Examination of Witnesses (Questions 165-179)
SIR DAVID
GREEN KCMG, MR
MARTIN DAVIDSON
AND MS
MARGARET MAYNE
12 JULY 2006
Q165 Chairman: May I thank the British
Council for coming to join us. As you know, we regularly have
you before us, as we did only a few months ago. I will ask a catch-all
question to begin. What do you believe is the purpose of the British
Council today? What value does it bring to British taxpayers?
Sir David Green: Our purpose is
to win friends for the UK and to win friends who are going to
be friends for the long term. Traditional diplomacy is no longer
sufficient in the world in which we live and public diplomacy
is therefore a very important tool in order to build a constituency
of support for the UK, and I believe vital to our long-term prosperity
and security. What the British Council does is to build friendships
and long-term relationships with people who are going to be in
positions of authority and influence in the future, so we target
the successor generation, the younger people. Therefore, we have
to engage with them in areas that are going to be of interest
to them. That could be the arts, education—primarily education—science,
English language and sport. I could give you a couple of concrete
examples in terms of value for the UK. If you take international
recruitment, we are the lead organisation in terms of recruiting
overseas students to the UK. There are some one million students
if you take into account all the English language students, FE,
HE and students in school here. That brings a benefit to the UK
of £10 billion per annum, but, more important than that,
that is one million people who could become friends for the UK.
Another example is the work we are doing on climate change, which
is a key Government priority. We have been running a project called
ZeroCarbonCity, which is going to 200 cities across 70
countries and will be seen and engaged with, by 2007, some eight
million people. Those are two examples of where we can really
add value for the UK. One of the difficulties of public diplomacy
is how you measure its success. We have been doing a lot of work
in terms of how to do that and the Annual Report that we have
produced this year for the first time really tries to be as transparent
as we can in terms of the success or indeed where we have not
done as well as we might have done. Perhaps finally, just in terms
of an indication of the value that we bring to the UK, it is quite
telling that other countries and other analogues look to the British
Council as something of a model. So only last month the French
have launched a new organisation, Cultures France, which
they say is modelled on the British Council. Similarly, the Canadians,
Americans, Germans, Irish and most recently the Indians look to
the British Council as the model for cultural relations and public
diplomacy.
Q166 Chairman: As you know, we have
recently published a report on public diplomacy, including a section
on the British Council and its work. One of the recommendations
that this Committee made was that there should be an independent
review of your work. What is your response to that? Do you have
any reservations about that proposal?
Sir David Green: We do have some
reservations. We agreed with the line that the Foreign Office
took in replying to the report when they gave their submission.
We feel that the Carter Review, which took place over a period
of 18 months and concluded at the end of December last year, was
a thorough review, and came up with a series of proposals, which
are now being enacted and that to have a further review on top
of that would not be particularly helpful. I think we should wait
and see how the new arrangements bed down and then, perhaps in
two or three years' time, we should decide whether or not it is
appropriate to do a further review. The British Council has probably
been the most reviewed organisation over its history, and even
in my time there have been two major reviews. There was the Wilton
Review five years ago and then the Carter Review two years ago.
Q167 Chairman: Can I move to one
specific issue which your Annual Report refers to as your long-standing
association with Shakespeare. You co-produced a production of
Midsummer Night's Dream in India. Could you tell how much
that cost and how you felt that contributed to the goals of the
British Council?
Sir David Green: This is a project
using Midsummer Night's Dream as the play that was being
performed. It was directed by Tim Supple from the RSC. What we
wanted to do and what our regional director in India wanted to
do was to have a director from the UK work with Indian actors
to do a new, fresh production of Midsummer Night's Dream
that would then be performed in India and also, it was hoped,
in Sri Lanka, because we were covering both of those countries.
It was sponsored by Hutch, the mobile telephone company in India,
although in the end they came up with less sponsorship than they
had initially promised. It involved 20 or 22 actors from India,
who were auditioned through a series of workshops by the director
across India until he had reduced it the 20 that he wanted to
work with. He then was invited to bring it to the UK as part of
the Complete Works of Shakespeare season at Stratford.
I saw it and it is a very extraordinary production in seven Indian
languages but probably half of it is in English. It was critically
very well reviewed. Why do I say that is important from a public
diplomacy point of view? It was demonstrating the mutuality; it
was using a UK director to work in different ways within the Indian
context, new ways of direction and also someone with a very deep
understanding of Shakespeare. It was also for him very important
because it was using different types of performance and a range
of different sorts of backgrounds of the people who were taking
part. It caused a huge amount of interest in India, a huge amount
of media interest. I do not know what the numbers who read about
it or actually saw it were, but from that point of view it was
a very successful public diplomacy event.
Q168 Chairman: How much did it cost?
Sir David Green: What we are now
doing is working with the director and his production to do an
international tour across the world. I am afraid I cannot give
you the costs. I will have to come back to you on that. [1]I
do not know what they were.
Q169 Chairman: Can you give me a rough
area of what we are talking about because 20 actors and a big
production, bringing people backwards and forwards must have had
a considerable cost.
Sir David Green: My expectation
would be that it would be probably in the region of a quarter
of a million pounds but I do not know precisely what it was.
Q170 Chairman: When will you know?
Sir David Green: I can find out
very soon.
Q171 Chairman: When you take on these
major projects, how does it work? Do you set a ceiling? Do you
have a call for a particular person to work from or do you basically
approve the proposal and then it just develops?
Sir David Green: No. We are changing
the way we operate now to a commissioning process, but the way
it works is that a project plan is put up and is then approved
and there is a budget.
Q172 Chairman: You cannot tell me
what the budget for this proposal is?
Sir David Green: I do not know.
I can easily find out.
Ms Mayne: I would agree that it
is in the order of a quarter of a million pounds.
Q173 Ms Stuart: Sir David, I think
this is your fifth appearance in front of the committee. You are
due to retire in March 2007. I hope you will not regard these
sessions as a cruel and unusual punishment. Can I tempt you to
write a letter to your successor which covers three points: one
thing you wish you had not done; one thing you wish you had done;
and the third a thing you wish your successor could do looking
forward? Do you want to answer that question later in the proceedings?
It is quite important.
Sir David Green: Can I mull over
that and come back to it?
Ms Stuart: One thing you would not have
done, one thing you wish you had done, and one, looking forward,
things which you say in the current state you could not have done
but it is something your successor needs to do.
Q174 Chairman: Can I move on to looking
at the overall role of the British Council in relation to the
Foreign and Commonwealth Office? The FCO published its strategy
paper in March this year called Active Diplomacy. How was
the British Council involved or consulted in the process of performing
that FCO strategy?
Sir David Green: We were given
a draft, bearing in mind that this is an update of their original
strategy that they produced in 2003, and invited to make comments
on it, which I did.
Q175 Chairman: Which issues did you
highlight as important?
Sir David Green: The strategic
priorities where we can make the biggest difference are in terms
of making the world safer from global terrorism; preventing and
resolving conflicts with a very strong international system; supporting
the UK economy; and achieving climate change, which is the recent
one that has been added. We commented in terms of how we could
work in support of those.
Q176 Chairman: In view of that, were
you surprised that the British Council is only mentioned twice
in the whole document, once on page 42 and once on page 47?
Sir David Green: Yes, a bit surprised,
and I did register that. I have, from time to time, made representations
that I thought we were under-represented in the parliamentary
report in terms of the proportion of the expenditure that goes
on the British Council, and indeed the BBC World Service, that
the amount of coverage that those two public diplomacy organisations
get within the departmental report, and also in the priorities,
is not commensurate with the role that we could play.
Q177 Chairman: Given that FCO has
developed this new strategy, does it have any major implications
for the operational work of the British Council?
Sir David Green: It really comes
back to the question you asked me at the outset. All our work
is in the UK's interests and has to come within the framework
of the international strategic priorities, so within the priorities
that are being set by the Foreign Office, which are of course
the UK's priorities, not the Foreign Office's; they are the UK
Government's priorities. All of our work—and we have a purpose
statement, three outcomes, and then five outputs to help to measure
our ability to achieve those outcomes—comes within that
framework of the international priorities. If you take making
the world safer from global terrorism, then the Connecting
Futures work that we have been engaged in is directly contributing
to making the world a safer place. That is something we have been
doing for five years involving 44 countries and 30,000 individuals,
70% of whom are Muslim. That was very much about building better
understanding between people in substantial Muslim populations
and the UK. Then on preventing and resolving conflicts through
a strong international system, an example of how we can contribute
to that is by the Peacekeeping English work that we do
which we manage on behalf of the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign
Office and we contribute ourselves as well to a programme called
Peacekeeping English. Through that at the moment some 50,000
police, border guards and military personnel are involved in learning
English, for obvious reasons, to minimise conflict. I think that
is a demonstration of how we can help to prevent conflicts. I
could go on. Similarly with the fifth objective of supporting
the UK economy: there is PMI, Creative Industries and a number
of others areas in which we are engaged. I have given you one
example of climate change. The point I would like to make is that
all of our work is within that framework of trying to contribute
to meeting those international priorities.
Q178 Mr Horam: How are the mechanisms
for FCO oversight evolving?
Sir David Green: I think well.
Q179 Mr Horam: What state are they
at?
Sir David Green: We have presented
a suggestion for how we can improve the accountability mechanisms.
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