Intelligence Services: Equality

Patrick Mercer
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs how many and what proportion of (a) field-based and (b) office-based Secret Intelligence Service officers were of each (a) ethnicity, (b) religious faith and (c) sex in each year since 2001.

Gillian Merron
It is Government policy not to comment on intelligence matters, including information about Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) staff numbers.

The Intelligence and Security Committee has reported on matters relating to SIS’s recruitment and staffing policies in its annual reports. Diversity issues relating to SIS were most recently covered in the 2004-05 annual report (paragraph 53, column 6510).