7 Departmental response
56. In 2007, the FCO has maintained its generally
very good record of responding to our Reports on time, and has
continued to issue its responses as full Command Papers.
57. In our last annual report, we commented on what
we described as "the continuing problem of eliciting information
from the FCO".[29]
Unfortunately, this problem has affected our work in 2007 also.
58. In our report on Global Security: The Middle
East, we noted that the FCO's failure to provide us with a timely
response to basic administrative questions had hampered our ability
to scrutinise the Government's approach to the Middle East. We
also concluded that the FCO needs to reconsider its approach towards
confidentiality of documents, observing that in one instance -
It […] appears that the sensitivity of one category
of data caused the FCO to classify a whole range of information
in its original letter. This has served to confirm our view that
the FCO too often classifies material unnecessarily and in ways
which, even if they are not calculated to avoid public scrutiny,
certainly have that effect.[30]
We accordingly recommended that, when parts of a
document can be released without classification, a crude blanket
approach should not be applied to that document. In its reply
to our Report, commenting on this recommendation, the Government
stated that it "will consider how we can do so [release part
of a classified document without classification] in future in
order to help meet the Committee's needs".[31]
59. In our Report on the FCO's departmental report,
we commented that we were very disappointed by the previous Foreign
Secretary's decision to withdraw a commitment to send us the FCO's
quarterly management reports. We welcomed the fact that under
the new Foreign Secretary this decision has been overturned. We
also reminded the FCO that the other aspect of the previous commitment
made to the Committee was an assurance that we would be sent information,
particularly key management papers, on a systematic basis.
29 Ibid., para 58 Back
30
Foreign Affairs Committee, Eighth Report of Session 2006-07, Global
Security: The Middle East, HC 363, para 8 Back
31
Eighth Report of Foreign Affairs Committee, Session 2006-07, Global
Security: The Middle East: Response of the Secretary of State
for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Cm 7212, p 5 (para 10) Back
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