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Russia: British Council

Volume 486: debated on Thursday 15 January 2009

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what the reductions to the British Council's regional network in Russia are, as referred to on page 28 of his Department's Autumn 2008 Performance Report. (246263)

The reductions to the British Council's regional network referred to on page 28 of the Autumn Performance Report referred to the planned closures of the following British Council regional centres:

Irkutsk;

Krasnoyarsk;

Nizhny-Novgorod, Russia;

Novosibirsk;

Omsk;

Rostov-on-Don;

Samara;

Sochi;

Volgograd;

Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.

In addition to this strategic reduction, the British Council suspended its operations in St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg in 2008. The British Council now has a single office in Moscow, without walk-in public access. The resources from its former library and information centre in Moscow were handed over to the State Library of Foreign Literature and have been made available to the public.