To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs how many members of his Department's staff deployed in each region of Iraq (a) have been trained in each year since 2003 and (b) are being trained in each local Iraqi language.

Since 2004, 58 Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) staff have studied Modern Standard Arabic and one Sorani Kurdish before being deployed in Iraq. Currently there are eight staff studying Modern Standard Arabic who are due to be deployed to Iraq later this year or next. Since 2004, 323 FCO civil servants have been deployed to Iraq. There are currently 35 staff there.

We only started to hold management information about language skills centrally in 2004. Our system records those who have passed exams on completion of language courses funded by the FCO, so may not include those who did not take an examination, those whose acquisition of the language was not the result of class-based instruction, or whose studies were not funded by the FCO.