18 October 1993
BY FAX
Miss Ingrid Ho
Security Branch
Government Secretariat
HONG KONG
pe 119/10.
Mus 340/1
RECE
WAL
2 5 OCT 1993
Foreign & Commonwealth
Office
263
Nationality, Treaty & Claims Department
Clive House
Petty France
London SWIH 9HD
Telephone: 071-270- 4070
Dear Miss Ho,
INDER
אי
OVERSEAS POSTS:
1.
STATISTICS FOR BN(0) REGISTRATION PROGRAMME
1256.
Please refer to your faxed message of 4 October to Mrs Barnes Jones. I am sorry that you have not had an earlier reply but I have been waiting for a report on the outcome of Mrs Barnes Jones's conversation with you on this subject which was only received by me on 14 October. I regret that this means that both we and our overseas Posts have not met your deadline of the middle of October.
2.
To
Rather than sending out another blanket request, we would prefer to single out those Posts which are in default. enable you to do this, I am sending with this faxed message a list of our overseas passport issuing posts, together with the number of passports issued last year. This leads me on to question whether to canvass all Posts is a worthwhile exercise. Firstly, as you can see, a large number of our Posts overseas issue less than a thousand passports and most of these will have a small, if any, resident Hong Kong community holding British passports. I wonder whether it would not be more sensible to single out, say, between 10 and 20 Posts which issue the most British passports overseas and where there are likely to be large communities of Hong Kong residents. I could attempt to compile such a list but I assume that you are better placed in Hong Kong to do so.
3. I also question whether the statistics you receive will in fact enable you to assess the effectiveness of your publicity campaign. Unlike Hong Kong, I assume that you do not have accurate figures of the Hong Kong community in each country nor of the demographic spread. This being so, it seems to me that the overseas statistics, ie outside Hong Kong, will serve little useful purpose. I should be grateful for your views on this.
4. I agree that it is most important that we mount as an effective publicity campaign as possible in those countries which have a large resident Hong Kong community holding British
/passports.
NJM127J