Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, how much was disbursed from the public purse by his Department to fund UK election observers overseas in each of the last five years.

​The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) funds the participation of UK election observers in election observation missions overseas where it judges that it is in the UK national interest to do so and where it is safe to do so. Details of this expenditure are not held centrally because decisions are made by individual FCO departments. It would therefore be disproportionately costly to calculate the total amount disbursed over the past five years.