Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
FOREIGN AND
COMMONWEALTH OFFICE
12 JANUARY 2006
Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon, welcome
to the Committee of Public Accounts where today we are looking
at the Report Consular Services to British Nationals. We
are joined by Sir Michael Jay, who is the Permanent Under Secretary
at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Would you like to introduce
your colleagues to us?
Sir Michael Jay: Thank you very
much Mr Chairman. On my right is Mr Dickie Stagg who is the Director
General of Corporate Affairs and has oversight of our service
delivery operations, notably consular and visa work. On my left
is Mr Paul Sizeland, who is the Director of our Consular Services.
Q2 Chairman: May we start by looking
at page 39 of the Comptroller and Auditor General's Report? It
tells us there in paragraph 3.16 that since 2001 the FCO has been
implementing a new casework management system. The truth is Sir
Michael, is it not, that this is now 13 years after an NAO Report
recommended a more systematic approach to recording consular work
and you are still rolling out the system 13 years later? Why is
that?
Sir Michael Jay: We have put in
place a system called Compass which is designed to ensure that
there is better knowledge and information around the whole of
our network and in London of our consular operations. That is
indeed some time after 1992. It is bedding down. It has taken
longer to bed down than we should like it to have done, but it
is now starting to show real results in ensuring that there is
better management information, that what happens in any part of
the world is known instantly in London and elsewhere and therefore
enables us to share best practice better than we have done in
the past. Yes, it has taken time to get there but we are getting
there.
Q3 Chairman: Okay, but there is still
a long way to go. If you look at page 55 of the Report, paragraph
5.9 you will see that there is scope there to strengthen central
monitoring, so how can you assess the quality of your service
when there are still these gaps in management information?
Sir Michael Jay: The issue of
management information is one which is not peculiar to our consular
operations. In the Foreign Office we have not had really effective
management information systems yet and that has been put in place
through a new Oracle-based management information system Prism,
which has now been rolled out to over half our posts, will be
rolled out to the rest in the next few months and is improving
our management information generally. That plus Compass will lead
to a much better system of management information by the summer
or the end of the year than we have had up to now.
Q4 Chairman: Let us look at one practical
example. If we look at figure 25 which you will find on page 41
which deals with prison and hospital visiting, one thing which
strikes me is that there are such wide variations when you look
at this map. Why is it that you apparently visit almost all Britons
who are in hospital in Bratislava but none in hospital in Budapest?
What is the difference between Bratislava and Budapest?
Sir Michael Jay: May I make one
general point which lies behind both your last two questions and
that is the balance between central control and management in
the network, if I might put it that way. What we are aiming to
put in place is a system in which we have the necessary flexibility
for our managers in all our posts overseas to operate within a
centrally determined system, under central guidance. We are moving
towards that and it will, as you have said, be easier with better
management information and with our Compass system, but I think
there will always be a degree of difference between operations
in different posts because circumstances differ. Paul will talk
about Bratislava versus Budapest, but there will be some parts
of the European Union, say, where we shall want to be more assiduous
in prison visiting or hospital visiting than other parts because
conditions and circumstances will differ. So there will always
be a degree of inconsistency.
Mr Sizeland: To follow up Sir
Michael's point on Compass, we have had difficulties in terms
of getting a system that was first of all effective, user friendly
and therefore was actually going to accomplish what we wanted.
We have tracked this through the last couple of years and we are
now mounting an upgrade which will make it a more valuable tool
for us, quicker, with information which we will be able to transfer
for other purposes. We will have a single version of the truth
on every single consular case which can be easily accessible from
anywhere in the world. As Sir Michael noted on the issue of prison
visiting policy, we are looking at making the best use of our
resources and within the EU, Iceland and certain other places
where we are reasonably satisfied with prison conditions, our
policy is to visit once after sentencing and thereafter only if
real need arises. There are occasionally other issues which arise,
for example if there are language difficulties, problems of people
settling in, welfare issues, health issues and so on, issues relating
to the way that the families are handling the detention of one
of their members. We try to take a pragmatic approach while setting,
as it were, a framework within which we can set out some basic
guidelines. One of the things we have worked on, and Compass will
help us to track it, is to make sure that we are pursuing our
policies ever more consistently across what is a very diverse
network, over 200 posts.
Q5 Chairman: Let us just look at
funding for a moment. If you look at paragraph 5.4 on page 53,
more and more people are travelling abroad and that is going to
put a lot more strain on your funding. How are you going to ensure
that you are putting the effort where the problems are?
Sir Michael Jay: You are right;
the premise is right. There is increasing demand for our services,
65 million visits overseas a year at the moment, more diverse,
more vulnerable groups travelling, travelling increasingly on
their own and to more and more adventurous places in a world which
is increasingly dangerous. I have no doubt that the result is
going to be increasing demand for services within a constrained
financial framework. What we are trying to do to meet that is
to be increasingly innovative and flexible in the way in which
we do respond to this demand. We are also committed to learning
the lessons from some of the crises that we have handled in the
last year or so. We are working much more closely with partners
than we have done in the past, which is an important means of
sharing the burden, working with and through others. To take some
examples: we have been working with the police, the Red Cross,
SOS International, much more than in the past; we are working
with other international organisations; to take one example, in
preparing for a possible avian flu pandemic; we are working with
the FA and with fans in preparing for the World Cup in Germany
in 2006; so consultation, partnership, increasing professionalism
through better training, making more innovative use of our network,
for example honorary consuls.
Q6 Chairman: Let us look at one practical
example then shall we of what happened? Let us look at how you
dealt with the tsunami shall we? Figure 28 on page 47. Your call
system broke down, did it not? Operators were not sufficiently
trained, poor information was collected and the whole system broke
down, did it not?
Sir Michael Jay: The system was
inadequate to cope with utterly unprecedented demand for it.
Q7 Chairman: So if this happens again,
you are going to be ready are you?
Sir Michael Jay: I cannot promise
that we are going to be ready for something which would be as
dramatic as the tsunami. I hope we shall not have to be ready
for something as dramatic as the tsunami, but this is one of the
lessons we have indeed learned and since then we have call service
arrangements now with the police and we are extending those also
to look at call centre arrangements with various private sector
companies as well. These are ways in which we shall aim to cope
with the question of demand.
Q8 Chairman: Why were you so slow
in getting to some areas? For instance, if you look further down
that figure, you were very slow in reaching the worst affected
area which was Khao Lak. What went wrong?
Sir Michael Jay: What happened,
first of all, was that this was an unprecedented disaster in Thailand
and what our embassy had to do first of all was to be in Bangkok
to handle enormous numbers of demands coming to the embassy in
Bangkok. It also had to service a new office which was set up
in Phuket, because that was where the Thai authorities themselves
had set up their emergency office and to where they were repatriating
people from the affected areas. We also had to get people to the
affected areas along a coastline of over 200 miles.
Q9 Chairman: Could your consular
staff not have made it their business to have some idea where
the main concentrations of Britons were? The problem was that
you thought most of them were at Phuket and that is why you did
not get to places like Khao Lak. Is that not the truth?
Sir Michael Jay: No. We went to
Phuket because that is where the Thai authorities were setting
up the emergency centre and it was clearly important that we should
be there to be able to receive the wounded and the distressed
who were being sent there from other areas along the coastline.
We also sent people on 27 December to Krabi, which was one area
to the East of Phuket where we knew there were families in distress,
and we sent a small team of three people also, which was in fact
one third of the total staff then available, to the north of Phuket
to the area around Khao Lak and they were there by a quarter to
10 in the morning on 27 December. They alas could not see everybody
that they would have wanted to see, nor everybody that they should
have seen and the result of that was that some people did not
get the treatment and the help that they needed and we wanted
to give them.
Q10 Chairman: If you look over the
page, at the bottom, this is figure 28 on page 48, the very last
entry about emergency plans, it says here "Posts reported
making little use of their emergency plans during the crisis".
Sir Michael, what is the point of having emergency plans if they
are not fit for purpose and they are not used?
Sir Michael Jay: They were not
fit for the purpose of the tsunami, because nobody had envisaged
that there would be a tsunami on this scale. It is absolutely
essential that all our posts should have emergency plans; they
have not all had them, they will all have them very shortly, they
will all be fit for purpose and they will all have been tested,
which is crucial. What happened in this case was that the particular
circumstances and extreme circumstances of the tsunami just turned
out to be less relevant to the emergency plan than we had hoped.
One of the lessons that we have learned is that there should be
proper and appropriate emergency plans, they should be in place
and they should be tested.
Q11 Chairman: Would you agree that
as far as the public are concerned consular services are increasingly
important? The emphasis in the modern world is less on sending
dispatches in matchless prose from posts back to ministers and
is more about providing practical help to our citizens. Will you
ensure that increasingly in the future, those high-flyers who
become ambassadors have had real experience in consular work?
Sir Michael Jay: Yes, I agree
with the premise and I accept the conclusion and one of the recent
things we have done is to ensure that every, high quality, fast
stream, new entrant graduate who comes into the Foreign Office
spends the second of their two years' induction in service delivery,
either in consular or visas. I have talked to a number of our
young people who have done that and they have been very impressed
by the difficulty and the importance of the operation. We will
indeed make sure that is the case.
Q12 Chairman: Will they have real
jobs later in their careers as a consul general, in Marseille
or wherever, doing a real job before they end up as ambassadors?
Sir Michael Jay: They certainly
will.[1]
Q13 Chairman: They will, will they?
Sir Michael Jay: The Foreign Office
very much shares the underlying philosophy of the Professionalism
in Government agenda which is aimed to ensure that all senior
civil servants, including our own, have the right balance of service
delivery, policy and corporate skills. That is hugely important
because underlying your question is the truth that almost all
our ambassadors, certainly in bilateral posts, have to be able
to send not so much the polished dispatch but the trenchant e-mail
and they have to be able to manage themselves properly and they
have to be able to cope with consular crises.
Chairman: Thank you Sir Michael for expressing
yourself in such matchless prose.
Q14 Mr Mitchell: I should like to
take that a little further. It does not emerge so much from the
Report as from personal experience in dealing with constituents'
problems relating to the consular service. It has always struck
me that there is a class division between the first class brains
of the Foreign Office sitting upstairs in rather lavish premises
entertaining intelligentsia and MPs and visiting parties, and
usually a lean-to shed at the back somewhere where the consular
services are provided by a much humbler class of person. This
has been a real distinction in my experience.
Sir Michael Jay: That may have
been true some 10 or 15 years ago; it is not the case now. I would
expect all our ambassadors, no matter how grand, to be really
focused on consular work. May I just give you one example? After
the terrorist attack in Sharm-el-Sheikh, I was on the phone to
Derek Plumblyley, our ambassador to Cairo, at two o'clock in the
morning. He was on the phone to me agreeing what the reaction
should be in an emergency. That is the kind of response I would
expect our ambassadors to have and they do. There is also compulsory
training, I should say, on crisis management for all heads of
mission before they go and take up their posts; they should all
be trained and they will all, I can assure you, from me and the
Foreign Secretary, have been told that serving the public, in
particular in consular work, is one of the top things they do.
Q15 Mr Mitchell: Training in disasters
or whatever is rather different to putting in a work period at
the people face, dealing with the actual problems that are coming
up. You were saying to the Chairman that in future people, to
get on the career and the promotion ladder, people will have to
have had experience of the nitty gritty of consular work.
Sir Michael Jay: They will all
have had experience of service delivery, either consular work
or visa work. I suspect when we did have the discussion around
this table about visa work, the same thing was being said then
about the importance of getting really good people in our visa
operation. They will have experience of visa work or consular
work in London and, increasingly, they will have experience overseas
as well and our best people will be doing consular work overseas.
I should say as well, that of course the vast majority of our
posts are not the Paris and Washingtons and Berlins, they are
small posts with only two or three or four people and anybody
there at number one, number two, number three in the hierarchy
is going to be doing consular work as part of his or her ordinary
duties.
Q16 Mr Mitchell: There is also in
some of them, particularly in African countries but Asia as well,
a siege mentality. The training you need for this kind of work
is training in a service industry, because it is a service industry
essentially and it is there to help people. The ethos of the service
industry is that the customer is always right. The ethos of the
consular officers always seems to me to be that the customer is
quite probably wrong and we shall try to find ways of telling
him that.
Sir Michael Jay: I hope if you
come across that occasion Mr Mitchell, you will tell me, because
I should come down very hard on somebody who gave that impression
to a Member of Parliament or indeed a member of the public. That
is not what our consular staff are for. The consular staff are
there to help and one way in which I hope we shall get this message
across is by the consular guide that we shall be publishing probably
next month. We have had our own guide internally about how we
expect people to conduct themselves in carrying out consular business.
We think it very important that that should be public. We have
consulted about that, which was a manifesto commitment of the
Government at the last election, over the last few months and
next month we shall be issuing a guide which will set out very
clearly what we can do, what we cannot do and it has a very clear
statement of what our values are and how we expect our consular
staff to behave themselves. If they do not, then I would expect
there to be complaints and they would be held to account.
Q17 Mr Mitchell: I am glad to hear
that, but it is also a question of how you treat people. One of
the things which emerges clearly is that we are now getting a
different kind of visitor overseas. It is not just the literary
classes going on a grand tour as they did in the 18th century,
it is football fans. I see you have made special arrangements
for rugby fans, but the arrangements for football fans do not
seem to be exactly the same; they seem to be viewed with an element
of distaste. Here we are letting loose a posse of hooligans around
the world and easyJet customers and other people travelling on
the cheap. It seems to me that there is an element of distaste
there; you are stretching yourselves to have to deal with these
people.
Sir Michael Jay: I would not put
it that way. I was ambassador in Paris during the 1998 World Cup;
we had the English and Scottish teams around the country for several
weeks. It was a challenging few weeks to be honest and we have
honed our skills a lot since then and we have, I believe and hope,
a really professional operation which we are putting in place
now for the World Cup. Not that it is anything to do with the
fans, the nature of the fans, but because we know what we are
likely to have to face. We are also working with easyJet on one
of their exercises this month.
Q18 Mr Mitchell: You must bear in
mind that some of these fans actually come from Grimsby, not that
Grimsby Town travels overseas all that much. May I just ask about
the charging system? You seem to be making an exorbitant profit
on passports in some areas. Is that the case, that your charges
are excessive for passports? Secondly, what is going to happen
when we get this new system of biometrics? If you are going to
have to go round with a charabanc and pick up people in doorways,
the homeless and cart them off to some centre where they are going
to be finger-printed, eye-tested, face photographed, you are not
going to be able to issue passports in embassies in remote places.
Sir Michael Jay: Not in the same
way as we do now. No, we do not make a huge profit on our passport
operation. The passport operation is, in principle, self-funding
and the fees for the passports that we issue overseas—
Q19 Mr Mitchell: So you charge the
actual local costs of providing that passport?
Sir Michael Jay: Yes. The £69
that we charge for full passports which are issued overseas, that
price is determined by what we believe is the price necessary
to cover the operation of issuing passports around the globe.[2]
You are right that biometrics is going to be a really big challenge
for us. We are moving to phase one of the biometrics' system at
the moment with passports which just have a chip like that, which
is a facial recognition. We shall, before too long, be moving
to phase two in which there will be finger or iris scans on them
as well and it is not going to be possible to maintain the present
passport issuing network given the technology of issuing biometric
passports. We are going to have to move to more of a hub and spoke
operation when we have fewer passport issuing places and find
some way of ensuring that the necessary documentation gets to
the hub. I am reaching the limit of my detailed knowledge on biometrics
and maybe Mr Sizeland could say one or two more words about that.
1 Note by witness: The Committee may want to
note that the post of Consul General in Marseille has now been
localised, ie, it is filled by a locally-engaged member of staff,
thus delivering significant cost savings. Back
2
Note by witness: A full table of consular fees can be
found on the FCO website at: http://www.fco.gov.uk/Files/kfile/Consular%20Fees%20Dec%2005%20A4,0.pdf Back
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