Tag: government communication

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 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?