Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, pursuant to the Answer of 30 January 2025 to Question 25988 on British Indian Ocean Territory: Sovereignty, how much and what proportion of spend to date on the Chagos Islands negotiations will be borne by the (a) his Department and (b) the Ministry of Defence.

Costs, including those of staffing, legal counsel, travel and accommodation and other expenses arising from the negotiations have been incorporated into the budgets of those Departments involved in the negotiations. There has been no central aggregation of those costs.

To go back over costs and expenses for the last three years in different parts of FCDO, different finance systems, and data that would have to be manually checked would exceed reasonable costs.