Rob Blackhurst

The Guardian - Public

October 2004

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Last year's Phillis report on the Government Information machine was written in the kind of punchy prose that press officers love and officials hate. The Government Information and Communication Service was "not fit for purpose" and guilty of a litany of sins – ranging from short-termism and excessive "departmentalism" to poor training, morale and – the biggest vice of all- an "over-emphasis on news media atthe expense of broader communications"

Eighteen months later, the service has undergone an expensive letterhead change - to become the Government Communication Network. Whitehall's web designers, internal communicators and marketers – previously scattered across departments – have been shoehorned into the new organization. Howell James, the new Permanent Secretary for Communications, exuding bottled PR breeziness, claims that that PR's Cinderella role within Whitehall is changing: "In the past, it was difficult for communication to attract the attention of senior players. Now there is a voice at the top of the organization promoting it – just as there would be in Shell or IBM".

Many of the suggestions in Phillis – more joined up Government, more strategic planning, more direct communication – are hardy perennials that were all highlighted in the Mountfield Report in Labour's first term. There was, he admits, "a certain amount of dilution, lack of focus and no clear drive before"

By all accounts, James seems to have cleansed some of the mustiness from the Government machine. Lucian Hudson, Director of Communication at the Department of Constitutional Affairs, says that Whitehall Press Offices used to have their best staff poached by corporates. Now, with the difference in public and private pay narrowing, there's traffic in the other direction. Staff are happier because the byzantine board system, in which press officers had to ascend one step at a time, has given way to a far more meritocratic system in which anyone can apply for any job.

The ancient suspicions between press officers and policy officials also seem be waning. In the DCA, fast-streamers go through a blooding in the press office and are, according to Hudson, "proving very effective". It probably helps too that, since the Hutton report, media interest in the workings of press offices has moved once again from the front pages of the broadsheets to the inside pages of PR week.

The biggest changes in the new organization have been the import of what James calls the "customer-driven approaches" of private sector PR. Information Officers have seen themselves rebranded as "communications professionals". At the same time the media are seen to matter less.

According to Howell James "they are not a tremendously strong way of reaching the public directly". Julia Simpson, Head of Communications in the Home Office, goes further: "Under 24 year olds are not reading newspapers now. If we were to start a campaign on the fact that crime has fallen, 75% of communication would not be in the media"

Energies have now shifted from press to direct communication. The tangle of two thousand Government web addresses – often just a dusty repository for paper documents – are to be streamlined and linked to a new single Government website direct.gov.uk. From there, any piece of information about Government should be no more than four clicks away.

James wants to replace "too much glossy paper" with a brave new world in which personalised emails zip to and fro between civil servants and the citizenry: "If someone contacts a Government department by email they should get a personalised response". Organising personal replies to queries about, say, the MoD's policy on troop withdrawals in Iraq would require a revolution in the way Whitehall deals with the public since, until very recently, civil servants refused to give out their email address. It could also have eye-watering resource implications.

For the Home Office, direct communication has become a stealthy tactic to take on the tabloids. They are trying to alter perceptions that community sentences are irredeemably liberal by hiring local PR firms to hold consultations on the kind of community punishments that locals would most like offenders to serve – whether litter patrols in the high street or visiting lonely pensioners. Participants have proven far more likely to favour community sentences if they feel some kind of ownership over them.

The Department of Health have commissioned Opinion Leader Research to organize a "Deliberative Day" in which one thousand people representing a cross-section of the country will be bussed to a conference centre and presented with arguments on the future of social care and health. This will accelerate debates that normally happen over months in the media – and allow the Department to see how they to different strands of argument. This two-way communication has even reached the pages of Take-A-Break Magazine, who are distributing a questionnaire about the future of health services.

The Phillis Report grandilquently hoped that this kind of direct communication will "rebuild and arrest the breakdown in trust [between politicians and the electorate] over time". But, unless Government is to frog-march every citizen to a Deliberative Day, it's hard to see how this will dent their perceptions of politics that will continue to be formed mainly by the media. Improvements in the quality of customer services from the NHS or the Passport Agency will not restore faith in politicians. Even if citizens are satisfied, they are unlikely to associate this with Westminster politics – just as the electorate tends to give credit for lower waiting times to their local hospital rather than to the presiding Government Minister.

The breathless claims about the irrelevance of newspapers on which the "direct comms" revolution is based underestimates the extent to which they still define the agenda and running order of broadcast and internet news – from Radio 4 to the headlines on the MSN home page. Media may be becoming more segmented but, so far, news priorities remain remarkably uniform. And, anyway, political propriety regulations prevent Governments sending out leaflets telling the electorate, for instance, that crime is falling. The only way of communicating contentious messages to a mass audience is through the media.

Neither is direct communication immune from public cynicism. As Mike Grannatt, former Head of the Government Information Service, has pointed out "the credibility of direct communication by business, pressure groups and government is virtually the same as the credibility of nationality newspapers. According to research by Populus, nearly half the people asked saw an overall drop in truthfulness among organizations over the last Twenty years"

This means more investment, not less, in media handling. James can occasionally sound complacent about the quality of the Government press machine. ("You'll be hard-pressed to find as experienced press officers anywhere. They're extremely experienced and good at it"). But anyone who has

called a Government Press Office will know that getting a call back can be haphazard business. Mike Grannatt, now a private PR consultant says: " In the private sector we go to enormous lengths to make sure journalists are informed about issues with huge amounts of background briefing. We used to put journalists directly in touch with officials who could explain the issues. But Ministers and officials are now increasingly unwilling to take that risk".

The resources devoted to press handling in Whitehall often remain inadequate for the functions they have to fulfil. As on serving press officer told me: "There's all this emphasis on forward planning and strategy, but my phone is ringing off the hook and I don't have time to return my calls. If you asked most press officers about the Phillis report they'd probably know nothing about it"

Rob Blackhurst is a writer on public policy.