Category: Government and Public Sector

Your government needs you

Ran across this on another blog – it’s a link to a request for ideas from the Foreign Office.  Stephen Hale, the  FCO Head of Digital Diplomacy,  is looking for ideas for how social media can be used to address global economic problems.  He’s gathering ideas in advance of the economic summit happening on London in April.  In his own words:

Can the web can help answer the major questions of economic action? How would you like to contribute to the conversation? Would you prefer to engage with government on official websites, or elsewhere? What web tools would you use to stimulate debate? Where on the web are the lively debates already taking place? Who should we collaborate with? What lessons can we learn from similar exercises? – 

More information on Stephen’s blog (see how blogging puts us on first name terms already!) which incidentally has lots of other really interesting stuff about how the web can work in government 

You cannot hope to bribe or twist…

I’m currently part way through Nick Davies’ book Flat Earth News,  which highlights what he describes as a crisis in journalism, and the role that  PR and political manoeuvering plays in it.  So I was  interested to read the report in today’s PR Week about a Reuters Institute study on the same subject, What’s Happening to Our News, which decides that, all things considered,  PR isn’t a cancer eating at the heart of journalism (so that’s alright then…).

I recognise a lot of what Davies says about a crisis in journalism, driven by cost-cutting and staff shortages, and the demands of  a 24-hour news machine.    I think his section laying into  PR is  actually pretty weak.   He’s much stronger on the evils of political manipulation of news and in particular the role of the CIA and the Bush administration’s machinations in the  ‘war on terror’.

What Davies doesn’t touch on (unless it’s in the bit I haven’t read yet) is the  effect the media has on politics.    Outside Whitehall it might appear that the politicos are pulling all the strings.  Inside it often feels quite different (this was touched on in Digby Jones’ evidence to the select committee.  A second  name check in a week for Lord Jones!)   Far too often serious political issues are reduced to their simplest possible essence – who’s “in” and who’s “out” ? Was that a gaffe? Who’s been disloyal to the leader?  Who’s making a leadership bid?  I can’t think of anything less likely to encourage intelligent  debate than the Today programme’s habit (thankfully ended) of wheeling in Nick Robinson to deconstruct political interviews immediately they’ve happened, to decode what the politician actually meant when he said X (Nick usually thought he meant Y, but sometimes he grudgingly agreed that he meant X but that X wasn’t what the Party needed to hear)  The issue of the damage caused by a cynical, confrontational media constantly trying to find out “why is that lying bastard lying to me?” was explored in John Lloyd’s book What the Media is Doing to Our Politics , which makes a good companion piece to Davies.

The title of this post, by the way, is the first line of a ditty I used to mutter to myself after a particularly difficult call:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,                                                                         thank God, the British journalist.                                                                                   But seeing what the man unbribed will do,                                                       There’s really no occasion to.

Does he mean us?

Digby Jones’ comments about the need to sack half of the British civil service raised a wry cheer in our house, where for once I found that I agreed with  bits of what the noble Lord Jones had to say.  Anyone who has worked in the public sector – I suspect particularly those who’ve worked in  Whitehall departments  – will recognise his description of the jobsworth civil servant who is shunted around from department to department when his line manager should really just offer a bottle of brandy and a pearl- handled revolver.  And I’ve  always  thought that the  misery that goes with  being a junior Minister can’t possbly be worth the remote possibility that one day you could be elevated to the cabinet and have a limo with a driver and a regular slot on Question Time.

There is, of course, another side to this.  Without naming names or specific departments (I want to keep working), I’ve seen more bullying behaviour, bad management, poor decision-making and futile work commissioned by Ministers than I could shake a stick at.  When all decisions, no matter how small, have to be taken by Ministers the decision making process becomes choked and inefficient.  When civil servants know that large chunks of the work they are being asked to prepare will never be acted upon, perhaps it’s no wonder that they aren’t as mustard-keen to complete it at breakneck speed as Digby might like (not that I’m suggesting that he was anything other than a beacon of good practice in his own dealings with the service).

The truly excellent people there are on both sides of the Minister/Official divide are battling daily against business processes which don’t work efficiently for either side – and more importantly don’t deliver best value for the public.  Whose fault that is, and what’s to be done about it are two questions that Digby didn’t really address.

Taking pot-shots from the sidelines won’t really change anything (and can seriously damage your career as the Civil Serf found out last year).  But open debate about the issue and floating some ideas for change can’t hurt.  A number of public sector blogs wrestled with this at the time and there’s a lot of public sector blogging still going on.  Perhaps new media can help let in some light on this one – and for those concerned about propriety here are the Civil Service guidelines on  blogging.   So join the debate –  we have nothing to lose but our inner-Sir Humphrey!

I Would Gladly Sell My House and All of Its Contents *

There is currently yet another campaign urging non-payment of the BBC licence fee going on with about 200,000 signed up so far.  A range of opponents of the BBC have been energised by Ross/Brand  to rage  against the broadcaster, which remains one of the  few  world class organisations the country still has.  As an ex-BBC staffer I’ve heard all the arguments against the Beeb, but it still seems to me that the arguments in favour are much, much stronger.  If you want to hear them rehearsed (with jokes), Stephen Fry does it extremely elegantly in podcast-form on his site.

The BBC itself supplied one of  the best anti-moral-majority -outrage arguments  ever.  Perhaps the fact that I saw this

  at an impressionable age is what made me the woman I am today.

Happy Christmas one and all, and let’s raise a glass to the ghost of Desiree Carthorse, who clearly still stalks the land.

* 

Living Life in Black and White

Increasingly it feels as though I’m living a secret life online, dipping in and out of all of the truly inspirational (well, OK, quite interesting) things that are happening in a world of PR somewhere else.  Google reader turned up this blog post today highlighting a range of great ideas for things I’d love to do myself and none sounding so close to the cutting edge of technology as to be impossible.    Then I turn my attention to the office I’m actually working in at the moment.  From here the online world feels like a technicolour Oz with me still stuck in sepia-toned Kansas.  Forget Facebook groups,  Twitter and webinars.  At the moment not only is there no digital strategy, I can’t even get security clearance to get through the internet firewall to update our website.   The notion that “Web 2.0 technologies have made participation more fun, accessible, instantaneous, trackable” is great, except it doesn’t feel that it has much to do with me at the moment; a month into this contract and wondering where’s the best place to start just to get the basics right.

Five reasons why money spent on PR is always worth it

Coming home on the tube yesterday I saw a headline in one of the freebie newspapers which said “Haringey Council blew £2m on PR”  The argument, depressingly familar to those of us who work in public sector communications, is that every penny spent on press officers means less for social workers, leading in this case directly to the death of Baby P.   Comforting myself with the thought that my source was hardly a paper of record, I googled the story this morning to see if any of the “proper” papers were running with it. I found this in the Telegraph, which repeats the argument pretty much exactly, making a direct link between the money spent on PR and the casework overload of the social worker in the Baby P case.

I am a PR consultant who works for public sector organisations (and therefore, obviously, am quite happy to grab cash and if possible food from the hands of widows and orphans), so I have a bit of a biased view of this one.  But I’m still pretty depressed at the frequency with which the PR = wasted money argument comes around.  I’ve spent most of my career in  publicly-funded bodies, and have always had at the front of my mind the fact that I am spending the public’s money on the projects I do,  so need to get value for money. (By the way, I appreciate the irony that I am now defending Haringey’s PR team, having criticised their performance over the Baby P case a couple of posts back – perhaps it means Haringey just aren’t spending enough…)

So, off the top of my head, here are five quick reasons why it’s worth public bodies spending public money on communicating with the public – and how depressing to have to trot them out yet again.

1.  There’s little point in spending very large amounts of money in providing services for the public and then failing to let them know how/where to access those services

2.  It’s good for local democracy to let people know how their elected representatives are spending their money.  Even if individuals don’t personally need to access all local services it’s good that they know that the Council does more than just emptying the bins.  If people understand how their Council Tax is being spent,  they can object if they want to, which is one way of keeping the link between local government and local people alive.  Comms budgets often pay for public consultations on contentious local issues.

3.  Media training doesn’t mean turning out hordes of automata who just parrot a party line.  It means helping people who are not professional communicators deal with the pressures of media scrutiny so that they can put their case as effectively as possible.

4. Press offices offer an invaluable resource of information and contacts for journalists – bet the Telegraph journo who sourced the quotes for this story gets lots of help from PRs!

5.  As a proportion of Haringey’s overall operational budget, £2.2m is peanuts.  I think I read that the total budget was somewhere north of £250m (I could always call their press office to check…)  So the PR budget represents just a shade under 1%.

If anyone wants to add more I’d be happy to hear them, and store them up for the next time this story comes around.

And finally, why is the PR industry so bad at doing PR for itself?

Not a considered response

I worked at the DfES (now DCSF) when the Every Child Matters programme was being put in place so I know the pains that were taken to try to strengthen child protection services in the light of Victoria Climbie’s death.  It is a far from perfect system but the tools are there for local authorities to use and the emphasis on putting children’s interests first now runs through every branch of the child-related public services.  So why is the response to Baby P’s death so predictable and totally enraging?  An enquiry announced, another debate about whether or not we are demonising social workers and (at least as far as I can see) no heads rolling, no-one held accountable, no-one accepting responsibility.  How well-paid, free of bureaucracy, supported by mangement and empowered to act do you have to be in order to realise that this is wrong?  And how on earth can you not resign immediately it becomes clear that it happened on your watch?

Trying to drag this round to being a comms issue; I notice that there is no statement easily findable about this on the front page of the DCSF site – you have to dig about a bit to find this, or the children’s commissioner’s site (although you can find a statement from the Deputy Commissioner welcoming the new enquiry).  Haringey’s statement is a click thorugh from a front page headline “Statement regarding government support for Haringey”, which implies to a casual reader that everyone is rallying round this authority which is having a bit of a bad time at the moment.

So, deep breath, rant almost over, red mist starting to clear… What has to happen before we get to the point where we can say “never again” with some confidence?  Is that possible – or are there some people who are just so wicked that their actions can’t be legislated for?  I really do appreciate how difficult the work of social services is, so what do we as a country have to do to support them to allow them to deliver better services?  Is it just a matter of better funding?  And if the response to disasters is always like this, how do we get people to swallow the tax-increases that might be needed to pay?