received on 31 May 2006
Email to the Committee from Mr David Blackie,
Director, International Education Connect Ltd.,
FCO DEPARTMENTAL
REPORT 2006—A COMMENT
ON PUBLIC
DIPLOMACY
The FAC have already called for an independent
review of the British Council, and we welcome that development
and look forward to the response of the FCO.
This FCO report notes that the FCO provided
grant-in-aid to the British Council of £186 million in 2005-06,
"about 40% of the Council's income", so we deduce that
60% of the Council's income comes from other sources. In evidence
to the FAC last year, and in response to a question from Mr MacKay
about whether the grant-in-aid from the FCO could be cut, Lord
Kinnock remarked that
"We [British Council] leverage the resource
that is utterly dependable from grant-in-aid resources so that
we are an organisation that can generate that additional value
and those additional resources."
In other words, the British Council explicitly
uses the platform of substantial public funding as a means of
access to other revenue—via development contracts, as an
agency for examinations, as a teaching organisation, publisher,
exhibition organiser and so on.
Over a period of 14 years my company built a
position as the clear market leader in electronic publishing of
information about English language teaching in the United Kingdom.
This leadership was, in effect, formally recognised by the British
Council when in 1998—at that time nine years since the project
had begun—the organisation signed a five year co-operative
(with no money changing hands) agreement with us.
With well over a year of the agreement still
to run, the British Council used their publicly funded position
and their staff (those specifically liaising with us) and other
resources to set up in direct competition with my company, to
duplicate our product and business model, and to persuade our
client base to switch allegiance from our service to theirs.
Setting aside the issue of ethics (fundamental
as ethics should be to the issue of British Council conduct) and
also the cavalier attitude of the British Council to a co-operative
agreement entered into in good faith, the point is that what the
British Council did could not have been done without "the
resource that is utterly dependable" ie the material financial
support of the taxpayer through the FCO. In this particular case
the British Council also loaded the imbalance by invoking the
"Prime Minister's Initiative" and the presumed advantages
of the Education UK "brand" as licensed to them by the
DFES. The FCO was, we submit, thereby sponsoring unfair and anti-competitive
activity and causing irreparable damage to a legitimate tax-paying
British enterprise. As a taxpayer who has had his enterprise and
his livelihood severely compromised, I submit that such sponsorship
is totally unacceptable. That, as it transpires, there is no mechanism,
function or personage for holding the organisation, whose response
has been one of pure denial, to account in respect of any aspect
of this merely adds insult to injury. Since none of this story
would have happened without FCO sponsorship, the FCO must be seen
to accept full responsibility for everything the British Council
does, or else drop its sponsorship and allow whatever remains
of the British Council to manage on its own.
David Blackie
Director
International Education Connect Ltd.
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