Category: Government and Public Sector

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 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. 

Poor hit hardest

Struck by the frequency with which I’ve been hearing the phrase “the poor will be hit hardest by …” on news bulletins about government announcements, I did a quick google search on it.   This is, admittedly, not a rigorous way of testing the likely outcomes of policy (although it is  a plea to journalists to find more original ways of describing it),  but it does indicate a trend.

Since the summer it seems “the poor” have been or will be hit hardest by cuts imposed in the spending review,  energy price reforms and cuts to council funding (Hackney gets an 8.9% cut , Dorset gets 0.25% rise).  Left Foot Forward claims that “child benefit cuts will hit the poor hardest in the long run; inevitably the same can be said for cuts in housing benefit.  Andy Burnham argues that the pupil premium will see “poorest schools lose cash” and  House of Commons library research agrees.

The dread phrase hasn’t been used to describe cuts to EMA but given what it was set up to do, perhaps journalists felt it was superfluous.   If today’s IFS report that government policies will push 200,000 into poverty is right, it looks like this is spot on:

Re-shaping government comms (a work in progress)

PR Week announced this week that government spending on comms has halved since May, and that Matt Tee,  the  Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary for Comms,  leaves his post in March and won’t be replaced.

The outlook for government comms is pretty clear.  In the short-term at least there isn’t going to be much.  Some campaigns will continue because they’re  too important (or too difficult) to cancel.  Most  ideas won’t get off the ground.  As the scale of the changes to public services becomes apparent, a need may be identified to do a bit more public communication to explain what’s happening, but we won’t be able to devote the kind of resources to the job that might have been made available  a few years ago.

There are, of course, some “process” questions to be answered as cuts are made.   For example: the Cabinet Office master-minded  last year’s cross-government communication in preparation for a possible swine-flu pandemic.  With  smaller budgets and fewer hands on deck – and no representation at the most senior levels of government – who will do that next time?   But that’s starting to feel like the wrong question to be asking.

I hope that Matt Tee is using the months he has left in post to shape a review of government comms and the role of COI  that doesn’t  try to deliver the same kind of communications on a smaller scale (and isn’t just about saving the taxpayer money).  It needs to ask the classic question for any strategy – what are we trying to achieve?  What  rightly belongs to government to communicate and what does not ?  If decentralisation is the new reality, what does that mean for communication from the centre?  What responsibility  for communicating with citizens and workforces should rest with local authorities (and how will they pay for it)?   How does government use  the cleverer, cheaper, more flexible, more customer-centric approaches to communication possible online?   And how do you change departmental structures and a Whitehall culture which seems to have made attempts to do this in the past such a nightmare?

Fretting that we’re losing the COI’s bulk purchasing power and expertise in managing procurement, as some people are, supposes that once budgets return to pre-crash levels there will be an appetite to get back to the kinds of campaigns that were a feature of the past five years.  I just don’t think that’s going to happen.  If it did it would mean that a fantastic opportunity to re-configure comms completely had been missed.

The language of welfare

I cheered  this morning when I read on  Twitter a plea for  a “nuanced debate about benefits, which doesn’t assume polar split between the hardworking & benefit scroungers.”  Yes, please, but it feels like a long way off.

Much of the debate about cuts  has seemed to concentrate on cases at the further extremes.    The debate about housing benefit  focused on the argument that it’s not fair for hard-working taxpayers (HWTs) to subsidise workshy benefit-dependents living in expensive houses in central London, so benefits must be capped.  Jeremy Hunt raised the spectre of large families with lots of children being supported by HWTs when changes to child benefit were being discussed.

The biggest HWT issue of all is benefit given to the long-term unemployed – too easily demonised as a workshy mass who can’t be bothered to work (but want money for fags and booze and have lots of kids).

The World at One’s package on the welfare reforms proposed today was illustrated with an interview with two women from the Glasgow district of Easterhouse, where Ian Duncan Smith was first converted to the cause of welfare reform.  Neither of them had worked in a decade, one had spent the past ten years taking drugs.  Both felt that threats to take their benefits away were disgraceful and that, for different reasons,  they couldn’t be expected to work.  However liberally-minded you are  it’s  hard to argue that a system which allows this is a good one – although the question of exactly what kind of work they might actually be able to do inevitably springs to mind.

The Glaswegian duo though, shouldn’t be used to represent everyone who needs the support of benefits.  As it happens, housing benefit is far more likely to be paid to HWTs to help out with high living costs caused by a shortage of affordable housing than to feckless families in penthouses in Kensington.   The long-term unemployed haven’t  all made a lifestyle choice to be on benefits – many are qualified, highly motivated, clever people,  desperate to work in an economy where there are no jobs and little in the way of accessible, affordable childcare.

I don’t think anyone is arguing that the welfare system doesn’t need to be reformed.  Drawing battle lines between the “undeserving poor” and the rest of us, though,  just  generates heat without light.   Labelling those who accept benefits as scroungers; pleading that it’s “not fair” to pay for services we ourselves don’t need, undermines support for the whole system and the social good it generates for everyone.   Time, I think, to claim back the notion of “fairness” before the welfare state is dismantled around us.

How do you prove you’re resilient? Work in the public sector

A depressing entry in the Guardian’s cutsblog suggests that the image of public sector workers as plodding, risk-averse jobsworths will count against them when it comes to taking some of the  2 million jobs that the private sector is poised to deliver any day now.

Enough recruitment consultants have been quoted in PR Week saying that public sector-ites will be at a disadvantage in the jobs market to have spooked me into attending a CIPR/VMA event looking at how hard it might be to move from public to private sector.   Inevitably the hardest thing to prove when you’ve worked in the public sector is that you have the commercial acumen to make it in private business.  Otherwise, it seems  the skills that employers are looking for are, encouragingly, the ones that you develop as a means of survival in the public sector –  resilience,  managing change, leading teams, influencing stakeholders,  a willingness to push back against difficult managers (Lord, have I got some stories to tell…)

Transferable communications skills

Having worked in comms in both sectors, I’d say that the skills you need to succeed are pretty much the same for either.  My starter list would include  a continuous focus on the audience, a sound understanding of the market you’re working in,  imagination, flexibility, tenacity, a sharp eye for managing budgets and people, an understanding of strategy (and how it differs from tactics),  a willingness to get stuck into delivery (and the practical know-how), a healthy respect for deadlines,  the political nous to navigate  layers of management, good writing skills and an eye for detail.  I see no reason why having the skills to work in one should somehow bar you from working in the other.

The importance of social networks

I was struck by how few people at the event said they felt confident  using social media as part of their job-hunting armoury.  Sadly, opting out isn’t an option.  Research suggests that 100% of recruitment consultants use LinkedIn as a tool to identify (and weed out) candidates for posts, and that the size of your network is important.  Something like 85% of them use Twitter for the same reason.  Not having an online presence suggests that you haven’t updated your skills in a decade and aren’t really playing the game – not having a LinkedIn account now is like not having an email address was ten years ago.

Barbara Gibson – our social media guru – recorded this  on her phone at the event I went to, demonstrating a neat way of gathering content for a blog or website at the same time as cementing a link with a potential contact – wouldn’t you be flattered if she asked to interview you?  And wouldn’t you put the link on your site too and link back to her?  Genius!

The point of opposition

During the Labour leadership election Richard and I talked a lot about what exactly it was that we were voting for (I know, I know, but we can’t afford to go out much).  Were we looking for the next Prime Minister – polished enough to win the confidence of media barons and banks,  someone to triumph in the 2015 leaders’ debates? Or were we looking for a Leader of the Opposition, who was focused on giving the government a good kicking every day for the next five years?  In the end I opted for the latter – I voted for Ed Balls – believing that a period of calm  reflection and sweet  reasonableness was a luxury that neither the party nor the country could  afford.

The deafening silence from the Labour leadership since the CSR (and the truly shocking outcome of the Tower Hamlets’ mayoral election); the lack of  an alternative economic plan and the seeming inability to mobilise against  the government’s programme fill me with real despair.  The job of pointing out the dangers of what’s being proposed seems to be being left  to  the IFS,  Nobel Economics Laureates and blogs.  The flood of communication from the Labour Party during the leadership campaign on email and Twitter seems to have dried up completely – they’re not even preaching to the converted at the moment.

One of the problems for any Opposition is that the big, dumb, easily-graspable lines the government is peddling: “This is fair.  It’s all Labour’s fault.  The education budget has been protected.  We’re all in this together” are so much easier  to fit into a headline than the nuanced analysis of the small print that you need to put the opposite view.    The Labour party needs to find ways to counter the belief that this is all unavoidable and it needs to find ways of getting a clear message out, fast.

I assume that the strategy is to build up a plan the party can unite behind and argue for in the long-term.  And I can see the value of not giving in to knee-jerk opposition for the sake of it.  The problem is that – as the man said –  a lie can be half way round the world before the truth has got its boots on.  The longer the “this is all Labour’s fault” line is out there unopposed, the harder it’s going to be to avoid the blame for what’s  coming next.

So how was the CSR for you?

Spent the day feeling maternal: filling hot water bottles and heating milk for my sick son while listening to the carnage of the Comprehensive Spending Review on the radio.  Noticed too late that the cats had caught a  squirrel and ripped it to shreds, leaving bits of tail scattered all over the garden.  Had it been a scene in a film the director would have cut it for being far too obvious…

Stra’tegy (n) art of war: art of planning

Every so often I agree with something  in the Daily Telegraph.  It happened again today.  I had to mark it somehow.

In the wake of a strategic defence review  which has given us new aircraft carriers but no aircraft to launch from them, Philip Johnston has identified a lack of capacity to think strategically as a major failing of British government.   The Public Admin Select Committee has come to the same conclusion: “We have all but lost the capacity to think strategically,” it said yesterday. “We have simply fallen out of the habit, and have lost the culture of strategy making.”

Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin was on the Today programme yesterday making the same point “We seem to be operating under the imperative of deficit reduction, there’s very little in what is being done now that really reflects deep and sustained analysis of what kind of country we want to be in ten or twenty years time. “

Hang on a minute while I climb on my high horse…

I had to smile when Jenkin said that a strategy “isn’t a document the government publishes and then sticks on a shelf” – this is, of course,  exactly what a strategy is in many  departments.  When I was there, there was an almost mystical belief that the  act of publishing a strategy  absolved everyone from the burden of delivering it.  I agreed with much of what Jenkin had to say, though – and have said quite a lot of it here in the past.  Dangerous short-termism?  Check.   Cuts taking precedence over serious policy review?  Why, yes.  Lack of effective cross-departmental working in government? Yup,  although the structures of government make that hard and things are getting better.

Jenkin was concerned that the strategic thinking module in the civil service training programme has been shrunk to one week.  I’d argue that that hardly matters if we continue to  cut the service to the bone  – more short-term thinking.  Oh, and one way of getting people to think strategically is to fund higher education  so that  subjects which teach people how to think  (not just  how to make money) survive.  We need far more historians and Classicists in government!  At least one of the Telegraph’s commenters seems to agree – almost.  “What’s lacking in modern Britain IMHO is a professional, well-trained and remunerated civil service formulating long-term options” he said, adding  ” and selling them to the government of the day” .  Well, it is the  Telegraph.

Middle class spread

 

The Daily Mail’s usually pitch-perfect sense of what its audience wants to hear hit a bum note a while ago with an article about   middle class workers who used to earn £80k+ and are now wondering where the next set of school fees is going to come from.  The Guardian did the same thing a few weeks earlier with a similar piece looking at couples wondering how they can manage the child care and pay the au pair as they look forward to a future without a decent pension.  In both cases the comment threads were full of people pointing out that reality for most people doesn’t  involve school fees, multiple foreign holidays or domestic help; that no-one has a good pension these days and that our correspondents should just get over themselves.

If you read the papers regularly you could be forgiven for thinking that “middle class” in this county covers people on incomes between about £30,000 and, say £100,000.  It’s no doubt coloured by journalists – who tend to be  well paid – assuming that they represent the hard-working norm.  For the record, the Office for National Statistics reckons that median pay for a man in 2009 was a smidge over £25k; for a woman, a whisker above £22k. Despite what the Daily Mail says, the real middle class is not going to worry about having a cap of £50k put on its pension contributions.

Who the middle classes are – and what they earn – is now a matter of serious debate , as the government changes child benefit, university tuition fees and pensions  (I note that  outrage about cuts to housing benefit has been  more muted, presumably because  lots of journalists get child benefit while  few need help with the rent).   It’s making me wonder, again, about how we define class in this country (why it matters – if it does – is another post entirely).  Is it based on earnings and does it change as disposable income waxes and wanes?

As I sail, seemingly unstoppably, towards the ranks of the new poor (Christmas may be coming, but this goose ain’t getting fat), do I still count as middle class because of my degree, the careers I’ve pursued, the food I eat and the fact that I don’t hold my knife like a pencil to eat it?  Or am I now one of the undeserving poor?  Should I have known  this was going to happen before I so recklessly had my children?  Should I be worried that  Jeremy Hunt might try to re-possess them?