Note from the British Council
As members know, both the British Council and
the BBC World Service submit their own spending review submissions
to the Treasury through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The
principle of ring-fencing for both organisations was established
in SR2000 with the aim of ensuring that the settlements allocated
in the Public Expenditure White Paper are passed on intact without
any subsequent variations in funding levels by the sponsoring
department.
We view this principle as essential both to
effective long-term financial planning and to our ability to deliver
maximum additional reach for the UK's public diplomacy effectively
through our arm's length relationship with Government.
There are indications that the principle may
be breached in the SR2004 process through a proposal to top-slice
some funding off the British Council's baseline prior to the settlement.
This would be used to finance a common fund for public diplomacy
campaigns. Such a tactic would undermine the ring fencing principle
and result in an erosion of our funding.
The major argument forwarded for top-slicing
resources for such a fund centres around a perceived need to incentivise
closer working together on the part of public diplomacy players.
This presupposes that joined-up activity is
not happening under the current structures of public diplomacy
committees among PD players in-country, or at the centre under
the Public Diplomacy Strategy Board (PDSB).
The key issue at stake is how we respond to
emerging priorities in public diplomacy. We can do this much more
effectively through deploying resources from our overall budget
to the areas of strategic concern for the UK. Recycling part of
our funding and creating an additional bureaucratic layer is not
in our view an effective or efficient use of managerial time,
or of achieving the outcomes of the relevant bodies.
We are currently able to respond to emerging
priorities (of the kind needed following 9/11) because we have
the capacity to churn current levels of funding. By re-directing
resources we are, for example, delivering significant impact in
Iraq through actively working with Iraqis on education reform,
capacity building for journalists and English language teachers.
We are ending decades of academic isolation in higher education
by opening information centres in Baghdad and Basra universities,
providing on-line resources for academics and in forging new links
between Iraqi and British universities. There are similar examples
in Iran, Afghanistan and Libya, while programmes in areas such
as increasing understanding with the Islamic world, leadership
capacity building under the New Partnership for Africa's Development
(NePAD), and promoting greater understanding of climate change
illustrate how we are tackling new priorities on a regional basis
and have re-prioritised resources to do so.
Reducing our funding levels at source will reduce
our capacity to respond in a strategic manner to such important
priorities as they emerge. This is particularly so in a tight
spending review year in which we are also committed to delivering
stretching targets of 2.5% annual efficiency gains. Establishing
a fund to which we can bid for what was previously part of our
core resource will be a less efficient and more bureaucratic means
of responding to public diplomacy needs.
There is strong evidence that public diplomacy
is effectively co-ordinated through a joined-up approach in at
country level. The initiatives jointly taken by our offices in
conjunction with Embassy/High Commission this year in South Africa
(the imaginative Democracy + 10 season of events) and in France
(where the Entente Cordiale anniversary events have enabled good
relations in the cultural and educational sphere to continue despite
the differences at a political level over Iraq) are two recent
examples.
It is further demonstrated by the experience
of Think UK, a joint campaign initiated between the British Council
and the Embassy in Beijing, which in planning terms pre-dated
the establishment of the PDSB. The evaluation highlighted the
major role played by the Council both in organising most of the
main events and in taking over the role of seeking sponsorship.
As I argued at the evidence session at the FAC,
a broader evaluation of one-year campaigns is needed before any
proposals are brought forward for a systematic programme directed
from the centre. It should be noted that the £1 million which
we have committed to centrally-run campaigns, to match the £1
million of the FCO, for each of 2003-04 and 2004-05 would fund
three country operations on the scale of BC Estonia for a year.
We need to measure the comparative value of campaigns with other
methods of working to achieve our objectives.
We believe that the newly-implemented arrangements
for the Public Diplomacy Strategy Board should be allowed to bed
down without further changes to funding or structures.
Sir David Green KCMG
Director-General
British Council
25 June 2004
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