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BBC World Service

My Lords, my noble friend is entirely right to identify the changes that are necessary as a result of the old-fashioned quality of short-wave radio. It makes me grieve that I can no longer get the BBC World Service while carrying around my little short-wave radio set. The other important point, which is common ground, is the extent to which the BBC World Service plays, as the Foreign Secretary himself has said, a crucial role in our soft power. That becomes all the more so for the reasons just stated by the noble Lord. For example, the Chinese ambassador estimates that in five years’ time one-third of the population of China will be learning English. We need to be benefiting from that by maintaining the service, whose quality is agreed on by everyone. Without being egocentric, I think that during my 10 years of masochism, first as Chancellor of the Exchequer and then as Foreign Secretary, we were able to maintain the real value of the World Service even though we were going through substantial periods of hardship and were cutting expenditure elsewhere. We did that by maintaining the percentage of our GDP going to overseas aid and development, not to the 0.7 per cent desired by the United Nations but to 0.36 per cent, which may be regarded as mean. However, one can regard the huge expansion of the ODA budget under the present Government as being so large that it cannot be impossible to find the modest sums of money necessary to respond to the anxieties expressed today. If my figures are correct, the budget for overseas development assistance in 2010 was £8.4 billion, due to rise to £12.6 billion. To put that alongside the trivial reduction in the resources available to the World Service could lead one to the conclusion that we must redeploy to the extent of maintaining, cherishing and expanding the service to which we have all paid so much tribute this evening.