Examination of Witnesses (Questions 59
- 79)
WEDNESDAY 23 JUNE 2004
SIR DAVID
GREEN KCMG, DR
ROBIN BAKER,
AND MRS
MARGARET MAYNE
Q59 Chairman: May I welcome the representatives
of the British Council: Sir David Green, Dr Robin Baker and Mrs
Margaret Mayne. It is my pleasure initially to congratulate you,
Sir David. You have enjoyed an excellent relationship with the
Committee. May I say that we consider it a point of honour, whenever
we can, to visit the British Council offices overseas. Obviously
your honour is something which relates to the work of the Council,
but it is also a very well deserved accolade for you personally.
Many congratulations on behalf of the Committee; we are delighted.
Sir David Green: Thank you very
much.
Q60 Chairman: I should like to begin,
as we began with your colleagues from the World Service and ask
for your perspective in respective of the new Public Diplomacy
Strategy Board. What is your capacity on it?
Sir David Green: The origins of
the Public Diplomacy Strategy Board go back to a review which
was undertaken before the last spending review by someone called
Wilton from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. We had a member
on the team reviewing the co-ordination of public diplomacy. They
came up with proposals, one of which was the formation of a Public
Diplomacy Strategy Board, which was one we supported. We think
it is important, in order to help to co-ordinate the work of all
the public diplomacy agencies working on behalf of the UK, but
it is very important that it is about co-ordinating and making
sure that you get complementarity from the different players and
not trying to get an homogenous approach to public diplomacy,
but recognising the strengths of different players and working
to those strengths. The catch phrase which the Public Diplomacy
Strategy Board has encapsulated is complementarity and clarity.
I am very much a full member of the board.
Q61 Chairman: You are a full member.
You do not have the status problem of the World Service of having
to retain a certain arm's-length relationship?
Sir David Green: No, I am very
much a full member. To go back to my earlier comments about the
nature and the role of the board, it is about strategy and co-ordination;
it is not about operational activity or determining where funds
are spent, it is about the overall co-ordination.
Q62 Chairman: Left hand and right
hand.
Sir David Green: Yes.
Q63 Chairman: How useful has it been
in your judgment?
Sir David Green: I think it has
been useful. It is fair to say that the co-ordination of public
diplomacy on the ground is very good indeed overseas and certainly
in most countries now there is a public diplomacy group which
brings together particularly the British Council and the Foreign
Office, the mission, but also other players where relevant such
as BBC World Service, such as VisitBritain. There was a gap in
the co-ordination in London and this has filled a gap and plays
a very important role in terms both of sharing information, co-ordinating
activity, discussing whether or not a particular campaign might
be appropriate for a particular country and looking at the evaluation
of our work.
Q64 Chairman: What has been the evaluation?
Where are we going from here? Are there improvements which you
could personally recommend?
Sir David Green: One of the areas
we have spent a lot of time discussing within the board is the
role of country campaigns, of which the most recently completed
campaign is the Think UK campaign which took place in China.
That was very much a collaboration between the FCO and the British
Council, with some input from UKTI.[8]
Two other campaigns are currently running: one on science and
technology in North America and promotion of the UK's role in
science and technology; the other one is on welcoming the accession
states into the European Union on behalf of the UK, which is called
Crossroads for Ideas. It is a bit early to evaluate them;
certainly the evaluation of Think UK was positive in terms
of the impact it made through the media. It got a lot of media
attention.
Q65 Chairman: Am I correct that the
SARS outbreak rather stumped you on that?
Sir David Green: It delayed it.
We were due to launch the Think UK almost precisely as
SARS arose. It put it back and the Prime Minister was due to go
to launch it and it obviously put his visit back as well. However,
we rescued it and the final campaign was an effective one. There
are issues about sustainability and there are occasions when a
short burst of major activity is very helpful. Then there are
questions about how you sustain it in the longer term.
Q66 Chairman: What lessons have been
learned from China?
Sir David Green: Lessons have
been learned particularly about the management of such campaigns.
One of the things we learned—and it took us a little while
to learn—was that actually it had to be jointly managed
and there had to be a campaign manager in place as early as possible.
We jointly learned with the Foreign Office...
Q67 Chairman: Drawn from one of the
participants?
Sir David Green: No, in fact this
campaign manager was independently recruited and was working in
China at the time. She was contracted just to do the job of running
the campaign, managed jointly by a steering group, which was comprised
of Foreign Office and British Council managers who directed her.
Q68 Chairman: And other lessons?
Sir David Green: Another lesson
was that these campaigns have to be planned a long time in advance.
You cannot expect to mount an effective campaign unless you have
a lead time of probably 18 months to two years. A third lesson
was that you have to be realistic in terms of your expectations.
In fact the evaluation has not shown that there has been a significant
change in perceptions within China as to the creativity and the
innovation which is the UK, which was the purpose of the campaign:
to raise people's awareness about the fact that the UK is a very
creative and innovative country. Certainly the research which
has been done, the survey work which has been done, has not demonstrated
that, although it has demonstrated that those people who took
part, who actually attended the events, have had their awareness
raised.
Q69 Chairman: We have just heard
of this astonishing review of the perceptions of the UK of young
people of Hispanic origin in the US.[9]
Is that a subject for another campaign?
Sir David Green: I do not know
about a campaign in that case. Certainly that is one of the elements
within our spending review bid. We believe that if the special
relationship between the UK and the United States of America is
going to continue then we have to do much more work on the West
Coast and, particularly with the changing demographics, with the
Hispanic populations and with Asian Americans and African Americans.
Q70 Chairman: What are you doing
about it?
Sir David Green: The first thing
we did was a survey and some of the results are rather shocking;
not many of the young people who were polled actually were able
to name the four countries of the United Kingdom and were not
able to recognise many UK personnel. I seem to remember that Catherine
Zeta Jones and Simon Cowell, who runs Pop Idol, were the
two names they could come up with, but they could not get much
further than that. There is a job to be done and what we think
is going to be the most useful thing to do is to do it. Not as
a campaign, but to do some work which engages with the other people,
particularly those at high school and at university through traditional
methods of exchanges, through conferences, through schooling,
through university links, through encouraging more people to come
and study in the UK, all the things which British Council has
built up an expertise and a reputation in. We just think that
is a focus which ought not to be neglected.
Q71 Mr Olner: Could you tell us whether
you think the British Council was fully consulted on the Foreign
and Commonwealth Office's UK International Priorities White
Paper?
Sir David Green: Yes, we were
consulted.
Q72 Mr Olner: Was it a listening
role or did you have an opportunity to shape it?
Sir David Green: We were shown
an "early-ish" draft and commented on that. In fact
one of our comments was that sufficient attention was not being
given to the role of public diplomacy as a tool of international
relations. As a result of that, that element within the strategy
was enhanced.
Q73 Mr Olner: One of the priorities
is to promote democracy, good governance and human rights. Does
that not conflict? I felt when we were in Russia last week that
there was perhaps some tension, that you were stepping into areas
which perhaps the Russians were not particularly pleased about.
I just wonder whether that same feeling plays in China as well.
Sir David Green: Increasingly
it has been an area where we have been able to do a lot of work,
the whole area of governance and human rights. The reason we have
been able to do it is because we are at arm's length from government;
we are an independent organisation. Although our sponsoring department
is the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, we are independent.
Q74 Mr Olner: That is not quite what
the Russians feel at the moment, is it?
Sir David Green: There is a particular
difficulty in Russia, as I know you picked up. We do not fully
understand it as yet; the ambassador is working very hard to have
discussions with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. That in no way
negates the role we can play as an organisation in promoting governance
and human rights. We have done a lot of work in China on the role
of the judiciary, on trial by jury and all of that work is much
appreciated. I think we have a particular role as an organisation
which is not government in bringing people together to discuss
those very important issues.
Q75 Mr Olner: I see the British Council
as a very important tool in furthering the UK's interests and
the UK in a wider world. How do you think the British Council
play in your role compared with a sister organisation which the
Americans or French or Germans or others would run in wanting
to promote their own countries? Where do we rank?
Sir David Green: I am partial,
but I think we rank as number one. I think that our colleagues
in the Goethe Institute and the Alliance Française
and in America would say the same. The reason why they would say
that is because of the very breadth of the activities we engage
in. From human rights to language teaching, to promoting excellence
in science, to promoting higher education links, to work in the
visual arts, we have a very all-embracing definition of culture.
Those other organisations, those other representative organisations
of the countries you mentioned, have a much narrower definition.
I think they envy the fact that the British Council is able to
encompass all of those different areas and that gives us a strength
that they lack. For instance, in Germany there is a body which
is separate from the Goethe Institute, which has responsibility
for the promotion of international recruitment into Germany and
also one for promoting links between universities. Those are all
things which the British Council does.
Q76 Mr Olner: You say in your memorandum
that you are shifting resources into various key areas and obviously
one of them is the Middle East. The Middle East is a fairly broad
brush. Where exactly in the Middle East are you seeking to promote
the British Council? I do not think even with unlimited resources
that you could promote the British Council in all parts of the
Middle East. What parts of the Middle East are you concentrating
on and is there a safety element which perhaps you have not needed
to look at in some of the other areas where you have operated,
but which you may have to look at, a safety, security element
in your offices in the Middle East?
Sir David Green: Those are big
questions.
Q77 Chairman: You can leave the security
side, if you want, as Sir John is coming onto that in a moment.
Sir David Green: In terms of our
spread across the Middle East it is pretty wide ranging and we
are in many of the countries of the Middle East. What we are putting
forward in the spending review bid is an initiative to work particularly
in relation to reform of education systems within Middle Eastern
countries, which is something where we are responding to their
stated needs. It comes out of the Arab Human Development
report which identified education systems and the fact that with
the very young populations in many of the countries within the
Middle East one of the key priorities is to improve the education
system. In discussions with a number of ministries of education
across the Middle East, we have been talking about how we might
engage and share expertise from within the UK.
Q78 Mr Olner: Which specific countries
are you looking to do more with in the Middle East?
Sir David Green: Across the whole
board from the Gulf States to Egypt, to the Maghreb. I do not
know how many countries it is all together.
Q79 Mr Olner: So this is just a broad
wander through the Middle East and not specifically targeted.
Sir David Green: We have country
programmes in each of those 11 countries which have their own
British Council centre, often teaching English, and we also provide
information about the UK. We encourage people to come to study
in the UK, we have arts programmes, we have a gamut of activities.
We also have a number of development service projects on behalf
of European Union or other funders. We have specific programmes
tailor-made for each of the countries we are working in, in the
Middle East. What I was describing was an initiative which is
in response to a need, which is a regional need in terms of needing
to enhance education systems. That is an element which we have
put in our spending review bid and, going back to the Chairman's
earlier question about the Public Diplomacy Strategy Board, something
the PDSB has identified as a really key priority: our engagement
with the Middle East and that the way to engage is through educational
reform.
8 UK Trade and Investment Back
9
"New research reveals long-term threat to UK/US special
relationship", British Council press release, 18 June 2004 Back
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