House of Commons - Foreign Affairs

Select Committee on Foreign Affairs Minutes of Evidence

Memorandum from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on travel advice

1. The FCO has for many years provided advice to British citizens planning to travel overseas. This service has gradually become more structured and its output more systematic. Since 1996 it has been available on the FCO website, which is now the principal source of guidance to British travellers—an average of 675,000 page impressions per month. We also put our message out via travel agents and tour operators. Our advice is important for British citizens living abroad as well as tourists, particularly in times of tension when an evacuation may be necessary (cf India/Pakistan this summer). Many Posts overseas provide additional advice to local British communities. There is an extensive Consular Division service providing hints and advice to particular groups of travellers.

2. The purpose of our Travel Advice is to allow British citizens to take informed decisions on their travel plans. The goal is to minimise, at one extreme, the number who are injured or killed during their travels; at a more modest level, the number inconvenienced or worse by crime, natural disasters, traffic accidents etc. As such, our main customers are the British travelling public. Much of our effort is devoted to getting our message to this group. Our Travel Advice also has an impact on various parts of the travel industry. We work closely with them in order to ensure they understand and endorse our advice, in the interests of their customers and ultimately of themselves, even when it may deter travel, rather than encourage it.

3. The advice we give to travellers can conveniently be divided into two broad categories:

(i) Intelligence-Led Travel Advice: CTPD receive assessments from the Security Service of raw material and consult Posts/Geographical Departments and SSU about the case for changing Travel Advice (as well as about wider issues including Posts' safety and advice to our staff overseas). We need to ensure that intelligence is used to provide timely and worthwhile advice to British travellers; and advice which is properly understood.

(ii) Other Issues: these include crime, personal safety, local laws and customs, natural disasters etc. In all these cases., advice is based on recommendations from Posts overseas, endorsed by Geographical Departments. Posts are best placed to warn of dangers on the ground. Geographical Departments can put the advice for one country into the wider context of the region and ensure that there is overall coherence.

4. Consular Division, working with e-Media Unit, are responsible for ensuring that new advice is put onto the website. In most cases, we make no further public announcement about changes to Travel Advice, but these are e-mailed to over 20,000 regular customers automatically. The Press Office draw attention to significant changes with a press release. Where we see a serious and immediate threat to British travellers, we can and do use the media to get the message out quickly and widely.

5. Broadly speaking, this system has served us well over the years. Millions of people have received practical and useful advice in planning their overseas travel. However, to ensure we retain our reputation for high quality advice, there are a number of issues which merit further consideration:

(a) How to ensure that out advice is genuinely useful/practical and our systems are simple, transparent and easy to use

We should as far as possible introduce standardised categories/standard language. This would help people using our advice to understand it easily and get the most from it. On occasion this might mean being schematic, rather than offering advice closely tailored to the individual situation. But the benefits outweigh the downside—not least for those travellers for whom our advice affects their ability to claim against their travel insurance. It is normally possible to get reimbursement for a cancelled holiday only when we advise against travel to a country, rather than simply advising caution and prudence. This highlights the potential commercial sensitivities involved in our advice.

We also need to find the best balance between keeping our advice up-to-date and the confusion which may be caused by introducing constant minor amendments. This problem has moved up the agenda, because of the growing number of intelligence reports suggesting threats to Western interests. Recent experience has also highlighted the need to build on existing practice to ensure that out-of-date or irrelevant material is weeded out—to keep our advice as simple and clear as possible.

(b) Clarity about responsibility for Travel Advice—and therefore for ensuring that it is right and up-to-date

We should establish a strengthened Travel Advice Unit in Consular Division to coordinate the whole process; ensure that Posts/Departments keep Travel Advice up-to-date; maintain editorial control; and disseminate Travel Advice as widely as possible. The substance of the advice, however, should be the responsibility of the Geographical Department in London, taking advice from Post. In the case of possible intelligence-led changes to Travel Advice, it should be CTPD's responsibility to ensure that new threat assessments are distributed quickly to Geographical Departments, SSU, Posts and Consular Division's Travel Advice Unit; and to take the lead on immediate follow-up (eg convening a meeting to decide what action, if any, is needed). If a submission to Ministers is required, however, the Geographical Department should take the lead—to put any recommended change into a wider political context. At the end of the process, CTPD should tell the Agencies what decisions we have taken and why. To help put these issues in context, CTPD, SSU and Consular Division should over the next month provide oral briefings to Geographical Departments to explain the process and its potential impact.

(c) Whether or not to distinguish in our handling arrangements between intelligence-led advice and the rest

We should. Both processes can lead to changes to the advice available on the FCO website; but they are quite distinct. Intelligence-led advice raises different and more difficult issues. It is the only sort on which we are likely to want to consult Ministers.

(d) On intelligence-led advice, to agree criteria for when Ministers should be consulted

Ministers should be consulted when either:

(i) It is proposed that our Travel Advice should be changed in a way which would have an impact on the plans of significant numbers of British citizens (whether resident overseas or visitors) or be controversial in other ways;

(ii) It is proposed not to change our Travel Advice, but where there would be a clear risk of parliamentary criticism if British citizens were injured/killed in an incident which might have been covered by altered Travel Advice.

(e) Dove-tailing effectively advice given at Post with that provided in London

Posts should only offer advice locally, which is additional to that on the FCO website, when there are issues likely to be of concern to resident communities but not to short-term visitors (eg a threat to schools). All such advice should be in line with the material on the FCO website. If in any doubt, Posts should consult London. We have already underlined the importance of this to Posts. We should issue regular reminders and ensure that the technical links between the FCO website and Post websites work effectively. Similar concerns relate to information on the TPUK website; TPUK will ensure that in future Travel Advice is provided only by a link to the FCO site, not by self-standing material.

(f) Improving arrangements to ensure that we are aware of others' decisions on Travel Advice and are able to keep them in the picture on our own changes (a particular concern in the EU context)

We already devote considerable effort to this area, in particular to brief EU Partners. But the reinforced Consular Division Travel Advice Unit will need to keep tabs on the Travel Advice of key partners and to have as good a system as possible to get information out to partners (in the EU case via Coreu) when we decide on a politically sensitive change to Travel Advice—with as full an explanation as we can provide of the reasons for our decision. In addition, Posts in key capitals (Washington, Canberra, Ottawa, Paris, Berlin) need to see monitoring this area as an important task.

(g) The degree to which we should offer tailored services to individuals/groups (which we have already done in the case of the England Cricket team visiting India last winter

There will be occasions when this is clearly the right approach; and Consular Division already help telephone callers by explaining the backdrop against which a piece of Travel Advice has been changed. But we need to be careful about accusations of picking and choosing between groups; and of implicitly offering a better service to some. We should, where possible, not be glossing our Travel Advice, but leaving it to speak for itself.

(h) Improving the way in which we advertise changes to Travel Advice:

There is now considerable press interest in changes to our Travel Advice. We draw attention to selected changes in Travel Advice with a press release, and a call to PA and Reuters. We should continue this practice. Decisions on issuing a press release should be taken on a case by case basis between Press Office and the Geographical Department. But any substantial changes, such as advising against non-essential travel, would automatically trigger a press release.

RESOURCES

6. The above arrangements should help both to improve the service we offer to the travelling public and UK residents overseas; and to minimise the risk of technical glitches with our processes. There will, however, be resource implications. Consular Division calculate they will need an extra D6 and C4 for the new tasks (which can be covered under their new self-finding agreement with HMT); CTPD will probably need an additional C4 and B3.

MEDIA AND PARLIAMENT

7. There is keen parliamentary interest in the issue of Travel Advice, most recently evident in the close scrutiny given to the subject since Bali. There are also regular adjournment debates and PQs on consular cases, in some of which Travel Advice may be raised. If this approach is approved, we should look for ways to get publicity for the improvements and to explain them to Parliament (we submitted a Memorandum on Travel Advice to the FAC on 28 October). Options might include a further Memorandum to the FAC and/or a Written Ministerial Statement, and references to these initiatives in our response to the FAC's report on the FCO's Annual Report.

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

November 2002

TRAVEL ADVICE REVIEW

1. I have carefully read tile FCO travel advice for the countries listed below. I have compared it to advice provided by the Australian and US governments for those countries. I have attended meetings with ABTA and the Plain English Campaign about our travel advice. This report has been drawn up with the help of Consular Division and CTPD.

2. The countries are Angola, Chile, El Salvador, Egypt, Ethiopia., France, Georgia,

Indonesia, Israel and the Occupied Territories, Japan, Morocco, Singapore, Spain, Sri

Lanka, Turkey, UAE, Venezuela, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

FINDINGS

3. Assuming the advice for these countries is typical, the FCO website does offer a lot of pertinent and useful information to British travellers and residents. In only one case, Chile, was the advice not worth the effort of looking it up.

4. Our advice also compares well to the Australian and American products. The Australian advice scores better than ours in its layout, particularly the use of short, clear summaries and simple English. But in many countries it glosses over a lot of detail that our advice gives.

5. The Americans have a different approach. They produce country reports (called consular information sheets), full of detailed information, but containing rather little advice. When something disturbing happens they produce separate global, regional or country warnings, which overtake their country reports. In general, the US concentrates more on description than prescription.

6. Advice from the three websites to travellers and residents was not always the same—eg in Angola, we advise against all non-essential travel, while Australia advises against only travel outside Luanda and the US give no advice on travelling. I do not necessarily see that as a criticism of our advice, provided we can justify our position.

7. A more delicate question is whether the FCO's advice is consistent as between different countries. It is not straightforward making such comparisons without a lot of knowledge of conditions in the countries concerned.

8. Although the FCO travel advice generally provides a good service, I found some weaknesses in the cases reviewed, namely:

(a) the summaries were generally too long (a full page in Venezuela's case) and were not always consistent with or justified by the detail of the accompanying text;

(b) the use of a standard formula on international terrorism added very little value to the summaries, often made them bottom heavy and repeated verbatim the worldwide terrorism warning in the box on the same page;

(c) in a few cases, seemingly important facts were missing from our advice—eg the US advice on Zambia warns travellers of land mines in the Gwemba valley, which make off-road driving dangerous, whereas ours does not mention this;

(d) the paragraph headed "Attention terrorism" in the body of the text, but outside the section on safety and security, often read somewhat oddly. And the advice did not cover the threat from global terrorism in all countries—eg omitted from the report on Georgia;

(e) some of the advice seemed beyond its shelf-life, as I reviewed it on 6 January—eg the Indonesia advice referred to the approach of the Christmas and New Year holiday period;

(f) there were cases where the advice would benefit from more editorial care—eg the advice on France has a paragraph on "Local Travel" devoted to driving in Corsica followed by seven paragraphs on "Road Travel" describing driving conditions throughout France.

REMEDIES

9. The following remedies suggest themselves:

(a) Summaries should have a strict limit on length—eg no more than four sentences—and should be consistent with the detailed text. I suggest a structure for them, as part of overall revision of the shape of our travel advice, below.

(b) The standard formula on international terrorism should be dropped from the summary but kept in the box on the first page and can be picked up, as necessary, in the main body of the text.

(c) Posts/geographical departments should check the FCO advice with information provided by other countries, particularly the US, to ensure that our advice does not suffer from significant omissions.

(d) The passage on terrorism should be a sub-section of the safety and security part of the travel advice. (See suggested new structure below.) Advice should always cover the threat from global terrorism, even if the risk appears remote. I have suggested some models for standardising the language on terrorism. But I do not think we should be Stalinist about it; we shall still need to take account of local conditions.

(e) To keep the passage on terrorism short, there should be links on the website to security tips for travellers and residents.

(f) There should be a system for checking that advice has not become out of date and that there are no editorial oddities or glitches in the text. I understand it has been recommended that deputy heads of geographical departments should include supervising their countries' travel advice in their objectives.

ABTA

10. ABTA would like very short summaries. These should give clear advice, as similar to traffic lights as possible—green, amber and red—about whether people should travel. Up to a point, I have tried to take account of their views. ABTA were attracted by the new model summary, suggested by the FCO, beginning "We see no special reason to advise against travel to X", in preference to the alternative formula already widely used starting "Most visits to X are trouble free.." ABTA pointed out that, in reality, the great majority of visits to countries, even dangerous ones, were trouble-free; it was the few cases of trouble that caused all the problems. The formula in use risked not adding useful information. In keeping with their view that travellers were looking to the FCO for clear advice, ABTA believed that we should try where possible to give it. For commercial reasons, the transition from "take care" to "don't go" was crucial; it was when insurance and cancellation clauses kicked in. That step above all in our advice needed to be unambiguous. It was also important to use the phrase "all holiday and other non-essential travel" in order to show the customer that we considered all holidays non-essential, in the context of the warning we were giving.

PLAIN ENGLISH CAMPAIGN

11. I have also taken into account the views of the Plain English Campaign. They want short sentences and active verbs. And they like sentences beginning with conjunctions. Most significantly, they want the text directed at the reader in the second person—ie "you should not travel to X". I have followed their style guidelines as far as possible. But sometimes we need a degree of complexity to describe a situation accurately. For example, the plain English people do not like our advice listing places at risk such as hotels, bars, nightclubs, restaurants and churches. But sometimes we get information linking a specific threat to such places.

NEW STRUCTURE

12. I recommend the following changes to the structure of FCO travel advice.

— The first sentence should give a brief assessment of the risk and, if necessary, the main thrust of our advice, Two examples: (i) the vast majority of visits to Spain are trouble free; or (ii) we advise British nationals not to travel to Venezuela because of the deteriorating political situation and worsening shortages of fuel and food;

— If required, other important local information can be given in a second sentence, eg on the risk of travelling to certain regions of the country or of the threat posed by rising levels of street crime;

— We may want to advise British nationals, in certain circumstances, to take particular care over their personal security. We should cross-refer any generic advice of this sort to a list of personal safety tips, which could feature on the general travel advice page;

— The summary should also mention the risk of terrorism.

(b) The section immediately after the summary should be called "Safety and Security". It should contain subsections on terrorism (domestic and international), the domestic political situation (optional), crime and local travel safety—in that order.

(c) There should then follow sections on local laws and customs, entry requirements, health, natural disasters (optional) and general points—as per the existing format.

NEW LANGUAGE ON TERRORISM

13. Firstly, some principles, Language on terrorism should avoid hostages to fortune and assertions for which there is no evidence. So we should not say "we see no risk of a terrorist incident" which looks foolish if some terrorist outrage is subsequently perpetrated.

14. We should also avoid using terms to define the level of threat that are meaningless to the lay reader. I am not sure I really understand the difference between a moderate and a significant threat or between a high and an acute threat. It is fine, however, to use low and high in our public advice provided we do not attempt too much precision over their meaning.

15. We should, where possible, describe the evidence (or lack of it) of a terrorist threat in the country concerned. The US reports provide this. For example, their Egypt report says that "the US Embassy periodically receives information concerning extremists' intentions to target American citizens or interests in Egypt". For Indonesia, their travel warning says "the US Embassy in Jakarta has received information that indicates extremist elements may be planning additional attacks targeting US interests in Indonesia". In Japan, the US report refers to "unconfirmed information that terrorist actions may be taken against US military facilities and/or establishments frequented by US military personnel". Such descriptions of the evidence for the terrorist threat would add credibility and authority to our travel advice.

16. There are many places where there have been terrorist plans to attack western targets but the evidence is weak, unsubstantiated and old. Omitting it could attract criticism should an attack take place later. I believe we should refer to that old evidence while putting it into context—ie that there has been no recent information indicating a terrorist attack. Parliament is more likely to criticise us for not including evidence of warnings, than including them.

17. In countries where the risk of terrorism is greater than "low", our advice should also describe, where possible, the extent to which the authorities of the country concerned are mounting an effective counter-terrorism policy. This can be delicate. But it is clearly germane. Two different countries could both be rated as being at "significant" risk of terrorism. But the relative competence of the security authorities in these places is surely a factor in deciding whether one should risk a visit. In fact our travel advice for many countries already includes this information. I suggest including it where we have the information to make a reasonable judgement, which will not be in all cases.

18. All advice to British nationals not to travel to particular countries must be given on a case by case basis, not follow automatically from a country reaching a particular level of threat assessment. The levels of terrorism threat are wide and group together very different sorts of countries.

19. We have to be careful of travel warning inflation—by which I mean that, out of natural caution, we advise against travel to more and more countries because of the generally increased terrorist threat around the world. I would like us to set the bar very high for recommendations not to travel, whether on holiday or on business. The more we give evidence of the information available to us about a threat from terrorism in our travel advice, the easier it is to defend setting the bar high. Otherwise, we will end up advising against travel to an ever larger number of countries on the basis of unspecific and rather generalised risk, which could bring the FCO travel advice, as a whole, into disrepute.

20. And now some examples of language. These are illustrative only and should be expanded with more country-specific detail of local conditions. They follow a set format, with threats rising from a low level at (a) to a high level at (g).

(a) There has been no terrorism in X recently. We have not seen any evidence of a threat to western interests from terrorism. But you should be aware of the risk that indiscriminate terrorist attacks can take place in any country.

(b) Following the signing of a cease-fire on (date) between the rebel group A and the government, the chances of being caught up in a terrorist attack in Y have greatly diminished. The government of X is fully aware of the impact of terrorism but terrorists have been able to operate in X with a degree of freedom in recent years. You should remain on your guard and avoid demonstrations and political gatherings (see our security tips for travellers).

We have not seen any recent evidence of plans by terrorists to attack western interests. But you should be aware of the risk that indiscriminate terrorist attacks can take place in any country.

security tips for travellers

We are unaware of any specific evidence of terrorist plans to attack western interests in G. But you should be aware of the risk that indiscriminate terrorist attacks can take place in any country.

(f) Country E was affected by domestic terrorism in the mid-90s, but there have been no terrorist attacks since (date). The government of E has made a great effort to put in place effective measures to prevent terrorism. The police and security forces have strengthened security at tourist sites. However, despite the best efforts of the government, terrorism continues to pose a threat.

We believe there is also an increased threat to British nationals and British interests from global terrorism throughout region R. Although we are not aware of any current, specific terrorist plans to attack British interests in E, you should keep your personal safety in mind in public places (see our security tips for travellers). The terrorist attacks in Bali on 12 October 2002 deliberately targeted Western tourists. You should therefore be on your guard in places popular with westerners. All British institutions and businesses should review their security arrangements.

security tips for residents

IMPLEMENTATION

21. In many ways, the easy bit is to identify the shortcomings and propose some remedies. The more difficult task is to implement and sustain them. Subject to getting a green light for these changes, I would be happy to brief, along with the travel advice team and CTPD, geographical deputy heads of department, perhaps taking them a Command at a time.

EU HEADS OF MISSION

22. Although this goes beyond my remit I believe there could be a role for EU heads of mission in considering travel advice. We would not want to be bound to toe an EU line, nor to have to give notice to EU partners of a change to our advice. But EU heads could be tasked with regular reviews of advice to their nationals, which could serve as an extra reality check.

ISSUES FOR MINISTERS

23. There are a number of issues here which we might wish to submit to ministers:

— Whether to change our advice on any particular country.

— Whether we should adopt the new format for the travel advice and, in particular, move the terrorism paragraph to the Safety and Security section of the advice.

— Whether, when we have the information to do so, we make some assessment of the competence of the local security authorities to tackle terrorism.

— Whether we should set the bar high for advising against travel.

— Whether in general our advice should become more descriptive and less prescriptive.

— Whether we should use the illustrative language in paragraph 21 and in the annex of summaries as models.

CONCLUSION

24. The most important element in providing good travel advice is to have good quality information. This review does not address that. Nor does it address, except in passing, the mechanism for ensuring that the right information is included in our travel advice. But the format and language used in our travel advice are also important. I believe the use of short summaries and a standardised format, with terrorism treated in the way described above, will improve our service to the British public and travel industry. I attach some examples (annex B) of how the new travel advice compares to the old.

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

January 2003

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