A guest blog by Timothy Fisher, HM Consul at the British Consulate General in İstanbul, Turkey.
With 2.5m British visitors and 40,000 British residents in Turkey, Consular work (helping British nationals in need overseas) is a key part of our work in Turkey. Therefore I was delighted to start work as Consul and Director of Consular Services in Turkey at our Consulate General in Istanbul on 18 February this year.
In the two months since my arrival in Turkey I have travelled around the country to see the work of our Consular staff in Ankara, Istanbul, Izmir, Bodrum, Marmaris, Fethiye and Antalya, first hand. I have been impressed by the compassion and commitment of the teams around the country and the close and effective working relationships they have with the local authorities.
As the tourist season gets underway the Consular teams, like all others involved in the sector, get busier and busier. Part of my role is to ensure that consular staff can spend as much time as possible assisting the people who most need their help and as little time as possible stuck behind a desk.
18 April marks the launch of the FCO’s new Consular Strategy. With its focus on doing more for the most vulnerable, preventing problems before they occur and delivering services more efficiently online, I’m confident that the strategy will support our vision for a service tailored to the needs of the people we assist.
When I met members of the British community in Didim recently, including the editor of Voices newspaper, we discussed the FCO’s registration system for British nationals overseas, LOCATE, its strengths and particularly its weaknesses.
Few people bothered to register and even fewer would tell us when they no longer needed to be registered. Various crises in recent years had demonstrated its limitations in an era of mobile phones, instant messaging and social media. It was a timely discussion as we announce today that LOCATE is to be switched off on 14 May in favour of a more responsive system for assisting British nationals in a crisis.
This is a significant change, and I would urge all British nationals to sign up to alerts and feeds from FCO travel on Twitter and Facebook and follow UK in Turkey on Facebook and Twitter as these will be key tools for communication with British nationals which we would use in the event of a natural disaster or other crisis in Turkey.
It’s been a busy start to my time in Turkey and I am looking forward to an interesting and exciting time working here and getting to know this wonderful country and its people over the coming years.