British Council - Overview

Overview

The British Council's remit is "to build mutually beneficial cultural and educational relationships between the United Kingdom and other countries, and increase appreciation of the United Kingdom’s creative ideas and achievements." Its overseas network extends to 233 locations in over 100 countries and territories. It has headquarters in Spring Gardens, near Whitehall in Central London. There are other branch offices in Belfast, Cardiff, Manchester and Edinburgh.

In June 2009 it was announced that 400-500 jobs at the British Council would be shed as part of wider restructuring of the organisation which was reported to involve outsourcing back-office jobs overseas and a further centralisation of its regional operation across the United Kingdom.

In September 2009 British Council Director of Arts Rebecca Walton told Monocle magazine: "We've really been striving to put the arts back alongside the main purpose of the British Council which is cultural relations. The arts are the most powerful tool you have to build a dialogue discussion across boundaries. It was only very recently that I heard a member of the Foreign Office say for the first time that arts are now as important as sanctions in the toolkit. We want people to become more inclined towards the UK and more sensitive to the positive benefits of the UK in the world. We want to focus on the BRIC countries. Russia is a difficult area politically. Also, in the Gulf we're just growing our presence. We're extending playwriting development work down there, which is about writing about areas of interest for younger people, seeing what can capture their interests. We've had this going on at the Royal Court with readings from the Near East and North Africa and we want this to go down the Gulf as well. As a country we do the longer-term stuff; there are occasions when I think the UK needs to do more of the big bucks projects, when it can change the atmosphere of a city quite viscerally, like France's Louvre in Abu Dhabi.".

In October 2011 the UK Treasury Select Committee Member Labour MP John Mann described The British Council as 'a nonsense of an organisation to sustain' and called for its abolition. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2048545/Whitehall-departments-leave-London-save-sky-high-office-costs-says-MP.html?ito=feeds-newsxml