The Minister for Europe (Mr David Lidington)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) on securing this debate, and I pay tribute to the consistency and tenacity with which she has represented the interests of the Lawton family to me and my officials in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I also want to acknowledge the presence in his place this evening of my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly) who, as Mr Steve Lawton’s MP, has been extremely active in making representations to the Government on behalf of the family.
I want to take the opportunity to respond to my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton by outlining the consular assistance we have provided to the family and the contacts we have had with the Greek authorities since Mr John Lawton was reported missing, and by trying to provide at least an initial response to some of the newer questions that she posed this evening.
As my hon. Friend said, Mr John Lawton had been taking part in the Taygetos mountain marathon challenge in the Kardamyli area of Greece on the morning of 8 April, Easter Sunday. He started the race, but did not show up at checkpoint 5 en route. Local search efforts began immediately it became clear that he had missed a checkpoint, and he was formally reported missing on Monday 9 April, Easter Monday. Following this, a more intensive search and rescue operation started on 9 April and lasted for 18 days before being officially called off on 26 April. To date, Mr Lawton remains missing. I am sure that the entire House will appreciate and sympathise with the anguish and sense of frustration and anxiety that Mr Lawton’s family and friends will have felt ever since the day he disappeared.
In these circumstances, expectations of consular staff are extremely high. In the overwhelming majority of cases, consular staff throughout the world perform their duties with care and compassion, doing all they can to help families to keep up to date with developments and get the information they need in order to make properly informed decisions as things progress. The primary role of consular staff is one of welfare: it is to assist, where they can; to obtain information from relevant authorities where possible; and, where appropriate, sometimes to raise more detailed issues with those authorities. What our consular staff cannot do themselves is to investigate missing persons overseas, and, as I know my hon. Friend understands, they cannot instruct the local authorities how they should handle a search or investigation in their own country, just as we would not expect other countries to attempt to instruct us how to carry out a missing person search in the UK.
Consular staff in Greece and London have been very active in this case since Mr Lawton’s disappearance was first reported. On the same day as the report was made, consular staff in Athens were in contact with the local chief of police who was supervising the search, to register our concern and see whether there was any assistance we could offer. The chief of police asked if we could intercede with the central authorities in Athens to try to secure the use of a helicopter with thermal imaging equipment. As a result of the direct intervention of the British embassy in Athens with officials at the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, such a helicopter was dispatched to the search site during Tuesday 10 April —just over 24 hours after Mr Lawton was officially reported missing.
In the early days of the search, consular staff were able to support some other strands of the search operation, including attempts to locate John Lawton through his mobile phone or through the Garmin watch with GPS facility that he was wearing at the time. Unfortunately, the mobile phone was later found to have been left switched off at his hotel, and the watch could only receive a signal—regrettably, it could not transmit details of Mr Lawton’s location.
Our consul in Athens was also in direct telephone contact with Mr Steve Lawton, John Lawton’s son, on the evening of Easter Monday, and has remained in contact ever since, with a face-to-face meeting when she visited the area on 19 April.
Our embassy staff in Athens maintained regular contact with the Greek authorities at both senior and local operational level in both the Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Citizen Protection, which has responsibility for the police and related emergency services, to support the efforts of Steve Lawton himself at the search site. Normal practice in Greece is for such a search to last for 72 hours, as was the case in March this year when a Greek national went missing in the same area. As my hon. Friend acknowledged, in this case—in large part, I believe, as a result of the that high level of contact from our staff—the Greek authorities maintained the search for nearer to three weeks. During that time they deployed a variety of resources, including specially trained search and rescue teams, other manpower—both official and volunteer—and trained dogs and a thermal imaging helicopter.
In the most recent high-level intervention, our ambassador in Athens has spoken to both the Minister and the Deputy Minister for Citizen Protection, acknowledging the efforts of the authorities so far and encouraging them to continue to consider whether there was anything more that they ought to be doing. The Minister confirmed that the investigation should continue, and obviously I will ask our embassy to follow up that conversation in the light of what my hon. Friend has said this evening.
My hon. Friend mentioned some of the findings of the privately commissioned investigation. Having received the report earlier this week, we have passed it on to our ministerial contacts in Greece, together with the family’s request that the search should recommence on the basis of the timeline analysis and the findings of the investigation. I note what my hon. Friend said about the time that it has taken to obtain the results of the DNA test that was promised for the gel samples. As she will understand, I cannot speak with any detailed knowledge of how the system of pathology tests operates in Greece, but I will ask our consular team in Athens to look into the matter as well.
I hope that my hon. Friend and the Lawton family will be reassured that we maintain, and will continue to maintain, a high level of contact with the Greek authorities. Inevitably, given the current economic and political situation in Greece, Ministers and the officials who are political appointees will be preoccupied with the forthcoming general election, but we will continue to do all that we can to maintain the profile of this case with them and with the operational authorities at a more local level.
I am grateful for the fact that my hon. Friend was able to arrange for me to speak directly to Mr Steve Lawton by telephone when he returned to the United Kingdom for a few days to accompany his mother home. That enabled me to explain our role in a little more detail, and to assure him that we would continue to maintain our close contact with the Greek authorities as the case progressed.
I completely understand why the Lawton family and John Lawton’s friends felt frustrated that the Government could not intervene and send UK search specialists to bolster the Greek effort, as we sometimes do in the case of natural disasters overseas. As I said to Mr Lawton when we spoke, it is the Greek authorities that have the local expertise and the legal responsibility and powers in their own country and locality, and they were co-ordinating the search on the ground. Official offers of support from the UK would normally be made only if the local authorities in the country concerned lacked the equipment, resource or experience to conduct a search, and requested such help from us. Those circumstances did not apply in this case. However, in the event that the family, friends or UK search teams wanted to be actively involved in the search on a volunteer basis—either independently or in support of an official search—we would help to facilitate contact with the relevant authorities in Greece if that were asked of us.
We have recently been in contact with the Cheshire search and rescue team in that regard. I understand that it had been invited to continue the search by the Lawton family and the Greek volunteer search teams. Although our assistance was not required in this case, we stand ready to help, should that be required in any similar deployments in future. As my hon. Friend has said, the funding for the Cheshire team has come from the JustGiving page set up by Missing Abroad, a charitable organisation set up by the Lucie Blackman Trust in 2008 to provide practical and in some cases financial support to families and friends of people who have gone missing overseas. Missing Abroad can supplement consular support by offering additional services, including supporting or co-ordinating searches for missing people in other countries. It also provides valuable emotional support to families. FCO consular staff, both in this country and abroad, regularly encourage people to contact Missing Abroad. My Department also provides some funding to Missing Abroad, as its services clearly complement the support that our consular teams offer. Details for Missing Abroad are available via the Foreign Office’s public website and in the FCO publication “Missing persons abroad”.
Let me respond to the point my hon. Friend made about the provision of information. Although there is inevitably an inherent tension between the wish to provide a concise and clear account and the need to provide answers to the detailed questions that families facing many different circumstances might have, we are always keen to learn from the experience of people who unfortunately have to make use of such literature. I would be very happy for my officials to talk directly to my hon. Friend and to members of the Lawton family to see whether improvements could be made in the light of the experience in this case.
The main help that the FCO can give in such cases is to assist families in understanding how systems work in other countries—although we cannot provide professional legal advice—to liaise with local authorities where necessary and, if appropriate, to act as a bridge between those authorities and families. That is the kind of support that our staff in Crete have provided to the family of Mr Steven Cook, in the other case that my hon. Friend mentioned. Steven’s family have been in close contact with consular staff in Crete since he first went missing in 2005.
I freely acknowledge that our efforts and those of the Greek authorities will never be enough for as long as Mr John Lawton remains missing. I believe that our consular staff have worked hard to provide the family with consular assistance during every stage of the case. More important, we stand ready to continue to offer support to the family and to maintain our contact with the Greek authorities for as long as necessary.
Question put and agreed to.