Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, how many fluent (a) Urdu, (b) Punjabi, (c) Pashto and (d) Sindhi speakers his Department employed in each of the last five years.

There is no mandatory requirement for staff employed by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to have fluency in a language. We do not hold the information requested broken down by year, but the latest information on our personnel database shows 37 staff with skills in Urdu, 25 in Punjabi and 1 in Pashto at varying levels, and none in Sindhi. Staff appointed to jobs where proficiency in the local language is essential for their role are offered fulltime language training and many of our locally engaged staff in our Posts overseas are native speakers or are fluent in the local language.