British Citizens Abroad: FCO Help to Return Home

Debate between Andrew Rosindell and Dominic Raab

Tuesday 24th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Dominic Raab]

I am very concerned about the situation in Bali. The embassy office in Bali is open and has been reinforced from Jakarta. The consular team is in direct contact with UK nationals there. Flight options have obviously been curtailed in the way the hon. Member described. The Emirates route is closed, but operational routes are still available via Jakarta.

There are something like 6,000 British nationals in Bali—that is an estimate—and in fairness 2,000 of them are long-term residents. We are working with London, Gulf posts and the transit hubs in the way I described to try to free up many of those links to enable those people to get home.

[Andrew Rosindell (Romford) (Con)]

The Foreign Secretary is making efforts to rescue people abroad and bring them home, but is he aware that many high commissions and embassies are simply not responding to British people in desperate need of help? The British Government have an absolute duty to deal with that without delay. Will he please use all the Foreign Office’s staff to ensure that they are there to look after people in their hour of need?

[Dominic Raab]

I thank my hon. Friend and give him this reassurance. There are only three posts that we have drawn down in their entirety: Wuhan and Chongqing in China, which are subsidiary posts, so they can be backed up from Beijing; N’Djamena in Chad; and Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That was done as a last resort, thinking about the situation there. We are ensuring that, in those jurisdictions I described where Governments have taken action, we have as much capacity, albeit working remotely. We have doubled call centre capacity and we are looking at doubling it again. I hope I can reassure him that we are doing everything we can to ensure that constituents of all Members on both sides of the House have a point of contact. Again, I stress that posts and the Foreign Office network are trying to deal with an unprecedented situation in terms of scale and the rapidity with which restrictions are being imposed.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Andrew Rosindell and Dominic Raab

Tuesday 4th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Rosindell (Romford) (Con)]

5. What recent discussions he has had with his Chinese counterpart on the situation in Wuhan.

[The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and First Secretary of State (Dominic Raab)]

I spoke to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on 28 January about the evacuation of UK nationals from Wuhan and also about UK medical supplies to help the Chinese authorities tackle the coronavirus.

[Andrew Rosindell]

I thank the Foreign Secretary for his reply, but does he agree that the safety and security of British nationals must be our primary concern, and will he therefore press the Chinese authorities to co-operate in granting any assistance necessary to ensure that our nationals are looked after while they remain in China?

[Dominic Raab]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and those are precisely the issues that I raised with the Chinese Foreign Minister. In fairness, we have seen 83 British nationals repatriated on Friday, and another seven British nationals and four dependants evacuated on a French flight that returned to the UK on Sunday. I can also tell him that we have been allocated 14 places on an Air New Zealand flight today for UK nationals and their dependants.

Global Britain

Debate between Andrew Rosindell and Dominic Raab

Monday 3rd February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Dominic Raab]

I can, and I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman for his tireless efforts on behalf of his constituent. It is a difficult case, but we will continue to do as much as we can to support the family and to secure release. The consular teams in the Foreign Office, as well as the missions and the geographic departments, work very hard on this. A lot of the consular work takes place beneath the surface, privately; the exercise of diplomacy has to be done out of the public limelight, almost by definition. But I assure the hon. Gentleman that we work tirelessly to secure release in cases such as this.

[Andrew Rosindell (Romford) (Con)]

Will the Foreign Secretary give a cast-iron guarantee that under no circumstances will the territorial sovereignty of Gibraltar be part of any type of negotiation as part of the trade agreement? Will he also confirm that any free trade agreement with the EU—and, indeed, the rest of the world—in future will include benefits for all our overseas territories and the Crown dependencies?

[Dominic Raab]

I thank my hon. Friend, who has been a tireless champion of not just Gibraltar but all the overseas territories. We are absolutely clear: the UK will not exclude Gibraltar from our negotiations with the EU. We will negotiate on behalf of the whole United Kingdom family, and that includes Gibraltar.