Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-99)
FOREIGN AND
COMMONWEALTH OFFICE
12 JANUARY 2006
Q80 Mr Davidson: I was not conscious
that there was a call-out charge; perhaps I missed that. Can you
just clarify that for me? What is the call-out charge for, say,
a stag party in Bratislava?
Mr Sizeland: It is a standard
fee worldwide and someone very kindly gave me a fee schedule a
few minutes ago, but I have mislaid it.
Q81 Mr Davidson: This would seem
to suggest that it is not used all that often, would it not?
Mr Sizeland: It is just the problem
that I am based in the UK now.
Q82 Mr Davidson: None of your assistants
behind are leaning forward.
Sir Michael Jay: I think the general
point you make, which is whether we should not be trying to recover
costs or in a sense charging people who behave wholly irresponsibly
and therefore use the taxpayers' money, is a very good one which
we should look into.
Q83 Mr Davidson: May I just follow
up that in terms of explaining before people go abroad? I suspect
that some of my constituents will misbehave when they are abroad.
Very few of my constituents will have access to websites. What
other routes are you using to make sure that people in areas like
mine are aware that abroad is different?
Mr Sizeland: For example, on the
World Cup campaign preparations—
Q84 Mr Davidson: Scotland is not
in the World Cup. Leaving that aside then. That is not of immediate
interest to us.
Mr Sizeland: We do work through
local radio, our PR agency will aim to place material nationwide
on the travel safety messages and of course many of our partnership
marketing members, Tesco's, Halifax, Sainsbury's and so on have
themselves got nationwide coverage, so those messages will be
going out as part of their own material.
Q85 Mr Davidson: Is there any evidence
that it is working?
Mr Sizeland: I have just received
a note that an out-of-hours call-out fee is £84.50 per hour.
That is the standard fee worldwide.
Q86 Mr Davidson: How often has that
been charged?
Mr Sizeland: I would need to get
back to you.
Mr Davidson: Maybe you could drop a note
to the Committee.[8]
Maybe you could let us know how many times it has been charged
in Bratislava in particular. The fact that it was not immediately
at your fingertips would tend to indicate that it has perhaps
fallen into disrepute. It would certainly concentrate the minds
of people in stag parties if they thought they were going to be
charged £84.50 for getting lost and having to be rescued
by the consulate.
Chairman: You have now answered the question
as to why you always visit people in hospital in Bratislava but
not Budapest.
Q87 Mr Davidson: May I just turn
to another point and that is the question of expectations? It
is interesting in the Report that there is a growth in public
expectations. Have you examined there the question of whether
or not you could operate some sort of facilitating role, if necessary
with charging mechanisms? I noticed in particular the question
of providing translation services for coroners' courts or the
equivalent. I can see all of that might very well be something
that the consulate ought to help people with, but without necessarily
paying for via the taxpayer, though that did not seem to be an
option that was being considered. Can you just clarify that for
me?
Mr Sizeland: Certainly the first
thing we have to do is make it clear to people what services we
can offer and the consular guide which we will putting out next
month once it has gone through the Plain English Campaign will
be a start. We shall publicise that and that will be the first
comprehensive statement really to users of consular services as
to what we can and cannot do. In terms of expectation management
generally, a point that Sir Michael made right at the beginning
was that we have a framework and we have to look at how some of
that will apply in local circumstances. We need to make sure that
in delivering a service we do give posts discretion within that
framework to deliver what someone needs rather than necessarily
what someone wants.
Q88 Mr Davidson: Would it be possible,
rather than, say, providing services yourselves, to have an arrangement
whereby you could facilitate them obtaining translators for coroners'
courts at their own expense, when somebody arriving there would
not be able to achieve that themselves? I wanted to clarify whether
or not you actually did that at the moment.
Mr Sizeland: We do. I cannot think
of a case on the interpreting side, but if we look at something
like forced marriage, we do work with an NGO, for example in Pakistan,
which will provide a lot of the services which otherwise we should
have to provide. We work with other NGOs here on child abduction
issues and therefore we signpost people to them to get that expert
help.
Sir Michael Jay: We cannot ourselves
give legal advice, but we can give people lists of lawyers who
will give them the legal advice they want and we do do that; that
is one of the services we provide.
Mr Sizeland: What we have done
in the directorate in terms of increasing professionalism is to
have our own in-house lawyer, a policeman who helps us handle
police matters, both home and overseas, a social work adviser,
particularly to facilitate some of the trickier cases, psychiatric
cases and other cases, from overseas back here. So we are using
that network as well.
Q89 Mr Davidson: The final point,
if I may, is the question of accessibility to the facilities.
I was struck in paragraph 3.6 on page 30 about the way in which
half of the posts visited were open for less than the recommended
25 hours and the posts, it mentions in particular Cyprus, two
hours away from most tourist resorts only open from 8 am to 12
noon. Now this smacks a bit to me of these German restaurants
which used to close for lunch, in the sense of the service not
actually being run for the customers, but for the convenience
of the people who are providing it and ties in with the points
that Mr Mitchell was making about, to some extent, a class divide.
What confidence can you give us that you are actually gearing
up more actively to provide services to those that need it most?
Sir Michael Jay: I think we need
to look at this. I was surprised by these figures as well. One
thing I shall say is that the fact that the office is not open
does not mean to say that people are not doing consular work.
The office will not be open for a few hours every day because
the consular staff will be issuing the passports or following
up the paperwork or telephoning people's relatives at home.
Q90 Mr Davidson: I was not suggesting
that they were all asleep, but if it is not open, then it cannot
presumably be accessed by members of the public.
Sir Michael Jay: There is a 24/7
service for emergencies around the world, so that will not stop
emergency services being provided. We do need to look at the hours
and I have already asked people to do that. We also need to look
at this question of whether we can have some flexibility in having
some kind of service where the tourists actually are, rather than
expecting them to come a very long way and then find that it is
not open long enough. This ties in with the question about greater
flexibility, honorary consuls, local staff. We need to think a
little bit more flexibly about how we ensure the services are
available where and when people need them. It is one of the things
which comes out of this Report.
Q91 Mr Davidson: I am very pleased
to hear you say this, but would you have been saying these things
if the NAO had not produced the Report and the PAC had not been
having a hearing on it? Does that not really make Mr Mitchell's
point again, that this whole area of work is a pretty low priority?
Sir Michael Jay: No, I do not
think it does. We asked the NAO to do this Report, because we
wanted their advice on precisely this kind of issue. We can do
a certain amount ourselves, we know a certain amount of what we
do need to know, but having the NAO's professionalism in looking
at these issues with us does come up in this and other areas with
recommendations and lessons which we positively welcome. I see
this as a sign that the system is working, not that it is not.
Mr Sizeland: May I just add to
that? It builds very much on the work of our first consular strategy.
In Partnership, which highlighted the challenges and which
really we saw as the starting point when we invited the National
Audit Office to come in to help us address some of the challenges
which are identified in here and come up with some of the options.
In terms of opening hours and other administrative issues, they
are also included in the framework for our review teams which
go out and look at how posts are operating, spreading best practice,
how the opening hours are affected, what the reasons are for it.
They have reviewed 35 posts in this financial year and they have
plans to carry on with that rolling programme. We have a central
team which is on the go all the time pretty well, to see how posts
are doing so that we can meet one of our objectives, which is
to operate as consistently as possible across the globe.
Q92 Mr Williams: When we go to book
our summer holidays, we are warned at the travel agent's that
you have to be careful because some countries will not let you
in if your passport has fewer than six months to run. How commonplace
is that? The advice is commonplace but how commonplace is the
reality?
Mr Sizeland: In terms of an individual
country's requirements, I should have to go back and check on
that. Most countries would want to make sure that there was a
period of validity remaining on the passport to make sure that
someone was returnable to the country of the nationality of the
passport.
Q93 Mr Williams: We do the same.
Mr Sizeland: We do the same.
Q94 Mr Williams: What is our limit?
Mr Sizeland: Usually on the visa
side it is six months, if someone is coming in.
Q95 Mr Williams: So we have six months
as well.
Mr Sizeland: Yes.[9]
Q96 Mr Williams: So we cannot blame the
others because we are doing it. My passport runs out in July and
I am working out when I need to get a new one. You have clarified
the situation for me amply. Biometric passports: we are told these,
like identity cards, are going to be much, much more secure. The
first thing is that the technology is relatively primitive at
this stage, is it not, and there are no agreed international standards,
are there?
Mr Sizeland: We have made some
progress, partly through the UK's and others' prompting, through
the International Civil Aviation Organisation. We have a technical
framework which we have contributed to.
Q97 Mr Williams: Is that really the
most effective arena in which to have this discussed and considered?
Mr Sizeland: We shall see, is
probably the honest answer. We are now implementing our biometric
passport regimes; many countries in Europe are, because there
is an EU regulation to introduce the first generation.
Q98 Mr Williams: The US has its own.
Mr Sizeland: The US is part of
this group.
Q99 Mr Williams: They are working
with us.
Mr Sizeland: They are working
with us; there is a lot of collaboration. People to some extent
are moving at different rates, but we shall meet both the EU deadline
of 28 August this year and the American visa waiver deadline of
26 October, which is important because we have nearly four million
British citizens going to the US every year under the visa waiver
programme.
8 Ev 29 Back
9
Note by witness: Entry Clearance Officers (ECOs) overseas
ensure that passport validity covers the intended length of stay
when issuing a visa. The commonest form of visa is a six-month
multiple-entry visit visa valid for any number of entries during
the six month period. ECOs would ensure that passports were valid
for at least six months for those visas. However, in some cases
applicants with passports valid for less than six months may be
given a visa for a shorter period corresponding with the validity
of the passport-it is possible for example that a musician coming
on a work permit for a single concert and who has only 3 months
left on their passport would be given a shorter validity for their
visa. Back
| 
