Category: Government and Public Sector

Communication isn’t the same as spin

Pop quiz: what do these   stories have in common?

The answer is, of course, they are united by rushed policy-making, an airy attitude to making announcements without expecting to be questioned about the details, and  spectacularly bad communications.

Ironically,the thing I like about this government  ( the only one) is its sense of urgency and its refusal to accept that there are any sacred cows that can’t be slaughtered.  I wish the last lot had been so bold.  But change on this scale needs to be based on sound evidence and detailed policy work, else it has a tendency to blow up in your face; and if you can’t explain what you’re trying to do, you can’t build the support you need to get it done.

The comms thing really pains me: poor briefing, confused messages, over-promising what cannot be delivered, insensitivity to the needs of important stakeholders,  confusion about key areas of policy.  They  need  good communications support and the need will get more acute as policy starts to be implemented.  Some optimists think that they are going to start realising this quite soon.  Regular readers will know, however,  that I am not  by nature a glass half full kind of a girl.  Government communication is firmly linked to spin and smears (Cameron said it again in his  leader’s speech yesterday).  The notions of PR, lobbying and campaigning are such an anathema to Ministers that they are effectively forbidding people to do it (even though an estimated 15% of new Tory MPs have a background in lobbying).  CIPR are trying to raise the issue of the value of public sector comms, but I doubt that will be enough.  They need comms help – how do we convince them?

Update:  I’ve just re-read this.  It worries me that it looks as though I think comms can or should be used as a cover for bad policy. It can’t and shouldn’t. My point is that if the government has a coherent strategy  that is driving what’s being done,  they have no chance of letting us know what it might be without a marked improvement in their comms.  The fact that it looks increasingly  as though no such coherence exists is worrying on many levels…

The brothers, a drama in several acts

The press’s  obsession with the psychodrama of Ed vs David Miliband is becoming completely ridiculous.  Ed’s speech yesterday was reported through the prism of how it might affect David; the news today is still about how David might feel about being beaten  by his little brother and the psychological damage each might have inflicted on the other.  At time of writing this, MiliD hasn’t announced whether or not he’s staying on in front line politics.  I assume he’s not, just to avoid  five years of fending off stories about fraternal rivalry, feuding  and factionalism led by the pop-psychologists of Fleet Street and the BBC.

I suggest this as a possible text for his statement this afternoon, and then a long holiday.

Where’s the audience for local TV?

Thank God I got round to finding out about local politics in Tower Hamlets. It’s  Dallas meets the Borgias with Oyster cards round here.

New readers wanting to catch up with a story of political double-crossing, conspiracy theories about religious fundamentalism,  suspicions of electoral fraud and  backroom deals in smokefree rooms can start here.  Those with a taste for a more analytical take on it all can pick it up here.

With such rich source material a local TV station broadcasting news about the area should be a hit – there’s a  news programme /soap opera combo just begging to be produced already.   But, even in Tower Hamlets, I fail to see  local TV of the type Jeremy Hunt was proposing on the Today programme this morning taking off.

As he explains it, the market has failed to give us a truly plural local media so he proposes to stimulate the market by relaxing ownership restrictions and allowing media companies to start hyper-local TV services to fill the gap.

He gave some examples of where local interest might be strong enough to make programming worthwhile.  It won’t fill a schedule, but, yes, football fans in Bolton may well want coverage of their team’s performance against Man Utd  (as long as ESPN/Sky/MUTV are prepared to share the rights – and Wanderers fans don’t already have access to the BBC, the internet or a newspaper).  People in Middlesborough may  want to see their Mayoral debates televised – a bit more of a stretch this one, but I can see the public interest argument for giving them the chance;  but it’s hardly going to be stripped through a week’s programming at 7pm – and if there isn’t a regular local channel for people to go to, how will they find it when it’s on?

It  may be a massive failure of imagination on my part, but I can’t see where the audience demand is for these services, or what the business model for a local TV service might be.  The  obvious conclusion is that creative use of the internet is the best way to achieve the  kind of services that Jeremy Hunt has in mind – a conclusion he seems to be reaching himself, if this speech is anything to go by.  Odd that he didn’t try to share this with us on Today.

Red tape as high art

The inimitable Neil MacGregor in the BBC’s brilliant  A History of the World in 100 Objects, talking about the administrative genius that kept the Ottoman Empire purring along for centuries.

If only there were any decent historians pressing the case for the importance of administrators  in the Cabinet.

Throwing out the baby and the bathwater

Waiting to hear Theresa May’s statement about the News of the World phone tapping story, I was depressed to hear the Home Secretary crowing that, while it took Labour 12 years to get round to compiling a strategy aimed at ending violence against women, her government was going to do the same within one year.

The Labour strategy (which I worked on briefly, so I may be biased) wasn’t perfect and had more to say on some subjects than others; but it was based on the largest public consultation ever undertaken on the subject.  It looked at domestic violence, sexual violence, honour killing, FGM, human trafficking  and  gender-related bullying among young people.  It included contributions from victims, asylum-seeking, traveller  and refugee women and almost every department in Whitehall, as well as the police, prisons service  and the CPS among others. It was a serious piece of work.  I’ll be interested to see what they come up with that’s different, but I can’t quite believe that they are really proposing to go over all that ground again – re-consult, produce another report, repeat the funding and governance negotiations between Whitehall departments  – and wait a year for it all to happen.  Why?  Can’t we just make what we have work?

The Dr Seuss guide to Labour

Upon an island hard to reach,/ The East Beast sits upon his beach/ Upon the west beach sits the West Beast./ Each beach beast thinks he’s the best beast. /Which beast is best?…Well, I thought at first/ That the East was best and the West was worst. /Then I looked again from the west to the east/ And I liked the beast on the east beach least.

Labour leadership election ballot papers go out today and I still have no idea who to vote for. I’m unable to make up my mind between MiliE and MiliD and  increasingly infuriated by the family-at-war,  feuding brothers storyline that the media seem to have decided is the narrative for the election.  I may just have repeatedly missed all the papers’ in-depth coverage of the Balls/Burnham/Abbott campaigns, family histories and relationships with Blair/Brown; but it’s hard to avoid the feeling that it’s been decided somewhere  that the right answer is a Miliband.  Now, which one?

Delivering the Big Society on a wing and a prayer

 When it was  elected the government pledged to: “support the creation and expansion of mutuals, cooperatives, charities and social enterprises, and support these groups to have much greater involvement in the running of public services”  (Cabinet Office, Building the Big Society, May 2010)

But

  • Capacitybuilders, the government agency responsible for supporting the third sector has just lost £1.3m of its budget
  • NCVO has revealed the results of  crowd-sourcing the reality of government cuts to the  sector – 700 responses to date, showing cuts of up to 90%  to some programmes of work
  • Charities warn that cuts threaten the Big Society idea:  What the government says it wants to achieve with the big society and how it is behaving are two different things. All this has created a lack of trust. Within weeks of this government starting out it has destroyed its relationship with the sector through its dishonesty.

“So is the big society a romantic Tory aspiration or cynical political sophistry? Follow the money and the story unfolds. Far from finding themselves cherished, charities are taking a hard hit from the first round of cuts”. (Polly Toynbee, The Big Society is a Big, Fat Lie )

I’ve been planning a post about the role of the sector  in a mixed economy of local service providers,  and the need for it to be properly funded,  for ages  but couldn’t get the right words into the right order.  Then I found this, so, with thanks to Progress, here’s the thing:   ” If local groups are to deliver more in the way of services, they need to coordinate their work with others in the same boat and work in consortia; to share good and best practice both in commissioning and delivery; and have access to capacity-building processes and skill development. They need to be genuine partners to local authorities to work on common programmes.  All these are under threat from a cuts agenda which regards back office functions as less important and therefore more readily discardable. “

The dash to academies

Flickr: Cogdogblog

Pretty obviously, most of the 1,900-odd  schools who “expressed an interest” in becoming an academy when the rules changed only did it to get hold of  information about what was on offer.  Jolly sensible too.  It never meant that they wanted to become academies and I’m astonished that Michael Gove was able to get away for so long with the pretence that there was a tidal wave of enthusiasm for the scheme which justified the  way the Bill was swept through parliament.  The fact that only 153 schools actually want to take up the offer having seen what it entails shows how  far they still have to go to persuade anyone of the value of the approach.

Anecdotal evidence from this part of London suggests that, at  a meeting of school governors from across the borough, no-one spoke in favour of the scheme and there was huge concern about the potential effects on the support offered to all schools by the local authority.   A period of properly managed communication and consultation about this – and about cuts to BSF  – might have explained the thinking, avoided some of what its claimed are misunderstandings about the approach (they’re not stopping all capital spending on schools, although have managed to give the impression that they are),  and, who knows, built a bit of support.  This might have meant that Mr Gove missed his chance to be first off the blocks with big cuts and new legislation in this shiny new government, but perhaps this is a case of more haste less speed?

Demonstrating value

I’ve been thinking again about how public services demonstrate their worth.  As the cull of quangos continues apace, more organisations are looking to see how to prove their value to government before it’s too late.  I’ve a presentation to write about this today, so I was interested in an item on the Today programme this morning on the subject.

The gist of the piece was that  although quango-cutting may be currently popular and demonstrate a macho approach to saving money, government should think about what’s worth keeping and be careful before it embarks on wholesale cuts.  The evidence shows high costs connected with cuts but often little in the way of added efficiency or long-term cost savings.  Jobs still need to be done, they’re just done by other agencies or bought back into government, leading to  a lack of focus and  reduced accountability.

I sympathise with my mate Menthol Dan’s theory that over the next few months we will see a mass cull of NDPBs, a slow disintegration of services, a realisation that something needs to be put back in place and then a process of re-assembling the pieces again.

I’ve said here before that the lack of hard evidence of achievement is a major problem for lots of quangos who don’t have the evidence up their sleeves to show how valuable they are.    It’s an issue for lots of voluntary sector bodies too – especially those who receive direct grants from government.   NCVO have been looking at the issue as part of their Measuring Outcomes for Public Service Users (MOPSU) programme – there’s a useful summary of the arguments here

The programme is starting to identify possible principles for voluntary sector bodies to use when they’re trying to manage the notoriously difficult job of measuring outcomes – maybe these could be transferred to NDPBs too ?

  • Any assessment must be based upon the experience of users rather than the interests of commissioners or providers.
  • Outcomes should be directly attributable to the intervention
  • The service should be assessed across different ‘domains’, which in turn are weighted to ensure that the service is making a demonstrable difference to the user, and that any difference reflects the different dimensions of any service
  • Any measures should carry as low a burden as possible, which in practice leads to the usage of regulatory data collected for existing purposes, if possible.

On the outside looking in…

… at the people on the inside looking out.

I’ve been hearing a lot from friends still inside the civil service recently.  They generally echo the Observer’s  secret diarist who noted a slump in morale and a Wacky Races -style race for the exits in his piece on Sunday.  Those who can (the able ones,  the ones with a good shot of getting a job elsewhere – the ones you wouldn’t want to lose) are moving hell and high water to get a job on the outside before the real unpleasantness starts and the competition becomes  more intense.  They are astonished by the speed and the scale of the policy changes that are being introduced and the cavalier way that they are being announced.

There are lots of reasons why civil servants might be feeling bruised – a pay freeze, cuts to redundancy packages and pension entitlements, job losses reckoned in the hundreds of thousands, being asked to impose big cuts on programmes they have worked for years on and often care passionately about.  No wonder that no-one wants to stick around.  The timing’s terrible though.  A strong civil service is vital if proposed  changes in health, education,  the criminal justice system, the administration of benefits and all the rest are going to be introduced effectively.

Let’s hope the Observer’s Man from the Ministry is wrong when he says:   A brain drain has begun and our brightest graduates have got the message that this is not a good place to be. The implications will not be felt for some time, but the results will be devastating to our society and our economy.

This also, of course, represents a challenge for the internal (and external) comms and HR functions of government departments.  Managing change on this scale while keeping all the regular plates spinning  is a highly skilled job.  I wonder if they’re going to be strengthening those teams  to help them do it?  Oh yeah, I forgot.