Oral Answers to Questions

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Wednesday 24th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

Q9. In the last comprehensive spending review, the clever wheeze of transferring expenditure on the BBC World Service from the Foreign Office budget to the BBC helped to prevent a calamity in our foreign policy capacity. Five years on, foreign policy making and analysis have got considerably more challenging. Will the Prime Minister ensure that a siloed savings requirement is not applied to our capacity to direct the overseas element of our national security strategy or our ability to represent the country abroad?

[The Prime Minister]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on his election as the Chairman of the vital Foreign Affairs Committee of this House. I know that he will always speak out without fear or favour, and that he is vigorously independent.

My hon. Friend is right that the soft power that we have as a country, whether through the British Council, the BBC, the Foreign Office or our overseas aid budget, which I was just talking about, is vital not just to fulfil our moral obligations but to project power, influence and British values in the world. I want to ensure that those things continue. He talked about the BBC funding being a wheeze. I am not sure that I would call it that. It was part of the BBC making sure that it found efficiencies, as other parts of the public sector were.