Foreign Affairs Committee
26 October 2026
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Committee Actual start House of Commons
15:27 - 16:58
Speaker 1
Welcome to today's Foreign Affairs Committee session. Today we are hearing from the Right Honourable Alistair Burt, the government's first ever envoy for complex consular detentions. This is a role that this committee and our predecessor committee called for, in fact probably be fair to say campaigned for. So we're really pleased to see you today.
For those watching this session, I think I should make it clear that the witness is not going to be able to discuss individual cases in any depth during this session. Instead, we're going to be asking more general questions about the newly created role, what its remit is, and how it relates to existing government structures for supporting those that are being detained overseas. So I think if I start really with that, we're as I say we're really pleased to see you today before this committee and we have been calling on several occasions for this role to be created and our predecessor committee, which Dan was part of both.
So we'd like you really to, if you can set out what you see your new role to be. And I think particularly with reference to the terms of reference, we wanted to really know how independent you were, how much you had to be directed by the Foreign Secretary, how much discretion you had and so on.
16:58 - 17:26
Speaker 2
Okay. Well first of all, it's very nice to see you. And to say a warm thank you to the committee because you did indeed, you and your predecessor, pressed for the role. So this is a great example of parliamentary democracy and government working together. You thought it was necessary, it's incorporated in the last manifesto of the present government and here we are.
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