1 Introduction
1. The Foreign Affairs Committee 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: the British Council;
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 2007, the Liaison Committee decided that departmental
select committees should produce a report on their activities
in respect of each parliamentary session rather than, as previously,
by calendar year. This Report covers Session 2008-09, which ran
from 3 December 2008 until 12 November 2009.
3. During the Session the Committee met on 29 occasions;
it heard oral evidence from 50 witnesses (some of them on more
than one occasion);[1]
it visited 14 countries and territories overseas; and it held
87 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. We also set out
as an Annex the Committee's entry in the House's 'Sessional Return'
which gives further information about our activity.
4. The structure of this Report follows that adopted
in our previous recent annual Reports. We discuss the Committee's
activities during the Session under the following headings:
- Scrutiny of foreign policy;
- Scrutiny of Foreign and Commonwealth Office publications;
- Scrutiny of legislation; and
- Other scrutiny activities.
5. 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.
6. We also seek to demonstrate how the Committee's
work relates to the 'core tasks' of select committees 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 both at Westminster and during our overseas
visits, is part of this process. The knowledge and information
we gain from the conversations informs our work and 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.
1 This year's figure does not include witnesses who
appeared before the Committees on Arms Export Controls. In 2008-09
CAEC will produce its own Sessional Return for the first time.
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