Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Deputy Foreign Secretary, if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of supporting a permanent seat for the Republic of India on the United Nations Security Council.

The UK Government supports reform of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), to make it more representative of the world today. This includes our longstanding support for a permanent seat on the UNSC for India, as well as permanent African representation, and permanent seats for Germany, Japan and Brazil. We support an expansion of the non-permanent category of membership, taking the Security Council's total membership to somewhere in the mid-twenties. The UK Government regularly reiterates its support for India's permanent membership of the Security Council, including earlier this year in the UN General Assembly's recent round of intergovernmental negotiations on UNSC reform.