To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs how much her Department spent on (a) sponsoring newspaper and publication supplements and (b) funding advertorials in newspapers and publications in the last year for which figures are available; and what the topic was of each. (130012)

In the last year the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) has made the following expenditure:

£20,000 was paid for a special supplement on UK-Israel relations in English and Hebrew. This was published with the Haaretz newspaper (in Tel Aviv) on 27 June 2006. This project was funded by the Public Diplomacy Challenge Fund, financial year 2006-07 from programme expenditure.

£103,330 was used to sponsor newspaper or publication supplements and fund advertorials in newspapers or publications in the last year as part of the Know Before You Go Campaign, which is an ongoing travel safety campaign run by the FCO. It encourages all British nationals to be better prepared for their overseas trips with a view to avoiding common travelling traumas, risks and dangers. It is not possible to give a further analysis of this expenditure without incurring disproportionate cost.

It is possible that additional expenditure has been made at Posts. This information is not held centrally at the level of detail which would enable us to answer this question. It could only be researched by contacting each Post, and to do so would incur disproportionate cost.