Learning from History: Know How Fund
FCO
Ebsworth, PIPs, PIFs and TIPs,7 he is your man. You want to do something with the environment, there is an environment fund. You want to twin your town with a town in Bulgaria, we have a scheme for that.‟ Those were always trying to keep control in areas where we could have spent all the money many times over. I think it is important to remember that the money, although it seemed huge to people in the Foreign Office when they looked at their mortgages, really was not very big in terms of the aid effort. I remember just after I had left the Know How Fund in January 1993, bearing in mind that in the first year of the Know How Fund we spent £15 million, DFID spent £20 million on concrete railway sleepers for India. It gives you some idea of how the relative finances work. One of the most interesting projects that we had, which has been referred to earlier, was the Open University programme. They had a Diploma for the emerging manager. Several smart people turned up and said, „Would it not be a great idea if these programmes were translated into Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Romanian, whatever it is, and that would then provide a real multiplier for people who want to understand how the market and small businesses might work‟. The Open University said, „That seems a great idea‟, obviously the Foreign Office would pay and obviously the Foreign Office did pay. The catch was that the Open University insisted that the people who were going to deliver this programme took the exam in English before they could deliver it. That is why in 1991, when they ran the exam, there were five Hungarians in the first 10, and a Hungarian came top of the exam. That is actually a programme that worked really well; nothing to do with government, but gave a whole set of people the tools with which to carry through their aspirations on the business side. On the differences between the various countries, one of the interesting elements was that we had people in the UK, the diaspora; we had people who spoke the languages. For historical reasons, we had a lot of people who spoke Polish. When Michael Howard went around Eastern Europe, promising this, that and the other, there were enough staff in the Department of Employment to staff a demonstration benefits office in Krakow, and they all spoke Polish. But we did not have the same sort of linguistic back-up – if that is the right word – in Bulgaria, Hungary or Czechoslovakia, and I think that some of the work that was done, trying to twin police forces, was also based on trying to find somebody who spoke the language in the relevant police force so that when they went to the country there would be somebody who could explain what was going on. Last point: was it successful? Well, who is to know? It was a long time ago and I think I bow to those who say it is difficult to evaluate. At the time, it seemed to be successful; at the time it seemed to be delivering what the politicians wanted. I am sure that if, at the time, somebody had said to us, „Would you be happy with all these countries joining NATO and the European Union, or would you want to put the dice back in the box for another throw‟, we would say, „No, no, we will take EU membership, NATO membership, and the re-integration of these countries into the European ideal.‟ Sir John Birch Thank you, I was the ambassador in Hungary from 1989-95, so I was at the receiving end, a recipient if you like, of the Know How Fund. I was a great supporter. It seemed to me to be a most imaginative response to the great political changes. It gave me and the Embassy quite a lot of influence into all walks of Hungarian life. People were very happy to see us. They thought the Know How Fund was much bigger than it really was. As a result, we were able to spread the influence of it much wider. It was, in fact, quite easy work. As many have said this morning, we were talking to people who came from the same European culture that we came from. The problem that I think the
7
Public Investment Programmes, Pre-Investment Feasibility Studies and Training for Investment Personnel Scheme. 30 October 2013
27