Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, with reference to the Third Report of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Flying Home: The FCO’s consular response to the COVID-19 pandemic, HC 643, what steps he has taken to ensure that answerphone messages of UK embassies abroad can be controlled centrally in times of crisis.

The FCDO has increased its capability to make emergency changes to telephone auto-attendants at UK missions abroad by training staff abroad to change the auto-attendant messages for their own mission in real time. By mid-December our Global Consular Contact Centres, which are open 24 hours, 365 days a year, will also have the capability to update auto-attendant messages remotely.

As a contingency the FCDO has also put in place revised commercial procedures with our telephony provider which enables the auto-attendant messages at all Posts overseas to be changed remotely by the provider within 5 days of a request. Under the previous arrangement it could take several weeks for updates to be made.