To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs how many foreign language speakers were employed in the diplomatic service in each year between 1997 and 2006, broken down by language spoken. (130294)

The following table shows the total number of Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) staff employed as of March 2007 who have a language qualification in one of the priority languages recorded on the FCO management information system.

FCO staff will have varying degrees of fluency in these priority languages. In order to provide a year on year breakdown of language qualifications we would need to extract both the start and end dates of the qualification. This information was not mandatory on the previous management information system and any breakdown would not provide a true reflection of the total number of staff who have a language qualification.