§ Mr. Tony LloydTo ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs if he will make a statement about recruitment policies at Government Communications Headquarters, and which groups are excluded on grounds of ethnic origin or parents' country of origin.
§ Mr. Hurd[pursuant to his reply, 3 February 1993, c. 209]: The second paragraph of my answer was inadvertently omitted. The full version is as follows.
No groups are excluded on grounds of ethnic origin. Members of staff at GCHQ must be British citizens, must never have held citizenship other than of the United Kingdom and colonies, and must not hold any nationality or citizenship in addition to British citizenship. As regards parents of applicants, the requirement is that each parent must always have been a Commonwealth citizen as defined by the British Nationality Act 1981.
If the applicant was not born—or did not take up residence in infancy—in the United Kingdom, each of the applicant's parents must be, or if deceased have been at the time of their death, a British citizen domiciled in the United Kingdom. These rules are at present under review, but I cannot say when this review will be completed or what its conclusions will be.