British Council: Funding

Lord Stone of Blackheath Excerpts

Thursday 19th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stone of Blackheath]

My Lords, I declare a specific interest: I chair DIPEx, an Oxford-based charity. We are currently internationalising ourselves, and this is my theme.

Last month, in a debate on the voluntary sector, I proposed to Her Majesty’s Government that they may wish to create a hub in the United Kingdom that would encourage and support other established British charities and social enterprises to internationalise themselves. The Government have not yet responded. In that debate, I mentioned the British Council, which has for decades promoted our language, education, arts and culture. I said that this was good for Britain and good for the world. Perhaps I was addressing the Government too vaguely and this debate is a more appropriate forum for my suggestion.

What I suggest is a way of expanding and infusing new activities and eventually more funding into the British Council. Here is the suggestion: across the UK many excellent charities and voluntary organisations have already successfully internationalised themselves, but others are struggling to create organisations that spread worldwide with the right disciplines and standards, and many as yet have not realised the vast potential and advantages of becoming international. Imagine if we were to encourage British charities and social enterprises—large, medium-sized and small—to consider researching the issues that they address here in other countries and linking with groups in those other countries to form international organisations.

Were the British Council to decide that it might be a good thing to add the voluntary sector of the United Kingdom to its remit, it might start with a trial of, say, 10 charities, then 100 and then 1,000. There are 162,000 charities registered in the UK and thousands of social enterprises. If 2.5% of them—that is, 5,000 charities with an average income of around £250,000 a year—were to internationalise over time, we would have created in the UK an enlightened centre, spreading good works around the world, with a turnover of more than £1 billion.

To start, perhaps 100 charities could be encouraged to come forward over the first year to internationalise themselves. The British Council hub would then give them access to international legal structures and the ability to set global standards and resources for branding, marketing and website publishing. Even if it cost an average of £50,000 for each of those organisations, the total cost of helping 100 of them would be £5 million. The charities could raise some of this, sponsorship would be forthcoming and, in time, the whole thing would become self-funding. In addition, providing the service worldwide would become a source of funding for the British Council.

Let me cite DIPEx as an example. I am not asking for help here: we will internationalise ourselves with our own resources. This is what we decided to do. DIPEx is a charity that has worked closely with the University of Oxford. With the support of the Department of Health, it has raised £10 million and created www.healthtalkonline.org. We publish people’s personal experience of health conditions online so that other patients can learn from them. So far, over 10 years, we have covered 70 health conditions, including cancers, heart diseases and neurological conditions, and life issues such as bereavement, pregnancy, menopause and the like. This year, our website will receive 1 million hits a week and 3 million unique visitors.

Now, based on training and support from DIPEx UK, organisations in other countries are setting up parallel projects in universities and hospitals in Spain, Germany, Holland, Japan, South Korea, China, Israel and Palestine, Canada and Australia. Together, we will establish DIPEx International to co-ordinate the activities of the group, to collect and publish health experiences worldwide and, combinedly, to help with fundraising.

We have decided to use £50,000 of our DIPEx charitable reserves to do this. Oxford would then become the international centre for the highest quality worldwide health charity. As a result of our activity, Green Templeton College, where we are based in Oxford, plans to create a health experiences institute, a centre for research into patients’ experiences worldwide. DIPEx is just one example of a charity doing this. I am suggesting that a conversation may be arranged by the British Council with people involved in this sector to see whether this programme to help the charity and social enterprise field from Britain should be added to its mission, and to see if we could make connections and create new ways to spread aid and services to countries with which we wish to have relations.

Perhaps a conference could be held, to which we would invite 30 or 40 people from this field who would be interested in helping to take the idea forward. The participants might include five charities, five social enterprises, small, medium and large, the Social Enterprise coalition, the Social Investment Consultancy, Prism, the gift fund with which I am involved, Global Philanthropic, Global Tolerance, some experienced lawyers in the field, some big UK-based international businesses to help with advice on internationalisation and perhaps funding, and the Charity Commission.

I am sorry that I do not have the resources to research this more deeply. It is merely a suggestion, but perhaps noble Lords feel that it merits further research, discussion and action.