- 3-
If these provisional budgets meet with your approval, please may we request the first half payments for these projects, totalling £9,250, to be set against our 1983/84 allocation. This will bring total payment in 1983/84 to £17,790, which is £2,210 below the ceiling of £20,000. I understand that I will hear from you in the next day or two as to whether you would like to use this as an initial payment for another study. If so, we will then send you a provisional outline and budget.
Lastly, I should like to respond to the third paragraph of Andrew Colquhoun's letter of 29 February. Rosalind Marsden reached an agreement with my predecessor, Lawrence Freedman, some two years ago that we would produce two papers a year for the FCO at an average cost of £10,000 and a total annual cost of not more than £20,000. Chatham House has kept to this arrangement, despite the fact that the retail price index has since risen by more than 10%, and would be sorry if the Foreign and Commonwealth Office now wanted to depart from it.
I cannot accept the suggestion that we undertake three projects a year for the FCO, save in exceptional circumstances. It is not clear what is meant by the remark that the Latin American study is 'valuable for the Institute itself'. This and the other studies commissioned by the FCO are no different from the rest of our research activities: we very much hope that they are all valuable to those who finance them, to policy-makers, and to the wider public, as well as to Chatham House and its members. The organizations which finance our other policy studies do so on a full-costs basis. It would be unfair to them were we to take on more projects for the FCO at less than full cost. Furthermore, since that part of a project not paid for by the FCO has to be funded from our already overstretched general finances, to increase the number of such projects would be to place an additional burden on these resources.
I am sorry that all these requests have been left until so late in the financial year, and I very much appreciate your willingness to deal with them quickly. If there are any points you need to raise with me I shall be in my office all day Thursday until 5.00 p.m. and then away until Monday, 19 March.
7
Yours sincerely
Jon Peane
Joan Pearce
و
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.