Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, whether his Department uses criteria to decide whether an international deployment of the armed forces is (a) combat and (b) non-combat.

All deployments and situations are different, because of this it would be very difficult to create a defined list of criteria to cover every scenario. Missions can also change over time, for example a deployment to provide humanitarian aid could escalate to civil unrest and the military need to be able to quickly and flexibly respond to those situations.