Speeches by Cooper.

“As you can see, we have set out a new strategy on tackling illicit finance, which is a cross-Government strategy. It highlights the issues that we have been raising—my predecessor, David Lammy, had been raising them as well—about tackling illicit finance. As part of that, one of the key things has to be the work done o…”

“No—clearly, it is not. We need to make sure that progress is made. Having served in very many different Government Departments—I am not going to count how many through the years—I find that the Foreign Office is distinctive because it has so many people overseas, and therefore so many different parallel structures in t…”

“I am concerned about that survey. Clearly, it needs to be addressed. Perhaps I could turn to Sir Olly to respond to that.”

“There are three areas, for example, where I have been increasing the focus. The first is increasing the staffing around migration, because we need to do much more in the prevention work on returns upstream, and we also need to expand some of the principles that underpinned the agreement with France. We will be able to …”

“The starting point for this is that, over the last 10 years, there has been a very substantial increase in the workforce, compared with the combined workforce of the two Departments—the Foreign Office and DFID. With the combined Department now, I think the staffing increase is something like 25% in overall staff, withi…”

“I will hand to Sir Olly for the details of this one.”

“The FCDO has a dispute resolution process and the PCS have requested this. The response from the FCDO has been to propose pre-dispute resolution discussions before it reaches that point— obviously, Sir Oliver can provide more details on that. That is why the assessment had been that we are not formally in the dispute r…”

“This is hugely important. It is a fundamental underpinning of democracy, and it is also a fundamental underpinning of the international rule of law—that we have independent media voices. At a time where we see not only threats to media freedom, but threats to journalists who show considerable courage in some countries …”

“It reflects the strength of our commitment to the World Service and our support for it that we gave it a significant uplift in funding this year—I think it was a 30% increase in funding to the World Service this year. That is exactly because we hugely value the work that it does. You will obviously understand that that…”

“Yes.”

“I need to see the reviews before we can respond to them. They have a hugely important role to play, but a lot of their income was based historically on the teaching of English. In some countries, that continues to be really strong—for example, in many countries, the provision of exams and the British exam system is inc…”

“I should start by emphasising the importance of the British Council and its amazing work across the world. I spoke to some of the British Council employees in Kyiv, where their building had been hit by Russian bombardment. We know the importance of cultural diplomacy, which helps with both economic and security diploma…”

“I am not sure I have the answer to that in front of me, so I would definitely have to write to you on that, but I am sure the permanent under-secretary would know the answer.”

“In terms of our discussions both between our agencies and the US agencies, and between the UK and US Governments, we have extensive discussions about all these issues, including security issues and embassy issues not just in the UK but all over the world. We have a lot of close briefing information sharing and collabor…”

“National security is the first duty of any Government, so we clearly take any security issues immensely seriously. Obviously, it is part of the diplomatic processes that other countries have embassies, and we have embassies all over the world. Countries build new embassies, close old embassies and so on. That is not a …”

“Each country is considered separately and differently, because countries obviously have very different circumstances, with different kinds of threats, challenges or, in some cases, opportunities. It is right that each country should continue to be considered separately. This is a Home Office lead issue, but the Securit…”

“It is exactly because of that transnational repression—threats to people resident on UK soil, including Hongkongers whom we have welcomed into our communities as a result of the repression they have faced—that we have strengthened the work of the counter-terrorism police and intelligence agencies on targeting state thr…”

“I welcome my hon. Friend’s highlighting of the Hongkongers in his constituency and other local communities. He will know that over 200,000 Hongkongers have been welcomed to the UK through the BNO route. I will pass on the points he has raised to the Home Office, but the route has played an important part in Hongkongers…”

“There is a deep, long-standing change that we have seen in the Chinese authorities’ approach over the last five years. Successive Governments have raised that with China, but we continue to do so because the national security law is deeply damaging, undermines the declaration and undermines the international rule of la…”

“We send our wholehearted support to Jimmy Lai’s family, who face the most difficult of circumstances, and to Jimmy Lai himself, who is a British citizen and has our strong support. We will continue to raise this issue in every forum that we can. The priority must be to draw on those humanitarian grounds, if nothing els…”