Speeches by Cooper.

“I would say two things on that. First, we expect greater progress from the overseas territories; we are insisting on it, and I raised it with them recently in the Joint Ministerial Council. Some of them have made substantial progress; others have been slower. Our anti-corruption champion, Baroness Hodge, has been visit…”

“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…”

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

“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…”

“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 …”

“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 …”

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

“Of all the different things I am dealing with at the moment, this is the thing that worries me most. We have seen horrendous atrocities take place, and there is a real risk of further atrocities. That is why we are seeking to maintain the pressure, and we announced new sanctions on RSF members around the atrocities tha…”

“Great.”

“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…”

“The audit was really a process to drive the approach that the Government takes, and it fed into the national security strategy, which is public. It also fed into a series of other approaches—our trading approaches, our national security strategy and so on—that are public. It has fed into the broader public process. I a…”

“Yes, I think some European countries have, but not Five Eyes countries.”