Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, whether his Department is developing contingency plans to improve its (a) consular and (b) repatriation support for British nationals overseas in the event of another pandemic.

I was pleased to meet with the Honourable Lady on 19th October to discuss the FCDO's consular work.

As part of our overall approach to crisis preparedness in the FCDO, we continuously review our plans and processes to ensure that they reflect lessons learned from recent crisis responses. Our learning from the COVID-19 pandemic response has led to us increasing our capacity to plan for pandemics of this scale in the future, including the provision of consular services and the repatriation of British nationals overseas. We have set up a Repatriation Taskforce which is continuing to monitor future repatriation risk, build future FCDO capability and is able to run more charters if needed. Going forward, planning for large scale repatriations will be incorporated into the FCDO's core crisis response capability.