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Foreign and Commonwealth Office

My Lords, I thank all those who have taken part in the debate. We have stressed how much the context of diplomacy has changed. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, remarked on registry trolleys. The first embassy I ever went into was in a small town in Germany. I remember being disappointed that the registry trolley there did not still squeak, as John Le Carré said in this book that it did. We have changed, and we on these Benches accept that we must continue the process of change. We do not think that we should spend more, but we do think that we must prioritise. I was interested, after saying in a Radio 4 discussion programme in December that we should cut consular services in Europe because people getting drunk in Tallinn and Prague and losing their wallets did not necessarily deserve the full weight of the British Government behind them, to be told that there were cheers in relevant departments in the Foreign Office as they listened. We do need to redirect our priorities. We know that the Government no longer like to have the sort of inquiries that they had in the 1960s and 1970s. I suggest, however, that we need to continue this discussion, that the Government should try actively to carry with them those outside and those in the other parties, and that the Foreign Office cannot do this on its own. Other departments are now enormously engaged in international business. The figures on exchanges that the noble Lord has just quoted are welcome. This needs to be a Whitehall approach as a whole. On the point of the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, I have been impressed in embassies I have visited in the last three or four years that one of the economic staff always seemed to be an extremely bright young Asian economics graduate. The FCO is changing, although one should also say that our last permanent representative at the UN was someone for whom English was only his second language—Welsh being his first. We are beginning to cope with all these necessary social changes. I have just one last doubt. I read about headcount reductions in the Gershon review. In all the capability reviews of departments I have looked at, I wonder whether, in pursing the goal of cutting back on staff, ““efficiency”” reductions do not sometimes risk cutting those who need to carry through the responsibilities we give them. Having said that, and hoping we will all continue to follow this discussion, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers. Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.