Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
FOREIGN AND
COMMONWEALTH OFFICE
12 JANUARY 2006
Q60 Mr Bacon: You are talking about
better service, but in paragraph 2.6 it says that the problems
of dealing with " . . . Omnibase or the underlying infrastructure
had resulted in delays in issuing passports and wasted staff time,
to varying extents. This ranged from a complete loss of service
for several days, through shorter spells of unavailability, to
system slowness". That is plainly not good service. Caterpillar,
the engineering company, can get a part, an engineering part,
to any of its clients anywhere in the world in 48 hours using
modern courier services and presumably the same could be true
for passports. Have you considered issuing passports all from
one place and then simply couriering them all around the world,
not least on grounds of efficiency and economy of scale, but also
on grounds of security?
Sir Michael Jay: As a result of
the need through biometrics to change the profile of our passport
issuing, we are now considering a range of options, which range
from doing everything in Britain to issuing passports in a series
of hubs and we have not come to a conclusion as to how best to
do that.
Q61 Mr Bacon: What is the timescale
for coming to that conclusion?
Sir Michael Jay: By the summer,
but in doing that we shall need to be balancing security, service
to the public and value for money. It is not a straightforward
proposal.
Q62 Chairman: So having a local system
of issuing passports will not lead to increased risks of fraud
will it Sir Michael? That is what you are telling us. Having a
local system of issuing passports will not lead to more risks
of fraud.
Sir Michael Jay: There is clearly
a risk of fraud now. My guess is that the fewer the places in
which you are issuing the passports, the lower the risk of fraud.
Q63 Angela Browning: Sir Michael,
I just wanted to make an observation and that is that if Mr Mitchell's
constituency is sending abroad a lot of football hooligans, increasingly
my constituency in Devon is probably sending abroad a lot more
elderly people who are travelling more and spending the kids'
inheritance. I was looking at the figures. I see it is a remarkably
low figure for the number of people who die or become ill abroad
who seek your assistance, but as more elderly people are travelling
and as they find it more difficult to get insurance, I wonder
whether you have picked this up as a trend and whether you have
considered how to deal with these people who do die abroad or
are very ill and do not have insurance.
Sir Michael Jay: We have picked
that up, both in relation to travellers overseas and also British
citizens living overseas who are getting older and inevitably
getting towards the end of their life. We have started working
with Age Concern. We have a first workshop later this month with
Age Concern to try to see whether we can work together to address
some of these issues.
Mr Sizeland: It is a problem now
in that a section of the population, which by and large pays less
for insurance of various descriptions, house, car, whatever, as
they get older finally ends up paying more for travel insurance.
We are working very closely with the travel industry as well,
Saga and other companies, in terms of training their staff and
ensuring some basic standards.
Q64 Angela Browning: It is quite
difficult to get it over 75 at all, never mind paying more for
it. May I just bring you onto something else? I am very keen to
hear more, given the comments on page 50 of the Report, paragraphs
4.10 to 4.12, which I actually think are quite damning in terms
of your preparedness and your approach to the question of dealing
with problems of disasters and I know that several people have
focused on the tsunami. If I look at paragraph 4.12 for example
and the fact that you do not record information about testing
plans, this preparedness for your staff all seems terribly laissez-faire.
If they do not have an incentive or an imperative to take these
matters seriously, I just wonder how you are going to improve
their game. How are they going to know, if something like the
tsunami, or even something on a smaller scale but just as horrendous,
happened that they are going to be able to deal with that?
Sir Michael Jay: There are several
ways of ensuring that they become more professional and better
able to deal with a crisis like the tsunami or a lesser crisis.
One answer is through the increase in the number of rapid deployment
teams and also the better training and skills sets within each
rapid deployment team. That is one of the things on which we are
now focusing and one of the lessons we learned from the tsunami.
For example, there is a rapid deployment team based in Hong Kong,
properly trained, fully trained, fully exercised, which deployed
on the first day of operation to Bali and was in Thailand for
the anniversary to help the families there. We are also, as we
said earlier on, increasing better training for our consular staff
overseas and our staff here who go to do consular work overseas.
We have regional training centres which were set up just over
a year ago to improve the training for all our overseas staff;
3,500 staff have been trained in the first year of operation.
This is all part of a much broader move towards a more professional
diplomatic service than we have had in the past and consular work
is an increasingly important part of that. We are also recruiting
a full-time member of staff whose duty will be solely to monitor
and test the emergency plans that we have overseas. I cannot give
you an absolute assurance that everybody is going to respond exactly
as they should. I do believe that our staff are becoming increasingly
professional over time, better trained, more conscious of the
duties which will fall on them in an emergency, working more closely
with headquarters in London to ensure a consistent response. I
believe that the consular guide that I mentioned earlier on will
help with that.
Q65 Angela Browning: In paragraph
4.12 it tells me "The FCO does not systematically record
information about which Posts have to date tested their plans",
so the training is good but actually running them through the
dry exercise of this . . . "but our survey indicated that
so far only one third of the Posts we consulted had tested their
plans". That seems terribly laid back. Why is there no imperative?
Why is no directive set for this and no timetable?
Sir Michael Jay: There is. It
is clearly unacceptable to have that low level. That is why we
are now recruiting somebody whose full-time job will be to ensure
that all plans are tested and are in place and are tested. We
clearly need to get that figure up as near as we can to 100%.
Q66 Angela Browning: Are you referring
to the end of the paragraph 4.12 where it says "The Crisis
Management team intends to recruit someone to focus on testing,
and Posts commented to us that greater involvement would be welcome"?
Is that what you mean by somebody who is going to be put in post?
Sir Michael Jay: That is what
I mean, yes.
Q67 Angela Browning: When is that
person going to be recruited?
Sir Michael Jay: We are in the
process of appointing somebody now.
Q68 Angela Browning: Have you advertised?
Mr Sizeland: It is going through
our internal appointment system.
Q69 Angela Browning: How long will
that take?
Mr Sizeland: I shall have to get
back on the detail. We are trying to fill it as soon as possible.
Q70 Angela Browning: I am delighted
to hear that, because of course I should have thought that, having
had that flagged up in an NAO Report, it would be something right
at the top of your list. This whole page, paragraphs 4.10 to 4.12—I
am not going to read it out because everybody has a copy and everybody
has read it—this laid back approach to this, really is an
indictment on the service, is it not?
Sir Michael Jay: As I said, we
need to get that figure up from one third to as near as we can
to 100%. The fact that we have not had a member of staff full
time on this up to now does not mean to say that we have not been
upping our game since the Report was written. We have and we have
been instructing posts to ensure that their plans are in place
and are tested. So it is not a question of doing nothing until
this person is in post, it is doing a lot already and doing even
more when the person is in post. I entirely accept that the paragraph
shows that there is a deficiency which needs to be put right.[6]
Q71 Angela Browning: At the beginning
we mentioned the tsunami and you said, Sir Michael, that it was
somewhat unprecedented in its scale and so unexpected, but you
also touched in your earlier remarks on the question of avian
flu. Whether that becomes a reality or not, none of us can tell;
we all hope not. Presumably, in your contingency planning, that
is a very real possibility, so can you just explain to the Committee,
in the light of having taken on board the criticisms on page 50,
how you have addressed the preparedness for avian flu?
Sir Michael Jay: The first thing
I did when it became even a remote likelihood was to ask Mr Stagg
to take charge of it. So perhaps I could ask him to say what our
contingency planning now looks like?
Mr Stagg: We set up a programme
in July last year to look at all the various strands which affect
us which are effectively around three things: one is the consular
side, the support we give to British people overseas; the second
is the duty of care to our own staff overseas; the third is business
continuity. In terms of each of these, we have tried to come up
with a coherent plan and to get advice to posts, particularly
to those in the most affected areas. In South East Asia we have
a fairly well developed plan. Posts have actually exercised their
plans, they have had meetings with other affected countries in
the region and they have had EU/US/Australian coordination meetings.
It is quite a good set of plans in terms of what services we can
provide and how we shall try to do it. Obviously, nobody knows
quite when it will happen or how it will happen and we shall have
a difficult balance to strike between ensuring that those of our
staff who are at risk are given the support they need and expecting
them to continue delivering a proper service to the British public.
We hope we have quite a good balance there and we are trying to
ensure we provide all the support we can to our staff in terms
of both medicines and medical advice to ensure they feel comfortable
staying on even after the situation becomes difficult. In terms
of the business continuity area, we have a programme which we
hope will deliver by the end of March, a new Extranet de-linked
from our main IT network, which will allow us to have people working
at home linked up together coherently and thus help us both in
the global network, but also in the UK if there is a pandemic
here. It is quite a good set of measures, but, if I am very honest
with you, it is a very uncertain scene and nobody quite knows
when it will happen or how it will affect us.
Q72 Angela Browning: May I just question
you on a broader point? In those rather unusual parts of the world
where we have no embassy representation, for whatever reason,
for example if it is deemed unsafe even to have an embassy in
places like Chechnya, what contingency arrangements do you have
for those rather wilder parts of the world?
Sir Michael Jay: There are two
different kinds of issues here. There is one where we do not have
people because ministers have judged that our interests are not
sufficiently great to require an embassy or a consulate. There
we would normally, even so, have an honorary consul; we would
have an honorary consul there looking after our affairs. Chechnya
of course is not a sovereign state, but where we have nobody at
all, people would be advised not to go there and if they do go
there, they must recognise that they are running a very, very
considerable risk and there is very limited help we would be able
to give them, if any.
Q73 Angela Browning: May I just conclude
by saying that, having spent Christmas reading DC Confidential,
I thought Christopher Meyer's assessment of the work of the New
York consulate after 9/11 was quite moving. I hope it was an accurate
portrayal, because I think they deserve a lot of appreciation
for the work that they did.
Sir Michael Jay: Thank you very
much Mrs Browning. It was an accurate portrayal and they did do
an extraordinarily good job. If I may just say at this point,
since you raised that issue, I do have immense respect for the
commitment and professionalism of very many of our consular staff,
many of whom are volunteers, and on Boxing Day they gave up everything
for the tsunami, to fly out and help others in distress and continued
to do that, despite not always getting the support that I think
they deserve. So I am very glad to hear what you said about our
team in New York.
Q74 Mr Davidson: On that point about
New York, is there any significance in the fact that none of you
has red socks?
Sir Michael Jay: I have not yet
started drafting my memoirs.
Q75 Mr Davidson: We look forward
to that. In terms of the burden of work and the numbers of cases
and also the amount of time it takes, what sort of percentage
of your consular work could be accounted for by, what I would
describe though you might not, drunks and half-wits?
Sir Michael Jay: That is a question
for the Director of Consular Services.
Mr Sizeland: What we are aiming
to do is to enable people to avoid as many problems as they might.
Q76 Mr Davidson: I understand that.
Alcohol obviously plays a considerable part in a number of the
incidents that will come to your attention, as will a neglect
of basic precautions. Give me a feel for the alcohol and stupidity
scale of things.
Mr Sizeland: About 70% of all
hen and stag parties nowadays actually take place outside the
UK and what tends to happen is a group gets together and one person
is nominated the leader; they do everything, they make all the
arrangements. If a member of that group gets separated from the
leader, from the fellow staggers, or whatever you call them, then
often they do not know where they are staying, they have no information
at all, they may not have their documentation. In places like
Bratislava people usually know who they are but they do not know
where they are supposed to be going and we do spend a lot of time
on that. Through our Know Before You Go campaign we do run specific
advice campaigns for different groups and the hen and stag party
groups got a fair amount of publicity back in September. There
is another group which tends not to take many precautions and
that is people who may be visiting friends and relatives overseas
and are perhaps lulled into a sense of false security, that it
is not really like going away because they are going to be staying
with an uncle, aunt or whatever. We are running a campaign on
that later in the year. We try to get those messages across, but,
at the end of the day, we have to reunite the individuals with
their—
Q77 Mr Davidson: Is this a "don't-know"
then? I am asking quite a genuine question, because I am uncertain
what sort of percentage of your work involves issues which have
arisen from an abuse of alcohol or people just simply neglecting
what we would consider basic and simple straightforward precautions.
I am in a state of some anxiety about the list of items that has
been produced for us on page 17, where people have been making
mistakes, what are described as common causes of avoidable assistance
cases and there is a list of these. I am therefore wondering to
what extent Know Before You Go campaigns ought to be the subject
of much, much greater expenditure. If, on the one hand, drunks
and half-wits are only half a percent of your workload, then perhaps
spending money on that is not worthwhile. If, on the other hand,
it is 95%, then it would certainly change my perspective about
the way in which we ought to approach these questions. So I should
be grateful if you could give me a feel for the balance.
Mr Sizeland: I do not have precise
statistics for the overall picture. What I can say is that the
sort of growing areas like hen and stag parties are an increasing
problem. What we have tried to do on the Know Before You Go campaign
which you mentioned is to take a new approach. We have actually
split the contract we had, so we now have a specialist PR company
and a specialist partnership marketing company working with people
like Tesco's and Sir Michael showed you their leaflet. That has
also driven out some value for money savings. We need to try to
get more messages across because the individual case studies tend
to have more impact. For reasons of consular confidentiality,
we cannot use a lot of them, but a lot of them do come through
in the media and they do have an impact on behaviour. We are trying
to target our resources on the preparedness and the awareness
side much, much more.
Q78 Mr Davidson: Right; okay. I take
it that is a "won't-say" rather than a "can't-say".
I am wondering about the extent to which almost deliberate misbehaviour
by travellers which incurs expense for the consular service ought
to be the subject of cost recovery. Is this something that has
been considered? On the example you gave of stag nights in Bratislava
and somebody then ends up having to get the consular service called
out to look after them, should they not then be charged for that?
It would not be worthwhile, if it were only one every five years,
but if it were 35 every weekend, then perhaps it is something
that ought to be considered. Can you tell me whether or not you
have any indication of the balance, even in particular locations,
of your work and whether or not cost recovery has been considered?
Mr Sizeland: I am afraid I cannot
give a full picture, although I am very happy to try to look into
it and get some more detail on it.[7]
In terms of individual posts, then certainly in Bratislava the
hen and stag parties are becoming a problem. In Barcelona, which
was very popular for those activities, the problem seems to be
diminishing.
Q79 Mr Davidson: May I just clarify?
It "seems to be diminishing"? Is that because people
who are going to Barcelona are more aware, or is it because fewer
people are going to Barcelona?
Mr Sizeland: The short answer
is that we do not know. We are getting fewer demands on our assistance,
but it may be because people are better prepared, people are getting
more familiar with locations. If our staff are called out, there
is a call-out charge; there is a series of fees which we can levy
and we do have undertakings to repay. If small loans are made,
then they have to be repaid.
6 Note by witness: Since the Spring of 2005,
Consular Directorate has made use of temporary staff to prioritise
and provide feedback to posts on their updated emergency plans.
As of 11 January, 100% of posts have updated emergency plans and
are required to test them at least once a year. While the NAO
Report was being drafted, we recruited a new member of staff to
focus on training and exercising. That member of staff is now
in place. We are now recruiting an additional member of staff
to help further updating and testing. The temporary staff will
remain in place until that person is appointed. Back
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