, the department’s other permanent secretary. He told a select committee last week that the Foreign Office was too bureaucratic, too big, too slow and insufficiently nimble.