Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, for what reasons his Department was not aware of a collection of Defence Adviser reports for Sri Lanka from the 1970s to 1980s before 2020.

The central archive team in the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) was informed of these files in 2018 as part of long-running systematic project to identify, and to transfer into the FCDO central archive for review under the Public Records Act, historical files held in UK departments and at overseas posts. These files have been held at the British High Commission in Colombo. They are in the process of being transferred into the FCDO central archive for subsequent review under the Act.