Interview: Jenny Grey

It’s a beautiful, warm, springtime afternoon when I head along to 70 Whitehall to conduct my interview with Jenny Grey, executive director of government communications. I’d like to be feeling relaxed, but by the time I’ve fought my way through the hordes of Westminster tourists I’m a little flustered.

I’m not the only person on Whitehall feeling uncomfortable, though: many of the civil service’s communications professionals are feeling rather bruised and battered. The coalition’s commitment to spend less on advertising and marketing has combined with former comms chief Matt Tee’s review of the government’s communications systems and Martha Lane-Fox’s report on its digital operations to foster a number of major changes. The results have included redundancies, a loss of power and autonomy for departmental comms chiefs, a dramatic squeeze on comms budgets, and a whole new set of priorities around web development, online services and ‘nudge’-based policymaking.

It is against this backdrop that Grey has taken on her new role. Replacing Tee, who left a year ago, she has been tasked with reconfiguring government communications in ways that produce more bangs per buck. However, while Grey will have more responsibility than Tee – particularly given the new centralised communications planning arrangements (more on this later) – she hasn’t been given his rank of permanent secretary. In part this is down to a feeling in government that the smaller communications workforce would make it difficult to justify such a senior role.

Sunny disposition
In the Cabinet Office, Grey greets me with a big grin and a hearty handshake. My mood immediately improves. Can she always be this bright and cheerful, I wonder, or is it just because the sun is shining? From what I read, the answer is that hers is an all-weather smile. In an interview for PR Week, conducted in 2007 when she was at the Audit Commission, Grey was described as “approachable and friendly”, and at the time Matt Tee said that her “ability to balance the finesse of a heavyweight corporate practitioner with the soft-skills of a consumer public relations officer has catapulted her into a senior position at a relatively young age”.

Now aged 40, and newly appointed to the highly influential role of executive director for government communications, Grey wields considerable power. She also finds herself juggling the demands of smaller budgets and fewer staff with the need to deliver more effective communications. As such, she’s relying on some creative thinking to get her messages out.

“We are constantly looking at innovation,” she says. “We can’t rely on big TV campaigns, so we’ve had to look at [how we can use] partnerships, digital, PR, using our own channels. We have great assets but haven’t traditionally exploited them well enough, partly because of the way we’ve been organised.”

To help make the most of the resources available, the communications function within government has been redesigned. One of the biggest changes made so far has been last month’s closure of the Central Office of Information, the trading fund that supplied PR work and advice to departments, and ran procurement frameworks through which they could buy services such as events, marketing and advertising.

The COI’s abolition led Simon Hughes, formerly the organisation’s director of events, to complain that civil servants will be left without adequate advice on buying communications services (see news section, CSW 28 February 2012). Indeed, some departments will have to improve their ability to develop communications strategies and buy the required services – but most have done a lot of work on this in recent years, dramatically strengthening their communications operations and expertise. Grey notes that the COI did help aggregate government’s “buying clout” by running centralised procurement frameworks, but that capability won’t be lost: it’s being transferred to the Government Procurement Service (GPS), she says. Indeed, at an event on 21 May, held in partnership with CSW, Grey will join other key figures to set out the new system and opportunities for an audience of 500 communications professionals and would-be suppliers.

“Sometimes you do need profound change to really make a difference,” she comments. “We’ve kept some really great people [from COI] and some of the really good functions, like combined media buying. When you take spend down as low as we did, the system becomes unsustainable. You can’t just salami slice your way down; you have to think a little bit more radically about how to make it work.”

New ways of working
One advantage of the new structure, Grey believes, is that it will be easier for civil servants to plan communications strategically across government. The COI “was a trading fund that did what clients wanted it to do. There were some very professional people there who would see several clients with campaigns that overlapped, but would have no ability to do anything about it,” she says. Under the new system, Grey and her team will have oversight of everything that’s going on in communications across Whitehall, producing a cross-government plan that will ensure – for the first time ever – that all departments are working effectively together and that they maximise the use of budgets and available channels.

Grey’s ability to get a grip on the major campaigns under way across government has been facilitated by the spending controls imposed on communications buying by the coalition government. As in many other fields, spending above a certain level – initially £25,000, now £100,000 – requires sign-off by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude, giving Grey’s team the data and leverage to ensure that communications work is brought within the cross-government plan.

While the controls represent growing central power over departmental communications, they also enable departmental comms officials to increase their control over the money spent on campaigns within their own departments. Previously, many such managers found that programme heads were going around them to buy communications services independently from the COI – but with the controls in place, these people have had to demonstrate that their departmental communications are backing their plans, enabling comms people to “get a grip on comms spend”.

“Hopefully this gives communications directors the leverage to advise [policy professionals] in a broad way, which should be a driver towards better co-ordination,” says Grey, arguing that earlier cooperation during policy development will reap rewards. “If you’re a policy official and you’ve got a big programme to deliver, you focus on delivering that programme and whatever comms might be needed. Someone from the communications team may come at it differently,” she explains, adding that comms staff might also know whether similar campaigns are planned elsewhere around government, helping to avoid duplication.

It’s a strategy that makes so much sense I wonder why these plans have only just been developed. “It’s actually really hard to do, because budgets don’t always sit with communications but quite often with programmes themselves,” she replies, adding that in the past departments have tended to work with the central communications function on an ad hoc basis, as and when priority issues have arisen.

Greater co-ordination will not only save money, but will deliver much more coherent messages from the audience’s point of view. The ‘Great Campaign’, which aims to encourage inward investment and tourism around the London 2012 Olympic Games, is a prime example. Previously, several different government organisations and campaigns promoted Britain to very similar audiences overseas; now Grey has brought together the culture and business departments, the Foreign Office, UK Trade & Investment, VisitBritain and the British Council to develop a single campaign.

The success of the new system rests on communications professionals’ ability to work more closely with policy teams, the Government Digital Service (GDS) – which oversees the government’s websites and digital service development – and David Halpern’s Behavioural Insights Team. And if her colleagues can indeed play a bigger role in developing policy ideas, Grey is confident that the quality of policymaking will improve. “Policy that isn’t easy to explain – there is often a clue there,” she notes, in what sounds rather like a veiled reference to the government’s NHS reforms.

Relatively minor changes to policies and delivery plans can often make a disproportionate impact, Grey says, recalling an example from her days at Guy’s and St Thomas’s Hospital. The hospital was planning to close its A&E department and open a minor injuries unit in its place, she says. As communications director, she was concerned that negative publicity around the closure of A&E would drown out the launch of the new unit. She suggested that the minor injuries unit was opened first, ensuring an unbroken service for local people – and the bad publicity was minimised.

In order to persuade policy professionals to make better use of their communications teams, Grey wants to build a stronger evidence base for the value of campaigns and press work. Evaluation can be expensive, she says, but it’s essential in order to improve the civil service’s use of communications techniques. Francis Maude’s team already recognises this, she adds, demanding a six-monthly review of all the campaigns that it approves.

“One of the things we will do is collect and share more results,” she says. “This way we can look at how much you need to spend to get a certain response rate. It will help us set budgets and assess which are the best techniques to use.”

Digital risk management
One of the most important communication tools at the disposal of government is digital technology, such as websites, social media and blogs. However, while the value of these media has been recognised, government is still grappling with how to manage the risks they present – the blurring of lines between civil servants’ professional and private lives being just one of them.

“We don’t police all communications but we do encourage responsible use,” comments Grey. “It’s important to remember that anything you could say could reflect on you as a civil servant. Gus [O’Donnell] always used to say: ‘Don’t write stuff down that you wouldn’t be happy to see in The Sun’, which is probably good guidance for all behaviour,” she says.

She emphasises the need for all civil servants to understand media such as Twitter – “We had one case where a civil servant didn’t realise that people who weren’t following them could see what they had written” – and to recognise the way they can influence public opinion: “You only have to look at the Budget. [Saga group chief] Ros Altmann started tweeting about the Granny Tax. It exploded on Twitter and the print media followed suit.”
Indeed, the debates at a recent ‘@Teacamp’event – which saw around 40 civil servants getting together to share digital best practice – highlighted the nervousness many staff feel about social media. Concerns included private comments being twisted out of context by journalists, and a lack of clarity over whether the Civil Service Code applies to personal communications.

To address this uncertainty, the GDS is developing a set of social media guidelines. Containing a number of basic principles that apply to all departments as well as guidance specific to particular roles, the aim is to arm civil servants with the knowledge they need to use social media effectively – and without landing themselves in trouble. The first draft had been issued for consultation, but following the @Teacamp discussion they’re being rewritten (see news section).

Digital is also viewed as a critical channel for internal as well as external communications, and Grey is working out how best to engage staff through these tools – such as via the head of the civil service’s Twitter account, @SirBobKerslake. She is also looking at the best ways to ensure that internal communications teams are giving out consistent messages on key issues such as pension reform. “The truth is that it’s really hard to do because of how we’re set up,” she says. “I can’t just send an email to all civil servants. This is why we run the civil service website and work closely with you at CSW on things like Civil Service Live, the Civil Service Awards and all that.”

“[Staff] know when something big is going to happen,” she adds. “They want the information to come from their boss first, but then backed up by other sources. Big change programmes should have internal comms right inside them.” There are plenty of good examples on this front, she says; but when I ask for an example, she hesitates. “I’ll be in trouble if I single someone out,” she laughs.

When pressed for an answer, Grey cautiously mentions the way the government has engaged with staff about the difficult issue of redundancies. “The sort of things you would want to do, we have been doing,” she says, citing “proper engagement with staff, involving them in the creation of the solution.” In their attempts to maintain morale and gather feedback on redundancy programmes, departments have used every technique from web-based crowd-sourcing of ideas to face-to-face meetings. “You have to blend that engagement with healthy realism [about the financial situation] and an understanding of people’s emotions,” she says.

However, informing staff about such changes is just one purpose of departments’ internal comms team. They have another role, says Grey, less obvious but just as crucial: that of highlighting the importance and value of communications as a whole, so that policymakers, HR teams and other key groups talk to their comms colleagues and make use of their expertise.

“It’s really important to me that with all the changes that comms has gone through – and with the COI closing, which was quite an iconic, totemic thing – we have a profession that is recognised for its impact. I would hate for that to be damaged as result of all the changes,” she says. “We have an opportunity to show the difference we make. It’s a bit of a cliché, but we’re not always good at communicating what we ourselves do. I think everyone will benefit if they understand the impact of professional communications.” ?