Author: Penny

As the title of my blog suggests, I am a freelance PR working mainly in the public and voluntary sectors, on projects from small scale copywriting to big social marketing projects. In my time I've worked for government departments, the BBC and a range of other organisations of various stages of dysfunctionality. Now I'm trying to get to grips with the world of the micro-business and facing up to the recession with a fair bit of trepidation.

Big Society – what next?

The news that Liverpool is pulling out of a Big Society pilot project, blaming cuts and central government inaction, was met with a certain amount of grim satisfaction yesterday.  It seemed like vindication for those who’ve been arguing that the Big Soc is incompatible with the cuts affecting the voluntary sector.    The announcement that Big Society head honcho, Nat Wei is cutting down on his voluntary hours because he needs time to earn a living got a similar response.  People are lining up to say “I told you so” about the  failure of the Big Society (look, I can do it too) without being able to offer an alternative vision of how to provide public services  at a time of swingeing cuts (no, I haven’t got one either).

The Big Soc has always been hampered by its supporters’ inability to explain how it would actually work.  The best summary I’ve heard of the problems with the BS was provided by Anna Coote from NEF at an RSA event at which the audience lined up to condemn the flakiness of the idea – and, if memory serves, the BS defender talked about the importance of people talking to each other on buses.  In the absence of a convincing narrative about how the Big Soc would work in real communities with serious problems, it’s been too easy for its opponents to paint it as a fig leaf for cuts.  (As one respondent to a  Third Sector/LGC survey of attitudes to the BS said “It might work in Ambridge, but not in the real world”)

So, we’re all agreed.  It was a difficult idea raising lots of practical problems, and it’s not going down well.  Rather than carping, though,  I’m intrigued by what happens next.  Given that the Tories aren’t going to change their minds and release more funds to support services, how are they to be delivered in future?  There’s obviously a role for public, private and third sectors to work together – how is that to be done?  Does it matter if it’s done differently in different locations (the chaos that Nicholas Boles said he would welcome in place of central planning)? Can a practical structure now be hung onto the smaller government/bigger communities/locally driven  idea, which many people find appealing when it’s explained properly.  What’s the transition plan?  If the objective is to get from central planning/central funding to locally provided, tailored services,  how do we get from A to B without decimating services en route?  Is the government completely the wrong institution to be driving this at all (a point made in CIPRtv’s examination of communications issues around the Big Society)?  And (another opportunity for me to say I told you so), how come the comms around this central plank of government policy has been handled so very badly that almost no-one seems to understand what the Big Society is all about?

Missing the Minister’s box

I had the unusual sensation of feeling sorry for Nick Clegg when I caught up with the Sunday Telegraph’s story about his refusal to accept new business via the red box after 3pm.

For the record, this does not mean that he is knocking off early to have a game of frisbee in St James’s Park with Miriam and the kids.  It means that if a civil servant wants him to respond to a query or approve a decision, the paperwork has to be  with Private Office by 3pm – else it will have to wait til the next day. That’s all.  The stuff in the box is  what gets taken home to be ploughed through at night, once the day’s meetings have been done.  Box times are just a signpost for officials, they have nothing to do with how Ministers spend their days.   There are, in any case, very few decisions in Whitehall which absolutely MUST be taken within 24 hours (whatever civil servants think), and I’m sure that if Clegg’s private office felt they had one of those on their hands after the 3pm deadline they’d find a way of getting in touch with him about it.

Oh, and far from it being unprecedented to close the box early, Ruth Kelly did the same when she was at DfES.  Her deadline was 4.30, I seem to remember.  It caused the odd raised eyebrow at the time, but the Department didn’t spin wildly out of control as a result.

Now, presumably the Telegraph knows all this.  So why are they gunning for the Deputy Prime Minister?

Foopball, foopball, ra, ra, ra

In the wake of the coverage of Andy Gray/Richard Keys, I had  a blog post floating round my head yesterday about the  crushing ubiquity of football and the culture that surrounds it.    Had I got round to writing it,  it would have made some of the points made by Catherine Bennett  in her piece for today’s Observer Forget getting rid of sexism in sport.  Let’s get rid of sport:  an end to the blokey horror if it all, say I, to the absolute  inescapableness of it, to the obscenity of the money (pretty much any story in the Observer’s Said and Done column most weeks is enough to make you want to ban the game completely), to the new social necessity of following a team.

I blame Rupert Murdoch, for enabling the Topsy-ish growth of the Premier League, and Nick Hornby , whose   Fever Pitch made it socially acceptable for football to spread beyond the back pages, wheedling its way into every part of daily life like honey fungus.

Bennett makes another good point in her piece about the pervasiveness of sports chatter in the media: the low percentage of women and girls who enjoy the competitive nature of team games:

the Women’s Sports and Fitness Foundation finds that 36% of women “enjoy the competitiveness of sport”, as opposed to 61% of men. Why, then… should the sport-averse be subjected to extended sessions of compulsory sport, as if they were still in class, forced out into the mud to contemplate the skills of the school elite?

Good point.  And why, if this is the case, are the government so keen to promote competitive sport in schools at the same time as they cut School Sports Partnerships to the detriment of sports that girls might actually enjoy?  I played lots of competitive sport at school – netball, hockey, rounders for the school, a county trial for hockey.  All at the point of my PE teacher’s gun.  I hated every minute and gave up sport as soon as I could, only to rediscover the pleasures of exercise years later when – by then pretty unfit – I joined a gym.

Professional sport is entertaining enough to watch,  but it isn’t important.  I do  not feel it will be a national disgrace if “our medal tally” is worse at the London Olympics than it was in Beijing.  I do not care that ‘we’ are unlikely to win the World Cup again in my lifetime.  I was delighted about the Ashes, but no-one would have died if England had lost.  Sport, like most other things in life, is more fun to do yourself than watch someone else do.   Can we get a bit of perspective back please?

Come on down for Opportunity Costs!

I’d missed the news that Michael Gove  banned the use of the phrase Every Child Matters at the Dept for Education until this week.   This is what you get if you try to find the old ECM site online.

For the record, ECM was set up after the Laming enquiry into the death of Victoria Climbie.  It tried to integrate children’s services, closing the gaps between services previously offered in isolation by schools,  social services and the NHS.  It included the expansion of Sure Start and major changes to the way that local authority services were provided.  It was, depending on your political tastes, either a hugely bureaucratic, over-engineered response to a problem which needed a simpler approach; or an ambitious attempt to address systemic problems in services which  left  young people at risk.  I applauded the intentions of ECM even as it drove me temporarily insane.

I worked on the comms  strategy at the beginning of the programme, addressing audiences in every branch of the public sector,  trying to change the way thousands of people worked.  Our approach was to try to work in partnership with the people who delivered services.  It made sense to us to have the people who were going to make the policy work in practice help shape it – the “if you want to go fast, travel alone; if you want to go far, travel in a group” philosophy.

The pace of progress at the start drove me nuts.  My old boss likened the endless trail of seminars and discussion documents and presentations to bushtucker trials, in which we had to eat our diet of toasted kangaroo balls and cockroach biscuits in order to win the opportunity to come back and do it all again next week.  Eventually, despondent at the rate of progress, I moved on to other things.  It’s taken me  years to realise that my expectation of a faster pace to such massive change was unrealistic.

All those hours of work,  the cost of making change happen so that services would be better in the long run, are now being written off – and I doubt figure  in the government’s balance sheet of the savings they are claiming from slimmed-down public services.

A GP taking part in PM‘s debate about health service reforms made the same point to Andrew Lansley this week, asking whether the costs of redundancies, retraining  and waste due to the scrapping of systems figured in his costs for NHS reform :  “I’ve been around for a long time and I’ve seen many reorganisations, and one of the problems is that there doesn’t seem to be any publication of the true costs of these reorganisations, which often take a couple of years to take effect…”    Lansley argued, as ministers always do, that this time the reform was for keeps, so the costs would be cancelled out in the long run.  I wonder.

I also wonder about the government’s approach to working with partners.  They give the impression of wanting to go very fast indeed and opting to do it solo.  The last post highlighted the apparent state of relations between DCLG and local government.  DoH seems to be working in the face of opposition from its key stakeholders too (though I’m not inside the Department so don’t know what conversations are taking place.)  As the Observer’s secret civil servant pointed out in today’s paper, this may have far-reaching consequences:

“Doctors have raised the tempo of the debate and, unlike teachers or policemen, they can comfortably play politics as public deference to medical professionals is strong. Government advisers are not alarmed. The coalition can win this fight. It will pass its health bill in the House of Commons and should get it through the Lords. The new health system will get built but the real risk is what happens then. If doctors are alienated and angry and patients worried and confused, the system won’t work. … Ultimately, this mess may even lose the coalition the next election” 

Irretrievable breakdown or intolerable cruelty?

The link between local and central government is currently providing the best soap opera  in politics.  It’s also offering a case study of what happens when a government’s relationships with one of its key stakeholders disintegrates.

In the face of sizeable cuts in funding for local government, bloggers and tweeters are lining up on the Local Authorities’ side, despairing of the way cuts are being handled.  Arguing that relations between local and central government have never been so bad, LibDem Council Leader, Richard Kemp,  has likened Secretary of State Eric Pickles and his sidekick, Grant Shapps, to Laurel and Hardy; called for Pickles to be sacked and, according to his blog,  written to the new non-exec director on the DCLG board to request that she investigate “school boy howlers” being made at the Department.  Normally mild-mannered members of the LGA are said to be enraged by the repetition of the argument that frontline services can be saved if overpaid council leaders take pay cuts and hack away at back office staff.  The Mayor of Middlesbrough has accused Pickles of refusing to listen to those with experience on the ground when it comes to funding.  (Eric certainly doesn’t give the sense of a man who feels the need to listen.  In size, accent and attitude he reminds me of Charles Laughton in Hobson’s Choice:  “take that or none”.)

The jockeying for position is, of course highly political and despite protestations that power is being devolved to a local level, it reveals how much is being held at the centre.

The LGiU blog has suggested that the recent spat about bin collections was a shot across councils’ bows to remind them who’s boss.   The Spectator argues that Pickles has bigger fish to fry:   “Communities are being empowered; councillors are not.  Pickles has introduced a radical agenda on which the dust will take time to settle. The Bill’s political genius is to devolve responsibility and enforce cuts without relinquishing financial control.”

What’s clear is that neither side are making much of a fist of hiding their animosity.  Lambeth and Camden councils are blaming the government for the cuts as they consult locally to decide which services will go.   Pickles is arguing that wasteful local government is to blame for the UK’s budget deficit.  For a non-combatant the entertainment value is terrific – as long as you can ignore the potential outcome of the cuts.  Government’s relations with such a major partner can’t have been as bad as this since the days when then-Education Secretary David Blunkett was trapped in a cupboard by demonstrators at the NUT’s conference.  How long will it take for a proper working relationship to be re-established?

So, farewell then COI?

A roundtable of comms experts is working with government to decide the future of COI.  I wrote about the beginnings of the process here a while ago.  If today’s  story in PR Week is to be believed, by the time the white smoke rises from their deliberations, COI will have been ‘re-modelled’ out of all recognition.

I worked at COI briefly a couple of years ago – on secondment  to the Strategic Consultancy  team.  It was an eye-opening 12 weeks, which left me feeling honour-bound to defend my former colleagues from criticism  – even though quite often I agreed with what the critics were saying.

The commonest complaints from civil servant comms leads were that the services COI offered to departments were expensive and too often not of high enough quality; and that they added little value when they managed projects (but still levied sizeable management fees).  In COI’s defence  I argued that, as in any agency, there were good and bad practitioners at COI, that the experience of  government that resided in COI was a great asset to draw on, and that some of the work they did was excellent. However, COI isn’t like any other agency and shouldn’t behave like one.

There’s an inevitable tension when one organisation is asked both to manage government’s relationships with its suppliers and  actively compete with them for business.   I don’t think COI managed that tension well, although in fairness they shouldn’t have been asked to.   It was interesting that, when last year’s 40% staff cut at COI was announced, there wasn’t a  queue of PR professionals lining up to defend it.

How government comms is going to be re-structured is still up in the air – so what role might COI play  in a new comms landscape?  After a bit of thought I’ve come up with some possible roles.  COI could:

  • continue in its role as government’s media buyer
  • continue to run the frameworks – though they will have to be smaller and  less bureaucratic in future;  some question the need for them at all
  • act as a central training body for government communicators who still tend to be  generalists rather than specialists; it could also run the professional networks which exist between departments  (though this begs the question of the overlap with GCN, and whether both are needed)
  • facilitate the big cross-departmental comms campaigns which need high level co-ordination and administration
  • continue to work as a specialist recruitment agency for government – although GovGap‘s impact on the market and its in-built advantage over other suppliers enrages many in public sector recruitment.

None of them feel like compelling arguments for COI to continue.  I hope there’s something I’ve missed, but I fear there may be more bad news at Hercules Road once the consultation is over.

The importance of ignoring economists

One of my already broken new year’s resolutions was to stop worrying about the economy.  This is on the grounds that I’m occupied pretty full-time worrying about things  in my own life that I can at least hope to change, without putting in extra hours fretting about things that  are beyond my control.

It’s quite hard not to worry about UKPlc’s GDP, though, especially if you’re woken every morning  by the massed doom-mongers of the Today programme (I loved  Chris Addison’s description of Today this weekend as: “Grumpy Old Men without jokes. If Today had a face it would look like Walter Matthau sucking a lemon”, and so it would)

So, when I am overwhelmed by the looming disasters and scary predictions about interest rates being peddled by Humphrys et al, I will try to remember this:

The future  performance of the economy, the passage from good times to recession or depression and back, cannot be foretold.  There are more than ample predictions but no firm knowledge.  All contend with a diverse combination of uncertain government action, unknown corporate and individual behaviour and, in the larger world, with peace or war.  Also with unforeseen technological and other innovations and consumer and investment responses.  There is the variable effect of exports, imports, capital movements and corporate, public and government reaction thereto.  Thus the all too evident fact: the combined result of the unknown cannot be known.

That’s JK Galbraith , who knew what he was talking about, on economists.   He seems to agree with my friend Philomene – although in rather more thoughtful language.  “Economics a science?” she once screeched at me in  disbelief.  “Witchcraft is more scientific!”

The value of being big

Roused from my post-Christmas torpor by today’s news that government is asking ad agencies to work for nothing, and that KPMG is offering Whitehall free work on potentially multi-million pound contracts.

Lest we are overwhelmed by KPMG’s public-spiritedness (government now comes under their CSR agenda apparently, bless), it should be pointed out that this is a time-limited offer.  What they appear to be doing is paying to have their feet under the table at the point when programmes are ready to be delivered, so they can exploit their incumbent’s status to keep the work rolling in future, when I doubt it will be on such generous rates.  This makes good business sense for KPMG.  There is, of course,  no small business in the country that could afford to do the same.  It’s a game only the big boys can play.

I drafted what follows  before Christmas but didn’t post it because the blog already felt depressing enough.  Feeling stronger now, so here goes:

At the moment, whenever two or more freelancers are gathered together there are a couple of standard rumours under discussion: that there still might be bits of work commissioned in the new year on the old spend-the-money-that’s-left-before-the-next-financial-year-starts pattern;  that there might be work of a rather ghoulish nature, managing the closing down of  quangos; that the scale of change being introduced could mean that work will have to be commissioned to smooth transition  in the public services.  The subtext to it all is, of course, simply “I REALLY want them to start spending money again.”

“They” won’t of course – and the other common topic of conversation is that even if they did the money would go to one of the big four consultancy houses  and the little fish won’t get a sniff of it.  Government commitments to help small business sound a bit hollow out here in consultancy land.  As the giant companies with the big bags of swag contracts go through the process of renegotiating their agreements with government, smaller shops are going under at a frightening rate. 

Here’s something else that was written before Christmas – BIS‘s paper on backing small business

 This new strategy demands a relentless focus on the needs of small and medium sized businesses. They provide nearly 60% of our jobs and 50% of GDP. They will benefit from the measures we are taking across the whole economy but Government is clear that they have specific needs and can be disproportionately burdened by poor Government policy. This has not been sufficiently reflected in Government’s attitude or orientation over the last decade. This Government is committed to a comprehensive effort to prioritise small businesses and those that run or aspire to run them.
 
Thanks for that. 

Laughter and madness and Grim-all-day

The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi  is a theatrical history containing tyrannical parents, insanity, insolvency,  alcoholism, depression, debtors’ prison,  child stars, singing ducks, performing dogs, and ruinously expensive tours of the provinces.   (I’m enjoying it so much that I’m writing this to put off finishing it.)  More than anything  it’s a study of outrageous artistic excess.

To cash in on Nelson’s popularity as national hero after the Battle of the Nile, the management of Sadler’s Wells turned the theatre’s cellars into a huge reservoir, tore up the stage and built a huge “wooden bathtub” in its place which could hold 65,000 gallons of water  and in which they re-fought naval battles with miniature ships.  On opening night:

 from downstage the miniature fleet floated to the front, its sails and pennants shifting in the wind, processed before the orchestra and fired a salute to the audience that put them ‘in an extacy’… The ships readied for battle.  Deafening volleys were fired on both sides as custom-built fireworks rained down… puncturing sails, dismasting ships and punching holes in enemy hulls.  shipwrecked children struggled in the waves, mimicking drowning with their feet planted firmly on the bottom of the tank… smoke rolled out  into the auditorium… [and] when it cleared revealed the coup de theatre, a calm sea bobbing with flotsam and the Franco-Spanish fleet smashed and beaten.

I’d have paid to see that – or to have seen Grimaldi go on a balloon ride: through the proscenium and over the heads of the audience. 

Proving that there’s nothing new under the sun, Stott describes a publicity stunt  in which  clown Dicky Usher:

sailed from Southwark Bridge to Cumberland Gardens in a washtub drawn by four geese. Landing two and half hours later he swapped his tub for a carriage lashed to eight tomcats which he then intended to drive to Waterloo Road.

I had no idea about any of this:  that before the Victorians got their hands on it pantomime was both artistically vibrant and politically subversive; that performances could be so volatile  that Sadler’s Wells had spikes fitted to the front of the pit to stop members of the audience rushing the stage; that threats of price rises in 1809 led to months of rioting.

A re-fighting of the Battle of the Nile  is my suggestion for the Olympic opening ceremony – a surefire crowd pleaser (possibly not for the French, but it was a long time ago and hey, we’re all friends now).  I wish I had the money to bid for the film rights.

Waiting for the cat in the hat

The sun did not shine/ it was too wet to play/ so we sat in the house/ all that cold, cold, wet day.  I sat there with Sally/ we sat there we two/ And I said, “How I wish we had something to do“.

It’s been a cold, grey, pinched and anxious December.  Gloomily overcast during the day and properly dark by mid-afternoon.  It’s been too grim to want to venture out, even to escape our drafty old house, which never heats up properly in mid-winter.  I have shivered through the month wrapped in a fleece hoodie – surely the least attractive garment ever invented – plus thermal socks and leggings, clutching a hot-water bottle. 

I’ve been trying to devote myself to the necessary job of re-focusing the business plan, thinking up alternative sources of income to fill the gap  left by public sector cuts.  But in all honesty, at the moment it feels like whistling in the dark and it’s hard to keep plugging away at it.    I need a break – an odd thing to say after the relatively idle few weeks I’ve just had – but for once I’m going to make like an office-worker and knock off for Christmas.  Time to stop worrying about work and money – or the lack of them – and enjoy what looks like is going to be a properly snowy Christmas with the family.