Mr. Denis Staunton:

On the issue of language training, it does not exist in a vacuum. I mention the fact that one of the difficulties is that even if a decision were to be made, say, to send somebody away for a year for full-time training in Arabic or whatever, because of the staffing shortage, it would be quite difficult to find somebody to do his or her job here or wherever the person was located. The other issue is that of valuing diplomacy as a profession. It is a very good thing that people from the Department of Foreign Affairs spend time in other Departments and people from other Departments spend time in the Department of Foreign Affairs. The fact is that diplomats require a particular skill set which is unique to the job they do and they are not interchangeable with other public servants. It probably does involve more than simply funding the language training. The British Foreign Office recently increased its language training budget by 30% and has reopened its language school which it had closed down. There is no reason we could not benefit from the fact that it has a language school nearby and available to us and, perhaps, that is one of those areas of British-----