Last year British residents made an estimated 53.6 million trips overseas, and Friday's Foreign Office annual review explained what happened when a few of those travellers got into trouble.
If you are unfortunate enough to fall ill, become a victim of crime or get arrested, then the British Consular servive, a division of the Foreign Office, is often an important source of help. From April 1999 to April 2000 consular staff provided advice and assistance to more than45,000 British travellers and issued 10,074 emergency passports: the total cost of the consular services ran to £49.1 million.
The review aims to sum up the work this money was spent on but is also a revealing portrait of the British citizen overseas. 'It is firstly a statement of what we have done, but it also gives an insight into the kind of work we actually do and what we hope to do,' says the Foreign Office's Robin Twyman. 'It is aimed at making the general public aware that Consular Services are a key part of Foreign Office policy,' he continues.
Although Consuls regularly help with mundane travel problems they also have to deal with complex situations such as forced marriages and abducted children. A total of 300 abduction cases were reported to the Consular Division for the period 1999/2000, while Consul staff helped 107 victims of forced marriage, 76 of which were in Pakistan.
Hundreds of British nationals lost property when Iraq invaded Kuwait, and one of the conditions of peace is that Iraq makes reparations. Last year the Consular Division distributed a total of £20.5 million to 3,701 claimants.
In the event of a crisis Consuls are called upon to act decisively: last May the FO evacuated 442 British and other nationals from Sierra Leone. There is always an emergency response team on call and there are contingency plans for 95 countries. In countries without reliable communications, radio networks have been set up.
Pre-departure advice is a central role for the Foreign Office. Frequently updated information is available from www.fco.gov.uk/travel/ and Ceefax page 470 onwards. The travel advice unit can be contacted by telephone (020 7238 4503) or fax (020 7238 4545) and copies of the annual review are available from Consular Division (020 7270 1500) or the Foreign Office website.
Your consul can...
issue an emergency passport
contact your friends and relatives
visit you in prison
cash a cheque
Your consul can't...
investigate a crime
get you out of prison
pay your bills
find you a house or job
Facts and figures
US prisons hold 586 Britons
302 Britons are in Spanish prisons, 184 of them on drugs charges
Last year FCO staff made 6,938 prison visits and registered 6,650 births
5.2 million British nationals live in Australia
2,418 died overseas: 35 were murdered
17 died in accidents from balconies, 13 of them in Spain
52 Britons died in road accidents in Spain last year
Britons made 14.7 million visits to France last year
