Spin & Government Communications
The Jo Moore/Martin Sixsmith affair raised serious issues about the role of special advisers and the impartiality of government information and led to the Phillis Review of Government Communications which has just been published. One of the Audit criteria for democratic government is that public information should provided independently of the government and it "own information machine"; and we expressed concern about the political contamination of official information under Conservative government in the 1980s and 1990s in the second Audit study, Political Power and Democratic Control (Routledge 1998, pp. 181-190).
In 2002, at the height of the Moore/Sixsmith affair, Audit director Stuart Weir and Nicholas Jones, the BBC political correspondent, published an article in the New Statesman revealing for the first time that 37 of the government's 81 political advisers were spin doctors. We exposed Alastair Campbell's claim to the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) that, "The vast majority [of special advisers] do not have any contact with the press whatever" as well as the Cabinet Office's claim that only 11 of the 81 were "employed primarily in the area of communications". We gave evidence to PASC on February 28 2002. Our concern was both with the damage that such advisers were inflicting on the impartiality of public information and a parallel infiltration of the civil service Government Information & Communications Service (GICS) by journalists close to Campbell; and we argued strongly for boundaries to be set for the work of special advisers. The subsequent PASC report, These Unfortunate Events: Lessons of the Recent Events at the Former DTLR (HC 303), led to the establishment of the Phillis Review.
The wide-ranging review provides a sound basis for reform. The primary recommendations are that:
1. the civil service as a whole should redefine and broaden the role of communications across government to achieve "a continuous dialogue with all interested parties"
2. a new permanent secretary should be appointed at the head of a new communications structure service across government;
3. the GICS - very much a media-focused and unsatisfactory service - should be abolished to make way for the new approach and structures, with a wider definition of communications professionals;
4. new rules of propriety and training should be introduced by the new permanent secretary to apply to all those invoked in communications, including special advisers;
5. the "overriding presumption" in implementing the new Freedom of Information Act "should be to disclose" (Phillis is critical of the changes made between the FOI white paper and the Act, as having the potential to "accentuate some of the problems and trust and credibility that are at the root of the crisis of public confidence")
6. the lobby system should be abolished and all major government briefings should be on the record, live on TV and radio and with full transcripts available promptly on line.
| Here Nicholas Jones, who wrote a thoroughly researched account of government spin in The Control Freaks: How New Labour gets its own Way (Politico's, 2002), reviews the Phillis report: |
| Review of the Phillis Report |
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