1 Introduction
1. The Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) is one of
the departmentally-related select committees of the House of Commons,
which scrutinise the expenditure, administration and policy of
government departments. In the case of the FAC, this scrutiny
is exercised over the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and
the agencies for which the FCO's Ministers are accountable to
Parliament: including the British Council, the BBC World Service,
and the Wilton Park conference centre. The Committee has 14 Members,
and since July 2005 its Chairman has been Mike Gapes MP.
2. In the calendar year 2007, the Committee met on
35 occasions; it heard oral evidence from 83 witnesses (some of
them on more than one occasion); it visited 18 countries overseas;
and it held 63 informal meetings with visitors to the United Kingdom,
ambassadors to the Court of St James and others. The Annexes to
this Report give more detail on these visits and meetings.
3. In this Report we adhere to the practice adopted
by the Committee in previous years, of presenting its work under
the following headings:
- Continuing scrutiny of foreign policy;
- Scrutiny of specific foreign policy issues;
- Scrutiny of Foreign and Commonwealth Office publications;
- Pre-legislative foreign policy scrutiny; and
- Other scrutiny activities.
4. We relate our work to the wider parliamentary
process of scrutiny of the policies and actions of the executive;
we comment on the responses of the FCO to our Reports, and on
its wider relationship with the Committee; and we preview our
future programme.
5. We also seek to demonstrate how the Committee's
work relates to the indicative 'core tasks' identified by the
House's Liaison Committee. Our pattern of activities is somewhat
different from that of other departmental select committees. In
addition to our central task of scrutinising the work of the FCO,
we see ourselves as having a useful role to play in informing
Members and the wider public about major developments in world
affairs and their consequences for the UK. Our extensive programme
of informal meetings with diplomats, foreign politicians and other
key players, held at Westminster and during our overseas visits,
is part of this process, and the knowledge thus gained feeds through
into our reports. The FCO itself differs in significant ways from
most other government departments; in particular, it is responsible
for comparatively little primary or secondary legislation, and
has only a small number of associated public bodies. We therefore
have to adapt our approach to the core tasks to reflect these
circumstances. Annex 1 to this Report sets out in tabular form
an analysis of our activity in relation to the core tasks.
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