Examination of Witnesses (Questions 500-513)
BRITISH COUNCIL
25 APRIL 2006
Q500 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Could I say
that it is particularly good to see Victoria Grant here because
I think the UK Indian Education Research Initiative is fantastic
news, and it was something we were made aware of when we went
to visit the British Council office in Delhi and everyone was
there was very excited. It struck me that it addressed a gap that
had been there for quite some time, although the sum of £10
million does not seem an awful lot of money and maybe out of it
we might see another £10 million if we can release it from
business. My question is, within the British Council we have people
who are very interested in the development of cultural links and
the provision of education, but do not strike me as natural sales
agents who can do a hard sell to Indian companies and get them
to liberate funds from their pockets and support this particular
initiative. It does not come easy asking for money from companies;
you need to be a certain sort of person to do that. The UKTI seem
to have a harder staff that might be very prepared to ask for
money, so it seems to me that there has to be a significant relationship
between the UKTI, who obviously have their fingers on companies
coming into India, and the British Council that now wants to liberate
some of their funds in order to do well by the British education
establishment. So what about the relationship between the British
Council and the UKTI? We went to visit the UKTI and they are not
overly populated with staff themselves. So it seems to me a fantastic
initiative but where is the personnel capacity to deliver that
and release that extra £10 million?
Ms Grant: I think you have made
a number of very good points. Firstly, I would just like to add
that the British Council sponsorship manager has managed to secure
almost £5 million in sponsorship from the UK industry, of
which £1.75 million is in cash, the rest in kind from UK
industry in terms of corporate partnerships from BP, BA, GSK and
Shell, and the next stage, as you say, is to identify and work
with Indian partnerships. The Tata Group has already said that
they are interested in coming on board as a corporate partner
and we are working with them at the moment. As you rightly say,
the British Council works in the cultural as well as the educational
arena. I would say that we do have a lot of the contacts with
industry and corporate partners that would be relevant to this
initiative, but also that we would in no way wish to exclude our
other partners, our other government partners, FCO, OST, DTI,
and I know that Rob Daniels in Delhi is working very closely with
the Indian side team of UKIERI. The British Council has initially
taken over the sponsorship role for the design and set up phase
because we have the capacity; similarly, we put in a lot of the
work for the strand development, the actual higher education design
for the initiative, but we have not taken it on in perpetuity
for the initiative. The details of who will be doing what will
be finalised before September this year, so the roles in terms
of identifying who will be the sponsorship managers in the UK
and India is to be determined and the British Council will certainly
be working with OST, DTI and other partners until then.
Q501 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Do you think
your partners are adequately resourced to do the job that they
are actually undertaking?
Ms Grant: Which partners?
Q502 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: If we could
just concentrate on the UKTI, the announcement of doubling the
capacity of UKTI, is that a long time coming and well overdue?
Ms Grant: I have to say that I
am not familiar enough with UKTI and their staffing structures
to be able to comment on that, I am afraid. My colleague may wish
to add to that.
Ms Stephens: Could I just come
in here because I think we would agree actually that if we have
ambitions in this area—and we clearly do—I think we
do actually have to look at the resource on the ground. We work
very closely with UKTI; in fact as you may know we have UKTI staff
in two of our centres in India. So we see very clearly the pressures
that are on them. Also, talking to the UKTI person in Mumbai,
who has just arrived, who is very experienced and very interested
in doing more, I think we do get the impression from them that
they do need more resource. We are working at the moment on a
joint paper with them to sort out our roles and responsibilities
where we are clearly on the education promotion side and wanting
to very much focus on that and these kinds of opportunities we
have talked about a bit, and they, we feel, should be working
on other aspects of education, perhaps the kind you have talked
about, with companies. But we do not think that they have the
capacity to do that at the moment.
Q503 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Victoria,
you have just said that you have liberated £1.3 million,
was it?
Ms Grant: £1.75 million in
cash and £4.8 million total cash in kind.
Q504 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: From British
companies?
Ms Grant: Yes.
Q505 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: And there
is an appetite from Indian companies, and I presume that if there
was more resource do you think there would be more money?
Ms Grant: I think that is a general
approach that you could apply to a lot of things—if there
is more resource then there is going to be more outcome of whatever
it is. So, in that respect, quite possibly.
Q506 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: What I am
trying to get at is that you have the capacity in this marketplace
and there are funds there to support this initiative, if you have
the bodies to go out and get them, and my question is: are you
at a saturation point or is there a lot more money and if you
had the resources you could get a lot more in?
Ms Grant: I do not think we are
at saturation point at all. I think we have identified initial
corporate champions in this country and that was the priority.
We now want to extend that to an extent in this country but also
go and work with the Indian interested corporate partners, and
yes there is definitely a capacity to do that.
Q507 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: My next question
is about your relationship with the Regional Development Agencies,
the British Council's relationship with the Regional Development
Agencies here in the UK and the devolved assemblies. What relationship
do you have with them? Are they aware of what it is that you are
trying to do? Are there comparable organisations with India? To
me it seems such a massive exercise that it is not worth undertaking
unless people come to you with an expression of interest. How
do you send your message? Do they know who you are? If I walked
into my RDA and said, "Steve, who is your contact?"
would he be able to tell me if I said, "What about this UK
Initiative for Research?" Would he know about that?
Ms Grant: Certainly on UKIERI,
yes, and I would expect the same would be true of major initiatives.
I have a contact in the Northern Ireland Office, the Wales Office
and in the Scottish Office. They are also in touch with our British
Council's offices in those countries; so, yes.
Q508 Chairman: Can we just turn to
the squalid question of money, very briefly? In India we were
told that your turnover in the year just finished was just under
£11 million, of which £4.5 million was grant in aid
and the rest you had to earn yourselves, through English language
teaching and that kind of thing. Is that kind of rate of return,
that contribution required for activities by British Council organisations
elsewhere in the world or is that unique to India?
Ms Stephens: No, that level is
unique to India although there are other places in the world where
we have a similar level near it. We are not actually required
to reach a target, in a sense. What has happened is that there
has been a demand for UK qualifications, in particular, which
I think is a very important point in terms of signalling that
there is a huge respect and appetite for UK education and what
it stands for. So there is this growing examinations market which
contributes to it quite a lot, and to resource that we have had
to grow our infrastructure. If that market for some reason diminished
or we took another view of it then obviously we would have to
trim the size of the operation accordingly.
Q509 Chairman: How is the process
arrived at—and I should know this—how do you decide
how much money you spend in India as opposed to China or a European
country? Is that a decision that you take unilaterally or you
discuss with the Treasury? How does it work?
Ms Stephens: We discuss it through
the Spending Review mechanism, of course; we have to put our further
spending plans through the CSR, like other Whitehall bodies.
Q510 Chairman: But in great detail?
Ms Stephens: Yes, in quite a lot
of detail, indeed. So it is discussed with the Treasury in that
sense, but of course our sponsoring body is the Foreign Office
and it is with the Foreign Office that we talk about most of the
detail. Having said that, I would like to emphasise that we make
our own strategic resource directions and we have to then supply
the rationale for that and account for it, of course. For example,
we have recently moved a million into the Indian recurrent budget,
for very obvious reasons, and that was our decision to do that;
we did not have to go to anyone else for that decision.
Q511 Chairman: So do you think you
have the balance right in terms of the money you spend on India?
Obviously the British Council would like the money for all this
work, that goes without saying. Are you convinced that you have
your priorities right?
Ms Stephens: We certainly think
we have our priorities right in investing more in India and we
will continue to do so and we will invest in education in India,
that is what we have put that million into.
Q512 Chairman: It is a huge country,
one point whatever it is billion people.
Ms Stephens: Yes, indeed.
Q513 Chairman: Is £10 million,
£11 million enough to reach out to that audience?
Ms Stephens: It depends what level
of impact we want. We segment the audience. We reckon that there
are about 25 million of what we would call our focal audience
in India. I still do not think that £11 million is enough
to reach the 25 million, although we have had things like these
very successful road shows recently, where we have reached staggering
numbers, actually. The problem is not so much reaching them of
course, but engaging them in meaningful impact, sustained activity
that leads somewhere in a relationship building sense so that
there is an outcome for industry or for education or whatever.
I would double the budget tomorrow if I could.
Chairman: I am sure you would always
like money and I am sure we would like to write you a cheque here
and now for the important work you do, but I am afraid we cannot
do that. We are very grateful to you for bringing to a conclusion
our evidence sessions on our trade and investment relationship
with India. Thank you very much indeed.
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