TUESDAY 23 FEBRUARY 1999

BARONESS KENNEDY OF THE SHAWS, QC, MR TOM BUCHANAN, CBE and MR EDMUND MARSDEN

  160.  But you have staff in place with the experience and the knowledge and wisdom to carry out this very essential work especially in these applicant countries and what we are doing as a Government, not that I am speaking as a representative of the Government, is that we are failing these applicant countries if the Know How Fund is disappearing eastwards?
  (Mr Marsden)  This is the burden of our argument, that the Government is willing the ends but not necessarily the means.
  (Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws)  It is also our argument that in fact it is short-sighted because we think it gives us a great strength in Europe if we are the route through which those applicant countries have access to Europe. If Britain is teaching them the language and Britain is helping them with their capacity building then we make friends that could be rather important to us.

  161.  Our myopia is even more astonishing given that I think it is fair to say that the United Kingdom appears to be one of the keenest advocates of enlargement.
  (Mr Buchanan)  Can I make one quick point on that. Given what we have said about the settlement to date to the end of the CSR period we have recognised the importance of that particular area. When Helena set out the priorities that we would want more money, for accession states were clearly in there and many of the things you have mentioned we recognise. In the absence of any interim solution or more money before the next round of the CSR that will mean that we will have to move money into these areas from other places and that will come back to the sort of point that Edmund was making about closures and running down programmes in less high priority areas in order to maintain that work as best we can in the circumstances.

  162.  One quick supplementary, not directly related, I saw in Warsaw queues of young people trying to get on to the TEFL course so there is demand for that. The Germans cannot beat us on this issue, this is where we have the field to ourselves almost. How much would it cost, for example, to increase our TEFL programme in Warsaw? We are reaching out to a new generation of young Poles and they are coming to us for it. How much money are we talking about to meet the demand that is there, as opposed to just rationing it?
  (Mr Marsden)  As you know, with our English language teaching programme we are required to run that work as an activity which does not draw on public funds.

Chairman:  So what are the constraints?

  163.  Why are we leaving the market unsatisfied?
  (Mr Marsden)  I cannot answer about Poland. If they were queuing round the block, they may have been waiting to register.

  164.  They could not all get on.
  (Mr Marsden)  If there is demand, then we will be doing our best to meet it. Maybe in that case there were problems at that point in time with accommodation or space or whatever. Generally speaking, we are able where there is a demand, which can meet the fees we are required to charge in order to recover our costs, we meet it. The countries I mentioned that we were thinking about opening in are countries where we feel there is such potential demand, so we can open new operations without having to spend a great deal of grand-in-aid which we do not have.

  165.  So there is absolutely no reason why a young Pole cannot actually get on a TEFL scheme on a self-financing basis in Warsaw?
  (Mr Marsden)  There should not be.
  (Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws)  The business of selling English language teaching is a matter of concern to us because, for example, in a place like China, which I visited in October, it became very clear that the desire to learn English is enormous. It is one of the areas where we may have to make a decision, I think, about having it as a loss-leader, if you like, that it cannot be that you ask everyone to pay at a level that would be financially viable but where the investment would be so much worth it for Britain that we should be contemplating that and we should not be restricting ourselves to that rather narrow definition.

  166.  I believe as a country, as a Member State, of the European Union we have an obligation to honour towards these applicant states in terms of assisting them with their infrastructure. One very last question relates to paragraph 54. You say in the seventh line, that there is "... a move away from training in the UK. The number of awards made available under Technical Cooperation Training has declined from 12,600 in 1990-91 to just over 2,000 this year ....". That is a dreadful drop, 85 per cent. Where are these young people going? Where are they being trained now? Are most of them heading for the States?
  (Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws)  I can answer from the South Africa position, but Mr Marsden can answer in a general way.
  (Mr Marsden)  First of all, we are talking here about people who are financed in government-to-government schemes, nominated by their own governments as part of our aid programme. The ODA as it then was took a decision that investing extensively in this type of training in the United Kingdom was not the best way of supporting personal development and capacity building in the poor countries, and redesigned its policy to encourage training to take place within projects and wherever possible in country or in third countries in the south; in developing countries. That is a reason why there has been such a dramatic reduction in the number of people coming to the United Kingdom and why there has been such a dramatic reduction in our turnover because we have been managing that training. You can argue about the wisdom of that policy, you can also, as we do, say that whatever the wisdom of the policy the effect of not having 12,000 people, many of them from Commonwealth countries, coming to the UK has resulted in a dramatic thinning of the flow or contact and exchange particularly with the Commonwealth and that on balance this is regrettable and should be, if possible, replaced by other programmes which enable that kind of flow of personal exchange to continue with poor countries.
  (Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws)  The opposite is also quite persuasive when you think that coming to Britain to be trained around technical skills may in some ways not be appropriate to what is available on the ground in a particular country. So there is more and more feeling that it is better to learn where you are, facing the problems where you are; it is better for us to send trainers. I saw that happening in South Africa where we have been training parliamentary draftsmen, and people who are drafting legislation for the Provinces. We brought some people here and then we sent a trainer there and the trainer who went there, a parliamentary draftsman from Britain, was saying he was able to tailor it much more to what their needs were. That is happening on lots of fronts but the disadvantage, of course, for us is that they do not have the whole British experience, and that is regrettable. However, it is a shift in thinking and philosophy and it is still pertaining within DfID, the feeling that it is much better that things are done there and can be related to the context in which people are operating. So there are arguments both ways. Also some of the countries themselves say that it is better for them to have their people there because having people leave the country, even for a short period of time, means a loss to them of some of the better able people.

  167.  Can I first of all apologise to you, Chairman, and to our witnesses; I was unavoidably delayed. I apologise for coming late and look forward to reading what you have said to the Committee. I was interested in both what Mr Marsden said and Lady Kennedy. We have recently, as my colleagues have said, been looking at European Union enlargement and when one looks at the current documents from the European Commission about the progress of the principal applicant countries they do flag up some deficiencies. By way of example, when you look at Poland, there is no problem as regards human rights, its legal system and so on, but there is a deficiency in terms of judges and advocates in commercial areas, and what we would call county court work, business, commerce and European law. I was concerned to hear what you said about how the Know How Fund has moved on. For what it is worth, the Westminster Foundation has as well. It does seem to me that there is this void which is not in our interests, quite apart from the applicant countries' interests. Have you, with perhaps the Foreign Office and other agencies, looked at the European Commission's progress reports on these accession countries to say almost, "You do this, we will do that", because clearly there is a void? I wonder whether the agencies of which you are the principal one are sitting down and really looking at and identifying where these gaps are so that even if there is this need to move east, as Mr Marsden said, nevertheless is there this——
  (Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws)  Strategic over-view?

  168.  Yes.
  (Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws)  It is something we are doing all the time and it is something which is not appreciated enough about how the organisation works. At every moment it is using its antennae and its skills because it has got such knowledge in assessing what the changes are and looking at the future. That is why for us to talk about just the next three years is meaningless because we are always having to look that much further ahead at what the trends are, at what is happening in the world and so on. We are certainly identifying these areas of gap which is what I was responding to with Mr Godman. It is a real issue for us, our concern that there is a whole other area of work that needs to be done if those countries are going to function well within an expanded Europe. On the issue you are talking about, we have just had judges out in Hungary through the British Council working with other judges around those areas of civil litigation, that whole area which is not within the experience of many of those countries.

  169.  How was that funded?
  (Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws)  That was a British Council funded exercise. One of the difficulties here is again we are trying to persuade the Lord Chancellor's Department to put more money into those sort of judicial exchanges which strengthen the independence of the judiciary in those other countries and which create links which are enormously enriching for all of us.

  170.  Forgive me if this has been covered already but it seems to me this is what our whole inquiry is about. If it was possible to amplify on what you have identified, it would seem to me that would be very powerful for us politically to press the Government on. The other thing, just amplifying what Ted Rowlands has said, I was with him when we saw these queues in Warsaw—and I do not think it was a criticism of the British Council, quite the reverse in fact—but we were moved by this and I guess people have had this experience elsewhere. It did seem to me, listening to you, Mr Marsden, that you were saying they have to be self-financing and it seemed to me that you were saying that probably the resource which is needed is the ability to organise, which might be done administratively but, if not, it seemed to me this was a case for special pleading for some relaxation on that demand, and that clearly we ought to have resources in. It is not just in Warsaw, I keep going on about Poland because it is a large geographical country with 40 million people but I guess it is also happening in miniature in the Czech Republic and even Estonia. I throw it back to you, should not the British Council find a little more money to shift those priorities so you organise these courses rather than fund them? Perhaps you might say you still have constraints there. Can I just complete this, one of the things which is happening in Central Europe I have noticed which is profoundly moving is that the people who are learning English are simultaneously teaching English.
  (Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws)  Yes, they pass it on, it is incredible.

  171.  Yes, it is a pyramid system. Partly because these young, very dedicated students need this small income, but I have witnessed this throughout Central Europe, this pyramid system, and it seemed to me this ought to be facilitated, to encourage these teachers who are both learning and teaching at the same time.
  (Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws)  Before I bring in Mr Marsden, I just want to say that we really do feel that the British Council should charge for its services where it is appropriate but there ought to be some movement, if you like, where it is strategically in our interests to make available opportunities which would otherwise not be met or which might be met by people other than ourselves.
  (Mr Marsden)  Firstly, we have trained 15,000[5] teachers of English in Poland since 1990, which is a wonderful network for us to maintain contact with. This is the point you were making earlier about how we are going to build on this investment for the future. Secondly, since Mr Rowlands mentioned it, I will look to see what is happening in terms of meeting demand in Poland. Thirdly, in approximately a third of our teaching operations this year we are probably not going to make a profit but because we have to wash our face, as they say, in our teaching operations globally it is impossible for us to plan to run teaching centres at deficit indefinitely. So even though they may be running at a deficit for a short period, perhaps after start-up or during a very difficult period, it is difficult for us to keep chronically non-viable teaching operations going. The final point I would like to make is that throwing grant money on teaching operations is problematic for us because it raises questions about whether we are operating on a level playing field in the international market and we get a lot of flak very often through MPs from the private sector for using grant money.

  172.  Finally, on European Union enlargement there is this injunction that Member States should facilitate twinning arrangements between primarily public servants. I do not think it is just public servants, indeed perhaps it should not be. What has struck me here in the United Kingdom is that there does not seem to me to be an agency which is actually bringing public servants in applicant countries together with public servants here. We have had testimony from our own European Minister and I think her phrase was, "We are a bit slow taking off on this matter", or words to that effect. It did occur to me that this would be a legitimate role for the British Council, that they could say to the UK Government, "Let us take this on, let us bring over public servants from Krakow and cities in Estonia" and also probably in terms of industry. The United Kingdom in my judgment is really not fulfilling its role or intent as regards twinning which is urgently required and is mutually beneficial.
  (Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws)  That is exactly what we do in the European Series, we bring civil servants from all those countries you are talking about together with our own civil servants. We also bring in from other countries where we think the dialogue is going to be useful. We find that is enormously successful. We will take up the point on twinning.

  173.  Could you provide a note on twinning, could you also provide a note for us on co-operation with the World Service on the Internet to avoid duplication? Can I thank you and your team very much indeed. You can see we are brimming with questions and I hope this will be the start of a very happy and continuing dialogue.
  (Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws)  Thank you very much, Chairman.