Alex Aiken
Executive Director of Government Communications
What were your biggest policy and delivery challenges in 2013? How did you handle them?
Our economic communications campaign is ambitious, coordinating communications to create confidence and encourage businesses to invest and take on staff. Part of that has been publishing the industrial strategy and pushing the “Business is GREAT” activity.
It has been impressive to see all Government departments, led by BIS and HMT, pulling together to help support the economy. It’s crucial that our biggest priority as civil service communicators reflects the central objectives of the government: to build a strong economy. We have an important part to play in the economic recovery.
Where have you made the most progress in implementing the Civil Service Reform Plan, and what are your reform priorities for 2014?
The new Government Communications Service will become a reality on 1 January 2014, following months of hard work. The GCS will operate as a single profession, with shared standards for recruitment, a new approach to talent management, closer working relationships at all levels, and better integration of digital into everything we do. It will make government comms exceptional by making best practice the standard, and this is reform in action.
The GCS is there to transform government communications – from a world of “press notice by default” to a new era of digital campaign communications, based on content creation. We will rigorously evaluate and prove the value of our work. And it will create a new kind of civil service comms professional: people who are also data analysts, stakeholder experts, digital communicators.
Our interest in the work of press officers, internal communicators, campaigners, marketers and digital experts is evidence of the important work our communications experts do, not just in delivering great government communications, but also contributing to the creation of an exceptional civil service.
What are your key challenges in the last full year of the Parliament, and how will you tackle them?
My overriding challenge is to make communications demonstrably efficient. We will do this by bearing down on costs and stopping unnecessary spend, but beyond that by making sure the work we do is as cost-effective as it can be.
We will reduce the cost of exceptional communications by sharing services and creating centres of excellence that other departments can purchase from. We will deliver at least 10% efficiency gains every year from 2014.
What would you most like Santa to bring you this year? And what would you like him to take away?
I’d like Santa to renew my three-year subscription to the Economist. And I’d like him to take away well-meaning but unnecessary processes in the civil service.