THE centuries-old tradition of sending sensitive ambassadorial material to Britain’s embassies sealed in diplomatic bags is going to be privatised and moved out of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

The work of assembling bags for the special diplomatic mail service is carried out, as it has been since it started hundreds of years ago, by civil servants.

Working in the basement of the Foreign Office, they handle non-classified communications to Britain’s outposts including policy briefs, visas and internal government communication.

Hundreds of special diplomatic bags are sent out from the Foreign Office’s Whitehall headquarters each week. Now the department has decided to outsource the work with the likelihood that it will be done by a private logistics business in a building at Heathrow or Northolt airport.

The Foreign Office is expected to put the work out for tender soon.

The move comes just weeks after it was decided to ditch Royal Mail from handling the House of Commons’s internal post and give the work to a US distribution company.

The Foreign Office said that it needed to free space and that the work would be better placed near the bags’ point of departure from Britain rather than in Central London.

A spokesman said: “A business case was put to the board on the handling of the diplomatic bags and a variety of issues were covered. It was decided that outsourcing would be the most suitable. It will be put out to tender shortly.”

Because of the sensitivity of the diplomatic work, a civil servant will still have to be responsible for the final sealing of the bags after the mail and other items have been received and sorted. The Vienna Convention maintains strict guidelines for diplomatic mail.

Staff working on the bags will be offered the option of transferring to the new company or a different job in the Foreign Office. But the move has been attacked by the main Civil Service union. Mark Serwotka, general secretary of PCS, said: “It truly beggars belief that a government department thinks it can privatise such a sensitive function. It smacks of privatising for privatising’s sake. This isn’t junk mail but sensitive letters and information such as passports and policy documents from government departments.

“We urge senior ministers to intervene in stopping what appears to be an unnecessary and ludicrous privatisation.”

HIDING PLACES FOR GUNS AND A TEDDY

A Cornish teddy bear was sent around the world to help students with their geography. For a flight from New Zealand to Thailand, it was tucked into a Foreign and Commonwealth Office diplomatic bag

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