Government communications not about spin, says UK director

The room of public relations professionals listening to the executive director of UK government communications Alex Aiken when he dropped into Dublin last week was already envious of the fact that he had a government with a strategy to communicate.

When he told them that £500 million – “What’s that, about €600 million?” – was spent on UK government communications, the eyes of the Public Relations Institute of Ireland (PRII) collectively watered.

At one point, in 2010, it had been at least twice as much – the UK government “stopped calculating its communication spending when it exceeded £1 billion” – but the budget was halved just before Aiken was hired, because the service “couldn’t prove the value of what they contributed” and 2,500 staff were culled.

It still has 7,000 professional “government communicators”, part of the civil service, and the service will later this month launch the 2016-2017 government communications plan, comprising some 90 campaigns “that represent what the government wants to achieve”.

A scan of last year’s document reveals almost 50 pages on topics ranging from how it will “promote British values” to how it will evaluate itself.

Aiken advised the PRII members present, which included PR handlers for various government agencies, to “be more German”, by which he meant be more thorough on the use of data to evaluate their work, and to wean themselves off issuing “long and boring” press releases.

The job is about “public service”, he insisted, and “not about spin”.