Foreign, Commonwealth And Development Office Implements 3 Harry Dunn Recommendations
The foreign, commonwealth and development office has begun implementing recommendations from the Harry Dunn review, with three recommendations already in place and nine more in progress. The changes include new guidance for serious incidents involving foreign officials and new requirements for US personnel assigned to the UK.
Harry Dunn, 19, died outside RAF Croughton in Northamptonshire in 2019. The review by Dame Anne Owers, published in December, said the Foreign Office failed to treat the case as a crisis and withheld information from his family after he died.
Foreign Office guidance for incidents
The new guidance sets out how departments should respond when serious incidents involve foreign officials and how families should be supported. That sits alongside updated legal guidance and new training requirements already under way for US personnel assigned to the UK.
US personnel assigned to the UK must receive a briefing on UK driving conditions and road safety, and they must pass the UK driving theory test. Those steps follow a review that examined the department's actions between 27 August 2019 and the end of December 2019.
Anne Sacoolas case findings
Dame Anne Owers said Anne Sacoolas was a US State Department employee and had diplomatic immunity at the time because she was the wife of a US intelligence officer. A police inquiry concluded that Sacoolas was not arrested at the scene because she was deemed to be in a state of shock.
Owers also said the then foreign secretary was not told that the family had left the UK until the following day. After Sacoolas's departure, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office asked Northamptonshire Police for a day or two to get our ducks in a row before informing the family, and the department asked police not to mention that request when the force met the family on 26 September.
Legal steps after the review
Sacoolas pleaded guilty in 2022 to causing death by careless driving and received an eight-month suspended jail term. The Foreign Office said ministers were detemined to fulfil the commitments tied to the review, with the remaining nine recommendations still in progress.
For families caught in serious incidents involving foreign officials, the practical changes now sit in the response itself: how departments communicate, how legal advice is handled, and how support is delivered while the case is still unfolding. The review's findings had already made clear that the department's handling of the Dunn case left too much to catch up after the fact.
