Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
BRITISH COUNCIL
& FOREIGN & COMMONWEALTH
OFFICE
23 JUNE 2008
Q40 Mr Bacon: Can I ask you about
the library. Who chooses the books that go in British Council
libraries?
Mr Davidson: They are usually
chosen by our librarians.
Q41 Mr Bacon: Locally? I tell you
why I ask this question: I was in Berlin for nearly two years
and I spent a lot of time in the British Council library, mainly
looking at the newspapers because it was the time of the Maastricht
debate here in 1991 and 1992 and it was extremely useful for all
the British periodicals and the Sunday newspapers, and also English
language bookshops—of which there were several in Berlin.
If I wanted to get a good range of interesting publications I
went to the English language bookshop; the library was full of
sub-Marxist claptrap, to be honest. At that point I had just received
a second political science degree so I think I knew what I was
talking about and it looked like neo-imperialist claptrap. I just
wondered why it was there, to be perfectly honest!
Mr Davidson: I cannot comment
on the detail of what was in the Berlin library.
Q42 Mr Bacon: Or any library. It
is done locally, is it?
Mr Davidson: It is done locally
with advice from headquarters, but also drawing upon the demand
we have from the people who are actually our members there. Obviously
we are constantly asking the question of what sort of books they
would like. I think the point you make is an excellent one. In
Berlin there are a very large number of English language bookshops
there, as there were for example in Athens. It would actually
have been cheaper for us to give the books away in Athens rather
than to lend them. We made decisions, which seemed to me entirely
appropriate, not to continue with the library.
Q43 Mr Bacon: I would like to ask
you about corporate involvement in sponsorship. Paragraph 2.6
talks about the way in which various companies are involved with
the UK-India Education and Research Initiative, and it all sounds
fine and dandy good stuff. Later, on page 15, there is a reference
to what the Report very carefully, not to say euphemistically,
describes as the "inconsistent application of Council policy
on working with companies; for example to address variable staff
perspectives on whether or not it is acceptable to work with energy
companies to present climate change events ... " Am I to
take it that there are some British Council staff in some parts
of the world who are happy or prepared to work with energy companies,
and others who say, "Not over my dead body"? Is that
basically what that paragraph is saying?
Mr Davidson: I think that probably
is what the paragraph is implying. In the middle of last year
we developed a policy on acceptable sponsorship. We, for example,
have made a decision that we will not accept sponsorship from
tobacco and drink[5]
companies. We are now applying that policy across the organisation.
The issue—and I think the Report has made this in a number
of places—is one about consistency across the organisation.
The problem of 110 disparate operations has been to provide that
consistency. That really is the focus of our work at the moment
and that is why we are going into regionalisation; and where,
with colleagues like Mr Lynes, responsibility is crucial there
is a consistent application of corporate policy.
Q44 Mr Bacon: Do you now have a policy
in relation to the acceptability of the involvement of energy
companies in climate change events?
Mr Davidson: It is part of our
acceptable policy, and we do believe that it is appropriate to
accept sponsorship from energy companies in the environment.
Q45 Mr Bacon: Can I just ask about
the signing off of projects. Paragraph 2.15 talks about this,
about the very late point in the day in which sign-off occurs,
quite often after a lot of money has been spent. How have you
dealt with that problem?
Mr Davidson: We have revised our
sign-off processes. We have a four-stage gate commissioning process.
Our expectation is that the vast majority of projects, if they
are not going to continue, will be taken out of the system on
the first-stage gate. The whole of our approach is the removal
of projects right up to the very beginning of the process; otherwise,
as the Report points out, we waste a great deal of time and effort.
Q46 Mr Bacon: Midsummer Night's Dream,
this particular thing in India, you could not get any sponsorship.
Am I right in my reading of this that essentially you should have
been able to get loads of sponsorship, and if it had been better
organised you would have done and you have learnt your lessons
now? Is that basically what this is about?
Mr Davidson: I think it was a
disappointing response.
Q47 Mr Bacon: You cancelled four
of the eight performances?
Mr Davidson: That is correct,
but we did take Midsummer Night's Dream back to India in January
of this year and we achieved a total of £303,000 worth of
sponsorship[6]
for that.
Q48 Mr Bacon: When you say it was "a
disappointing response", there must be loads of British corporates
who would love to get their names in front of big Indian middleclass
spending audiences and managerial audiences, who would be the
sort of English language speaking people who would go and see
this sort of thing. It just was not managed properly?
Mr Davidson: We did not do well
enough, no.
Q49 Mr Bacon: I would like to ask
you about teacher capacity. You mentioned the point about reducing
the cost—paragraph 2.33 talks about second-language teachers
using people for whom English is not their native language as
teachers, and that that actually works. However, there is resistance
in some markets to tuition from second-language speakers when
premium prices are charged", which I can completely understand
having been myself a consumer of foreign languages tuition taught
by native speakers and non-native speakers. What are you doing
about that? Are you having a two-track approach? Are you having
non-native speakers and charging less, or what? Or are you trying
to charge more whilst offering a second-rate service?
Mr Davidson: Could I ask Mr Lynes
to answer that, who is an expert in this area.
Mr Lynes: The Report refers to
how we are looking to diversify the number of English language
teachers we have in our centres, quite rightly. Currently we have
approximately 1,800 English language teachers working for us;
out of those there are approximately 80 who are second-language
speakers. The way we see moving to in the future is actually moving
towards more second-language learners. We have not got places
yet where the majority of our teachers are second-language learners,
so we have not got a two-tier model as yet. However, from experience
from other competitors, for example International House and Bell
who operate in the market with a mixture of native English speakers
and bilingual teachers, they do not differentiate between the
prices of the courses that are charged. I would not have thought
that we would differentiate. If somebody comes to the British
Council whether they are taught by a native speaker of English
or whether they are taught by a bilingual teacher they are not
going to pay a different price.
Q50 Mr Bacon: You would have to make
sure they were of a high enough standard?
Mr Lynes: Absolutely. I think
this is one of the key issues. In some cases a unique selling
point is that if you come to the British Council you expect to
get a native teacher of English from the UK. That is changing.
The world of English language teaching is actually changing as
well. There is more acceptance now—the majority of people
who learn English learn through bilingual teachers. I think it
is the right way to go as the Report highlights.
Q51 Mr Bacon: I have one more question,
about Russia. This is a quote from an article by Mary Dejevsky.
If it is back to the Cold War it may be our fault. You may have
seen the article. "The Russians have not been happy with
the activities of the British Council for several years—and
not just because they [the Russians] harbour Soviet-era suspicions
about the purposes of foreign cultural representations ... they
were put out when the Council shifted its English language teaching—long
a major part of its work—onto a commercial basis. In their
eyes, this changed the operation from charitable cultural outreach
to business, and required it to be on a different legal footing
and tax liability". That is fair enough, is it not?
Mr Davidson: I think the position
on Russia is a complex one. We are registered and are prepared
to pay taxes whenever the local authorities require it. I do not
believe it is a fair representation that the Russian authority's
action against the British Council was based upon the way in which
we taught English. I think there were a much wider range of issues.
The Russian authorities have used a whole range of different reasons
for their approach towards the Council of which one, but only
one and certainly not the most overt one, has been the issue of
our teaching.
Q52 Mr Bacon: Your office is now
closed there, is that right?
Mr Davidson: No, we still have
our office open in Moscow. Our offices in St Petersburg and Ekaterinburg
are, however, closed.
Q53 Mr Burstow: Can you start by
telling us whether the larger scale projects you have been moving
towards, these regional based projects, have generated greater
outcomes relative to the greater costs that you are incurring?
Do you have ways of demonstrating that?
Mr Davidson: It is early days
yet, but our initial work on looking at them has indicated, first
of all, in terms of efficiency they are more efficient. The example
I gave a few moments ago about our Interaction programme in Africa
where the unit costs reduced from £8,000 to £4,000 is
perhaps a dramatic one but, nonetheless, it is not completely
unprecedented. Also our end of year performance measurement this
year has indicated that there is a statistically significant improvement
in the effectiveness of the programmes which have been run at
a regional rather than at an individual local level. I would not
want to give you the view that we have completely sound evidence
of this, but we have good indications that that is indeed the
case.
Q54 Mr Burstow: In that process of
looking at your score card, I gather from this Report that there
is some disparity as to how consistently applied the tools are
for actually assessing performance. How certain can you be when
you look at what is coming back from the regions that you really
are seeing something that is telling you that this is delivering
better outcomes for greater costs?
Mr Davidson: I think the comment
in the Report about consistency—and I referred earlier to
one of the issues of consistency we have as an organisation—is
between regions. I think the evidence we have got is also within
the region. One must assume that the region is actually (and I
think this is the case) drawing on evidence consistently between
the region as well as the local programmes. Within regions it
is clear that some of those regional programmes are delivering
a more effective programme than local.
Q55 Mr Burstow: You are an organisation
in about 110 countries, with a huge reach potentially and actually.
How do you ensure that reach as an organisation does deliver what
you at the centre want it to deliver through your local staff?
How does that actually happen? How can you ensure that they are
managed to deliver what you have decided in London needs to happen?
Mr Davidson: We have gone through
a range of changes—the first and most important one has
been this move to regionalisation. Instead of operating with a
relationship between London and 110 countries, we do now operate
with a relationship between London and 12 regions, of which Mr
Lynes is one of the Regional Directors. It is his responsibility
within his region to ensure that the country operations do deliver
against the set programmes. What we have also introduced for the
first time this year is a very clear and explicit agreement between
the centre and the regional director on the contribution that
each region will make to the delivery of our corporate outcomes.
While we will define a set of corporate outcomes we want in a
particular area of work, Mr Lynes and his colleagues will be required
to actually sign up to delivering a part of that. The third area
we have done is we have brought into our management looking at
the finances on a global basis against outcomes on a monthly basis
and on the effectiveness of the programmes on a quarterly basis,
where previously there was a tendency to look at this only at
the end of the year.
Q56 Mr Burstow: Can I move onto something
related to this. The business is a people business; it is all
about contacts and building contacts. We understand you have over
five million contact records. How many new contacts do you add
each year to your systems across the organisation?
Mr Davidson: I am not sure I can
give you an exact figure off the top of my head. We are, for example,
engaging with over 15 million people per year, of whom my expectation
would be that a significant proportion would be new contacts.
Q57 Mr Burstow: Is it a number you
do not know today but could be obtained, or what?
Mr Davidson: I will certainly
write to you with the best estimate we can of that.
Q58 Mr Burstow: In the same note
perhaps you could say how many contacts are missed each year.
The reason I ask this is that we learn from the Report, on page
29, paragraph 3.19, that "In 2004 the Council failed to respond
to over 500,000 telephone or email enquiries", and that rose
by 2006 to 1.5 million enquiries that were missed—surely
a huge part of your potential business is being just missed because
of systems failing and people failing to answer calls and respond
to emails. How many contacts do you think you must miss as a result
of that every year?
Mr Davidson: We estimate that
we have 15 million enquiries per year into the organisation, and
that is telephone email and personal enquiries. The numbers which
are given in the Report are our failure to meet our service standards.
It does not mean that we fail completely to respond to those,
but we do not meet the service standards that we have set ourselves.
Our service standards are that 100% of emails should be answered
within seven days, and 100% of telephone calls should be answered
within two minutes. Again, the issue of consistency is critical
here. We are meeting those standards in some places; we are not
meeting them consistently across the organisation.[7]
Q59 Mr Burstow: Is part of the reason
you are unable to provide all the information on this today and
why perhaps some of that performance is not as good as you would
want it is that there is not a workable system at the moment for
relationship management, for contact management; there is not
a database, an integrated system?
Mr Davidson: We do not have an
integrated global database, you are quite correct. In drawing
up the data on this we would be enquiring at the country level
rather than by drawing it from a smaller system.
5 Note by witness: We do accept sponsorship from alcohol
companies, albeit with restrictions Back
6
The £303k figure includes box office receipts Back
7
Ev 18 Back
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